yeah..
with any frontier or frontier tech it's the same story..
the folks that made it to the frontier.. they make all the calls.. they establish all the rules.. they do all the abusive things they want cus...
we plebs, who buy their frontier stuff?, just don't know any better..
and then one day, after living in the frontier/futureland sufficiently, it clicks, we recognize we are being had..
then we organize, we get politicians to fight back the tide of abuse..
and it's our time to correct things, make the abuse illegal..
good luck fellow plebs..
knowing how the system is rigged in so many dimensions, i don't have much hope..
I often get puzzled when I hear that the firmware on Nikon cameras are essentially DOS programs, I guess from checking out this list I get why.
Perhaps there would be advantages to having DOS got re-written in Rust? No more hand-crafted machine language or c/C++... I wonder if the world is ready for DOS everywhere :)
Mebbe easier to just search Amazon or Goodreads. Like site:amazon.ca <query words> as someone has mentioned below.
Every book has an ISBN 10 or 13 digit ISBN number to identify them. Unless it's some self-pub/amateur-hour situation by some paranoid prepper living in a faraday-cage-protected cage in Arkansas or Florida it's likely a publication with a title, an author and an ISBN number.
A self-pub amateur-hour book printed by a paranoid prepper living in a faraday cage is exactly the type of book I'd probably enjoy reading, but I doubt these exist anymore.
Single-thread could be a thing if it's like a full-stack all sitting in a web browser--like Dioxus is going toward..
If a web browser is in a glorified chromebook like a 2025 Macbook Air, indeed there's a lot of breathing room. A lot of ram. Processing power. Cores. It's nice. I get that.
And then you can do off-line first: meaning use the cached local storage available to WASM apps.
Then whatever needs to go to the mother ship, then call web apis in the cloud.
That would, in theory, basically giving power back from "net pc theory of things" back to "fat client"--if you ask the grey-haired nerds among you. And you would gain something.
But outside of a glorified chromebook like a 2025 Macbook Air--we have to remember that we are working with all kinds of web devices--everything from crap phones to satellite servers with terabytes of ram--so the scalability story as we have it isn't entirely wrong.
I have been to U of Toronto, very smart people. But honestly this is a troll piece. Doesn't go into any depth and one-sided. Unhelpful. I think U of Toronto's reputation would be better served by something more sophisticated than this asinine blog entry.
Yes, ChatGPT has flaws (strange "hallucinations"?), but I found the same with me. Questions that I get no where with Google Search-n-friends (Duckduckgo/Qwant/Bing/etc etc) I had to give a last try with ChatGPT, and ChatGPT seems to fare considerably better.
Given my time dedicated to researching thing, I feel like I am "more productive" b/c I waste less time.
But I do my due diligence to double-check what ChatGPT suggests. So if I ask ChatGPT to recommend a list of books, I double-check with Goodreads and Amazon reviews/ratings. Like that. I guess it's like having a pair-research-sesson with an AI librarian friend? I am not sure.
But I know that I am appreciative. Does anyone remember how bad chatbots were before the arrival of low-hanging-AI-fruits like generative AI? Intel remembers.
whatever happened to the r--- allegations from Sweden, I understand that Sweden has dropped the charges but.. can we get some closure about that as interested followers of this entire saga? Hope that's not too much to ask..
The UK routinely extradites people to the US (and facilitated extraordinary renditions from UK soil). The claim he could not leave the UK for fear of being extradited to the US was always a nonsensical lie.
It is perfectly normal - If the judge orders the person's extradition, he must remand the person in custody or on bail pending the extradition. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
In reality he is not "free" till the judge slaps their hammer down.
So many people are trained nowadays to self-censor certain words so that "the algorithm" won't shadowban their comment. Thankfully, HN is one of the few websites on the modern internet to not have such censorship algorithm.
Go easy on yourself. Write desktop apps in something you are already familiar with--HTML, CSS, Javascript--with the help of Electron. Then using interfaces like Neon, you can rewrite hot-pots in Rust/Go. All you gotta do is profile your code from time to time to find out where the hot-spots are.
we plebs, who buy their frontier stuff?, just don't know any better.. and then one day, after living in the frontier/futureland sufficiently, it clicks, we recognize we are being had..
then we organize, we get politicians to fight back the tide of abuse..
and it's our time to correct things, make the abuse illegal..
good luck fellow plebs..
knowing how the system is rigged in so many dimensions, i don't have much hope..
but we can dream right?