Quite often the meeting starts as “let me pick your brain on something“. This kind of expert advice from AI would save time and improve productivity of the team.
Or, in other words, if you meant it as a joke, it's not bad. But if you meant it seriously, I doubt many people find it useful to pick your brain-- you have so little respect for yourself that you believe you have already been replaced by AI.
Having a standard CLI is definitely helpful. But does it have to be so hard to use? At what point would we acknowledge that we are being hostage by some random ideas put into ancient software, which just happened to survive?
I don't think calling for a stop of experimentation is the way. Nobody is going to take away your vi and bash any time soon.
We shouldn't be held hostage, but the evolution of interactive CLIs is GUIs and the evolution of batch CLIs is scripting languages, and we don't need to render the CLI concept meaningless by integrating both. I've seen a terminal emulator that supported pixel graphics - what's the point! Just make a GUI using your favorite framebuffer library!
Time will tell if this API is usable. In particular, the way resource synchronization works, and object renaming.
Time will tell if it will perform better than WebGPU or other abstractions.
Time will tell if it remains small in the presence of driver bugs that need working around…
I’m also sceptical about their new bytecode for a shading language. Parsing shaders at runtime was not a concern with WebGPU - it’s very fast. Even producing native shaders is fast [1]. It’s the pipeline creation that’s slow, and this bytecode wouldn’t help here.
This rubs me the wrong way. Resource renaming is a high level concept, which was one of the features of OpenGL that all the modern APIs have successfully dropped. A modern low level GPU API should not do that.
Yesterday RustRover became so unresponsive that the UI would freeze for more than 15 seconds (as reported by their exception notifications) and completions would take 5 seconds to appear and be wrong or lacking most times.
I was seriously doubting the internal Rust engine (they don’t use rust-analyzer or LSP), so I switched to VSCode with the rust-analyzer extension, and the same happened there too, although no freezing. Turns out some of my types were 80k characters long, and ‘cargo clippy’ was taking ~900 seconds of one core pegged at 100% for rustc. Oops.
Now I know what they mean when complaining about super long compile times on Rust, and I wasn’t even doing async :)
A parser with Chumsky. There’s a lexer with logos too, but that’s simple and fast. Chumsy makes you create parsing functions which are chains of other parsing functions, and the types can become insanely long, if you don’t box some of them for erasure.
edit: to elaborate, it’s not that the type name was 80k characters, the type definition itself was, like TypeA<TypeB<TypeC, TypeD>>, TypeB<TypeE, TypeF<TypeG…>>>
Moving fast works well if you don’t know exactly what you’d be doing tomorrow. It’s an effective strategy of experimentation, regardless of VC money supporting it.
It’s a bit ridiculous that we’ve built a system to motivate change by distributing money, and that system fails flat when it comes to plastic use.
In a healthy society, avoiding plastic would be both cheaper and more convenient.
How could avoiding one of the greatest, most versatile materials humans have ever invented be "more convenient and cheaper"?
Plastic is a literal miracle material, it is one of the most important ingredients to industrial society. Removing plastics is unthinkable, for most of its applications there are literally no alternatives.
It is amazing. And essential. And has gigantic external costs that either nobody is paying right now or that the government is picking up the bill for. I.e. the true cost is not being priced in
It is interesting you complain about money distribution and then your next statement talks about being cheaper. The reason paid is so prevalent is because it is cheaper and more convenient. I'm not sure what you mean by "healthy society" but the reason money is distributed is to try to make something else cheaper and more convenient. But that takes time and money.
I think you missed my point. The high level role of money is to direct people’s energy to activities beneficial for society. You come to work and help someone achieve their goals, you get paid back.
If we collectively agree that plastic production and waste needs to stop, we ought to reflect this decision in our money distribution. In practice, it could mean government incentives and penalties.
I have been wondering why do some governments ban single-use utensils, straws, shopping bags, but not plastic bottles. They are perfectly replaced by superior (fully recyclable, etc.) glass, and yet not only are they not banned but, in fact, water or drinks in glass are so difficult to find in supermarkets.
There can be an argument that banning avoidable use of plastic would mean more expensive packaging, and unless the government subsidizes it (which it probably does not want to spend money on?) then those costs will be passed to the consumer, so some products may become more expensive. Naturally, some of us could just buy less (and be better off), but 1) some perhaps could not afford it, and 2) general reduction in consumption is supposedly bad for some economy metrics.
A more cynical argument is that there inevitably is a lot of interest from powers that be, invested in oil and plastic, to maintain the status quo and thicker margins.
It seems not that there is no solution, but that there perhaps is not enough motivation to enact one.
Glass is massively inferior. It is much heavier, broken glass is a mess to clean up and it does not just magically come into existence. Instead it is very energy intensive to produce and transport, much more so than plastic.
> Instead it is very energy intensive to produce and transport, much more so than plastic.
Have you checked how much energy it takes to produce plastic? You can start with sourcing and refining oil. Economies of scale help it be cheaper, but so they would for glass.
Have you checked recyclability of plastic? It can only be recycled a few times, and it degrades every time becoming unsuitable for use in, say, food packaging much earlier. Glass, on the other hand, has virtually infinite uses, which if factored into the cost brings it down even further.
For transportation, sure. I have made the same argument, if it is more expensive to transport then it will cost more. However, many products are not transported large distances and are made somewhat locally, and even if I only look at products (e.g., drinks) made in the same (pretty small) country still 99% of them are bottled in plastic.
> broken glass is a mess to clean up
You beat me here, (micro/nano) plastic definitely isn’t a mess to clean up.
Did you read it? I did, in fact I remember encountering it back when it was originally published.
Article’s conclusion is that glass “may be equally as detrimental to the environment as plastic”, not “plastic wins”.
Their primary sources are something about regulation-violating mining of silica in India, and a UK paper that seems to claim glass may be more harmful because it takes more energy to produce and recycle (their “environmental impact” includes “potential to deplete fossil fuels”, I suppose they didn’t consider that green energy can be used). Funnily enough, even by such standards the UK paper admits on page 59 that glass bottles would be less harmful than plastic if they were reused (which single-use plastic bottles simply can’t be) in addition to being recycled.
Glass can be reused. In various countries customers pay a deposit for the bottle, and only pay for the drink itself onwards. The bottles are washed and reused at the bottling plant. Much greener than plastic.
A few milk brands still reuse their bottles in the US. Here in SF high-end organic milk brands have a $4 deposit for the bottle, which is exchanged or returned at the grocery store.
If you are making and selling something that is falling in demand, you are forced to sell it cheaper, which eats at your margins. As the price falls, eventually you sell at a loss, but you are motivated to wrap that business up and start making something else long before.
The gap down to where most oil fields are no longer profitable is huge, so while that would eventually happen, reduced plastic use is not likely to bring us there.
The amount of plastic used for packaging that can be replaced with something else is also huge. Case in point: this article. Also, it is probably not an exaggeration that every item in every supermarket that I personally lay my eyes on uses plastic, a lot of it avoidable.
As oil becomes less in demand as fuel, we should be aware that manufacturers would do their best effort to promote any other uses of it they can find, including plastic packaging, vinyl records, etc. To not do that would be stupid on their part.
Windows builds are out there. You can build it yourself as well. They haven’t matured as much as Linux ones yet. But your requirement of portability is definitely fulfilled.
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