samiv (u/samiv) - Readit News

samiv commented on IBM to acquire Confluent confluent.io/blog/ibm-to-... · Posted by u/abd12

JSR_FDED · 8 days ago

IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time with the family. They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they’ll find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as being “at the heart of AI infrastructure”.

samiv · 8 days ago

That's a very cynical take. Unfortunately likely correct.

It's a fact that a publicly traded company is beholden to Wall Street and any time such a company would use their earnings for R&D the P/E and margins go down (i.e. spending more money to earn the same) and this is considered a negative signal at Wall Street and the company gets punished in the market.

So the only way a company can spend their earnings is to pay dividends or buy assets such as other companies, which then must be squeezed for margins.

More here:

https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-ex...

samiv commented on Britain is one of the richest countries. So why do children live in poverty? cnn.com/2025/11/24/uk/bri... · Posted by u/rawgabbit

HPsquared · 22 days ago

It's nothing new. Regardless, today's conditions aren't nearly as bad as they used to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condition-of-England_question

samiv · 22 days ago

Don't worry we (the people in the political west) are quickly reverting back to the historical norm that was also in effect during the Victorian era. Few rich people, minimal middle class and lots of poor working class people.

After all capitalism is the same as system as slavery or feudalism. Only the names of the roles are different but the dynamics in society in terms who owns capital and who own the means/result of production and who don't, are the same in every system. (Small minority who own everything)

samiv commented on Britain is one of the richest countries. So why do children live in poverty? cnn.com/2025/11/24/uk/bri... · Posted by u/rawgabbit

samiv · 22 days ago

Because the wealth is not distributed evenly.

You could ask the same question, why are the kings/emperors/despots and their rich oligarch friends of any given country XYZ wealthy and living luxurious lavish lives in palaces and private yachts etc while the common folks live in slums?

samiv commented on Rust cross-platform GPUI components github.com/longbridge/gpu... · Posted by u/xvilka

WD-42 · 2 months ago

In my experience QT designer was awful to use. It’s probably fine if you are doing super vanilla layouts and widgets but as soon as my team started implementing custom css (or whatever the qt equivalent is called) things went off the rails. We pretty quickly abandoned to the tool completely to write the ui files by hand. They ended up much smaller and cleaner as a result. For some reason the designer seemed to add loads of unnecessary cruft.

So yea I can understand why they aren’t a priority.

samiv · 2 months ago

That would seem odd.. the QSS is completely orthogonal to the code generated by the UI tool.

I accept that sometimes you need to some tricks with it and sometimes the layout in the preview is not the same you get at runtime which is annoying.

But in my UIs I use hundreds of widgets and I can't even begin to think about the useless effort required to write all the code by hand vs. spending seconds to drag and drop widgets into their place visually in the GUI editor...

samiv commented on Rust cross-platform GPUI components github.com/longbridge/gpu... · Posted by u/xvilka

tredre3 · 2 months ago

> * Minimum binary size is definitely not 20MB but less. In general your apps distribution size depends on which features of the toolkit you're using.

In my experience that point is absolutely correct. Qt is good but big. You usually end up with 30-40MB of it.

Core, Gui, QML, Widget are 8MB each. For a Hello World you need 3 of those. Maybe 2.

Yes you could build Qt yourself with various flags, or possibly do a static build with LTO might help. But that's not the typical way Qt is used.

samiv · 2 months ago

Yes and no.

I just checked against Qt5 on ArchLinux. Core, GUI and Widget .so are all about 6mb each.

I concede that it's closer to 20mb after all but at the same time it's not a fair apples to apples comparison because those libraries provide you with so much more functionality than just the UI.

samiv commented on Rust cross-platform GPUI components github.com/longbridge/gpu... · Posted by u/xvilka

samiv · 2 months ago

Do these "modern" UI toolkits not have visual editors for knocking up the UI anymore?

