I haven't been keeping track on servo's progress too much, but I was pleasantly surprised. I was able to download and run it without having to worry about building it. It already supports multiple tabs. It was able to load HN and a few other sites I threw at it just fine. Couldn't run YouTube videos but that's understandable. Gives me at least some optimism for the future.
I am also really rooting for Ladybird [0]. I wish they'll take some inspiration from this and provide prebuilt versions for people to try soon.
Ladybird is further ahead than Servo, at least with what it can render and how correct it is. But Ladybird is a lot slower at this point.
One reason of course is that Ladybird wrote its own JavaScript engine while Servo uses SpiderMonkey.
Ladybird scores over 500 on https://html5test.co which is better than Firefox 60. And Ladybird is not too far behind Safari on the Web Playform Tests (ahead of Servo).
I am running the latest version of Firefox, but I said it was better than version 60 of Firefox (years old). I am certainly not suggesting that Ladybird is more feature complete than modern Firefox. Ladybird is pre—Alpha.
But the fact that Ladybird scores over 500 and you are getting 546 in Firefox tells us how advanced Ladybird is getting.
When I tried Servo a month ago, it was scoring around 400.
Call me a pessimist, but I don't agree with this blog post at all. The author's views seems a bit biased and narrow based on their social circle perhaps.
> VR is no longer experimental
Till it has practical everyday uses and is at least semi affordable, I would categorize it as experimental still
> Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use, thanks to a clever Ray-Ban partnership (and associated equity stake). 3D printers have become real household products.
I don't know a single person who actually owns a Meta wearable device or a 3D printer. Isn't Meta actually shifting their focus away from metaverse?
> Design matters again. In our devices, and in our lives
Design has been forgotten. Just look at your phones and computers and most of the web.
All I see around me are people swiping away at their screens (most of the time not using their headphones), getting their fix in bursts of 15 seconds, rinse and repeat.
It's getting harder to have fun with tech when you have to deal with things like:
* Operating systems that are actively hostile to their users (Windows and OSX).
* iPhone and Android being the only 2 choice when it comes to phones (the author did mention this). The chances of getting a 3rd player here seems negligible.
* Everyone trying to shove AI down your throat. At no time in the past did we need mandates to use a "useful" thing.
* A couple of players consolidating all the power in the AI space and millions of people having no ethical issues about using products from these companies, or opening up their source code and data for these companies to come suck it all up.
* No real disruption or competition in the browser space. It will be a long time before Ladybird will be usable.
* Bloated, heavy websites with popups galore.
* Everything getting a redesign every couple of months for no reason
* You don't own anything anymore. Even building your own PC seems like it will become a thing of the past given how price are rising.
> Till it has practical everyday uses and is at least semi affordable, I would categorize it as experimental still
I have a Meta Quest 2 from half a decade ago. It's old, but still feels like a mature gaming device (though relegated to more of an occasional fitness device for me).
Sure, it's failed to be anything more (commercial, education, media), but perhaps it's not fated to be for simple entertainment, in which case it's still an interesting new category. And I think the entry price point is like half that of a PS5?
> I don't know a single person who actually owns a Meta wearable device or a 3D printer. Isn't Meta actually shifting their focus away from metaverse?
I think the Ray Ban partnership is consistent with their shift away from the metaverse. The grandiose visions are put on ice, while they shift towards a fashion-accessory with a camera and audio.
Young people seem to be very into 3D printing. My father runs a photography store and a steady portion of the customer base is high schoolers requesting 3D printed models of things they've found online. I presume they'll own their own 3D printers in the future.
> Operating systems that are actively hostile to their users (Windows and OSX).
Never been a better time to give Linux a try. The days of fighting with audio drivers for 3 days after the install are largely in the past
> Everyone trying to shove AI down your throat
There is some backlash against this. SaaS used it to justify price increases, but ironically AI may make it more difficult for them to sustain their very high per seat pricing model
> * No real disruption or competition in the browser space. It will be a long time before Ladybird will be usable.
