Take

But let's for a moment assume that Apple does not intend to shut down the App Store. There's something they can do that would have both good optics and be actually productive.

Strike the mentions of In-App Purchase from section 3.1, and replace it with a set of hard rules for qualifying services. The services must be as easy to unsubscribe from as they are to subscribe to, may not use misleading "dark patterns" to trick people into staying on longer than they intended to, and must be straightforward to understand. In other words, the kind of rules that would usually come from hard laws or region-level consumer protection practices.

Sprinkle on some APIs implemented by the apps to make it possible to get to the appropriate aspects of the other payment solutions from within Settings, or the App Store subscription panels, and there's suddenly a whole lot more freedom without the risk of a precipitous drop of usability or confidence. The people that have been kicking up a stink about this for ages have been doing so because they've been trying to run businesses in a hostile environment – it's in their interest to handle this well.

I mention optics because Apple could still reasonably come out of this as a pragmatic, customer-focused leader. Not a terribly responsive one, mind you, but a leader none-the-less.

A hardline stance will not sway hearts and minds, and it has proven unable to change developers’ business models without sacrificing the user experience. Apple needs to decide if it wants to be “right,” or if it wants to be happy.

One of the reasons I started Take was to make a clean break from my previous site Waffle where I'd gotten into a rut. There's a whole world full of things to write about, and somehow I centered on the same subjects and with the same mentality and tone, and it wasn't very positive. Now, for good reason, the innate failures of the App Store are in the news again, and I'm writing about it again and while it feels good to be topical, I do want to do something different and highlight the reasons I am so frustrated.

In October 2007, Steve Jobs posted an article to Apple's Hot News page announcing the development of an iPhone SDK. Before this, he was hounded by developers of all stripes and from all places (including inside Apple) to be able to develop apps for the iPhone, including getting into a spat with John Carmack who wanted to put games on the thing. The first iPhone was a watershed in hardware capability for a phone, in being able to deliver applications that weren't just "pocket" versions, to the point where Nokia spent the rest of the day of the original announcement in denial, saying that it must be fake. The demo was carefully choreographed along a working path, but it wasn't fake, and it shipped five months later.

Everyone saw the potential. There was a jailbreak of the then iPhone OS shortly after its release, which allowed for unlocking the carrier lock, and let me import one that fall. I wrote the beginnings of an iPhone app with the jailbreak makeshift SDK - it was not pretty, but it did work, and the Cydia package manager that quickly appeared and was bundled with jailbreaks contained many apps, some polished, others not quite so polished.

The next WWDC, Apple announced iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0, which included the original App Store. If they hadn't done something to pull in developers, and even if they'd included all apps they make themselves, my guess is that iPhones would now occupy something like 4-7% of the market, instead of the 35-45% it currently does.

The iPhone's killer app was apps. Apps that could live and frolick on hardware and a platform that strived to be something more than the prototypical real-time embedded OS of the time.

For nine months in 2007, Steve Jobs told people that the reason there was no apps was because AT&T doesn't want their cellular network to go down, which is straight-up bullshit. There is a resource management and security aspect to having apps run in a constrained environment with sensitive information, but the ways you deal with that does not affect the carrier's network any more than it proscribes how those apps are distributed or what they actually do. More so than on Mac OS X, he wanted control, and the App Store gave him control.

Now, in 2020, the App Store is still the App Store. Apple is forced to justify contradictory and inconsistent stances on what's a valid app or not, to allow in apps that they probably do not really like to be associated with them because otherwise there are consequences and to deny apps that they probably would want to be associated with because of business decisions. And it has turned into Chekov's gun, where as a completely unnecessary funnel point, Apple can be pressured by dictatorships to drop apps that are politically inconvenient for bullshit reasons.

I tore into Phil Schiller, Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing and de facto boss of the App Store, because of the things he said in defense of the recent actions, and other responses have set the worst possible tone for Monday's WWDC opening. Everyone of us who are reacting to this, everyone who's writing apps, everyone of us (I'm told there are 20-30 or so) who are still holding off on writing iOS software because of the App Store in general... we don't want to do this.

If I had five minutes with Phil Schiller, I'd ask him if it was worth it. Is it so worth it to not renege on a silly compromise formed to placate a difficult, if often brilliant, man? Is it so worth it that you end up antagonizing the people who build on your life's work? Is it worth it to be remembered for being a politruk, an apparatchik, spouting an opaque party line no one in view of the world and the facts agree with, instead of for having the courage to see a solution that no longer works and take action to fix it? All the status quo gives him and gives Apple is money at the cost of lost trust and long-fomented frustration.

We don't want to do this. What we want is the same we have wanted from the beginning, from before there was an App Store, from the moment we saw a pill with an arrow and the words "slide to unlock".