One of the strengths of Qt based UIs is that the framework has IDE like tools where creating UIs is just a matter of drag and dropping the UI widgets into a layout. No need to write code by hand. Both QtCreator and QtDesigner can support this workflow.

Secondarily this comparison table has several problems when it comes to Qt.

  * Their license is dual license LGPL *and* commercial. 
  * Minimum binary size is definitely not 20MB but less. In general your apps distribution size depends on which features of the toolkit you're using. 
  * Comparing "Syntax Highlighting" makes no sense... QSyntaxHighligther is an interface by which you can add your own syntax highlighting to any QDocument. You're welcome to use reg exps, parsers (such as tree-sitter) or whatever you want there. 
  * QRichText supports markdown such as HTML.

samiv commented on The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe techtrenches.substack.com... · Posted by u/redbell

gjsman-1000 · 2 months ago

And they somewhat have a point. What's the point of code quality, if it delays your startup 6 months, and the startup goes under? What's the point of code quality, if it will be replaced with the newest design or architecture change in 6 months? What's the point of planning for 5 years if a pandemic or supply chain shock could muck it up? What's the point of enforcing beautiful JQuery code... in 2012?

The problem isn't that companies make these tradeoffs. It's that we pretend we're not in the same boat as every other trade that deals with 'good enough' solutions under real-world constraints. We're not artists, we're tradesmen in 1920 arguing about the best home wiring practices. Imagine what it would be like if they were getting artistic about their beautiful tube-and-knob installations and the best way to color-code a fusebox; that's us.

samiv · 2 months ago

For a startup good quality code will never make a difference if everything else is wrong, i.e. product market fit etc. But conversely poor quality code can destroy a startup (the product cannot pivot fast enough, feature development grinds to a halt, developers leave, customers are unsatisfied etc.) even if everything else is right.

samiv commented on Vibe engineering simonwillison.net/2025/Oc... · Posted by u/janpio

agentultra · 2 months ago

Many Luddites were fine with using the new Loom machines. They smashed them because they were precious to the capital holders and in a time when there were no labour laws. The Luddites were protesting child labour, forced labour, and having no social safety net when they were discarded by their employers other than workhouses.

samiv · 2 months ago

This has been the dream of the capital classes since time immemorial.

And unfortunately (for humanity) this has been the status quo for the whole civilization. Small ruling elite class (you might designate them as masters, lords or employers) with all the wealth, minimal or no "middle class" and lots of poor people (you might designate them as peasants or slaves or workers).

The only exception to this has been the period of time since World War 2 when in most of the "western" countries the middle class demanded and took their share of the wealth. That's the time when modern well-fare states were born, universal health care became a thing, working safety improved, education became accessible. etc.

All these were NOT given by the elite but TAKEN by the working class via social reforms, workers unions and social democracy.

The capital owning class wants to take all these away and they're succeeding.

So yes, in fact the Luddites were not against technology, they were against the unilateral and uneven distribution of wealth produced by the technology.

samiv commented on Vibe engineering simonwillison.net/2025/Oc... · Posted by u/janpio

sally_glance · 2 months ago

Well said! Reading this I feel reminded of the early protests against industrialization and automation in other fields. Checks all the same boxes - insecurity and fear about the future, alienation towards the new tools, ...

Not saying AI is similar in impact to the loom or something, it just occured to me how close this is to early Luddite texts.

samiv · 2 months ago

I'd say the fear is justified. The economy should serve the people and the citizens not the other way around. Yet, our economies are increasingly the other way around, people have to fit into to the shape of the economy.

It's not hard to see a future where the workers displaced by AI get pushed to the sidelines and fringes of the society while the capital holders hoard more wealth and get the benefits of the "value" created.

We already have half the population on this planet living in slums without access to economic means and in the "developed" countries larger and larger group of people are barely hanging on either already displaced and unemployed or working jobs below living wages.

Frankly, It'd stupid not to be concerned.