I believe use of Electron is known as premature deoptimisation and if it had been a thing when Knuth coined the original phrase I'm sure he would have come up with that term too. Use of Electron to deliver software is popular and works but that doesn't make it any less of an abomination.
I'm actually considering, for the first time since 2013/14 when I worked on a Visual Studio extension, creating a piece of desktop software - and a piece of cross-platform desktop software at that. Given that Microsoft's desktop story has descended into a chaotic mishmash of somewhat conflicting stories, and given it will be a cold day in hell before I choose Electron as the solution to any problem I might have, most likely I will roll with Qt + Rust, or at least Qt + something.
20-odd years ago I might have opted for Java + Swing because I'd done a lot of it and, in fairness to Swing, it's not a bad UI toolkit and widget set. These days I simply prefer the svelte footprint and lower resource reuqirements of a native binary - ideally statically linked too, but I'll live with the dynamic linking Qt's licensing necessitates.
That's a good idea because, although I love this, 1 minute per token is absolutely savage. Whereas if you can juice the performance you're into semi-credible Jar Jar Binks simulator territory.
It does also make me wonder what you could do with somewhat more powerful retro hardware. I'd love to see what a transformer running on a PSX or an N64 could do.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "manchild" territory: hobbies are fine, and if your hobby is DIY mechanical keyboards, more power to you.
Where I start to break out the scepticism is when people start talking about how much more productive they are because of their fancy keyboard, or how important exactly the right keyboard is to productivity.
That's mostly nonsense.
I've got valuable work done in a whole variety of more and less ideal/noisy/comfortable/uncomfortable environments on a 13 inch laptop using its built-in keyboard.
The primary driver that makes you productive or non-productive is your motivation. If you want to get it done you'll get it done. To a very large extent, everything else is incremental. Multiple monitors, fancy keyboard, cool mouse, ergonomic chair, whatever. They're nice, and they do help a bit. But, fundamentally, what really gets things over the line is desire, motivation.
Whereas a lot of this work adjacent stuff is a form of procrastination.
I've gone through a similar experience with musical instruments and studio gear, versus actual music creation. At some point you just have to stop tinkering and start making music, and what I've realised is that the only item I have available to me at almost all times to do that is my laptop, so maybe I should focus on working in the box instead of on acquiring more hardware.
I have to disagree. It isn't nonsense that a good keyboard feels good, and something that feels good makes someone more productive by inspiring them.
What is nonsense is that everyone cares. For some people it won't make any difference. It also won't make any difference in the quality of work (except in the case the keyboard is broken) when you force yourself to work.
If a good keyboard gets your over the hump and working then it isn't procrastination.
Computer Shopper in the UK was a lot like that back in the 80s and 90s: just a massive wedge of a magazine where the vast majority of pages were ads.
The classified/small ads section alone was enormous. And then you’d have companies that sold computer components include huge swathes of their catalogues and price lists in multi-page adverts. Would have been a real boon for system builders, but I didn’t have the cash back then. I was still in the world of 8-bit micros and 16-bit machines.
Sure, but 80 -> 28,000 -> 54,000 is a hell of a lot of slippage.
Trading platforms can guarantee a maximum slippage on stops, and often even offer guaranteed stops (with an attached premium), so I don’t see why Google and Firebase can’t do similar.
Yep. And cloud providers could eat any slippage cost (enforcing, say, every 5 minutes by stopping service) without even a rounding error on their balance sheets.
The fact that they don’t indicates that there’s no market reason to support small spenders who get mad about runaway overages, not that it’s technically or financially hard to do so.
> Trading platforms can guarantee a maximum slippage on stops
Yeah no, physically impossible. If nobody is selling at that price, there is no guarantee your sell stop will execute near that price. They can sweep the market, find the best seller price and execute.
There might be a costly way to do it with microservices as I indicated, but your example easily falls apart.
They can take the other side of your other themselves, lose money sometimes, but make it up in the premium they charged you in the first place (or in the old days, from your other trading fees or your monthly subscription payment).
