Yup. If it takes me more than a day to get started working on business logic, that’s on me. That should take max 4 hours.

So, repeatedly buy and return games?

We have two, so the fat one steals the skinny one’s food.

I want my…

it’s basically “customers use crappy laptops -> we decided to make them use web browsers” which sounds insane to me because web content IS the reason why tons of otherwise unnecessary upgrades are done in recent 10 years or so

We do processing on the cloud because our customers use crappy laptops. We use a web browser because:

• convincing customers to get approval for our app is hard (corporate IT), whereas they already have a recent browser
• it’s faster to get the result we want
• our dev env (macOS) is different from our target platform (Windows); this is because it’s easier to work around our IT Dept than with them (and nobody on the team likes Windows), and our servers are Linux, and macOS is close enough for BE dev
• audits are easier - just need to test the API, not the whole desktop app platform since auditors trust the browser

The same is true for my the other project I mentioned. If your business is largely B2B, then browser apps are a much easier sell than a desktop app. We’re getting a little pushback as we’re breaking into a new market, so we’re turning to Tauri to provide a desktop-app experience, a different keep the web app for the rest of our customers.

I love my ereader.

You can obviously decide to buy whatever you want.

My point is that their legal team doesn’t seem to impact their product development team much at all. Nintendo develops their IPs pretty consistently, so you’re unlikely to get into a situation where they just sit on something and sue the crap out of anyone who tries to use their stagnant IPs.

Compare to Disney, who is more litigious and doesn’t do a lot with their core IPs (when’s the last time you saw Mickey Mouse star in a high profile film or game?).

If you like Nintendo products, the good news is they’ll continue creating them. The bad news is mostly around preservation, Nintendo really wants you to hang on to old hardware if you want to play old games. They’re also very touchy about how their IPs are represented in the media, so be very careful when you use them in a YT video or something.

I think it’s important to separate Nintendo’s legal department from product development. While the products are expensive, they are high quality and are generally enjoyed by their target demographic. Their legal department is a supervillain, sure, but that’s a separate thing entirely from the product development side IMO.

This argument is very different from the argument I’m talking about. Lemmy isn’t a government, nor does it attempt to fill that role (as much as my instance’s “Agora” community wants to think it does), so whether Lemmy is successful doesn’t give any insight into whether a more decentralized form of government could be successful.

communitarianism produced Lemmy

That’s a pretty generous description.

A more accurate description, IMO, is that two people wanted a safe space for their extremist community (tankies), and they had a working version at the time that a lot of people were frustrated with Reddit. Those two are still running the project, and they moderate their instances very tightly. But many people outside that community came and decided to make something good out of it, which is why additional instances popped up run by people with different motivations from the original pair.

So I don’t think communitarianism produced Lemmy, at least not initially, but it did help turn Lemmy into what it is today.

We win when Lemmy is the superior option for enough people that we actually start bleeding Reddit out.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think we have already won in that people choose to stay here over returning to Reddit or whatever social media platform they came from. That said, active users on Lemmy seems to be steadily dropping, which is a bummer, but I’m still able to have decent discussions here, so it’s working for me.

And that’s why the tariff situation pisses me off. I get that we don’t want subsidized EVs from China to ruin the local EV market, but we should at least take the tech that works and implement it here. Maybe we can estimate the amount of subsidies the Chinese government gives its EV market and charge that on import, idk, I’m not an economist so I don’t know what that would look like. I just know I want an inexpensive EV for commuting and I only need to go about 50-60 miles in a given day (call it 100 if I need to run some errands after work). If I can get that, during winter, for a low price, I’ll buy.

The Kia Soul is just over $20k, but not EV.

The Nissan Leaf is about $30k w/ ~300 mile range (my local area’s cheapest is $36k, but I guess that’s because they don’t carry base trims), and a replacement battery is something like $5-10k, depending on size. That’s pretty close to that $20k target, and given that the Soul is around that $20k price, I could see a manufacturer getting a sodium-ion based EV with limited range (say, 100-150 miles) right around $20k.

The Slate truck is targeting $25k or so, so if the battery prices are similar to the Leaf, that’s your $20k vehicle right there.

We are not anywhere near close to AGI.

That’s my point.

The major breakthroughs I’m talking about don’t necessarily involve consciousness/sentience, those would be required to replicate a human, which isn’t the mark. The target is to learn, create, and adapt like a human would. Current AI products merely produce results that are derivatives of human-generated data, and merely replicate existing work in similar contexts. If I ask an AI tool to tell me what’s needed to achieve AGI, it would reference whatever research has been fed into the model, not perform some new research.

