It's much worse than you think. Press coverage -> manual intervention is at best a bandaid covering up a major wound in a flaw that happens with independent software distribution.
The old model where the user decides which software or apps to run on their machine, is basically already replaced by a whitelist system that is managed by companies who have no interest or obligation to approve developers. Factors like ”being an individual”, an open source developer or god forbid reside outside the USA, you rely on a combination of L1 support doom loops, unjustifiable high recurring prices, kafkaesque and changing requirements, internal inconsistencies. Windows is the worst, but all platforms (except Linux) suffer from this and you can and will get hurt, delayed, and gaslit. If you haven’t, it’s just a matter of time.
I have been blocked for 6 months now with Digicert code cert renewal, for my app Payload, which will never get any media attention. The app doesn’t matter though, the approval process is per-entity (usually, a company). The point is that nobody gives a shit, because they have a monopoly/cartel and they start the validation process after they take your money.
If you are not an app publisher, the best way I can describe it is the ”pre-let’s encrypt” era of SSL certs, but more expensive, strict and ambiguous. In fact, I’ve never gone through any worse approval process in my life, and that includes applying for residency in two countries, business licenses, manual tax filings etc.
Some countries (the EU in general) are already doing things about this. Owning the app store means you are a monopoly and now the only question is are you illegal by the local laws which vary.
You can/should write your congressman (or whatever they are called in your country) and get better laws in place.
You are not wrong that regulation is desperately needed, and that EU is doing good things. However, even the EU which are doing the right thing on an anti-trust pro-competition basis, they fundamentally succumb to the same misconception – that middlemen are necessary at all. The EU doesn’t care about the App Store model, they care about the App Store monopoly. They are right about that, but the solution isn’t alternative app stores - it’s much simpler: the solution is NO App Store.
More specifically, it used to be feasible to distribute software between me (the developer) and my customers (the users) without a mandatory gate keeper that looks at me and decides whether I’m worthy, am from the right country, have good intentions etc. This is currently necessary on all desktop and mobile platforms except Linux. There is exactly 1 gatekeeper per platform (the platform owner who controls your device), except windows, which effectively have like 3-4 CAs that’s shrinking every year due to mergers and private equity ownership.
Software curation and reputation systems can be good, either with whitelists (say steam) or blacklists (say antivirus). I can see some use cases for it, but they should be within user control. What we have now is worse than a fearmongering Stallman rant. It’s incredibly bad, both pragmatically and philosophically.
Why not just have the Secure Enclave in the ID card and use NFC to communicate with it? Think about it, you literally have dozens of computers between you and the provider. Routers, middleboxes, load balancers, servers etc, all insecure or untrusted, but somehow my device needs to have their special rootkit and hardware DRM. A separate device that can be provisioned with ID is the least to ask. If the government doesn’t trust me with my device, fine, but then return the favor - I don’t trust them either. Both governments and corporations that are gonna use this have long track records of invasive, often illegal spying - whereas my track record is letting people mind their own business.
This is exactly what the ID cards I'm talking about are. You tap them to the phone or a desktop reader and it works. You just invented something that already exists.
eIDAS just takes this one step further and gives you an option to not have to carry your card with you. But if you refuse to have an attested phone, then you pay those 20EUR to get the ID card (which you probably need for other uses as well) and move on with your life.
> This is exactly what the ID cards I'm talking about are. You tap them to the phone or a desktop reader and it works. You just invented something that already exists.
Great, thanks for clarifying. Please be mindful not everyone are domain experts and we’re all (hopefully) trying to learn.
Now, do you know whether ID cards will work with the proposed German system for e2e online ID verification? My understanding from comments was that it doesn’t, and providers are free to require the app-based version.
In Sweden we have an app-based system now (BankID), and afaik there are no alternatives that work reliably. You have to buy an American phone every few years to participate in basic societal functions. However, the government is ”looking into” decoupling digital identity from (1) banks and (2) mandatory hardware manufacturers (iOS/Android).
Rust is a language for fast prototyping? That’s the one thing Rust is absolutely terrible at imo, and I really like the production/quality/safety aspects of Rust.
> The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve.
It’s actually worse than that: the AI will not stop and say ”too complex, try in a month with the next SOTA model”. Rather, it will give Bob a plausible looking solution that Bob cannot identify as right or wrong. If Bob is working on an instant feedback problem, it’s ok: he can flag it, try again, ask for help. But if the error can’t be detected immediately, it can come back with a vengeance in a year. Perhaps Bob has already gotten promoted by then, and Bobs replacement gets to deal with it. In either case, Bob cannot be trusted any more than the LLM itself.
When he said we need more time to do this properly, he was labelled slow. They pushed him to use AI all day long and told at the all hands that there will be programmers who use AI and those who don't will be left behind. So he said fuck doing it right for the project, let me do it right for myself.
Now he got his promotion, they will hire 3 people in a cheaper location to handle various issues that are coming up (product will always have bugs you see). Given his excellent speed of delivery, they will report to him.
