Yet, the Year of XYZ software seldom comes, the usual cheering of tools like Blender, often forgets its origin as commercial product and existing userbase.

Someone has to pay the bills for development effort, and when it based on volunteer work, it is mostly followers and not innovators.

There's nothing wrong with commercial software being the origin. What's a crime is that it can stay commercial. Source code should enter public domain in a decade at most.

> What's a crime is that it can stay commercial. Source code should enter public domain in a decade at most.

In many cases, people are free to write their own implementation. Your claim "Source code should enter public domain in a decade at most." means that every software vendor shall be obliged after some time to hand out their source code, which is something very strong to ask for.

What is the true crime are the laws that in some cases make such an own implementation illegal (software patents, probitions of reverse-engineering, ...).

> every software vendor shall be obliged after some time to hand out their source code,

Obviously. Since software is as much vital to the modern world as water, making people who deal with it disclose implementation details is a very small ask.

Access to the market is not a right but a privilege. If you want to sell things we can demand things of you.

Worse than lipstick on a pig is lipstick all the way down, with no pork, like the user interfaces coming out of Apple.

I've been using Zig for few days. And my gotchas so far:

- Can't `for (-1..1) {`. Must use `while` instead.

- if you allocated something inside of a block and you want it to keep existing outside of a block `defer` won't help you to deallocate it. I didn't find a way to defer something till the end of the function.

- adding variable containing -1 to usize variable is cumbersome. You are better of running everything with isize and converting to usize as last operation wherever you need it.

- language evolved a bunch and LLMs are of very little help.

I don't know if that's just aged noob in me speaking but so far, while Rust has "zero cost abstractions", Zig feels like it has "Zero abstractions".

Deallocating the wrong thing or the right thing too soon bit me in th ass so much already that I feel craving for destructors.

> Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

Actually it's the opposite.

Strong men create hard times by trying to show to each other how strong they are. Hard times create weak men because during hard times strong men kill each other, thus mostly weak men remain. Weak men create good times because instead of trying to show their strength they just build stuff so that the world is easier for them. In good times people breed and the population returns to the mean with just enough strong men to start the cycle again.

WWII was the last time strong men created hard times. We are overdue for another round and it shows.

Thank you for this description. I thought it's a glider for some 1 dimensional cellular automata system.

Yes, that was my first reading as well. I thought "((1D Conway's Life) glider) found" but it is "(1D (Conway's Life glider)) found".

Yeah, it helps a lot to make first steps, to overcome writers block, to make you put into words what you'd like to have built.

At one point you might take over, ask it for specific refactors you'd do but are too lazy to do yourself. Or even toss it away entirely and start fresh with better understanding. Yourself or again with agent.

It works both ways. If you are good, it's also easier to spot moments of brilliance from AI agent when it saves you hours of googling, reading docs, some trial and error while you pour yourself cup of coffee and ponder the next steps. You can spot when a single tab press saved you minutes.

Yes. Love it for quick explorations of available options, reviewing my work, having it propose tests, getting its help with debugging, and all kinds of general subject matter questions. I don’t trust it to write anything important but it can help with a sketch.

That kind of explained half of comments on HN. When it's your induatry that's being disrupted suddenly a lot of people are on the edge.

At one point if someone mentions they have trouble cooperating with AI it might be a huge interpersonal red flag, because that indicates they can't talk to a person in reaffirming and constructive ways so that they build you up rather than put down.

Watching other people interact with a chat bot is a shockingly intimate look into their personality.

Have you?