All we want is to write apps.

Real apps, good apps, innovative apps, apps that make money sunstainably for their creators, apps that build on what's there to go further, apps that make life better, apps that respect the time of their users, apps that are great because they have paid attention to details.

Why won't you let us?

One of the lower hanging fruit in the CMS powering this site was that, for each edit or new post or deleted post, it would reload the entire thing from the database. (To keep load times at a minimum, it keeps the HTMLized state of all the posts entirely in memory, essentially frying it, but entirely from the working set on every page load.)

I wanted to reload only the changing parts, but between having two separate "tracks" of "all posts in chronological order" depending on whether you only see the published posts or you're me and you see everything, it was enough complications to make me skip it before. But tonight, I tackled this and quickly realized that by limiting the changes to the only changes that really happen, which is one post being created, changed or deleted, all that was needed was to make a copy of the list of all post information, find its next/prev neighbors for each of the all/only-published combinations, reload them together with the post itself, insert this reloaded information into the list copy and create a new instance of the everything-about-all-posts object (which does all the lookups and even has the pre-baked JSON and Atom feeds) with the new list.

It now occurs to me that this way of doing it is in fact a bit more dumb because it introduces a flaw. If a post's published date is changed such that it is ordered differently, it will have a different set of neighbors before and after being saved. Reloading everything from scratch each time avoided this corner case. I suppose it's back to the drawing board to fix it – but not before documenting it, because I do find it interesting to write about these things. This site is about opinions and thinking, which often turns into criticizing or critiquing other people and the fruits of their labor. I don't talk much about my own work, so it's only fair to talk about something.

(Update: I fixed it by, after all the work is done, finding the next/prev neighbors again on the new state and comparing the ordered sequence of the next/prev neighbors before and after. If there are differences, get all of the new neighbors and reload them too – then, between the two passes, all posts that could possibly have been affected will have been reloaded. This is skipped if a post is deleted, because there's no "after" state that can conflict. This is a bit inefficient because it does all the work of the everything-about-all-posts object being created again, but it only happens on a tiny fraction of all edits and it takes very little time and CPU in the first place, so it's not worth complicating the code with tricky code prone to bugs and written only for this rare purpose to avoid.)

Another note is: why this constant frying (computing the page on demand)? Why not just bake the posts (into static HTML files)? There are two reasons for this – one is because it would complicate things slightly with templating, and the other is because I want for the pages to have the editing UI for me, but be "zero cost" to everyone else. That involves either having some sort of middleware trap to selectively serve something else, at which point I'm already taking a performance hit and might as well just serve it dynamically, or including a JavaScript for everyone into the baked page that checks for something and makes it show up, but I don't want for the page to incur that cost for most of its readers.

Say you don't care one whit about developer freedom, or owning the device you spent $1,449 on (a figure known in the industry as an arm and a wheel). The App Store is still a tremendously bad idea if you want good applications that work.

As detailed, Phil Schiller offers this excuse:

"You download the app and it doesn't work, that's not what we want on the store," says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.

The amount of contortion this line of logic requires is unconscionable, and is the kind of reasoning that make people believe salespeople do not trigger automatic doors. The reason it doesn't work is because Apple's own damn guidelines prevent developers, reasonable people the lot of them, from including functionality that would make it work, and also feed their employees, kids and household pets. It allows it if you use a payment method that would require custom development and nick 30% off the top. Since this is so reasonable, I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind the principle of giving up similar amounts of money in the name of communal development into the many ecosystems they so wildly benefit from, not just in terms of personal talent but in enabling people to purchase high-margin products in the first place. Oh, wait.

If we allow ourselves to tease apart the thinly-disguised organizational avarice from Mr Schiller's statement, a trace of a soupçon of a reasonable usability concern can be detected: it would just suck if apps weren't usable and weren't good. The problem with that is that the App Store, for all the relatively recent improvements to its storefront and editorial articles, still has a rampant shovelware problem. It's entirely possible to go looking for something you know you want and come out with something else, and it's entirely possible to find 25 apps with no thought or care put into it for every app that is even merely competent.

The App Store has been a crappy idea from the very start. It serves only the monopolist owner, and all compromises break in favor of them and against the other party, be it the developer or the end user. The only winners aside from Apple are a few app developers that manage to beat all odds and achieve success (often fueled by loss-and-viability-insensitive venture capitalists who don't mind playing foul to grab market share) as well as the unscrupulous corner of humanity that always show up to squeeze what they can get from the naive, the weak and the misinformed. Users get left behind and developers pose the same well-reasoned feedback year after year after year, without anything changing.

