The brainwashing, high tolerance for pain and misery (and expense!), and lock-in makes it close to impossible for ordinary computer users to escape.

My only “conclusion” is that Pop_OS 24.04 seems to be incompatible with having a desktop that just works.

24.04 uses Wayland, and while some people have had no problems migrating, many people are having serious problems. From what I can tell, it’s not a good choice for me yet. This article tells me that it may not be a good choice ever.

I am a huge fan of System76 and Pop_OS, and I am sorry to see how this migration has split the community and forced many people to make difficult choices. I suspect that I will have to leave Pop_OS once 22.04 is no longer supported, in a year.

To be fair, there are two issues. Pop_OS Is introducing a new DE, COSMIC, which is written in Rust. That new DE is another source of instability. I’m afraid that Syatem76 has bitten off far more than it can chew.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061995

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

- Generate z-values for spatial objects. Points -> a single z-value at the highest resolution of the space. Non-points -> multiple z-values. Each z-value is represented by a single integer, (I use 64 bit z-values, which provide for space resolution of 56 bits.) Each integer represents a 1-d range. E.g. 0x123 would represent 0x123000 through 0x123fff

- Spatial join is basically a merge of these z-values. If you are joining one spatial object with a collection of N spatial objects, the time is logN. If you are joining two collections, then it's more of a linear-time merge.

For more information: PROBE Spatial Data Modeling and Query Processing in an Image Database Application. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 14(5): 611-629 (1988)

An open source java implementation: https://github.com/geophile/geophile. (The documentation includes a number of corrections to the published algorithm.)

I think this dynamic applies to any use of AI, or indeed, any form of outsourcing. You can outsource a task effectively if you understand the complete task and its implementation very deeply. But if you don't, then you don't know if what you are getting back is correct, maintainable, scalable.

And then:

    - Butterfly keyboard
    - Touchbar
    - M-series CPUs, which, while technically awesome, did not allow for Linux VMs.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623554

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-...

I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote:

    Around 1997, when I was working for the General Counsel, HP engaged
    a major global consulting firm in a multi-year project to help 
    them think about the question: “What happens to very large companies that
    have experienced significant growth for multiple successive years?”

OP then goes on to talk about fighting for resources for investments, a "healthy back and forth" on these tradeoffs, and then losing the "will to fight" following this report. "The focus became how not to lose".

Unlike OP, I did not work at HP. But I have seen up close startups, middle-sized companies, and huge companies, and the transitions among these states. So I feel justified in saying: OP has missed the point. And in particular, he makes no reference to that letter from David Packard.

Look at this quote from the letter:

    I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. ...  why 
    are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company 
    exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of 
    a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real 
    reasons for our being. ... a group of people get together and exist
    as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish 
    something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. 
    They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution 
    to society .... You can look around and still see people who are 
    interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives 
    come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to 
    give a service—generally to do something which is of value.

And sadly, there are very, very few companies that actually embody Packard's ideas. I think that JetBrains is such a company, familiar to many HN readers. Another one that comes to mind, from a very different field, is Talking Points Memo -- an excellent website that does news reporting and analysis, mostly on US politics. It started as a "blogger in a bathrobe", and 25 years later, it is a small, independent news organization, supporting itself mostly through paid subscriptions by a very loyal readership.

To me, the saddest part of the essay is this:

    In the last few years more and more business people have begun to
    recognize this, have stated it and finally realized this is their
    true objective.

I have been programming since 1967. Early in my college days, when I was programming in FORTRAN and ALGOL-W, I came across structured programming. The core idea was that a language should provide direct support for frequently used patterns. Implementing what we now call while loops using IFs and GOTOs? How about adding a while loop to the language itself? And while we're at it, GOTO is never a good idea, don't use it even if your language provides it.

Then there were Abstract Datatypes, which provided my first encounter with the idea that the interface to an ADT was what you should program with, and that the implementation behind that interface was a separate (and maybe even inaccessible) thing. The canonical example of the day was a stack. You have PUSH and POP at the interface, and the implementation could be a linked list, or an array, or a circular array, or something else.

And then the next step in that evolution, a few years later, was OOP. The idea was not that big a step from ADTs and structured programming. Here are some common patterns (modularization, encapsulation, inheritance), and some programming language ideas to provide them directly. (As originally conceived, OOP also had a way of objects interacting, through messages. That is certainly not present in all OO languages.)

And that's all folks.

All the glop that was added later -- Factories, FactoryFactories, GoF patterns, services, microservices -- that's not OOP as originally proposed. A bunch of often questionable ideas were expressed using OO, but they were not part of OO.

The OOP hatred has always been bizarre to me, and I think mostly motivated by these false associations. The essential OOP ideas are uncontroversial. They are just programming language constructs designed to support programming practices that are pretty widely recognized as good ones, regardless of your language choices. Pick your language, use the OO parts or not, it isn't that big a deal. And if your language doesn't have OO bits, then good programming often involves reimplementing them in a systematic way.

These pro- and anti-OOP discussions, which can get pretty voluminous and heated, seem a lot like religious wars. Look, we can all agree that the Golden Rule is a pretty good idea, regardless of the layers of terrible ideas that get piled onto different religions incorporating that rule.