Yeah, fractional scaling is absolutely the one thing that I miss on Linux. On X11 it's too slow and laggy. On Wayland I have... Wayland issues.
I don't entirely love MacOS (mostly because I can't run it on my desktop, lol). But it does fractional scaling so well, I always choose the "looks like 1440p" scaling on 4K resolution, and literally every app looks perfect and consistent and I don't notice any performance impact.
On windows the same thing, except some things are blurry.
On Linux yeah I just have to bear huge UI (x2 scaling) or tiny UI (X1) or live with a noticeable performance delay that's just too painful to work with.
It seems wayland has fractional scaling, but it is recent, but the bottom of this is high DPI handling should be handled at the GUI toolkit level. Compositor scaling is just a dirty fix for legacy GUI apps.
I absolutely adored the little intro that Razor1911 added to their crack of GTA IV. Cool graphics, nice jingle, short, to the point. https://youtu.be/htbDeD-wv7s
Also not entirely related (kinda?), but I also regularly listen to the music that was inside the Digital Insanity keygen for Sony Vegas. https://youtu.be/kJln_F7Y2P4
Maktone [1] did some very nice chiptunes for Razor [2] [3]. This playlist [4] has a lot of good Razor ones, I bet someone was looking for [5] =]
Also, a lot of keygens didn't have to be used back when a simple hexedit of one value could validate the software. I remember that being the case for mIRC. And Sublime Text. I mean, it could be as simple as changing an if statement to if not. I use the same idea for Proxmox. It is quick and dirty, but not the way the code was intended. If you wanna go that route, a keygen is the way (a serial does the job). With crack, you never know what it does, same goes for keygen (wrt malware). I still love Serials 2000. A program which had all the keys and serials in existence. Which was a big feat back in the end of '90s when search engines were shit. It even had regular updates/patches.
As for the website. Screenshots don't show videos.
And instead of YT/archive (though, shoutout to textfiles.com, which is now part of archive), https://www.pouet.net/ and https://scene.org/ is still where things are generally at
I'm totally biased towards Android development using Gradle and kotlin.
Gradle can be a pain, but if I look at what our neighbors at the iOS team experience (constantly having to manually merge project files, not being able to simply import some libraries, ...) it's hardly a nightmare.
Specifically adding dependencies is super easy? Just specify which repo they're in (mavenCentral or Google or whatever) and add dependencies under "dependencies". When running or syncing, Gradle does the rest.
My country launched an identification app (https://mygov.be/) that does the same thing. I have no idea what they're trying to achieve. Security through obscurity? Trying to piss off power users?
I'm a developer and use adb and some dev settings daily. Annoying af to have to disable developer mode constantly.
It's fundamentally client-side security: the phone tells the server "no, I haven't been rooted" and the server believes it.
Any security system that relies on any form of client-side security is going to have other problems as well, since its designers haven't grasped this basic principle.
That used to be a core principle but might not be guaranteed anymore. Depending on the implementation it can be near impossible to bypass modern hardware backed security. As it should be!
The policy issue at this point is that users effectively aren't in control of their devices anymore.
I saw a video I wanted to share with someone, but it was part of a compilation. So you just search for it, right?
So I searched "cat lets brick fall onto mouse" and got... 100000 AI generated videos of cats with bricks? And cats with mice and cats being rescued by people (like you said). But not the video I was looking for.
We've totally passed the point where real information is impossible to find anymore. Video generation was really out of reach / delayed for a long time, and honestly all of those probably have a digital watermark in them that could be detected. YouTube could have prevented this if they'd have just been more proactive with detection and filtration. A simple "AI generated" and "not AI generated" filter would have prevented this.
> I saw a video I wanted to share with someone, but it was part of a compilation. So you just search for it, right?
There's something with these compilations. Almost as if deliberately AI slop is mixed in to numb the public to it, or for some AI startup to testdrive on an unaware public how good their stuff is.
Take compilations of lightning strikes for instance. There's always a couple that are just too spectacular or just unbelievably. Like a ball lightning going across the street.
It’s mostly content farms based out of Asia - Vietnam, India, Bangladesh etc pumping out these stuff to make a quick buck. It’s like 5 min crafts but now easier and faster due to AI and no personal overheads.
If the devs behind Charles would just tweak their UI a bit, it would be the absolute perfect tool. Functionally it pretty much already is. Mainly being able to turn on and off and configuring features I use all the time (rewrite, map local, map remote) is always a journey through menu's that don't always make sense. The only functional thing I'm missing is some DNS stuff (e.g. throttling or breaking DNS specifically).
