It's a neat project. Write cross platform desktop apps in C. Presumably it would not have been very usable in practice in the late 1980s, because of all the OTHER system interfaces that still weren't portable, even if the windowing system was available in a portable way.
I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:
1) cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;
2) in the Java case, it seemed heavyweight to install and sluggish compared to native apps;
Point 2 would not have applied to stdwin, as it would have produced small compiled binaries I suppose, but Point 1 would have.
So in the end, obviously web apps (and partly, Flash) took over the niche that "cross platform desktop apps" had once tried to fill, and then it was something of a dead zone until Electron, as far as I remember.
> cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;
I think this is an implementation detail. It's up to the software stack whether it leaves off before drawing the UI elements on screen, or goes ahead and takes on that responsibility too. The wxWidgets toolkit uses the runtime platform's UI, so it does not draw the widgets themselves. Java Swing took on the task of drawing the UI elements on the screen in its own style.
When OS X was new, Apple was still under the assumption that Java on the desktop was important, and they built an in-house Java with full Aqua support. It was still _terrible_! All the Aqua-specific affordances like animation or shadows were janky or absent. Sizing and positioning always felt weird because the application was written assuming Windows-shaped controls.
Basically, cross-platform GUI only looks good on the platform that it was originally designed for. Unless the other platforms make zero interesting choices, they will always look worse.
> cross-platform GUI only looks good on the platform that it was originally designed for
Formulated more rigorously, cross-platform GUIs and outsider, non-Mac-first GUIs ported to Mac OS look (and feel) bad on Mac. The opposite is virtually never true though; there aren't really high standards for beauty or consistency on the other platforms. Windows, for example, in this decade is a mishmash of different toolkits (even from Microsoft). Desktop GNU/Linux people comprise a faction consisting of people that either doesn't care about GUI beauty or have standards that are about on par with Windows folks—and are generally so grateful just have an app that ships* their platform, that they won't reject outright any Mac-first app (and that would be true even if it painted itself as a pixel-for-pixel match of the Mac OS version).
* and runs; I still run into "cross-platform" apps that are Electron builds packaged as AppImages that still terminate at launch, even if you try to run them on something as unremarkable as Ubuntu
> Java Swing took on the task of drawing the UI elements on the screen in its own style.
Sun/Oracle also cheaped out by not having designers. If you see Flutter, they are able to recreate all of the platform specific widgets purely by having design engineers eyeball the implementations until they replicate the exact color and timing of every animation. Oracle/Sun was cheap and lazy.
Honestly, "native UI" gets so much worse with every passing year that I don't even want native UI. I want old windows UI.
I saw a screenshot of GTK 1 and the first thing I thought is that I'd rather make something using GTK 1 than GTK 3. Unfortunately I asked an AI chatbot about it and they advised against it because of "security" :(
That's the false assumption that unmaintained is insecure. Any old DOS game in Dosbox would be insecure by that logic.
So if I run Dune2 in dosbox, is that a security issue? Of course not, but if you were to load a bitmap from the network and feed it to GTK1 for displaying, there could well be an overlooked issue lurking around. But you need to look at the greater picture, not just "old==insecure"
1) cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;
These two things don't connect. Not being identical doesn't mean ugly or only one GUI would be considered not ugly.
... was said reading it in a browser on who knows what OS/DWM.
I mean that 90% (if not more) of all UI interactions happen now in a browser or in multi-platform applications (e.g. messengers, SublimeText, VSCode, etc).
I had a long conversation with a fellow parent sitting next to me at soccer practice today. Never met her before in my life, but we just started chatting about soccer logistics, and then I just started asking her about her life. I learned about her 5 kids, her tough relationship situation with her spouse of 16 years, her having moved here from Arkansas as a child, her feelings about how gentrification damaging local communities, her dream of moving out of the USA to another country, how there are the same kinds of social problems most places, how we can come to empathize more with our parents as we get older, and probably more things too I'm not remembering. These are the kinds of things you can talk about if you happen to have good rapport with someone and they feel like it...
