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I think it’s becoming hard to ignore that the Internet has fundamental flaws from a game theoretical view. I hope that we can skip the step of having Google as the feudal lord who saves us from anarchy though.

How about we start with some accountability for entities that host fraud? The main reason we can have relative anonymity in public is part trust and partially because you can get physically taken out if you cross the line. I understand there are some real limitations with enforcing accountability on the Internet, but perhaps that’s where we should be focusing.


> I hope that we can skip the step of having Google as the feudal lord who saves us from anarchy though.

It's clear IMO that this is the plan.

The Google/Meta/Cloudflare axis on the Web is just part of it. Everyone with a nontrivial stake in a major corporation wants techno-feudalism. Every industry is heavily consolidated and is trying to consolidate even more. Lord-and-serf type of arrangements are so prevalent throughout history because they're maximally profitable for the lord and hard to break out of for the serfs.


> What -apart from cost- prevents a user who wants more bandwidth from installing 10 devices in parallel and alternate each radio so none of the radios exceed their allowed transmit duty cycle?

Folks with badges knocking on the user’s door. It is pretty trivial to locate stationary signals.


The point they are making is that if the limit is _per device_ than using 10 devices doesn't break the rules.

The FCC or whoever is almost 100% just looking at power/time/location. Those 10 devices will look like 1 device.

when would the 10 radios be sufficiently spaced to count as separate devices?

Law enforcement that isn't solving 50% of murders also isn't looking for exotic crimes unless there's a lot of money in it for them.

I’m not sure how you could suggest starbucks and mcdonalds outcompete based on product quality or ambiance. Have you been to a random mom&pop coffee or burger spot recently?

Chairs aren’t magic, we know roughly what’s good or not. You don’t need a PhD to choose a good chair. A mom and pop could just copy the chair too.

The chains outcompete on marketing, leverage with vendors, etc.

They put a huge amount of effort into baseline quality because it’s incredibly hard to pull off across 1000s of stores staffed by people who don’t have any incentive to care.


I'll start of by saying I really hate C (also love it), and welcome improvements; but I have a few criticisms:

- Sensor agent is such a rancid name for a remote sensor that I feel a need to public say so. Please don't use marketing names for things that already have more descriptive names.

- Rust uses a full RTOS and C uses the mediocre ST HAL (vendor specific). Immediately apples to oranges. Also I've never heard of the C JSON library and it looks sketchy at a glance so that will also hurt the comparison.

- Streaming slow sensor data with a 160MHz 786KB/2MB MCU is not a good test in the slightest. You could probably use something like micro python here and be done. No one is reaching for bare metal C here. Also no one serious about performance is using JSON serdes. If you're using bare metal C, you're likely trying to push the limits of your hardware or doing something so simple that you won't be tempted to reach for terrible third party libraries.

- Does the Rust code base use the 'unsafe' keyword anywhere, including the RTOS? If so, it's not memory safe without additional formal verification.

Overall I'd say this paper has approximately zero value wrt its stated goal of comparison.


Good for you? I’m glad you have languages that fit your needs.

In the realtime/high assurance systems world, where garbage collection can be a huge source of non-determinism and overhead; we don’t have great options.

Zig is really the only language (idk about Odin?) trying to take the same approach that C did in giving you absolute control over a minimally abstracted CPU model. Us folks who need/want maximum control/performance should be allowed to have nice things too.


> It's not by writing syntax that you get there. It's by creating software and gaining the experience of seeing it go wrong.

I’m not sure there’s any data to support this statement. Maybe if you hedge with “not by syntax alone”.

I am aware of studies that showed the act of physical writing letters improves retention.

I would not be surprised if this extended to physically typing out your curly braces, naming functions, etc.


> The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts.

Nope. Nope. Nope. That has explicitly not been ruled on yet. Transformative means that you don't need a fair use defense. Anthropic has only gotten away with their outputs being called transformative so far because they put a dubiously effective filter in front to block the most egregious infringing outputs. No one has actually challenged this afaik.


> The big tools that won on collaboration (eg. Google Docs) have understood that low-friction sharing is critical to becoming the default choice.

Google docs is a heavily subsidized product and not representative.

Also tool pricing seems hard, but I can’t really get behind saying that a company should bait and switch with their pricing models harder.


Under that logic is a free trial a bait and switch? How about a 1-month free deal? How about what Adobe (and many others) do where they license to the school and students get it free until they graduate?

It seems like a really weird point to make, when you could just as easily argue that Figma giving their services for free to students is a gift that levels the playing field, by allowing students without means to gain experience with industry standard tools they might not have been exposed to otherwise.

It’s not zero-sum.


> Under that logic is a free trial a bait and switch? How about a 1-month free deal? How about what Adobe (and many others) do where they license to the school and students get it free until they graduate?

No. The key difference being transparency. You know when signing up for a free trial what the actual long term costs will be and can plan for it.

We might be talking about different things. I was mostly replying to this line from the OP:

> But I think it's part of a larger mistake Figma is making: they seem to have shifted to an extraction mindset too early

I’m not sure if this was just awkward wording that seems to condone these type of strategies.

All these loss leading, vendor lockin strategies have distorted markets heavily. Complex tools cost a lot of money to develop; and if another player is just going to burn piles of cash from elsewhere to undercut you, it becomes a game of capital allocation and not individual product quality/costs. It’s terrible for consumers and a big reason why even common chat apps are barely functional.


That's fair. I'm also heavily opposed to VC-funded, market-distorting behaviors and the later extraction-oriented outcomes they produce. In this case I was framing it in terms that might be more widely received by folks who aren't, and pointing out that, even if that was their mindset and goal, they were still making a mistake strategically.

But I appreciate the reminder to not cede ground in wording, thanks.


> Tell me you know nothing about web development without saying you know nothing about web dev

This Twitterism really bugs me.

You took the time to write a really detailed response (much appreciated, you convinced me). There’s no need to explicitly dunk on the OP. Though if you really want to be a little mean (a little bit is fair imo), I think it should be closer to level of creativity of the rest of your comment. Call them ignorant and say you can’t take them seriously or something. The twitterism wouldn’t really stand on its own as a comment.

Sorry for the nitpicky rant.


I think that's a fair criticism.

It bugs me that the author is "dunking on" React without knowledge on the matter (React is the tool you use to enforce consistent UI on a site; it has almost nothing at all to do with a design decision to have inconsistent UI). So I guess I "dunked on him" in response.

But ... too wrongs don't make a right. I'd remove the un-needed smarminess, if it wasn't already too late to edit.


I’m a decade+ linux power user and I still do insane things like pipe outputs into vim so I can copy paste without having to remember tmux copy paste modes when I have vertical panes open.


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