I loved technical books from Mir publishers. Russian authors have a special place in my heart for explaining complex technical topics in concise yet engaging way.
Books like Problems In physics by I E Irodov were my favourites
I see posts like this, this deep dive into the call stacks and am always humbled and reminded of the limits of my knowledge about computers and programs.
These sort of bugs require a lot of knowledge about a) Windows Internals b) Tools to debug at that level. Most application-level programmers won't need nor are exposed to these.
However, if you are interested in knowing what is all involved, see; Advanced Windows Debugging by Mario Hewardt and Daniel Pravat - https://advancedwindowsdebugging.com/
As someone who has debugged his fair share of tricky low-level issues, the parts that I find impressive in his blog posts are things such as "then we look at the bytes in memory and oh yeah, this looks like an exception record". I would usually not think to do that (or be able to recognise it as easily as I presume he did).
I assume it's mostly just something you learn to recognize after decades of poking at the same things. I remember being impressed with Thiago (Qt developer) being able to immediately tell if a pointer was heap allocated, invalid/unaligned, etc. until I spent more time poring over /proc/*/maps and in gdb.
Never figured out how he could tell someone's Qt version just from an strace excerpt, though.
> Never figured out how he could tell someone's Qt version just from an strace excerpt, though.
Sonames might be a big clue? Otherwise, initialization order changes maybe? Sometimes there's enough file content in an strace to be able to see a strong indicator?
Those are just guesses, I do a lot more debugging with pcaps rather than straces. Although you do often want to determine which side of the syscall caused whatever you're seeing in the pcap.
I have done everything from desktop apps to web apps and a bunch in between. Regular debugging is good enough for me. Never had the need to go down into call stack level.
Even with embedded programming, regular C debugger has always been enough.
I love these articles. Like. Of the million possible ways this could go, squiggles were the one, and it was from decisions of one man, on a whim. Yet, they completely change the world.
Been using Angular v21 for a very complex app. Have had a wonderful experience, in terms of the cognitive load to make and work with components, state and data flow.
Signals and signal stores make it very easy.
Did the whole coding by hand, no ai coding tools too.
Will AI corporations fob off their AI users with chat bots and ignore them like the megacorps do with their human users today?
On the other hand, it will finally not matter any more if AI-generated software is crap, because its bot users have infinite patience and infinite tolerance. Only the people who pay the electricity bill for all that waste will care but that's the price for survival in a world where only bots count.
"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."
Some chucklehead car review guy on YouTube is going to get their hands on one of these, put a Door Dash car topper on the roof and drive around town to see if anyone notices the $640k delivery vehicle. Few people will, and that's what's wrong: the entire point of Ferrari, for better or worse, going on 85+ years, is to get looks.
If all the people that have ever purchased a Ferrari for its interior design vanished today, there are so few it wouldn't make a headline. The Testarossa interior was so tragically bad it probably shouldn't have been permitted by the DOT et al. Yet there it was, plastered on posters and magazine covers; a thing of dreams around the world.
So only yet another case of complete disconnect between a brand and its loyalists. Not the first, and given the myopia plaguing such folk today, not the last.
How about this: techbros got their hands everywhere nowadays, so even an iconic car brand is forced to use their brainfarts? Forced by market pressure, forced by export conditions, you name it, but I cannot fathom why otherwise getting a tech guy design a car. I actually like the design, but I must agree it doesn't look Ferrari at all. Did they fire Manzoni or what?
> there is no 1st party Apple made hiking and topography map on the Apple Watch is such a failure
I remember a time when Apple was chided for integrating functionalities of popular apps into its OS.
Apple created an incredibly awesome device, and its up to the market to make full use of its potential. Why would it be a failure for Apple to not make such an app?
But in this case at least, the third-party developer has produced exactly the wonderful result they're looking for. The screen shot at the end showing the difference between Apple's map and theirs is so stark and compelling. If I were hiking I'd pay $20+ for their version.
Edit to add: throwing out a price like that made me go check to see what they actually charge, and either Apple's presentation of in-app purchases or their use of it is sad: it gives the same "premium" item like eight times, with different prices. Maybe that's per month and then longer periods with bulk discounts? Maybe they have a lifetime option for $40? If I were a regular hiker, I'd go for that.
APIs are hard to get right the first time. I could see why they wouldn't want to release one until they've dogfooded and refined it.
That said, I'd love to see them take an approach unstable API release that requires the app to show a warning like "This app relies on unfinished features that may change or stop working entirely in the future, requiring the seller to release an apo update." and require them to launch it as a free preview, make it refundable during this period, etc.