I have no idea if it will take the US or EU torching it for things to change, but it baffles me that the bundling of a web browser was considered a bigger problem than this. One way or another, it's way past due for the App Store and its share-cropping mockery of users and developers alike to burn clean to the ground.

The passage that I'm going to read right now takes place right after a party, and what's happened is that typically, when I went to parties in high school, oftentimes there were three or four black people in a room of 300. So finally a black friend of mine and myself decided to invite some white friends to a black party, at an army base, out in Schofield Barracks, one of the major army bases in Hawai'i.

And we immediately sense that they're a little uncomfortable, being in this minority situation. You know, they're sort of trying to tap their foot to the beat... you know, they're being extraordinarily friendly... and after a while, they decide, after about half an hour they say "well, Barack, let's get going", you know, "we're feeling kind of tired", we're feeling this or that. And suddenly, this sense that what I've had to put up with every day of my life, is something that they find so objectionable that they can't even put up with it for a day, and these are good friends of mine, and folks who have stood by me for many years... something is triggered in my head and I suddenly start seeing, as I say in this passage, a new map of the world.

Works the same as Basecamp (also from, uh, Basecamp), which has had an App Store app for years.

The two most compelling arguments against the iOS and iPhone user experience are the App Store policies and the sandboxing restrictions. Some of those choices are made in favor of privacy and speak for the user, but which users are better served by Apple getting their organized-crime-type cut than they would by getting a functional application designed the way Basecamp had in mind?

Non-exhaustively:

• Searching for a song by name because you're looking for one version of it and then playing one by an artist that you've never heard of does not imply that I now forever want to know about everything that artist does, or am interested in their genre.
• In general, playing a single track, or a handful of tracks once, by an artist does not imply that I like this artist or want to hear more like it. Chances are I just want to listen to see what it is, or to play it for someone else.
• Asking for my favorite artists when Apple Music came out and now hide the ability to change this list is a dick move.
• Not being able to cull the recently played list is a dick move.
• Not being able to play something less recently played in the recently played list to make it more recently played is a dick move.
• Filing something that isn't German and something that isn't Pop under "German Pop" is inscrutable and US-centric, and reminds me of when Apple used to print Dutch text on Swedish packaging.
• Not having a way to shuffle all songs by an artist from Apple Music, just the "top songs" as statically determined by someone else, is bullshit.

Including the poignant:

So, even if a different black person committed every murder, it means 99.989497% of black people DIDN'T commit a murder that year.

That also means 99.994923% of white people didn't commit a murder.

So it's not 13 percent committing half the murders. .010% of black people are murderers and .005 percent of white people. Which means, I'd have to meet 10,000 people before I met a black killer.

Statistics. 🤯

Absolute best case, someone was strong-armed into building this and snuck this into the presentation to highlight what a terrible idea it is. But in all scenarios: these fucking guys.

We're coming up on WWDC, and in an eerily similar way, the imminent announcement of a transition of the Mac line to a new processor architecture is being reported in a big mainstream newspaper. This time, we're talking ARM Macs in 2021.

There are many questions to ponder:

What about the Mac Pro?

Given that the Apple A series of processors are so ahead of other ARM processors that flagship Android devices released recently are having trouble keeping up with last year's Apple counterpart, I don't think there's an issue achieving performance in the abstract. The ARM architecture has always been famous for its power-sipping, to the point where during the first successful power-on, it was able to run without the power supply being properly hooked up, and Apple's work with thousands of independent power domains to power only the parts of the chips that are necessary at the moment doesn't exactly hurt.

This doesn't mean it's easy to scale up in a smart way, that can compete with Xeons and especially modern AMDs. But the story of ARM over the years has been that it's much easier to make it go fast than an x86 family CPU power efficient.

PCI Express is strongly entangled with the idea of a modular PC, but the standard is its own island. There's no reason an ARM Mac Pro can't have just as many (or more) PCI Express slots or interfaces.

But a new CPU brings with it an entirely new environment, though. The boot environment of the new Macs are much more likely to be based on T2-style security. UEFI is available on ARM, but Apple is essentially starting over no matter what. On top of this, the software stack, the OS and the access allowed can be wildly different architecturally. Being able to stick in a PCI Express module doesn't mean all assumptions will hold about how to work with it. The compatibility story for GPUs will be especially interesting, since Apple's GPU chops are much more untested than their CPU chops.

Even if all of these are handled in the most inclusive way possible, unless there's some sort of extra bone thrown towards Mac Pro users, who now have seen a platform long-neglected, then ostensibly rebooted, twice, back-to-back, the future for the Mac Pro as the value proposition it currently occupies is murky at best. Forming a Pro team and taking everybody out for a ride of gradually coming to terms with actual people's actual needs only to decide that they are no longer a priority would be unspeakably stupid. Unless Mac Pros will live on in the current form, there's more to this, although maybe not revealed immediately at this year's WWDC.