Cloud providers would be taking way less risk interacting with their own services than a broker does interacting with the market. Perhaps they would be more at risk from bad actors, but it shouldn't be significant: they could reserve this behaviour for people who have already spent, say, $100 with them so you can't abuse it at scale.
If they are a market maker, they can buy/sell at or near your stop. It might be a bad idea for them, but if they have a guarantee, this is how they will do it. Or, it will be like the Amazon guarantee (refunding free shipping on your late order).
Not impossible to do: they can hedge and/or absorb the cost, hence the premium. They usually also specify a (fairly large) minimum distance for such stops.
That's exactly what I proposed in my response. Big corp can waiver the extra costs to match your limit. Glad we finally got to that part of my response. The question is: will they? Probably not. Do brokers do it? I haven't seen any. Maybe you know more.
This must negatively impact a huge number of businesses. Is there no move for them to all get together to take legal action against LaLiga to stop them doing this?
This is the country that takes a 2 hour nap every day. They also have a sleeping contest every year with a winner and everything. And Spain isn't hot like Mexico where folks take 2 hours off in the topically heat and make it up for it in the evening because that's more efficient.
Oh, come on, be serious: if that’s the argument then why start with Sam Altman?
If you want to hold the leader of a contemporary tech giant responsible for causing excess deaths then Meta and Zuckerberg would be a lot higher up the list - maybe even at the very top.
Now I despise Mark Zuckerberg, but I don’t want to firebomb his house: I want his company neutered and/or broken up, I want him stripped of his ill-gotten wealth, and ideally I want him to face criminal prosecution and incarceration.
But the point is this: whoever firebombed Sam Altman’s house didn’t do it out of a principled stance - in fact I suspect they barely expended any thought on the matter - because if they were really acting out of principle they’d have chosen a different target, they’d have done some research into who is trying to expose and bring down that target, and they’d have figured out how they could help rather than just randomly engage in violence. Whereas this was just a dangerous stunt.
They could have chosen the target that was most available to them. Or they could feel particularly wronged by Sam Altman. Maybe they have Iranian friends.
Well Zuck has that big scary hedge, and I’m sure people have been going after him for ages.
> I despise Mark Zuckerberg, but I don’t want to firebomb his house: I want his company neutered and/or broken up, I want him stripped of his ill-gotten wealth, and ideally I want him to face criminal prosecution and incarceration.
Great! Is the plan to wait until after the billionaires have their AI controlled military drone swarms to have this revolution? Because they already control your government - I don’t think you will achieve anything like this through legal means
This has already been a movie called Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Sarah Connor is out to kill Dyson to stop Skynet from becoming a thing and the audience watched it thinking she was probably justified but was uncomfortable anyway. Spoiler alert: she ended up shooting but not killing him.
My point is, we've seen this movie and killing Sam Altman is uncomfortable but justified.
> The deeper problem is that Microsoft keeps trying to solve GUI consistency at the framework layer
I really don't think that's the fundamental issue.
TFA points out, and I agree, that the fundamental issue is political: competing teams across different divisions coming up with different solutions to solve the same problem that are then all released and pushed in a confusing mishmash of messages.
I haven't written a line of code for a Windows desktop app or extension since early 2014, when the picture was already extremely confusing. I have no idea where I'd begin now.
My choice seems to be either a third party option (like Electron, which is an abomination for a "native" Windows app), or something from Microsoft that feels like it's already deprecated (in rhetoric if not in actuality).
It's a million miles from the in the box development experience of even the late zero years where the correct and current approach was still readily apparent and everything you needed to move forward with development was available from the moment you opened Visual Studio.
There's just so much friction nowadays, starting with the mental load of figuring out the most acceptable/least annoying/most likely still to be supported in 5 - 10 years tech to use for solving the problem.
Honestly, things like Electron are quite literally the problem!
All of people’s modern desktop woes begin and end at the browser. Here’s why: the late 2010’s push into the cloud made JavaScript all-the-rage. A language the creator made in pretty much a weekend coding session.
There naturally is major business incentives powering this. SaaS made things MUCH easier for delivering software.