AI tools like LLMs and image generation can feel human because they’re derivative of human work, a proper AGI solution probably wouldn’t feel human since it would work differently to achieve the same ends. It’s like using a machine learning program to optimize an algorithm vs a mathematician, they’ll use different methods and their solutions will look very different, but they’ll achieve the same end goals (i.e. come up with a very similar answer). Think of Data in Star Trek, he is portrayed as using very different methods to solve problems, but he’s just as effective if not more effective than his human counterparts.

Personally, I think solving quantum computing is needed to achieve AGI, whether we use quantum computing or not in the end result, because that involves creating a deterministic machine out of a probabilistic one, and that’s similar to how going from human brains (which I believe are probabilistic) to digital brains would likely work, just in reverse. And we’re quite far from solving quantum computers for any reasonable size of data. I’m guessing practical quantum computers are 20-50 years out, and AGI is probably even further, but if we’re able to make a breakthrough in the next 10 years for quantum computing, I’d revise my estimate for AGI downward.

Relevant XKCD.

Ever since I read that, I try to review that page every few years and there’s always something I am wrong about. It’s fantastic!

Eh, probably not a few centuries. I could be, IDK, but I don’t think it makes sense to quantify like that.

We’re a few major breakthroughs away, and breakthroughs generally don’t happen all at once, they’re usually the product of tons of minor breakthroughs. If we put everyone a different their dog into R&D, we could dramatically increase the production of minor breakthroughs, and thereby reduce the time to AGI, but we aren’t doing that.

So yeah, maybe centuries, maybe decades, IDK. It’s hard to estimate the pace of research and what new obstacles we’ll find along the way that will need their own breakthroughs.

The difference between devs and webdevs

There is no difference, webdev is someone who solves problems with web tech, mobile dev is someone who does mobile apps, embedded dev works with low level components, etc. It’s all development, and often the two will mix.

For example, I worked at a startup using C for embedded stuff, Go for the server stuff, and web tech for the FE. Rust wasn’t out yet, so C was the best option for interfacing with the board components (in this case a math module for our signal processing), Go was a good mix of performance and ease of training new devs, and a web FE was the lowest barrier to getting our customers using our product (basically a high end IOT device). We built a small native FE for certain simulations, and eventually moved it to a server with a web FE.

At my current role, we build a reporting and simulation app for a niche industry. We do everything from simple forms to 3D rendering to simulations that take hours to complete (most are 15-45min). Our customers use crappy laptops, so doing the processing locally isn’t an option (they probably don’t have enough RAM anyway), so we’re going to need a server. Because of that, we decided to build it as a web app. We still have native components (some simulations use C++, another was Fortran until recently, etc), and they’re maintained by Ph.Ds in our field because the hard part isn’t the coding (our JS specialists could handle that, they’ve built a 3D app in the last few months with complex transformations and calculations due to business login needs), but knowing the math behind it all, hence the researchers.

Not all web apps are overengineered crap because they hired a dev team to build a static site, there are apps like the two I mentioned that do interesting things and happen to use web technologies.

That’s the thing, mine aren’t easily replaced and it’s not because they live in DC much of the year, but because my district is gerrymandered, and that seems to be true for most districts in the country. Only a fraction of races are actually competitive after the primary, and there’s not going to be a primary to replace a sitting rep unless they piss off the party.

If we simply made state politics more impactful than federal, parties would move their focus to rigging state elections.

The issue, IMO, is there’s too much incentive to rig politics. Government interferes so much in all aspects of life and is so powerful that it will absolutely attract money. If we shift more of that to the courts, now that money would need to focus on everyday people, which I think is an improvement.

That’s… actually an incredibly good deal!

Ouch.

As a non-French speaker, I completely agree with you. If I use a borrowed word, I do my best to pronounce it like a native speaker would.

What’s wrong with webapps?

I get that many could be static pages, but you’re comparing web vs desktop. And in that case, I prefer web most of the time. Why? It works the same everywhere, and I can probably access it just fine on my phone without having to get their mobile app, which probably has fewer features and more telemetry.

Web doesn’t make sense for everything, but it’s far better than desktop apps for relatively simple use cases. If the app isn’t performance sensitive and doesn’t need to store a ton of data, web is my preferred platform, especially since I’m a Linux user and would likely need to run the app through WINE instead.