I still use Firefox for now. But they, unfortunately, have to own their bad decisions.
> You don't own anything anymore. Even building your own PC seems like it will become a thing of the past given how price are rising.
I do worry about this, though less from a cost standpoint, which tend to be cyclical. Deeply embedding and integrating everything does come with some advantages that make DIY builds more difficult to justify outside of seeking peak performance. Though computers like the Framework are actively trying to push against that for some segment of the market.
> I think the Ray Ban partnership is consistent with their shift away from the metaverse. The grandiose visions are put on ice, while they shift towards a fashion-accessory with a camera and audio.
So that people can film me at all times against my choice? So that people are interacting with their devices (with some ads popping up on them eventually, most likely) rather than connecting with me on a personal level, even though we seem to be in a loneliness epidemic? And how is this breaking the tech monoculture exactly? Same 4-5 corporations owning everything and creating walled gardens?
> Never been a better time to give Linux a try. The days of fighting with audio drivers for 3 days after the install are largely in the past
You and I might be using Linux and Firefox (can't even feel proud of using that anymore with the way things are going), sure. But I look around me and I don't see the tech monoculture breaking. I see the opposite. I see technofeudalism. Sure, some of us nerds might be rebelling and holding the line, but I only see things getting worse outside of this bubble.
> I don't know a single person who actually owns a Meta wearable device or a 3D printer
I whish I could say the same :p I just bought another 3d printer and have no place to put it - I have another 3 active printers in my home office. And yes, I keep telling myself its for "work reasons", but its mostly for hobby stuff.
Technically true, sure. Let me rephrase it to "iPhone and Android being the only 2 real choices when it comes to phones". My definition of real here would be that
1) non tech people should have heard about it and
2) when institutions like banks force users to use their app, they actually make an app for this platform.
My point still stands. How many non tech people do you know that will switch to a Librem Phone? Or know it even exists? Or will muck around with Waydroid? And eventually we might not even have a choice to switch banks.
I use it on mobile via the web browser, it's pretty good actually. They don't have an official mobile app yet but there might be an unofficial one, I forget exactly.
> if you're primary role is to write software which interacts with a SQL database you should understand how to interact directly with that database.
I agree that there should be a general understanding one should be able to interact with it when needed. But at the same time I don't think devs need to be able to spit out queries with the right syntax on the spot in an interview setting.
Unless I'm doing an exercise where the candidate is actually writing software (in which case they can have Google, their favourite IDE, and if they must an LLM) I never expect exactly correct syntax in an interview. I'm assessing whether they demonstrate the sort of thought processes you'd expect from someone who knows what they're talking about, and can get in the same ballpark.
in our particular case, they could use google. that said, I didn't ask them anything particularly complex. the AI depndant coders(I saw nothing in their abilities that demonstrated engineering) broke down trying to update a single record of known id with a new value.
> > I cannot understand how programmers don't mind adding a strong dependency on a third party in order to keep programming
>
> And how they don't mind freely opening up their codebase to these bigtech companies.
And how they don't mind opening up their development machines to agents driven by a black-box program that is run in the cloud by a vendor that itself doesn't completely understand how it works.
You mean the same companies they are hosting their VCS in and providing the infrastructure they deploy their codebases to? All in support of their CRUD application that is in a space with 15 identical competitors?
My codebase is not my secret sauce.
Sure, the codebase itself isn't special. But it's the principle and ethics of it all. These companies trained their models unethically without consequence, and now people are eating up their artificially inflated hype and are lining up to give them money and their data on a silver platter.
My opinion is that the value to be that I’ve been getting out of these tools in both my personal and professional projects is greater than value that they (and others using the downstream effects of them) get out of having my particular codebases.
Also, many of my personal projects are open sourced with pretty permissive licensing, so I’m not all that mad someone else has the code.
I am also really rooting for Ladybird [0]. I wish they'll take some inspiration from this and provide prebuilt versions for people to try soon.
[0] - https://ladybird.org/
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