Try interacting with anything that uses u64 and you’ll be a lot less happy!

Anyway JavaScript does have BigInt so technically you are choosing.

that insanity is how C and Intel handle NaN conversions.

It’s not actually quite as bad as the article says. While it’s UB for C, and it can return garbage. The actual x86 conversion instruction will never return garbage. Unfortunately the value it returns is 0x8000… whereas JS apparently wants 0. And it sets a floating point exception flag, so you still need extra instructions to handle it. Probably not many though.

Also in practice on a modern JS engine it won’t actually need to do this operation very often anyway.

Yeah. I think the smallest number of number types you can reasonably have is two - f64 and arbitrary precision integers types. One of the few good decisions Python made.

That’s not a network effect.

Maybe slightly, but it’s still way on the helping side.

They’re clearly not going to be able to afford $100m/year in free CI.

Relatively minor for source code forges.

The reasons everyone uses GitHub:

• Free, even for private repos. No ads.
• Free CI - this is huge. Nobody else does this because it costs Microsoft around $100m/year to provide.
• It’s quite good.

If anyone can ever compete with that then I doubt network effects will keep people there.

Terrible title. The article is about the risks of everyone using GitHub. That doesn’t mean GitHub is destroying the open source ecosystem. In fact it’s the complete opposite - GitHub massively helps the open source ecosystem. That’s why everyone uses it in the first place!

I wouldn’t expect the UI/UX to magically improve, in the same way that e.g. Audacity’s is, or Blender’s did back in the day.

LibreOffice is ancient and enormous. It would take a decent sized team several years to overhaul its UX.

code often contains backticks

I’ve never seen code contain three backticks though.

I guess your heading logic kind of makes sense but tbh I still hate it.

Very weird style. Inconsistent heading styles. Four tilde code blocks? That’s totally nonstandard. Why?

Yeah unfortunately these numbers don’t really allow any conclusions to be drawn at all.

Also they’re not really related to supply chain security which is more about deliberate subterfuge. I think the interesting stat there would be how many authors are being trusted typically for each crate.

It’s because as soon as one country forces it on their citizens the others can say “it can’t be that crazy - Australia and the UK have already done it!”

because someone believed an ANSWER on a different question answered my question

Yeah that is actually their official position. Your question is duplicate if an answer elsewhere might answer it, which is clearly absurd. Essentially they think “what’s 1+3?” is a duplicate of “what’s 2+2?”.

I think fundamentally they gamified moderation too well, and for many people they turned the site into a mod-maxing game, which obviously makes it an abysmal place to be for normal users.

It isn’t really. This is based on slightly implausible statistics and an unusual definition of “growing”.

Can’t remember tbh. It was a work setup. It wasn’t an unreasonable one though. 32 is not very many!

I hit a bug recently in KDE Wayland where the task bar was just slightly offset from the edge of the screen, so there was a gap behind it. Very dumb.

OPAM (OCaml’s package manager) had a bug where it couldn’t find curl or wget to download stuff with (don’t ask me why it shelled out to those in the first place) if you were in more than 32 Unix groups. Have fun thinking of a reasonable explanation for that!

Even if there are tight time constraints, you won’t sacrifice quality, because that would make you slower.

Too right. People find this so hard to understand. I think they dramatically underestimate the payback time on technical debt.

I am currently working in a startup that has the classic “we’re a startup, quality doesn’t matter” attitude. They think that they might not be around in a year so it’s best to go fast and not give a shit about tech debt.

In my experience that attitude bites in under 6 months. I’m already wasting entire days sorting out messes that they neglected to deal with.

I mean, it would be great if this succeeded… ffmpeg is nice and all but its interface is clearly terrible and there’s absolutely no way it is remotely secure. Anyone that uses it on a server basically has to run it in its own VM, or a severely locked down sandbox.

But good luck supporting all the codecs people expect. I’m not even talking the obscure ones ffmpeg supports; just the ones “normal” people use will be a life’s work.

Also you have to change the name!

Obscure 10 years ago maybe. These days there have been so many articles about them I bet they’re more widely known than more useful and standard things like prefix trees (aka tries).