It isn’t. Bob has a different problem: that there are millions of Bobs with access to the same tools, meaning the value of Bobs labor is commodity priced. That may be good for some Bobs and bad for others.
> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things.
Yes, but how does he know if it worked? If you have instant feedback, you can use LLMs and correct when things blow up. In fact, you can often try all options and see which works, which makes it ”easy” in terms of knowledge work. If you have delayed feedback, costly iterations, or multiple variables changing underneath you at all times, understanding is the only way.
That’s why building features and fixing bugs is easy, and system level technical decision making is hard. One has instant feedback, the other can take years. You could make the ”soon” argument, but even with better models, they’re still subject to training data, which is minimal for year+ delayed feedback and multivariate problems.
That’s… one 9 of reliability. You could argue the title understates the problem.
> You don't need every single service to be online in order to use GitHub.
Well that’s how they want you to use it, so it’s an epic failure in their intended use story. Another way to put this is ”if you use more GitHub features, your overall reliability goes down significantly and unpredictably”.
Look, I have never been obsessed with nines for most types of services. But the cloud service providers certainly were using it as major selling/bragging points until it got boring and old because of LLMs. Same with security. And GitHub is so upstream that downstream effects can propagate and cascade quite seriously.
> And if this simpler solution was actually better for the company, it should be highlighted[…]
Simpler than what? The reason this phenomenon is so pervasive in the first place is that people can’t know the alternatives. To a bystander (ie managers), a complex solution is proof of a complex problem. And a simple solution, well anyone could have done that! Right?
If we want to reward simplicity we have to switch reference frame from output (the solution), to input (the problem).
I'm (also) an EM, I've been a pure EM in some roles in my career and I really struggle to understand these pain points that many people bring up. Isn't a manager job to know what their managees are focused on over a period of time? Shouldn't be they aware of the projects the team is working on? As EM and most probably previously engineers, shouldn't they know already why simple solutions are good?
Contrary to HN popular belief, there are neither incentives nor benefits to building native ui apps, for neither consumer nor professional apps. The exception is apps that only make sense on a single platform, such as window management and other deep integration. On iOS/macos you have a segment of indie/smaller apps that capture a niche market of powerusers for things like productivity apps. But the point is it makes no sense for anything from Slack, VSCode, Maya, DaVinci Resolve, and so on, to build native UIs. Even if they wanted to build and maintained 3 versions, advanced features aren’t always available in these frameworks. In the case of Windows, even MS has given up on their own tech, and have opted to launch webview based apps. Apple is slightly more principled.
Qt delegates to native UI in a lot of cases. I think a lot of people who rail against native UI fail to delineate between native UI and first party frameworks. Using third party frameworks, even cross platform ones, does not mean you lose out on native UI elements.
Strong disagree. I think Microsoft’s decision to wrap web apps for the desktop is one of the stupidest they have ever made. It provides poor user experience, uses more battery power and needs more memory and CPU to be performant and creates inconsistencies and wierd errors compared to native apps.
The increased adoption of webviews has resulted in a death by a thousand cuts effect on Windows 11 performance. The speed bump that comes from going from an up to date Windows 11 install to a up to date Windows 10 install on the same machine is stunning… W10 is much more snappy in every regard despite being nearly identical functionally speaking.
I won’t try to claim that Electron and friends have no place is software development but we absolutely should be pushing back harder against stuffing it everywhere it possibly can be.
Every modern desktop uses webviews in some capacity. macOS renders many apps with webviews, GNOME uses gjs to script half the desktop. The time to push back was 10-20 years ago, it's too late to revert now.
They’re still fairly uncommon in macOS, mostly being used in places related to cloud service settings. SwiftUI and Catalyst (iOS bridge) are both much more common than webviews, and AppKit remains ubiquitous.
Meanwhile on Windows major features like the Start menu are written in React.
Worth noting that WebKit webviews also tend to be more lightweight than their Chromium brethren.
What do you mean? With every launch they change the orientation of the camera array so you can tell who has the new model, and thus, is a better person.
You need to be well versed in the attribution for camera disposition. I am too old for that so getting understanding who is the better person is challenging :)
The old model where the user decides which software or apps to run on their machine, is basically already replaced by a whitelist system that is managed by companies who have no interest or obligation to approve developers. Factors like ”being an individual”, an open source developer or god forbid reside outside the USA, you rely on a combination of L1 support doom loops, unjustifiable high recurring prices, kafkaesque and changing requirements, internal inconsistencies. Windows is the worst, but all platforms (except Linux) suffer from this and you can and will get hurt, delayed, and gaslit. If you haven’t, it’s just a matter of time.
I have been blocked for 6 months now with Digicert code cert renewal, for my app Payload, which will never get any media attention. The app doesn’t matter though, the approval process is per-entity (usually, a company). The point is that nobody gives a shit, because they have a monopoly/cartel and they start the validation process after they take your money.
If you are not an app publisher, the best way I can describe it is the ”pre-let’s encrypt” era of SSL certs, but more expensive, strict and ambiguous. In fact, I’ve never gone through any worse approval process in my life, and that includes applying for residency in two countries, business licenses, manual tax filings etc.
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