giovannibajo1's comments

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: Laying the foundation for Rust’s future

Please, turn this into blogpost. I’ve had very similar feelings for some time.

I tolerate the borrow checker because I want to use Rust’s other features. I think Rust with no borrow checker is much closer to my dream language than it is right now. Rust with an optional borrow checker is in fact even better.

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: Laying the foundation for Rust’s future

It’s not clear whether they will continue to be assigned to Rust, though. At least, I didn’t find this explicitly confirmed anywhere.

If anything, I’d love to know how many Mozilla employees were working on Rust full-time as their paid job before the layoffs, and then after. I can’t find these numbers cited anywhere.

Pietro’s sibling answer seems to be that Mozilla will transition to be a sponsor — I’d love to know whether this means they will keep investing development time (and how much).

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: Mailto: ?attach=~/ parameter allows including arbitrary files on disk

The feature is useful for desktop applications that want to help the user compose a mail to the customer service, including some report logs as attachment.

Notice that the user is still required to actually press Send in front of their default mail client with an open window showing the full email and attachments.

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

I don't think there is a cogent risk that general computing open platforms will go away soon.

PCs can be self-assembled without buying them as an appliance from a specific vendor, and you can at the very least install Linux on them. If you care about Windows, Microsoft is adopting open source more and more, you can have install Ubuntu within Windows right now, I doubt they will change course on software installation.

I do have a Linux box in my home and successfully use it for many tasks. This doesn't mean that I feel that all devices that have a CPU in my home must absolutely run unsigned binaries compiled by me.

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: Apple to kill Epic’s accounts on Friday the 28th

Fortnite is available on several different game consoles and platforms (most of which, by the way, have a 30% commission fee). It used to be the case that it wasn’t available on iOS, and it was a planetary success already. Customers that had a iOS device and absolutely wanted Fortnite had to resort to use another platform, eg. buy a PC or a PlayStation. Now we’re back on the situations where we were before: Fortnite won’t be available on the iOS platform (like it’s not available for others), and customers will have to play it in other platforms.

I’m not sure how this shows a monopoly. On the contrary, I think it will be hard for Epic to prove that Apple has a “monopolistic power” on Fortnite distribution when they got billionaires through it even before it was ported to iOS.

EDIT: downvotes on HN for stating an opinion?

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: How we scaled Google Meet during Covid-19

Use Safari. Turn on the developer settings, and find the setting to disable VP9 in WebRTC. That will force Meet to stop using VP9 and switch to H264 for which MacBooks (and Intel CPUs in general) have a hardware accelerated decoder and encoder.

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: Apple Security Research Device Program

I think Apple point is that users that need being protected from themselves without even realizing it are far more than those who might get a benefit from root without getting burnt. Since the two things can’t exist at the same time, they’re going for the road that makes the majority happy.

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: The cpio trailer problem (2018)

I would classify this as using an in-band signal rather than an out of band signal. Twitter used to have this same problems ages ago. I don’t remember the details but it was something like DMs being standard twitter messages with “/dm” at the beginning.

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?

On the other hand, programmers are very good at wasting weeks creating incredible software architectures to try the latest library they read about or try a design pattern, or in general over engineer something so that it’s “better designed”, more generic, more “flexible”, and so on.

In other words, if a project manager sets an expectation that a task is a “task that takes two weeks”, the developer will somehow manage to use about two weeks to make it, that is find the “best way” to do it given that timeframe, where “best” is probably evaluated under some kind of metric which has nothing to do with product or user value.

Sometimes the question “explain me why it should take more than two days, when i know it takes two days to do just that in the context of a minimal MVP” goes a long way in making programmers focusing on delivering the maximum value for the product.

So I think there is actually some value in having a technical person continuously challenging developers in shortening their path to implement a feature.

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: Linux Mint drops Ubuntu Snap packages

Third-party apt repositories are a security nightmare: you are giving a third party unrestricted semi-silent root access to your computer. I can trust my distro provider with this, but it should be strongly discouraged for third-parties. Instead, installing PPAs to get updated builds of standard packages seems considered “normal”. At least, this doesn’t hold true for snaps.

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source

I’d like proof that humans are better at recollecting two weeks of random encounters on the streets, compared to an imprecise Bluetooth app.

Immuni (Italian app) has been analyzed and certified as GDPR compliant by the Italian privacy watchdog, that has a technical department that is actually able to read and understand technical documentation.

giovannibajo1 | 5 years ago | on: The radix 2^51 trick (2017)

Actually, setc is the idiomatic way, and doesn’t depend on the previous value of the destination register so it’s much faster to execute because it has no dependencies
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