Given the reactionary position people in tech are increasingly taking with AI, I think we know the answer to that.

Js is indeed painful. I find the right approach is to simply treat it as a compile target. I’ve worked with ClojureScript when I had to do front end work, and I find it’s a huge improvement because it has sane language semantics. You have things like proper equality, comparison by value, immutable data structures, and so on. It’s not perfect because you still have to deal with stuff like source maps to get errors out of minified bundles, and you have to interop when you deal with Js libraries, but it’s a huge improvement overall I’ve found.

One huge impact mass FOSS adoption would have is that there would be a lot less software and hardware churn. Commercial nature of proprietary technology is the main driver for constant upgrade cycles we see. Companies need to constantly sell products to stay in business, and this means you have to deprecate old software and hardware in order to sell new versions of the product.

Windows 11 roll out is a perfect example. Vast majority of Windows 10 users are perfectly happy with the way their computer works currently, they’re not demanding any new features, they just want their computer to continue to work the way it does currently. However, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 and now they’re forced to buy a new computer to keep doing what they’ve been doing.

This problem goes away entirely with open source because there is no commercial incentive at play. If a piece of software works, and there is a community of users using it, then it can keep working the way it does indefinitely. Furthermore, in cases where a software project goes in a directions some users don’t like, such as the case with Gnome, then software can be forked by users who want to go in a different direction or preserve original functionality. This is how Cinnamon and Mate projects came about.

Another aspect of the open source dynamic is that there’s an incentive to optimize software. So, you can get continuous performance improvements without having to constantly upgrade your hardware. For most commercial software, there’s little incentive to do that since that costs company money. It’s easier to just expect users to upgrade their hardware if they want better performance.

I would argue that non technical software users would be far better off if they had the option to fund open source software instead of buying commercial versions. Even having to pay equal amounts, the availability of the source puts more power in the hands of the users. For example, building on the example of Gnome, users of an existing software project could also pull funds together to pay developers to add features to the software or change functionality in a particular way.

This is precisely what makes licenses like GPL so valuable in my opinion. It’s a license that ensure the source stays open, and in this way inherently gives more power to the users.

Yup, it’s frustrating that there’s still no process that’s easy enough for a non techie to go through easily.

Yeah basically, a turn key solution where your machine gets wiped and imaged with a Linux distro that does all the basic stuff most people need would be an ideal solution. A good way to look at it would be making sort of a Linux based console for non technical users as opposed to a general purpose computer. Tech people want the latter, but non technical users just want a reliable tool that can reliably handle a few tasks.

Indeed, it kills me how much perfectly hardware is constantly thrown out because Windows refuses to run on it.

I think the trick has to be that somebody who has a bit of technical skill sets the laptop up initially. I did this for my mom a while back, and once I set it up once, it just worked from there on. Non technical users tend to have a fairly small set of things they need to do like check email, browser the web, and play media. Once that’s working, they never need to change anything. In fact, they don’t want to change anything because they get used to the workflow, and they’re comfortable.

It would be great if people set up community centres where people can bring their old laptops, and somebody switches them over to Linux for them.

I find what you generally want is a service bus. For example, if you have common tasks like sending emails, making PDFs, etc. you can create generic services that handle the action, and then call them providing the context such as the document the service should operate on. Meanwhile, actual business logic and the state should absolutely live in a single place.

welcome to the world that capitalism built

:)

Because they have a predatory business model.

Usually what happens is people create lambda functions on AWS which are basically managed functions that get invoked when a request comes in (think a modern version of CGI), and then if there are a lot of requests then the user can easily end up with a huge bill.

I find the most relevant aspect of an estimate is how familiar the person making the estimate with the problem. People who have the best understanding will inevitably give the best estimates.

Genetic algorithms use a fitness function to converge on a solution, so it’s not just random iterations hoping one will work. It’s basically a gradient descent algorithm applied to output from LLMs.

I’ve never touched ChatGPT out of principle, but everything I hear about it makes it sound like hot garbage.

My experience is that you want to keep changes as focused as possible. The smaller the context it has to work on the better the results tend to be, and the easier it is to check that it did what you actually wanted it to.

here’s what DeepSeek gave me for the following prompt: write a small bash script to check if a CSV exists and if it does rename to the filename_date.CSV and upload to hdfs, keep it simple

#!/bin/bash

# Check if filename argument is provided
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <csv_filename>"
    exit 1
fi

CSV_FILE="$1"

# Check if file exists
if [ ! -f "$CSV_FILE" ]; then
    echo "Error: File $CSV_FILE not found!"
    exit 1
fi

# Generate new filename with date (YYYYMMDD format)
DATE=$(date +%Y%m%d)
NEW_FILENAME="${CSV_FILE%.*}_${DATE}.csv"

# Rename the file
mv "$CSV_FILE" "$NEW_FILENAME"

# Upload to HDFS
hdfs dfs -put "$NEW_FILENAME" /path/to/hdfs/directory/

echo "Successfully processed: $NEW_FILENAME"

Not just OpenEvolve, I’m talking about how agents can use MCP to run code now. Cursor can now have agents iterate on a solution completely on their own.

Nowadays, the agents can iterate. It basically works like a genetic algorithm where it converges on a solution.