Apple Maps has been able to display full-size navigation on the lockscreen since iOS 7 or 8 (?). Apple Maps also has access to a special style of notification that no other navigation app has.
iOS 7 was released in 2013. 13 years ago, aeons in tech land.
So "APIs are hard to get right the first time. I could see why they wouldn't want to release one until they've dogfooded and refined it." is crap. They're hoarding private API access purely for competitive advantage in services.
1) Apple has had a lot of functionality gated for many years. I’d buy the “they need to refine it” if they had a track record of actually opening things up without the hammer of regulation forcing them to.
2) This is a solved problem. You throw a “this is an experimental API, it’s interface may change”
I feel like we could expect a bit more from the billion dollar company to support new apis. They have a solid mechanism to deprecate apis and force developers to rebuild their apps already, just shorten that window for the cutting edge apis released in preview.
Oh and while I'm here the single layer non editable menu / weird grid is also the worst. I grew up texting under the desk on a nine key and only checking after I'd selected the contact to send to. Give me that level of muscle memory again someone, anyone, please.
Also Garmin watches. E.g. the Fenix line has 5 buttons and you can do pretty much everything with the buttons. So much handier than fooling around on small touch screens when you are e.g. on a bike or hiking (it does have a touch screen too). Also, the battery lasts up to several weeks (depending on the model), so you don't have to worry about it. Plus great support for using maps during a workout.
I also have an Apple Watch Ultra. My feeling has always been that Apple Watch Ultra is a smartwatch first, sports watch second. Garmin watches are sports watches first, smartwatch second.
I was an early adopter of smartwatches with first the Moto 360 and then Apple Watch Series 1 and I have found that I use the smartwatch part less and less. In the end I only used it for notifications for two apps (Signal and WhatsApp), sometimes for calling my wife when I'm on a bike, and contactless payments. These I can do with a Garmin as well, but it far less clumsy as a sports watch than Apple Watch.
Plus Garmin Watches generally work with GadgetBridge, so they are much easier to use in a privacy-preserving way.
That is quite literally how every part of Cocoa was polished. Things such as sidebars, notifications, came from third party libraries, Growl, etc. were all design patterns from the community. Isn't that also how iTunes came to be? Apple trying to acquire the best music players to integrate into its ecosystem? It's somewhat sad to observe what become of apple.
And jailbreaking was a creative source as well until jailbreaking (full, surviving reboots) went away. Yes there is still a sideloading community but nothing like what we were doing with Summer/Winterboard or the hundreds of random tweaks I applied to my phone back then. So many hours spent scrolling through new packages on Cydia.
I wish Apple would see that opening up their platforms actually leads to a better core OS as Apple borrows/steals from the community.
That’s a somewhat obvious flattening of perspective. While it’s clever we can make both positions sound silly, it illuminates nothing while throwing shade.
LaTeX has a huge learning curve, and a mess of online information.
I tried to use it to generate automated reports, and was frustrated at every turn. My usage scenario was a completely offline system to generate reports of a few dozen pages, which included graphics, tables and other visualizations.
1. The whole system download is about 1 or more Gigs.
2. Each report is accompanied by half a dozen files.
3. The choice of packages to use, and the versons to use, is all confusing, with various books and site using various packages, often further customized.
4. The syntax is confusing and jarring, at least to me.
Finally, I ended up using simple template tools to generate HTML with proper semantic structing and CSS print media queries to generate my reports.
I do appreciate the fact that my requirement does not involve laying out content over multiple pages, something which LaTeX is good at. That is very difficult to achieve with HTML and CSS.
But, for use cases where each document page is independent, HTML, CSS and print media queries are great.
You can also use all the exciting javascript visualization libraries to generate awesome graphics.
> 1. The whole system download is about 1 or more Gigs.
For me that’s one of the beauties of the tool: you install the 6 GB and get everything. It’s not like e.g. Rust where you get 1.2 GB of compiler and co. but then have to download more and more crates to actually do the job.
> 1. The whole system download is about 1 or more Gigs
A full installation is 6GB actually, but you don't have to install everything. A minimal installation is only about 50MB, and that's enough for simple documents, and then you can use the package manager to install any additional packages you need. The main problem is that transitive dependencies aren't properly tracked, so it can sometimes be annoying to figure out exactly which packages you need to install.
> 3. The choice of packages to use, and the versons to use, is all confusing, with various books and site using various packages, often further customized.
Agreed, but you can say the same about most old and successful programming languages, so TeX isn't terribly unique here.
I love the folding ones, but if only I had a folding eink screen, that would be glorious !
Or at least, something close.
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