I won't say I have conversations with strangers like that all the time, but it is 100% possible, and a lot of people really do appreciate it if you bother to talk to them. People often like being asked about themselves (I used to do cultural anthropology research so I have had quite a bit of practice too...).
There are of course reasons why it doesn't always work or becomes awkward. For example, gender is a factor - a significant part of the population is much more comfortable having same-sex conversations with strangers - not to mention other sociological factors around race, class, nationality, all the obvious things.
Counterpoint: I thought it was a useful analysis — I was very disappointed when the local Joann's closed and this added a bunch of context I would not have had otherwise.
As was I, but I don't see how the comparison to Best Buy supposedly aping Amazon is useful when step 1 is "don't go billions of dollars into debt for no benefit."
I realized early on in my enterprise software job that if I produce code faster than average for my team, it will just get stuck in the rest of our review and QA processes; it doesn’t get released any faster.
It feels like LLM code gen can exacerbate and generalize this effect (especially when people send mediocre LLM code gen for review which then makes the reviews become painful).
Theory of Constraints right there. Producing faster than the slowest resource in the chain is detrimental to the entire process. You waste resources and create difficulties upstream.
So much wasted time debating whether the 1000 lines of generated code are actually necessary when the actual transform in question is 3 of them. “But it works”, goes the refrain.
It doesn’t even need to be the case that the LLM produces worse code. Software development is like a gas that expands to fill its container. If the schedule allows a fixed amount of time before shipping, and the time to write the code shrinks to zero, it just means the other parts of the process will fill the remaining time, even if the LLM did a decent job in the first place.
I thought this was a really good piece of writing. It’s rare to do something like this because the job discourages it by putting PR filters on everything you say.
My uncle was a pretty big pop star in the 1960s. His group at one point had a big fanzine, they were household names across the country, over time they had stalkers and weird fans and all that, made movies and albums, had big parties and knew other famous people, pretty much all those things that the OP writes about (circa 50 years later, some of it has changed but not that much).
He could be charismatic and surprisingly eloquent and I could picture him writing a piece like this, if the mood had struck.
He also lost pretty much all the money through mismanagement (several times over), eventually moved out of LA, had a tumultuous family life with numerous spouses and wasn’t around much for his kids, and after his 40s was trapped in a sad cycle of reunion tours because the band still needed the money. The tours still had some level of excitement and crowd enthusiasm, even pretty late in life and I guess he always loved the stage, the performing, all that. But in the end, I kinda felt it seemed like a lonely existence. Hard to form really deep connections when you’re always traveling and often away in your head.
> after his 40s was trapped in a sad cycle of reunion tours because the band still needed the money.
Celebrity memoirs are often written for the same reasons, or to promote other ventures. For instance Peter Wolf seemingly reluctantly shared vignettes about Dylan, The Stones, Faye Dunaway, and rock 'n' roll life in the 1970s to promote his newer stuff:
"I was putting out solo CDs. Not to sound self-congratulatory, but I thought each one got better and better— but they weren’t finding an audience. I thought a book might encourage people to check out the other stuff. So basically, the intent of the book was to find a wider audience."
It was interesting and a fun read, but not a “good piece of writing” in my opinion. Apart from some spelling mistakes, the sentences droned on and it read more like a semi-coherent rant than a thoughtful piece on “being a pop star”.
I thought it was excellent for something that appears mostly off the cuff. This is what lots of good writing looks like before the editors get to it, btw
It is thoughtful, that's not the problem. It's just not written in the standard language "written English", but instead in "spoken English" with some attempts towards the former ("My final thought on ...") that sound like someone trying formal writing for the first time.
The sentences do drone on, but they're fully coherent; this is above-average writing. It wouldn't likely meet publishing standards, but it's a lot better than you'd expect a randomly-chosen person to produce.
I'm sure an editor would go through and suggest tightening up some points, but I agree it's good enough as a first draft.