Fast forward 15 years and MSFT is full in on TypeScript. It’s a disease that starts with MsOffice and percolates to the whole OS (same as what’s happening in copilot).
.Net is actually elegant in many ways. You have PowerShell, VB .Net, C#, F# etc. languages of many paradigms all targeting the same bytecode (and supported by the OS).
And this is being replace by a fun little JavaScript thingy.
That may be how JavaScript started, but unless your claim is that JavaScript hasn't changed at all in the thirty years or so since then, your argument is a complete non-sequitur.
Yeah, thank you. Also, JavaScript today means TypeScript—an arguably extremely capable type system actively developed by Microsoft—and several, modern runtimes with a big standard library and solid asynchronous primitives. There are a lot worse scripting languages out there.
Folks misunderstand the whole point just because I mention TypeScript. Sure it’s a capable and elegant language. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bloated monstrosity on the desktop.
Think about it: it transpiles to JavaScript. Even if it’s the most elegant language in the world doesn’t change the fact that it’s a world of bloat.
Stacks on stacks on stacks. And yet people are complaining about .Net? Come on. Lol
Transpilation and bloat are orthogonal. Javascript being bloated or not is also a relative: consider Python, which is much slower than js, and much more memory hungry.
To further argue your original point: chrome & electron are the only reason desktop is still around, both Microsoft and Apple tried their very hardest to build a walled garden of GUI frameworks, rejecting the very idea of compatibility, good design, and ease of use, until they were surpassed by the web, and particularly Google, showing that delivering functioning applications to a computer does not require gigantic widget libraries, outdated looks or complicated downloads & install processes, but is in fact nothing more than a bit of standardization and a couple MBs of text.
All this electron & web hate is so incredibly misplaced I don't even know where to begin. Have you tried making a cross platform mac/win native app? I have, its like being catapulted into the stone age, but you're asked to build a skyscraper.
Why would transpiling change anything? C++ was once transpiled into C. I appreciate that you personally think JavaScript is poorly designed (I mostly agree!) but that doesn't mean it's slow. V8 can do miracles nowadays.
> They said our docs were too big and for some reason their chunking process was failing.
Why would the size of your docs have any bearing on whether or not the chunking process works? That makes no sense. Unless of course they're operating on the document entirely in memory which seems not very bright unless you're very confident of the maximum size of document you're going to be dealing with.
(I implemented a RAG process from scratch a few weeks ago, having never done so before. For our use case it's actually not that hard. Not trivial, but not that hard. I realise there are now SaaS RAG solutions but we have almost no budget and, in any case, data residence is a huge concern for us, and to get control of that you generally have to go for the expensive Enterprise tier.)
I agree it makes no sense. The whole point of chunking is to handle large documents. If your chunking system fails because a document is too big, that seems like a pretty glaring omission. I just chalked it up to the tech being new and novel and therefore having more bugs/people not fully understanding how it worked/etc. It was a vendor and they never gave us more details.
Not all problems have to be solved. We just fell back to using older, more proven technology, started with the simplest implementation and iterated as needed, and the result was great.
That's good. I think if you can get the result you need with a technology that's already familiar to you then, in cases where that tech is still supported, that's going to be a win.
RAG worked well for us in this recent case but, in 3+ years of developing LLM backed solutions, it's the first time I've had to reach for it.
I'm actually considering, for the first time since 2013/14 when I worked on a Visual Studio extension, creating a piece of desktop software - and a piece of cross-platform desktop software at that. Given that Microsoft's desktop story has descended into a chaotic mishmash of somewhat conflicting stories, and given it will be a cold day in hell before I choose Electron as the solution to any problem I might have, most likely I will roll with Qt + Rust, or at least Qt + something.
20-odd years ago I might have opted for Java + Swing because I'd done a lot of it and, in fairness to Swing, it's not a bad UI toolkit and widget set. These days I simply prefer the svelte footprint and lower resource reuqirements of a native binary - ideally statically linked too, but I'll live with the dynamic linking Qt's licensing necessitates.
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