Baldur Nil

But is it that different than the podcasts voices Google already generate with NotebookLM since a while ago?

Only chatGPT has these kinds of comments as if you’re seeing code for the first time. 😆

I’m not against adding comments where is needed: in the company I work for (a big bank) my team takes care of a few modules and we added comments on one class that is responsible to make some very custom UI component with lots of calculations and low level manipulations. It’s basically a team of seniors and no one was against that monster having comments to explain what it was doing in case we had to go back and change something.

For 99% of the code you just need to have good names though.

Just a reminder that reencoding already compressed videos is a recipe for destroying the quality, unless you’re using a very high bitrate, which quite often gets you the same size as the input video.

I think the consensus is that if your video isn’t 4k or higher, there isn’t much gain in using HEVC if it is already H.264.

So if you want to store them long term, reencoding them now means that if you decide to do it again later (for whatever reason) you’ll have too many artifacts accumulated.

Yeah, a video is a video.

If the distro is rolling release, it can always support the latest software in theory, you’d just need to have the correct package formula, which is exactly what AUR offers.

The problem with AUR is just that the author of the package is likely not the author of the software and not affiliated with the distro, so you should normally check what the script is doing.

I really understand how hard is maintaining something for every single package manager and distributions

But for apps distributed in your system’s package manager, it’s not the devs that are distributing them in every package manager. It’s the distribution itself that goes to each repository, checks and tests the dependencies they need and creates the package for the distribution, along with a compiled binary.

When they aren’t offered in the distro’s package manager (or the version is outdated because the distro isn’t rolling release) things become more complicated indeed, and sometimes you can’t even do it because the dependencies are older than the ones you require.

Also Windows has a button similar to “don’t update this week” or similar.

That’s a very nice idea, and something I’ll definitely implement for some annoying tasks in my company.

Also… the actual good stuff has a good chance of not being free, or not being on YouTube—it’s just the reality of our world.

When you look for YouTube videos of random people, you can get anything, from good programmers to horrible ones. You can’t really require quality from strangers posting stuff for fun.

I also have a M2 Mac Mini. It’s my favorite computer among all I ever had so far. Being able to run Windows ARM on a VM and install anything I want if I ever need it is priceless. And I still keep Ubuntu and Arch installed on a VM just to play with them sometimes.

What you’re saying is right about the possibility, but when you’re assessing some software for yourself, you have to consider things in the bigger perspective.

Some protects are very complex and require multiple teams of developers to maintain. That’s different than a small project that one person can maintain and curate external contributions.

So something like Chromium or Flutter isn’t the type of software that a community will self organize and maintain, they need some sort of organization behind them. This organization will probably need some sort of funding, ex: donations. Otherwise the projects will either fall into chaos and die or they’ll look for other ways to support themselves (ex: Qt with their commercial license and paywalled features).

In practice everything needs resources and without these resources any project simply dies.

Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users

That’s not a universal behavior though. There’s so many utilities and simpler apps made by indie developers or smaller companies that don’t care about this.

At the same time, I feel like nowadays there’s less forums or places people can ask help with, although today ChatGPT can be a good help with newbie questions.

The whole article seems a bit forced with many topics that are present in most other languages too. I don’t think “Faster release cycle” is one reason Java got where it is today.