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Comment Not News (Score 4, Insightful) 109

Apple reports that the language Apple wrote performs well when a bunch of Apple engineers use it to remake a project. Why is this news?

There are hundreds, if not *thousands* of devs on Slashdot who have rewritten something ... even in the same language ... and seen massive performance improvements. The fact that a 2.0 version of something has the potential to be better than the 1.0 is not news, and neither is anything else in this article.

It doesn't even offer a real comparison of Java vs. Swift, because they didn't just translate Java => Swift ... they wrote an entirely new version of the code, so it's impossible to tell what parts of the performance increase came from the language change, and what came from the rewrite.

Comment Re:Not about the workers (Score 4, Interesting) 46

It's actually worse than free online resources: the Duolingo Ai will mispronounce many languages (eg. Japanese, Irish). Spending your time learning the wrong way to speak a language is just awful!

At least the free resources are (generally) made by human native language speakers, and thus have correct pronunciation.

Comment Re: I read the article (Score 3, Insightful) 116

A (VC funded) start-up's MVP has one goal: to convince investors to fund it. Once you get funded ($500k in this case) you can hire a couple of real devs, who can write real (ie. maintainable) code.

But for the "get funded" part, it truly doesn't matter if the MVP is 100k lines of GOTO-riddled BASIC code ... all that matters is that it can convince investors.

Comment That's Not How Copyright Works (in America) (Score 1) 14

Under American copyright law you can't copyright an idea, only a specific piece of writing. In other words, if these sites posted movie scripts for upcoming movies, they could get in trouble, because the movie companies own a copyright on those scripts.

However, you CAN NOT copyright an idea! As long as you describe the spoiler yourself, in your own writing, an American site would be so clearly in the right that anyone attempting to take them to court would be laughed out by the judge.

Now, maybe Japanese copyright law works differently, but I have a hard time even imagining a system of laws that let's you claim control over an entire idea (not counting other established intellectual property, like patents or trademarks).

Comment Re: $500,000 per dose (Score -1, Flamebait) 23

Yeah, that's a pretty childish response.

Research needs to be funded somehow, and we have not yet evolved (as a society) to the point that a single governing authority can be trusted to allocate all research funding (and then tax the population at gun point to pay for it). Adults understand that.

Comment Signs You Shouldn't be Applying There ... (Score 5, Insightful) 51

All of these applicants should be grateful! These companies just warned them, in no uncertain terms, that they are incompetent and don't respect their employees. Working for them will be miserable, so you should go get hired somewhere else.

I *wish* humans would save me the trouble of trying to get a job by just repeating "vertical bar pilates", instead of making me go through multiple rounds of interviews, plus a week or more of employment, before finally revealing what idiots they are (and that I never should have applied for the job in the first place).

Comment Re:no. (Score 1) 187

Man, judging by the upvotes this got, irrational bigotry exists even among software developers.

Look, I hate Perl, Ruby, and PHP. All those languages make choices which I consider to be terrible, and I would turn down almost any job offer if it involved coding in them (primarily).

But, I will also be the first to admit that all three languages are perfectly viable: you can 100% use them to create numerous kinds of serious business applications. I may crap all over those languages when discussing their pros/cons with other devs, but would *never* say that they are the "wrong tool for any job", because there are mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Similarly here: hate on Javascript all you want, personally ... but if you think it's not a good and viable tool, you're just letting your bigotry cloud your judgement.

Comment Re:Standing on the tracks. (Score 1) 58

Exactly! For years before AI, Stack Overflow has drifted from "that place devs can get help when they have a question" to "that place where every new question you ask is downvoted, (falsely) flagged as a duplicate, and ignored for days, weeks, or maybe forever ... unless you're lucky enough for a kind soul to happen upon it".

As they wrote:

It's very much been always added to and not been thought of holistically

Exactly: there was a push to improve quality on the site, which was good ... but it was made with absolutely no thought whatsoever as to the side effects. As it turned out, training all of the site's power users to malign new questions, instead of answer them, ultimately had a huge effect on everyone's use and enjoyment of the site.

By the time the damage was done, the site was already on the ropes; AI has just finished it off.

Comment Re:What is it for? (Score 5, Insightful) 120

Apple's marketing most certainly did not say that!

Google Glass *was* for developers: you had to submit an application showing you were a dev to even purchase a pair. Everyone involved was 100% clear that it was an early developer/demo device.

In contrast, Vision Pro was sold directly to consumers, advertised in mass media, and free demos were given to anyone who walked into an Apple Store. It was an "early adopter" device, absolutely ... but it was not a *developer* device.

Comment Chegg Was Doomed (Score 4, Informative) 16

Never believe a CEO. I worked at Chegg as AI was coming out, and the company's leadership claimed everything was still going to be just fine. "We have all the data (on what professors ask what questions and such), and Chat GPT doesn't, so students will still use us."

Flash forward to the mass layoffs (and the stock losing something like 90% of its value).

Comment I Don't Want More From Figma (Score 0) 10

Figma is like Micro$oft: they dominated the market, rested on their laurels, and charged *a lot* more because everyone "has" to use them.

Now, to be fair, Figma did originally earn their position: their tool was significantly better than (say) InVision. But that was years ago, and the first meaningful news to come from the company since are these "us too" knockoffs.

Maybe they'll knock it out of the park, like they originally did with Figma ... but I suspect they'll be like other fat and lazy companies, and these new products will just be ... bad knockoffs.

Comment Re:What Windows programs don't run under Wine? (Score 3, Informative) 22

What Windows programs don't run under Wine?

Lots. https://appdb.winehq.org/ can show you the status of most programs, if you want to see for yourself.

What substitutes are there for Windows programs that don't run under Wine?

Virtualization (ie. running Windows inside another OS, like Linux) ... and that's pretty much it. WINE is the only serious game in town.

There is this thing called Proton that Steam created, which helps the Steam Deck run a lot of games (that previously weren't supported under WINE). However, Proton isn't really a separate tool, it's just a set of libraries that enhance WINE.

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