I tried using proxyman for a while, and while definitely powerful and more modern, it honestly didn't feel "better" or more powerful so I didn't go for yet another license.
I personally haven't found any keyboard that works better than gboard. And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
From my experience it is much worse than it used to be 5 years ago. I have been writing English, French, and to a lesser extent German on an iPhone since ~2008. Initially, the dumb autocorrect would just correct to the closer word in the dictionary corresponding to the current keyboard, but over time it would pick up more and more words I used regularly. At some point around 2018 or so, it was nearly flawless. I think it changed the dictionary depending on the language or the sentence, because I had different suggestions for the same mistyped word in the same document. Also, I assume that by then my personal dictionary was quite extensive.
And then they bragged about a new machine-learning improved keyboard and it went downhill. First, all keyboards became monolingual, which was a 10-years regression. And even in that language, it was very flakey. They added multi-language keyboards somewhat recently and it got slightly better, except that for some reason it changes the keyboard back to the English-only one regularly for no reason I can see.
It is maddening. For a couple of years it was fantastic.
And that’s not the worst. On the Apple Watch not only is the multilingual keyboard completely broken, but worse than that: if you change the language of the keyboard by long pressing the space button it shows the new language, but the autocorrect proceeds to just ignore it completely and autocorrects everything as if I were typing in the system language rather than the one I selected.
And contrary to the iPhone you can’t even disable autocorrect! This + the super-aggressive autocorrect of watchOS (the screen is small after all so you are likely to make a mistake and we better fix it automatically!) makes it an absolute NIGHTMARE to type on an Apple Watch in multiple languages. Your only option is to use speech to type because that one for some reason works when you change the language whereas the keyboard doesn’t care.
Edit: the language switch bug on watchOS seems to have finally been fixed on watchOS 26.1. The bug was already long present on watchOS 11, so not something that watchOS 26 introduced.
Completely agreed. Apple seriously regressed the multi-lingual experience. They probably have a model per language. If you have to mix languages in a sentence, well, good luck!
I just want to talk to the folks who made the language switching logic so complicated instead of just a constant rotation like desktop IMEs. It seems like they expect the user to remember the previous language or prioritize languages in a clear order, but did it not occur to them that I might switch languages chaotically (A->C->D->B), keep it there, then hours later when I forgot what $previousLanguage was and press switch, I might as well be spinning a roulette?
> And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
I can't stand keyboards that do this - especially those that don't let you turn it off. If you write in another language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, you end up with nonsense suggestions - common English words like "the" or "and" will get replaced with obscure words in another language that just happen to sound vaguely phonetically similar. I almost never switch languages mid-sentence when typing, and yet the keyboard can't seem to grasp that.
This. I use romanian, english and turkish at the same time. Sometimes goes sideways because we mix a lot of words in english and romaninan in the same sentence, but it's ok. No other keyboard comes close.
Multilingual typing is a godsend. I did have to tweak settings though, like disabling the "suggestion strip" (because sometimes I'd be typing fast and accidently click the GIF button, then an image, which in many apps sends it immediately without a draft which was extremely annoying).
Yup. I would never be able to give my Jira tickets to an LLM because they're too damn vague or incomplete. Getting the requirements first needs 4 rounds of lobbying with all stakeholders.
We had a client who'd create incredibly detailed Jira tickets. Their lead developer (also their only developer) would write exactly how he'd want us to implement a given feature, and what the expected output would be.
The guy is also a complete tool. I'd point out that what he described wasn't actually what they needed, and that there functionality was ... strange and didn't actually do anything useful. We'd be told to just do as we where being told, seeing as they where the ones paying the bills. Sometimes we'd read between the lines, and just deliver what was actually needed, then we'd be told just do as we where told next time, and they'd then use the code we wrote anyway. At some point we got tired of the complaining and just did exactly as the tasks described, complete with tests that showed that everything worked as specified. Then we where told that our deliveries didn't work, because that wasn't what they'd asked for, but couldn't tell us where we misunderstood the Jira task. Plus the tests showed that the code functioned as specified.
Even if the Jira tasks are in a state where it seems like you could feed them directly to an LLM, there's no context (or incorrect context) and how is a chatbot to know that the author of the task is a moron?
Every time I've received overly detailed JIRA tickets like this it's always been significantly more of a headache than the vague ones from product people. You end up with someone with enough tech knowledge to have an opinion, but separated enough from the work that their opinions don't quite work.