The problem is there are too types of writers who don't get the help of an editor, those who are too big and famous to accept one and those too poor to afford one.
I sort of feel the people who are saying it's bad aren't very able to separate their own preferences from determining quality
I certainly believe that if you want to be a successful musician, not even a pop star necessarily just one that's able to draw crowds large enough to sustain you financially, you probably are bound by certain norms and expectations. Not necessarily because audiences hate women (or men for that matter) that break the mold, but they're not as easy to digest. It adds friction. And when there are thousands of other artists out there to listen to, that friction can be the difference between success and failure.
I agree with you though, if you're willing to live a small life where you only need the love and respect of a small handful of people, you can do almost anything and very few people will genuinely hate you.
> I wonder if one or both of us have biased vision
The more common term you're searching for is "privilege", and yes, you both have it.
Do you hang a lot in professional entertainment circles? I'm not saying she's certainly correct, but if I were to wonder what problems a mid-20s female pop star faces, I'd buy her anecdata over a 50-ish man who posts on HN.
I admit I started reading with some skepticism. It didn't read like PR, so I assumed I was reading fanfic. By the midpoint, she managed to convince me otherwise.
I think the author is walking a tightrope between convincing the reader that she wrote this herself and that there's more depth to her than what we see on stage or in pop media. Writing this blog is definitely a tougher assignment than doing podcast interviews or behind the scenes videos.
You are right, of course, a good editor could make this better, but I think she's deliberately avoiding that here. A pop star is unwise to fire a good producer without a better replacement, but sometimes they have to bring out the piano and do an acoustic performance live.
As interesting as I find it, cannot agree more. It's very childish writing - feels a lot like it was written by a teenager. It sort of reminds me of my young 8 year old niece telling me a story she finds so exciting she barely comes up for air.
That's the fate of many acts from that period. So so so many artists who were stratospherically popular but are still touring for cash playing to nobody younger than them. It's sad.
"better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"
Is it sadder than any other individual who has to work into retirement age? Or is the fall itself what you find sad? I can imagine some artists might be happier in this latter stage of their lives where they can focus on their real fans and better fostering other personal relationships in their lives.
I misinterpreted the title and was hoping that this was going to be a post about realtime algorithmic music generation from the Postgres WAL, something like the Hatnote “listen to Wikipedia edits” project.
Agreeing with most of the other comments here that this discussion needs more context which we don't have...
If the request for additional access controls/access cleanup came from one of the Ruby Central funders, could we not know who that was and what exactly their ask consisted of? I am interested in knowing their side of the story, and what the motivation was. (But in general, cutting off long-time maintainers' access seems like a bad choice - as presumably they have long since proven their good will toward the ruby community as shepherds of these projects.)
I have a toy web application that accepts a very, very low rate of writes. It's almost all reads.
It is implemented like this:
- The front end uses react to draw a UI.
- It fetches data from a JSON file stored on S3.
- When we get a write request, a lamdba function reads the JSON file, parses it, adds new data, and writes back to S3.
The main selling point for me is that almost all of it is static assets, which are cheap and simple to host, and the tiny bit of "back end" logic is just one nodejs function.
The previous implementation used SQLite and a golang back end, but I eventually got tired of having to maintain a virtual machine to host it.
I ever plan do it with sqlite, loading it at memory during app start and flush data to s3 during runtime but it create more corner cases and logic to handle.
You can set concurrency limits per function on AWS, so you can apply a hard limit on your function to only have a single invocation running at the same time. That should give you a guarantee that data isn't lost without the producer noticing.
I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:
1) cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;
2) in the Java case, it seemed heavyweight to install and sluggish compared to native apps;
Point 2 would not have applied to stdwin, as it would have produced small compiled binaries I suppose, but Point 1 would have.
So in the end, obviously web apps (and partly, Flash) took over the niche that "cross platform desktop apps" had once tried to fill, and then it was something of a dead zone until Electron, as far as I remember.
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