With USB4 subsuming Thunderbolt 3, it's not impossible that Mac Pro could just get AMD's best performing CPUs in them and gain an impressive boost. (Although there's other Intel technology to worry about, such as the wireless video standard one that powers Sidecar.)

What about the software story?

macOS is not going anywhere. It would be criminally incompetent to assume that only UIKit/Catalyst-based apps were welcome on ARM Macs. Apple would have to rewrite, to a first approximation, all of their own software for that to fly, including Finder, Safari and all Pro apps. Macs will still be Macs, at least in that regard.

What might happen is that, as has happened with 32-bit-to-64-bit transitions before, chunks of the platform that's being supported and maintained largely for compatibility is unceremoniously sloughed off. With the decade-long trend towards sandboxing, "Developer ID" and notarization, I'm feeling ill at ease for what could be made to be mandatory. I don't think it will be bad enough that the Mac App Store will turn into the only mode of distribution, but if they ever wanted to do it and anchor it in some technical credibility, now would be the time.

Of course, there's nothing inherent about ARM itself that makes this inevitable. Looking back, it's been more prevalent across ARM devices simply because they've been devices - which are expected to perform a set function first, and where some lockdown to ensure the stability of that function is at least straightforward to motivate. But one of the most widely known ARM devices today is the Raspberry Pi computer, which is the epitome of hackable and open and free from such lockdowns. A general-purpose computer is still closer on the scale to a Pi than an iPad. Being able to bring out the power tools when necessary isn't an obstruction of the function, but rather a part of the function itself.

What about all the little stuff?

The hardware "form factors" that can be brought to market using ARM are worth considering.

• A Mac mini that looks more like, and develops about as much heat and fan noise as, an Apple TV; similar in size to a NUC, and much more similar in price.

• A MacBook that out-MacBook (2015)s the MacBook (2015). Lower power consumption means less cooling and less thermal throttling, and much less batteries – and much less weight and volume/thickness.

• A Mac Pro mini, with the best performing chip they can put in there, an onboard AMD GPU, iMac-level SSD storage and user-replaceable RAM. Think the Mac Pro without the PCI Express slots, and likely the size of the G4 Cube. It's not a bad concept (it's just horrible when it's the complete extent of the platform). This is possible with Intel today, but cooling and power draw would likely make it too bulky to be tiny, or bring down the level of performance by a lot. Pro products never used the energy-efficient Core chips, and the G5 was a famously bad fit, so this might be the first time it's considered worth doing again by the powers that be.

Concrete, heart-wrenching examples, making it hard to pick a quote. Just read all of it.

And since many people seem to blanch at the phrase itself, it's worth highlighting this part of the conclusion:

As to you “being part of the problem,” trust me, nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody. Just like nobody should be mad at me for being black. Or female. Or whatever.

I have been lucky enough so far to avoid doing screen sharing and streaming, but I've been in meetings where other people are doing it and I've seen plenty of streamed videos on all subjects where something is demoed, and it is astonishing to me how much effort is put into moving stuff around the screen, and how the thing you want to show is always locked into what a window shows.

For example: The .NET Community Standups have regressed tremendously even as they got a professional studio with its own technology staff, but it still comes down to sharing a big dumb thing with floating buttons that no one who's watching actually cares about in the way of the person. And this is just what one of the biggest company in the world, in control of its own OS and several video conferencing solutions can muster.

There is a big need for a new user-visible, user-manipulable primitive on the OS level: surfaces that an application can project. Skype or Slack or Zoom or Discord should be able to have a separate surface for just the video, laid out and with no UI, and a surface that's just the chat, and you should be able to go into your streaming software and grant the 75 OS-level mother-may-I permissions and say: I want the chat from Discord, the video from Skype, my own webcam in this corner and this window from this game or application.

All those things would be latently available, would render directly into some buffer when needed, would be easy to add support for and would cost nothing when not used. The word surface comes from many similar concepts, including IOSurface on Apple platforms where it would most certainly be used to implement this, but the thing I'm proposing is something concrete and user-level. People who care about streaming would know that a surface is available, could hook up and preview any surface from any app (subject to completion of the obligatory round of permission Twister), and would know to ask application authors to add support for them.

Answers to presumptive questions:

• Doesn't this exist? For all I know, this does exist in some form, but since I've never heard about it as an application developer, and never heard of any video conferencing applications implementing something like it (but making enormous hacky workarounds for call recording to work), it effectively isn't what it could be.