Same, I think there's an idealistic belief in people who write those tickets that something can be perfectly specified upfront.
Maybe for the most mundane, repetitive tasks that's true.
But I'd argue that the code is the full specification, so if you're going to fully specify it you might as well just write the code and then you'll actually have to be confronted with your mistaken assumptions.
> how is a chatbot to know that the author of the task is a moron?
Does it matter?
The chatbot could deliver exactly what was asked for (even if it wasn't what was needed) without any angst or interpersonal issues.
Don't get me wrong. I feel you. I've been there, done that.
OTOH, maybe we should leave the morons to their shiny new toys and let them get on with specifying enough rope to hang themselves from the tallest available structure.
Your comment sounded how an instance of copilot would complain to its coleagues and for a moment I pictured OpenAI being just a large scam based on an army of mechanical turks :)
I like this use of LLM because I assume both the developer and ticket owner will review the text and agree to its contents. The LLM could help ensure the ticket is thorough and its meaning is understood by all parties. One downside is verbosity, but the humans in the loop can edit mercilessly. Without human review, these tickets would have all the downsides of vibe coding.
Thank you for sharing this workflow. I have low tolerance for LLM written text, but this seems like a really good use case.
Wait until you learn that most people's writing skills are that of below LLMs, so it's an actual tangible improvement (as long as you review the output for details not being missed, of course)
Speaking of things that are only real in your mind...
Am I outraged?
And yes, there absolutely was a vocal group of a certain type of programmer complaining about high level languages like C and their risks and inefficiency and lack of control insisting that real programmers wrote code in assembly. It's hard to find references because google sucks these days and I'm not really willing to put in the effort.
Have you not noticed that the story you reference is so well know because... literally every single developer thinks people like Mel are crazy?
Mel or Terry Adams are the exception to the rule... Having that image of greybeards only come if you have never worked with one in real life, sorry you are biased.
What? Mel is regarded as deserving massive respect, not as crazy. If a developer thinks Mel is nuts, they are coming from a perspective I don't understand.
And yes, the shift to higher level languages like C, FORTRAN, etc., was regarded by some as pandering to the new generation that didn't want to actually learn programming.
With some truth, in my opinion. I think higher level languages bring huge benefits, so I'm not bemoaning their existence. But it still weirds me out when there's a professional developer that doesn't have at least a cursory knowledge of assembly. AI programming assistance (which I'm sure will be very different than today's 'vibe coding') does seem like a similar state change. I certainly don't object to it in principle, it will probably be a large productivity improvement.
But I'm sure that with it, there will be the loss of fundamental knowledge for some people. Like digital artists who never learn the properties of real paint.
A significant part of my workflow is getting a ticket that is ill-defined or confused and rewriting it so that it is something I can do or not do.
From time to time I have talked over a ticket with an LLM and gotten back what I think is a useful analysis of the problem and put it into the text or comments and I find my peeps tend to think these are TLDR.
Yeah, most people won't read things. At the beginning of my career I wrote emails that nobody read and then they'd be upset about not knowing this or that which I had already explained. Such is life, I stopped writing emails.
An LLM will be just as verbose as you ask it to be. The default response can be very chatty, but you can figure out how to ask it to give results in various lengths.
You think the business line stakeholder is going to patiently hang out in JIRA, engaging with an overly cheerful robot that keeps "missing the point" and being "intentionally obtuse" with its "irrelevant questions"?
This is how most non-technical stakeholders feel when you probe for consistent, thorough requirements and a key professional skill for many more senior developers and consultants is in mastering the soft skills that keep them attentive and sufficiently helpful. Those skills are not generic sycophancy, but involve personal attunement to the stakeholder, patience (exercising and engendering), and cycling the right balance between persistence and de-escalation.
Or do you just mean there will be some PM who acts as proxy between for the stakeholder on the ticket, but still needs to get them onto the phone and into meetings so the answers can be secured?
Because in the real world, the prior is outlandish and the latter doesn't gain much.
Businesses do whatever’s cheap. AI labs will continue making their models smarter, more persuasive. Maybe the SWE profession will thrive/transform/get massacred. We don’t know.
I don't entirely love MacOS (mostly because I can't run it on my desktop, lol). But it does fractional scaling so well, I always choose the "looks like 1440p" scaling on 4K resolution, and literally every app looks perfect and consistent and I don't notice any performance impact.
On windows the same thing, except some things are blurry.
On Linux yeah I just have to bear huge UI (x2 scaling) or tiny UI (X1) or live with a noticeable performance delay that's just too painful to work with.
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