Sophistifunk (u/Sophistifunk)

Sophistifunk commented on Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B 9to5mac.com/2025/10/23/ap... · Posted by u/thelastgallon

crims0n · 4 months ago

Honest question, what do people think is a fair percentage? The platform development, app hosting, payment processing, and quality control is surely worth something.

Sophistifunk · 4 months ago

Thing is that's a question for the market to decide. Which is why we have anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws in the first place. We don't want the state setting "fair" prices for anything, it always backfires. We want them ensuring the market is free to set prices. Monopolies granted by the state (trademarks, copyright, patents) are specific and limited, and ideally we want monopolies that arise naturally to be similarly limited, or broken up if they are being weaponised against the public.

Sophistifunk commented on Claude Memory anthropic.com/news/memory... · Posted by u/doppp

cainxinth · 4 months ago

I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time.

Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what I want, I adjust the prompt and try again.

Sophistifunk · 4 months ago

Claude is (in my limited experience so far) more useful after a bit of back and forth where you can explain to it what's going on in your codebase. Although I suspect if you have a lot of accurate comments in your code then it will be able to extract more of that information for itself.

Sophistifunk commented on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly anderegg.ca/2025/09/08/yo... · Posted by u/geerlingguy

Sophistifunk · 5 months ago

The idea that what's needed is for these alternative platforms to switch to "free with ads" is amazingly short sighted and disheartening. Everything bad YouTube does is driven by this business model. Switching to it might make a few people rich at the top of these alternative platforms, but it won't make anything better for any user or creator.

Sophistifunk commented on The History of Windows XP abortretry.fail/p/the-his... · Posted by u/achairapart

cheschire · 6 months ago

Race cars are barren of safety and security features, creature comforts, and even frequently missing windows.

But boy are they sure fast.

But I wouldn’t daily drive one.

Sophistifunk · 6 months ago

Race cars have heaps of safety systems not present in road cars. They don't have ABS and traction control because they don't actually increase safety on track with a professional driver. SRS airbags also offer no additional safety when in a 6 point harness and wearing a helmet and neck brace.

Sophistifunk commented on A Rust shaped hole mnvr.in/rust... · Posted by u/vishnumohandas

Expurple · 7 months ago

They complain that Go is too low-level for their needs. Zig, with its explicit allocators, is definitely even lower-level.

Rust seems low-level too, but it isn't the same. It allows building powerful high-level interfaces that hide the complexity from you. E.g., RAII eliminates the need for explicit `defer` that can be forgotten

Sophistifunk · 7 months ago

True, but I think the "low-level" complaint against Go in the article was just referring to all the stupid repetitive ceremony required for error handling, which Zig mostly skips over.

Sophistifunk commented on Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction techcrunch.com/2025/07/16... · Posted by u/boulos

Sophistifunk · 7 months ago

The wasted time and money in construction comes entirely from two places: a small percentage of crooked builders (and their local council mates), and the bureaucracy that is trying to protect the citizens from same. Big brother puts in a lot of hoop-jumps standards and supposed checks and balances that end up creating massive delays and costs for the consumer, but the actual standards (while usually quite sensible) are easily sidestepped by the crooked builders, so the war continues, and the overhead constantly increases with the usual expansion-only government regulation ratchet.

None of these things are susceptible to "AI" and other such automation. We have had prefab construction for decades.

Sophistifunk commented on A Rust shaped hole mnvr.in/rust... · Posted by u/vishnumohandas

genshii · 7 months ago

This hits close to home. TypeScript is also my language of choice for 90% of the software I write. I agree with the author that TypeScript is very close to the perfect level of abstraction, and I haven't seen another language with a type system that's nearly as enjoyable to use. Of course, TS (any by extension JS) obviously has its issues/complications. Bun solves a lot of the runtime-related issues/annoyances though.

For the other 10% software that is performance-sensitive or where I need to ship some binary, I haven't found a language that I'm "happy" with. Just like the author talks about, I basically bounce between Go and Rust depending on what it is. Go is too simple almost to a fault (give me type unions please). Rust is too expressive; I find myself debugging my knowledge of Rust rather than the program (also I think metaprogramming/macros are a mistake).

I think there's space in the programming language world for a slightly higher level Go-like language with more expressiveness.

Sophistifunk · 7 months ago

I very much enjoy reading and writing TS code. What I don't enjoy is the npm ecosystem (and accompanying mindset), and what I can't stand is trying to configure the damn thing. I've been doing this since TSC was first released, and just the other day I wasted hours trying to make a simple ts-node command line program work with file-extension-free imports and no weird disagreements between the ts-node runner and the language server used by the editor.

And then gave up in disgust.

Look, I'm no genius, not by a long shot. But I am both competent and experienced. If I can't make these things work just by messing with it and googling around, it's too damned hard.

Sophistifunk commented on A Rust shaped hole mnvr.in/rust... · Posted by u/vishnumohandas

Sophistifunk · 7 months ago

Sounds like a Zig-shaped hole to me ;-)

Sophistifunk commented on The time is right for a DOM templating API justinfagnani.com/2025/06... · Posted by u/mdhb

Sophistifunk · 7 months ago

When are we done adding everything into the browser API?