• Since OBS plugins and overlays exist, isn't this superfluous? OBS plugins and overlays exist and are great in-so-far that people can tweak and add in what they want and they shouldn't go away, but it's not this, since it's not open-ended. Application A can't say "I've got views A, B and C if anyone is interested" and application B can't say "I'll take view B and C" without application A and application B having engaged in some form of blood pact beforehand.

• Should this really be called "surfaces"? This could very well be named "views" to users, but it would be very difficult to call it that to developers who are used to "views" meaning controls in a window. Calling it "surfaces" has a similar issue but can be seen as raising some surfaces to the user level and making them accessible.

• Okay, so how isn't this like "sources", then? What I'm asking for is pretty much like the interface that allows streaming applications (or any application) to take a stream from a webcam, which is why I think it's technically a solved problem. But by convention they all come from a hardware device, and not being a hardware engineer or driver developer my guess is that it's hard for just an application to project one of these things. And besides, having a separate name could be good too: "please add a pseudo-webcam to your application" is ripe for confusion.

• Why the OS specifically, couldn't this be polyfilled/provided by something else? Sure, and software like OBS is in a good position to do so if there is a good technical path to stream video to some sort of receptacle that can facilitate it. Making it suitable for real use means keeping it low-latency and efficient and preferably low on copying while respecting security, privacy and permissions. But, hell, if you can figure out a way for applications to advertise that "if you connect to me in this way I'll talk libretro to you and you do with that what you wish", we're most of the way there.

And the final one: Can't you just do this with windows?

Yes, almost, but the problem is that the window has to present a good UI within it. Something that's a good visual that you want to show – when what you want to show isn't literally a UI itself – doesn't have a bunch of buttons and crap on it to annoy, distract and occlude. It's the difference between just looking at the slideshow in PowerPoint, confined to a segment of the screen, with UI affordances and borders and grip handles and what have you, and entering presentation mode, except that surfaces could be even cleaner because no one but the presenter would see the little toolbar with back/forward buttons and drawing tools because they wouldn't be on the surface.

And on a technical level, now you're getting into syncing with the window manager and compositing and screen recording and god help you if someone moves a window or something shows in front, compared to the application saying "this is what you want to see" and filling a buffer, and that buffer being rendered. Recognizing that some things are more like screws than they are like nails, and putting away the hammer for a while.

As I wrote the previous entry, I realized that many programming languages have their own texture of difficulty.

C is difficult because it is an unsafe veneer over assembly, because it's so easy to fall off the edge and because almost nothing is included. That's how it had to be in the 70s if you wanted to write an operating system, but it's easy today to make dangerous mistakes that compilers still won't warn you about, and see uninitialized memory. You're free to express a whole lot of things that just won't be compatible with reality. At every juncture you have to know exactly what you intend to do and intimate details about what the code calling you and the code you call expect to do with values and memory, and tooling to enforce these things are rare and hard-won commodities.

C++ is difficult, and I have always shied away from it more than any language, because of the mix of ambition and tricks to make things low-cost. Between Rule of the big four (and a half), rvalue references, moving semantics and templating, it's the most immensely complicated programming language in the world, and despite all this extra machinery, much of which is called implicitly, if you slip up, you crash really bad.

Rust is difficult because of having so many new concepts, and in being so precise and exacting. As far as I can tell, it moves all of this complexity to the compilation stage, so you end up with things not building instead, although some things can still be surprises.

JavaScript is difficult because the standard library is straight up pants-on-head stupid. Never mind the language; the Date object alone with its "add 1900 to the year", "months start at 0 but days start at 1" and incredibly imprecisely defined functions that have only recently been supplemented with sane alternatives is a good demonstrative microcosm. Not to mention that its relative poverty of functionality combined with having grown up in an unsophisticated environment has lead to a culture of many small ad-hoc polyfills.

PHP is difficult for the very many reasons this is still true. For heaven's sake, I read up on PHP 7 today, and I knew it was created because PHP 6 didn't get anywhere, but I hadn't realized until now that it meant they gave up on having an actual Unicode-compatible string data type.

Rust is impressive for many reasons, but not the least because it was an ambitious long-term bet. It was researched for years, with the explicit aim to rule out the safety issues Mozilla ran into all the time when maintaining Gecko, and it brought a new focus of combining safety with zero cost-abstractions that do not require runtime support. Not many other languages has a known and commonly targeted subset for functionality that does not require run-time allocation. With Mozilla's previous experience of writing Gecko in the first place to replace the Netscape 4 rendering engine (a famously drawn-out process), they wanted something that could support them in gradually renovating their browser subsystems, and so far the results have been encouraging.

I have looked into it, and in my experience so far the programming model has been very cumbersome for me. It requires you to think in new ways and specify the world, and this is a common refrain even for people much less dense than me. I'm not sure what could be made to help the ergonomics, but from what I understand improvements have been made in usability already.

