What technological advancements has the EU developed in the past 20 years that are widely used today?
Smartphones?
Readit Newsmeekins commented on It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds berthub.eu/articles/posts... · Posted by u/Sami_Lehtinen
I really like SST compared to SLS because it is by far more featured and actually supports multi-cloud. This kind of cements that as you can deploy nearly anything with it now.
But, if I was going to start a new project today, I would probably reach for SLS, because it is simpler and faster to get set up. I think SST sometimes gets in its own way with complex IaaC config; if I wanted to do all this then I would reach for Terraform, and part of the appeal of serverless is the low lift to getting to "deployed."
So I think it's really cool that SST is adding all these things and exploring areas outside trad serverless to expand and grow new user bases. I also think this kinda sucks for people who have been with SST for a while and waiting for improvements to the DX for serverless (the functionality is there, the DX is not). I'm sure lots of thought went into this decision, but I still think it would be profoundly "worth it" for SST to tackle DX again, or for someone to build a wrapper around it.
In a sense the simplicity of SLS is a trap: immediately when you need to move past the synchronous lambda invocations via API GW use case (caching, service integrations, step function workflows etc) you need to either fall back to plain CloudFormation or rely on third party plug-ins with possible problems with maintenance, quality and feature-completeness. This makes it a difficult choice to recommend beyond simple use cases.
How is compiling to terraform a positive? I'd rather debug python than python-compiled-to-terraform.
In an AWS scenario I can think of:
Pro vs pulumi: you get a declarative template to debug and review
Pro vs CDK: The declarative template is applied via APIs instead of CloudFormation. The CDK CloudFormation abstraction leaks like hell
meekins commented on Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO danluu.com/ballmer/... · Posted by u/greggyb
this is the funny thing about microsoft
they are way better at buying and selling software than ideating and creating it.
successful microsoft products are acquisitions.
Same story with Azure. All the good services are acquisitions, rest is low quality feature catch-up with AWS augmented by a terrible IAM system.
meekins commented on PowerToys Run: extensible quick launcher for power users learn.microsoft.com/en-us... · Posted by u/nateb2022
I find it interesting that, to my knowledge, launcher/assistant tools like this aren't common on platforms other than macOS.
Windows has had one or two that I've seen, but not common, and I don't hear every Windows user swearing by them. Linux has GnomeDo, but I found it lacking, and again I haven't heard people swearing by them. ChromeOS has one I think, but I can't remember the name, and again it doesn't seem popular.
macOS on the other hand has had Quicksilver, Launchbar, Alfred, and Raycast, to name just those that I've personally used, and Spotlight has been built in to macOS for a long time, with a launcher/utility interface for many years. I've also heard many people (at least in techie/knowledge worker circles) using them, and have met strong proponents of all of these options.
Is this difference just down to my lack of knowledge of other platforms, or is there a grain of truth to this? If so, why? What makes macOS conducive to this (is it that these are all built on Spotlight and therefore can exist easily), and do users just demand this more on macOS?
KRunner [1] on Plasma is pretty awesome. Plenty of plugins available [2] and it's also very useful out of the box on most distributions.
meekins commented on Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support lwn.net/Articles/973130/... · Posted by u/signa11
KDE 4 looked like a cheap Vista knockoff gone wrong and the widgets were worse than useless, I stopped using KDE altogether because I felt the developers completely lost the plot.
One of the most arrogant moves was to not have files on the desktop, instead they put together a poorly made widget called folder view, I believe they completely U-turned on that one, not sure how many years it took them though.
To be fair, last night I tried putting a shortcut to a picture onto the home screen on my iPad that has better hardware than my MacBook Air and I couldn't figure out a way to do it and iOS has well-paid armies of people working on it.
I loved the folder view! It really highlighted the shift to a modular design in Plasma and solved the problem of desktop eventually ending up as a garbage dump of stuff that at some point was relevant but now impossible to find by providing configurable views to files that exist elsewhere and can be adjusted to fit current needs.
The 4.0 release was otherwise painful though as it was a slow, constantly crashing mess of bugs. At around 4.3 it became stable enough to serve as the primary desktop but IIRC that took years and I saw a lot of friends adopting Gnome or XFCE.
Not that you asked, but there's exactly one (popular) game that utilizes the same control scheme in modern times, Outer Wilds. Although it's not a shooter, it's quite a nice adventure game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/
There is, however, an outright continuation of the subgenre, in Overload.
Overload is awesome! However I wonder if some remnants of 90s game design like tight time limits and repeating enemy ambushes that make the game such a familiar and intense experience for the old school in reality disadvantage the game and the genre from reaching wider audiences.
There was also another classic Descent contender, Forsaken, that got remastared in 2018 to run on Linux and macOS in addition to modern Windows platforms. The original game was actually used as a graphics benchmark for early 3d accelerators due to its lighting effects.
That said, looking forward to playing Descent 3 on a modern platform!
meekins commented on Support for Windows 10 will end in October 2025 microsoft.com/en-sg/windo... · Posted by u/coucoualpha
The only Windows box I have is an AMD-based gaming rig and last time I checked the hardware isn't Windows 11 compatible. Time to check out how the gaming experience on Linux is these days.
meekins commented on Gitlab's ActivityPub architecture blueprint docs.gitlab.com/ee/archit... · Posted by u/p4bl0
This is fantastic. I stick my personal projects on GitLab and Codeberg - but if I want people to contribute, I use GitHub; that's where the people are.
GitHub has a number of weird repos from popular projects which are just copies of other repos. You can look, but you can't touch. (WordPress and Linux are the big ones).
It would be brilliant to look at a project in my preferred UI and raise issues / PRs without having to sign up to yet another service.
Very excited to see how this pans out.
It would be awesome to see Git becoming decentralized again but what's the likelihood of GitHub implementing this?
My current primary workstation is very low spec and old compared to a M2 Mac. On that machine Sublime Text is very performant and provides an awesome code writing experience through LSP. I use it as a daily driver with TypeScript, Go and Dart. I try out IntelliJ (or Android Studio) and VSCode occasionally to check out how they are these days but they feel sluggish in comparison.
If you need more IDE-like features like running tests and builds or managing for example mobile phone emulators from the editor it requires more fiddling with configuration and plugins but is doable.