It’s not as dumb a client as VNC, but it’s close. Basic operations like typing and scrolling will stutter and lag if your connection is less than perfect. VSCode’s client is really VSCode from a UI perspective.
The fund sold off most of their US bonds, some journalist heard about it and considered it newsworthy and published an article. DI.se’s readers are largely also benefactors/owners of Alecta’s, so that seems fair.
Someone else considered it worthy of sharing here and enough people here found it interesting enough to get it to the front page. I don’t quite understand why, but it seems like it’s striking some sort of chord.
What if your 10B investment encourages others to invest 50B and much of that makes it back to you indirectly via selling more of your core business?
I may be way off, but to me it seems like the AI bubble is largely a way to siphon money from institutional investors to the tech industry (and try to get away with it by proxying the investments) based on a volatile and unpredictable promise?
That’s a good way of putting it. Previously Serif’s goals were aligned with my wishes. They’d release a new version of the software ever so often and I’d pay to upgrade. Fair.
Now I’m suddenly a third-class user, as I’m neither an enterprise customer nor paying for their AI features. I can only cross my fingers and hope the product doesn’t follow its new incentives. That doesn’t feel like a great position to be as a hobbyist who appreciated and paid for everything they released previously.
It nuances ”leader” and ”manager” from something you are to descriptions of problem-solving toolkits when dealing with people.
In that sense it could be reconstructed as ”soft power mode” and ”hard power mode” where the former inspires confidence and encourages creativity and the latter emphasizes compliance and alignment. Any person in a position of power will utilize strategies that could be seen as signs of either mode depending on the situation.
Honestly I think people are just going to use whatever definitions are most convenient for them to make their point. That’s the problem with vague terms.
I’d suggest the GPL family without a CLA as an approximation of that intent.
> If it exists, what are the barriers to adoption? Why don't we all use it?
My theory is that people in general don’t care that much, or (particularly in the case of corporations) consider permissive licenses to be ”freer” than copyleft.
> But suppose we accept that the XDG specification only applies to some Unix operating systems, despite making no mention of this.
the very first paragraphs on specifications.freedesktop.org says this:
> Freedesktop.org is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
> We are not a formal standards body. The standards published on these pages are active or tentative (if marked as such) specifications which desktop environments may implement to improve mutual compatibility, share code and pool resources.
Deferring to XDG_CONFIG_HOME on MacOS if it exists makes a lot of sense as it conveys a clear intent from the user and the convention has grown popular. I’m not sure that the default ~/.config from the XDG specification is automatically better than ~/Library/Application Support by appeal to freedesktop.org’s authority.
And please don’t move configuration files around between releases without really being intentional about it.
Why should it not.
The easier case for me to defend is XDG_CACHE_HOME - if it defaults to ~/.Library/Caches then it makes life simpler on macOS as it means that you don't have to add other directories to be removed from your backups.
Doesn't matter. This whole situation is a mess, and it's still a mess in the year 2025. Clearly existing operating systems can't be changed significantly enough to change anything like this.
but we're all still afraid to write new operating systems. We cling to MacOS, FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows as if our lives depend on it. Our lives do not depend on it.
If we want a saner OS, we could have it, but we don't want it bad enough, I think. It's easier to just deal with the piles of horse manure that has been piled on top of everything. So we have a rather active bikeshed discussion on HN about whether or not to use XDG_*.
We want to bikeshed more than we want to fix anything. Like all communities, this one also disappoints me.
Of course, if you decide to account for Windows / macOS conventions, it’ll be a bit trickier, but pulling in a library for that is a bit overkill, yeah.
Adding a library has nothing to do with that. You can implement it yourself in a few lines of code, especially if you only need one path, like configs. You do need to research for caveats (e.g. check $XDG_CONFIG_HOME on Linux and not just put it into ~/.config) but it’s not rocket science.
And if you choose to just trust library authors, you are putting their ideas there instead. There’s that Rust crate that uses XDG on macOS, for example.
I’m concerned that AI slop will affect open source projects by tilting the already unfavorable maintainer-contributor balance even more towards low-quality contributions.
Daniel Stenberg (from the curl project) has blogged a bunch about AI slop seeping into vulnerability reports[1], and if the same happens to code contributions, documentation and so forth that can help turning a fun hobby project into something you dread maintaing.
When I checked a few years back, even a ”hello world” Go application compiled for Windows was flagged as malware by a malware scanner that I investigated.
I’m not at a computer where I could try that hypothesis right now, but back then my conclusion after testing various executables was that any unsigned Go binary would be flagged as a malware.
I don’t think hobby developers are the cause for concern here. To me, these steps should be taken for professionally developed services where there is a reasonable expectation of accessibility (in my mind this would roughly speaking be those that are either publicly funded or where the revenue is at least a million euros).
For smaller businesses and hobbyists it feels like expecting support for all major browsers would be discouraging in a negative way. I appreciate digital art even if it doesn’t work in my favorite browser and a shitty online menu for a food truck is better than none.