Cliff L. Biffle's Rewriting m4vgalib in Rust is a great capsule of the promise of Rust: prove that what you're doing is safe by mechanism and construction, and then not only avoid bugs but achieve minimum slowdown by unnecessary synchronization and the like. (Quite the inversion of terms combined to the more popular approach of wrapping things in smart wrappers, and one I hope is the wave of the future.)

Biden's a documented gaffemaster, but he has survived to this point because he is a competent politician. He's not the one I'd choose of the hundreds of millions of qualified possible applicants, but he's got basic decency, a working mind, a reasonable grasp of his own limitations and the ability to prioritize the future before the present, the bigger picture before the attention-grabbing flashpoint detail and the greater good before his own personal interest. These are not usually unique or distinctive qualities among the two presumptive major party candidates, nor does the cost of forgoing them usually continue being highlighted so clearly each passing day.

(The assertion of basic decency is contingent on the allegations being made against Biden not holding water. If they do turn out to hold water, there are many similarly (and some even more) qualified candidates to take his place.)

I didn't realize the full background and consequences of what's happening in Minneapolis until I read this. Coming from a country with a mostly competent and non-corrupt police, the sheer audacity of what's going on in the US gets stranger and more flagrant every day.

The common refrain from the proponents of the wrong side of history is: "well, okay, but why make this about your skin color? Shouldn't – ahem – all lives matter?"

It's not about skin color for the people who were shot, assaulted, demeaned or mistreated. For them it's the opening of wounds that can never be healed, sorrows that can never be forgotten or the taking of lives, senselessly, in vain.

It's about skin color for the people who were doing the assaulting. It's about dehumanization, relegation to second-class status, willful ignorance of all the individual properties that make up a person. It's about the overwhelming, overbearing legacy of systemic and systematic mistreatment reaching back centuries, and the scar it left.

Whether or not someone is indoctrinated, deeply mistaken (perhaps with the lure of formality fairness, or borne of corrupted shame) or willfully negative, their position is ultimately one of choice, and can be reversed by humility, thought and compassion. No one is born with hatred in their heart, and no one needs hold onto it to their death.

I've been waiting for this ever since I caught the mention in the leaflet (as shown). Within years, many legitimate demands for full-on servers and desktops will be able to be served by single-board computers like the Pi. The main obstacles now are a lack of properly hardware accelerated graphics (which has been started), getting widespread ecosystem 64-bit compatibility and moving to Wayland.

Speaking computing-power-per-dollar-wise, ARM and Raspberry Pi-like computers have us living in an embarrassment of riches. If it weren't for the above reasons, and for SD cards being flakier and more prone to failure than other storage systems, there would be few reasons to build a NUC instead of a Pi unless you absolutely had to run games, Windows or video editing on it.

Worth a listen. His main point is that if you're a consultant you get to see, touch and own only very little, with no agency.

As some people notice, this is not necessarily still true; I've seen big companies use consultants to do what's necessary but impolitic, or throw impossible projects at firms that are too deep in to be able to do anything but attempt to deliver, or act as a wax paper-thin "source of recommendations", when they are more or less dictated up front and laundered. Some consultancies represent what's worst about business, but even good ones can enable dysfunctional businesses to misbehave even further.

Update: taken from a 1992 talk at MIT Sloan School of Management.

From a previous Swift compiler engineer: A working game written in Swift for Mac OS 9, with the help of many bespoke parts, including a Swift runtime largely written in Swift. Follows on from getting a Swift program to run on OS 9 largely with C mappings.

(See also: UEFI Snake in C#, which falls somewhere in-between.)

Two or three years ago, you couldn't swing a social media expert without hitting someone who believed in so-called "gamification". The core observation behind gamification is that when people are playing computer games, they become focused, driven and engrossed. They have a goal and are working towards it, the process is stimulating, and if they encounter resistance, they keep trying again until they can solve the problem.

The traditional definition of the work that has emerged after literacy and industrialism has been obsessed with efficiency, similarity and fungibility. A lot of similar things need to get done, and people need to have the discipline to buckle down and do them. This isn't "fun", it's hard and grueling and repetitive, but the value of work comes from having put in the effort.

Viewed from this angle, it's easy to see why multi-billionaires tell people to live at the office and not go to the bathroom. Ostensibly, if grit is the singular name of the game, advancement and success comes down to doing more of it. But then again, something that sounds like play should be mindbogglingly unpopular, so how does the relative success of gamification work?

