I've programmed Win32 for decades and while it was fine for the time, much of the user facing APIs are obsolete for modern GUI development and some of the non-user facing stuff too. But Microsoft really hasn't produced a credible replacement for it and has shat out a succession of technologies one after the other that devs are supposed to use before Microsoft abandons them for the next - Win32 (and layers on top like MFC), WinForms, WPF (and Silverlight), UWP, Windows App SDK / WinUI.

Some of these technologies are overlapping, but each was intended to coral devs into making Metro apps or Windows Store apps and burn their bridges in the process. It went down like a lead balloon. Now they're dialing back trying to make WinUI somewhat platform agnostic to the version of Windows its running on but who knows if it will stick. It's not the only pain point because Microsoft even extended the C++ language to deal with these APIs with new types like "ref", "partial" and hat notation to deal with garbage collected objects, auto generated classes and other things that also impedes portability.

So it's no wonder that app developers have gone for web apps (and QT) because it's makes it easier to write portable apps and acts as insulation from Microsoft's mercurial view of the world.

some end in .com but oh god yes I HATE the term app.

I used the hell out of MS Works. It did what I needed quickly and without the HUGE bloat of M$Office and Word. Though I came from a GML background so it was easy...

LMAO...I wish I had mod points...you deserve it.

HTML/CSS/DOM sucks rotting eggs for doing real GUI's. It was stretched way beyond it's original purpose of displaying static documents, and mutated into rocket spaghetti surgery and still has common GUI idioms missing or done wrong.

I'm for an HTTPS-friendly GUI markup standard, by the way. Build it from the ground up for GUI's.

Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.

I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.

I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.

And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.

I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash plugin loaded too.

FWIW that old machine would take about 15 minutes to encode a 3 minute mp3 file and my current machines does it in about six seconds. So the hardware gains are real.

Maybe ML will actually be able to find some optimizations that are too cumbersome for humans to manage.

I didn't miss the jr. high "figure out what g is" stuff in the beginning of the book. I was kinda bummed at how much the selective breeding was glossed over as they had to cram a line into the movie to explain the disaster at the end. But a the same time the movie is two and a half hours long. While there are a handful of other cuts I think they could have gotten away with (the extended Karaoke scene maybe), there wasn't a ton of fat to trim to keep the runtime reasonable.

I don't think Xenonite is made of Xenon exclusively, but it is strange enough that handheld spectrometers can't deal with it. Maybe it offgasses xenon when bombarded by charged particles? One thing the movie glossed over is how Rocky's species is in many ways much less technologically advanced than Humans. Their materials science is outstanding due to the hellish nature of their home world, but they don't have electronics. Their math and science are back in the early 20th century. They went interstellar before discovering relativity. Mostly due to the fact that the astrophage is basically magic. In the book one background character mentions offhand that the astrophage is a miracle that will solve countless problems and everybody just glares at him angrily because even though he is right it's also killing them. On the other hand, while reading the book I had thoughts of an interstellar ferry service that collects astrophage and brings it back to Earth where it is tricked into releasing its energy into the atmosphere to warm the planet and light up cropland. Spin drives open up the entire solar system to exploitation and the astrophage is the perfect energy storage medium.

I don't know why I should care about limited compatibility for a subset of devices with another subset of devices. There's some of everything in my home. I found a tool called LocalSend years ago that allows me to do mildly obnoxious data transfers between arbitrary devices regardless of platform.

at the very least, doing code reviews of jr developers gives one (of age/experience) the satisfaction that the mentoring is going to produce a better developer who can take on bigger tasks, eventually start reviewing others, and the company experience continues to grow until the obligatory pointless layoffs to boost the stock price.

you can't trust an AI to truly remember anything you tried to "teach" it if it even got a look at your fixes of their crappy code, because even if it did, the next version of the bot's engine may need to be retrained from scratch as it "forgot" almost everything. Plus, it is REALLY hard to get AI to understand general code design philosophies like "3 strikes and you refactor" - it is designed to regurgitate first, not solve problems by increasing the use of shared code. I look at some AI results and all I see is tech debt that will eventually kill the product but never get fixed because nobody quite understands the original task it was trying to do when it just did 'copy and mod'.

If "the problem is peer pressure" then the nicotine/tobacco industry should have NO PROBLEM with ads / promotions / marketing / sponsorship being banned right?

The reality is that vapes are in the same situation as tobacco in the 70s and 80s deliberately using marketing of people looking cool and sexy to get people hooked on this shit. The way to stop people getting hooked is to remove all prominence of the product and make it hard and extreme risk for a business to sell to kids. And to make the product less affordable by banning disposable vapes. And to make the product less attractive in terms of flavours and such.

These are all obvious measures. Will it stop all kids from vaping? Of course not. But it will stop a lot. And that's why tobacco / nicotine lobby REALLY want things to stay as loose as they are now. They need a constant stream of new addicts and anything that threatens that is detrimental to their business model.

lengthy prompts to draft

Just use AI to help generate prompts!

Because sometimes the client paying for the work wants it to be on GitHub.

If Microsoft is going to put ads in GitHub the people who upload the code should get a cut of the money. The more bugs you fix, the richer you get!

It turns out that acquihiring a twenty person company just to get a couple developers and two UX people is a bad idea. Who knew?