Grit as a model of careerism works only insofar as everyone is willing to play Bloomberg's game. Among the several billions of people on this planet, there's more than one set of priorities and more than one type of person. Aside from the people who just plain don't want to advance into the stratosphere, there are also the innumerable who take to "presenteeism". This word can commonly mean people who have to go to work who otherwise would be home sick or treat their parents or kids, but it also refers to people who are coasting and "going through the motions"; feigning work, or taking pains to act as a compliant cog in the organizational organism, without actually having to put in effort to get stuff done.

I don't know whether adherents to gamification believe that it's supposed to shock the coasters into being productive. I don't know whether they have picked up on coasting at all, and are just trying to use it as a newer, better-smelling version of Taylorism, a system wherein every minor step of manual labor in a factory was optimized to within fractions of a second.

If you're not careful, gamification tends to enhance the constant strive towards "KPI" (Key Performance Indicator) maximization, which often maximizes the salary of an individual or budget of a department at the cost of the quality of the work or outcome of the purpose of the business. In this way, corporate business and especially professional/commoditized gaming share an approach. The important thing isn't what you do, but that the numbers keep increasing, be that levels or EXP, or number of veeblefetzers manufactured.

The perverse conclusion is that some of the old world analysis was right. Some work does involve putting in grueling and uncomfortable effort in order to reach a good outcome, and that's the work of realizing that most people in the workforce today are dealing with problems that require creativity to solve and analytical thinking to reason through. The more cookie-cutter and danger-minimizing the approach is to these problems, the worse they get solved, the less fulfilled people are, until failure, insufficience and malicious compliance isn't so much an unfortunate result as a bog for well-intentioned people to tentatively just survive in.

You have to trust people to do the right thing, and you have to give them the opportunity to do the right thing, and you have to not have coasters onboard who will take this freedom and squander it, instead of doing their job better. And whether they know it or not, the school of management that takes grit for granted as the way to salvation are the coasters of their organizational level.

To pull an Amazon and reinstitute Taylorism isn't just dehumanizing, it's intellectually lazy; a brute-force solution of a discredited method. And to run your business in a way constrained by the way you worry the laziest employees will abuse the system, instead of the ways all of your employees will be empowered to do a better job, is just destructive cowardice.

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

– Jamie Zawinski

Google Chrome was a web browser released after Google had already launched Gmail, and so doesn't particularly need to read email. But its Chromium backend is still one half of the Electron engine (together with Node), powering many applications today.

The gist of the previously linked Software disenchantment is that most of the architecture assembled to cumulatively support the sum of 30 years of web pages, including an Xbox 360 controller driver, is present and available and accounted for in the low-effort approach to desktop application development.

When Chrome runs several processes, it's for reasons of privacy, security, stability and decoupling; the sum of complex architectural deduction weighing in backwards compatibility and power consumption. For better or for worse, this is what a browser is forced to do to browse the web these days. When Electron does the same, it's because Chromium was cribbed and duct-taped together with Node, in a feat that is truly technologically impressive, similar to how a chicken with its head cut off still running around is zoologically impressive.

I'm getting mean, but the point isn't to piss on the arduous and precise work necessary to make Electron work, done by people who want to make it easier to make desktop applications. The point is that what you end up with is gross, from top to bottom.

Here's Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, explaining the things he got wrong, and who subsequently started the just-released Deno which takes a different approach.

Chromium isn't itself bad, but see above. Swatting flies by poking them with nuclear warheads gets even more dangerous once you realize that you're asking the same hand that would have held the fly-swatter to hold the warhead instead.

And the act of putting together desktop applications based on web UI is also bad. Maybe it's fine on ChromeOS, but an application is one point in a landscape. Every possible way that an OS could be of service now depends on being piped through two layers of abstraction, maintained by two different development teams. Not to mention the cognitive load of constantly deciphering new models of interaction. For web sites, that's okay – you're there to read something, and maybe add a reply every now and then, or maybe play a game where the game itself is the interaction mechanism. But anything put through Electron aspires not to be a publication but an application.

It's not impossible to create good UIs in a web setting, but it sure as hell takes effort and time and practice. It takes constant vigilance to keep up to date and well adjusted in the face of every device that can access it, and most of the frameworks that are there to help you add more heft and complexity for the developer.

Many web-based apps deal with tables/grids in one way or another. How many of them have rearrangable columns, resizable columns, sortable columns? In how many of them can you select several rows and use the copy shortcut to copy the text? Type the first few letters to jump the selection to the first row that starts with them? None of these things are there from the beginning. All of them have to be added. It's not that it's impossible to do these things, it's that it takes effort for the developer, it's that it erodes familiarity for users who can't get their work done faster and can't build an intuition about how things work and what things are capable of.

Of course Electron can be a good tool for someone with few resources or without extensive knowledge of desktop APIs. You've gotta start somewhere. But it's become the go-to tool for even large companies to use, under the debatable pretense that it solves more problems than it creates. And by redefining UI and usability to also include experience (which was necessary), we have opened the door to shift the "experience" away from "did this work well for me?" and towards "was this UI high production value enough to impress them?". What gets thrown away? Familiarity, respect for the user's computer and battery life, respect for the user's desire to master a tool so that they can capably get work done.

Polarization is the enemy of reasoning. I'm not the first to rail against Electron or web-based UIs. But the answer isn't always to switch, tomorrow, to the lowest native stack available on all platforms, and code as if you're using your grandfather's Pentium Pro. It's to be aware of what you're doing, to understand what you're buying into and what you're giving up; to respect your users and respect yourself by doing the best job you can for them. Be informed, be deliberate; be proud of the work you do, the bugs you fix, the complexities you manage and master. Be willing to improve.

Ever since I read Nikita Prokopov's Software disenchantment, I've been going down the rabbit hole. The article is about software quality going to crap, and how often it is linked with expediency.

It contains a mention of Jonathan Blow's language Jai, which made me look it up, and whose history and philosophy I gradually soaked up after watching a number of his archived streams on YouTube which are largely either progress reports or him making a change live. (The name, as far as I can tell, is never explained nor even said on camera, which is a rare feat given the screen time.)

The gist of this philosophy is basically: "speaking as a game developer with Braid and The Witness to my name, to whom details are important both in that they make my game what it is and in that they dictate whether given the previous details I will even be allowed to hit 60 fps, I am thoroughly disappointed with today's programming landscape, most languages and most current dogma on architecture and abstraction, so therefore I'm making my own programming language from scratch so I can make it do the things I think it should be able to do".

Jai is enthralling because of these perspectives. It has metaprogramming-that-is-also-compile-time-code-generation-which-feeds-into-runtime-introspection on a level that is rare for how close the language gets to the metal. Generics are turned into "polymorphic functions" which are fully mapped out and realized at compile time from actual use. Each top-level declaration or function is parsed and type-checked separately and fed into a "meta-program" using which you can choose to produce new code or alter the just-parsed code. There's no such thing as classes, and indeed no constructors or methods - but basic levels of "inheritance" are possible through struct containment and the keyword using, which turns into syntactic sugar for going up the chain if you can't find it, but by the compiler doing lookups instead of via virtual method tables.

The reason for all of these things are that they allow flexibility in the code while still not prescribing implementation. You're supposed to make your own of most things, because in Jonathan's world that's basically how it is anyway – the memory layout of the list of entities affects performance, so why wouldn't you roll your own, or at least want to be able to? Earlier versions contained support for managing turning an "array of structs" into a "struct of arrays" — ie being able to pack the base metadata of all entities in a denser form, and so on – while still using the same syntax.

Having always carried the stereotype that people who cared so much about performance never aspired to neater code, or at least never let it bother them that they couldn't have it, I was disturbed at first by all this. Heaven knows how rudimentary code completion or "go-to-definition" type analysis would be implemented for this language, and that's probably why this road isn't often taken. Security experts would run from numerous aspects of the language and its model, and it doesn't attempt to make things easier for people who screw up memory safety in a pointer-oriented language (which at last count is still literally everyone).

There are numerous reasons to "not try this at home" and Jai is explicitly not designed for general use by everyone, but those concerns are not reasons to avoid looking at an unconventional language that throws off, at least temporarily, the yokes of soundness and theory and abstraction in exchange for actual utility and usefulness – and even other kinds of abstraction.

The minimal CMS and engine behind Take has gotten a few improvements along with minimal tweaks to the site look.

Particularly important to me, there is now a step which minimizes the HTML of all pages. The front page (which for me is slightly heavier since I'm logged in) now weighs in at 40 353 bytes for me, and contains 31 661 characters of text, for a 78.4% text-to-HTML density.

For comparison:

• Today's issue of the text-heavy (but also interactive-charts-heavy) Electoral-vote.com clocks in at ~9.8% (31 363 vs 320 055)

• Daring Fireball's latest full-text article page at ~47.6% (6 951 vs 14 602)

• CloudFlare's Medium-hosted How we made our page-load optimisations even faster at ~5.3% (13 196 vs 251 035)

(Play along home by running
[document.body.innerText.length, document.body.parentElement.outerHTML.length, (document.body.innerText.length / document.body.parentElement.outerHTML.length) * 100]
in the developer tools console of your browser.

Please be advised that this is in no way a useful representative measure of bloat since it completely disregards the potential freight train of externally included resources, and punishes links, tables and images. For me, now, it's a good measure of the whitespace-removing and HTML-simplifying minification process, and the rest is just in good fun.)