historyloop's comments

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Scalable but Wasteful, or why fast replication protocols are slow

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when an argument in that area starts using fake math to drive a point home. Top-tier engineers spend 6 months to have 20% improvement that could be achieved by spending 20% more on hardware?

Where IS all this coming from? Why is it acceptable to pull out a few random numbers out of our ass and conclude that it's always best to buy more hardware?

I know Google literally invented HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 to shave a few % off their hardware costs. And they had to not only implement this in Chrome and Google.com but to make it a world-wide standard. So surely they must be the idiots putting top-tier engineers for 6 months (or more) on such optimization efforts, instead of spending more on hardware? I don't know.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: TypeScript's Type System Is Turing Complete (2017)

I wanna see a language where the type system and the actual language are the same language.

I'm not talking about self-hosted compiler, which TS is already. But basically what runs statically and what is compiled for runtime to be the same language in two contexts.

C++ is moving in that direction with constexpr expansion, but it also has to carry the legacy of macros, its existing type system, templates, and so on.

We need something clean.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Apple MagSafe Battery Pack

> This meme about Apple products deriving most of their demand from being status symbols is a decade or two out of date.

Both of you are arguing on which side of an ideal abstraction (Veblen goods) Apple is. Seems silly to me.

Apple products ARE status symbols in many countries, that's what most of the Chinese market is for Apple presently.

They're also playing as utilitarian tech products with mass appeal. Apple has always had this hybrid strategy, it's not one OR the other.

A quick look at their profit margins vs. the competition will show that they're marking up their products significantly above the competition. And I mean in profit margin specifically, so that we don't have this argument about whether they have more expensive software and hardware in principle (they do, but most of it is profit margin).

And also sorry but this is a $15 battery sold for $99, even as an Apple user they're losing me here. Some of their accessories are literally for people who want to spend money on Apple shit.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Apple MagSafe Battery Pack

> Would anyone else just be fine with a thick phone that had a better internal battery?

Replaceable battery.

Anyway, this argument has been made plenty of times. Apple prefers to sell you a new phone and an external battery.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Where’s the Apple M2?

> The M1 was hailed as an entry level chip

Hailed by whom? I doubt you'll find a single instance of Apple calling M1 an "entry level chip".

It looks like this is the blogosphere getting too high on their own supply, huh?

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: A privacy war is raging inside the W3C

I don't care much about tracking, but this ad is very effective. It's kinda dishonest about what tracking is (it's not bunch of people making job and purchase decisions for you, come on). But effective.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Where’s the Apple M2?

I wonder if they can't ship the same M1 but with some external RAM and GPU. It won't speed up some apps, but it'll help with Pro apps.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Is π the Same in Every Universe?

There's a limit to how much we can hypothesize about the nature of other universes, given we don't know if they actually exist. It'd be foolish to claim "QED" either way.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Where’s the Apple M2?

"Eight months without perceptibly faster chip!"

Get a load of this guy. Can't even wait even a full year, he wants his CPU revolutions every 4 to 8 months.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Apple MagSafe Battery Pack

> You're not really comparing features to features if you're comparing to a boring 5000mAh brick with wired charging.

So wired charging is boring and magnetically attached is exciting?

You know, this is not like AirPods, which are completely disconnected from the phone. It's a lump attached on your phone that you may also unintentionally disconnect and drop on the floor while taking videos of something.

I'm way more "excited" by the cable, especially given the price (you can find pretty good 5000 mAh bricks for as little as $12).

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Apple MagSafe Battery Pack

A Canyon 5000 mAh is of comparable size and costs $12. It's not MagSafe, but frankly the cable is not a problem at all.

I'm an iPhone/Mac user, but this thing costs $99 and they didn't even bother to write out the damn capacity on the page (reportedly less than 4000 mAh).

I like Apple, but their accessories are truly reserved for people with either too much money, or too little intelligence.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Apple Music Style Guide

> A music and artist focused startup or business has no problem catering to artists.

You forgot to name one.

> My hope is that the DOJ will break up these companies so that good, healthy competition can take place again.

You think DOJ has to break up Apple Music off so this artist up there will be allowed to post non-face face photos on his account.

Nice. A bit killing a fly with a tank, if you ask me.

> A company that cares deeply about music and artists would serve everyone better than Apple. Or Google. Or Amazon.

We have lots of those companies. And I don't see how they're strictly "better" than Apple, Google or Amazon. Each has their fans and users. Your problem is clearly absolutely unrelated to what the artist up there complained about.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Why is standing more tiring than walking? [audio]

Yes, let's have whimsical music, long pauses, tangentially related side chit-chat, and re-enactment filling us on what it means "to walk" complete with walking sound effects.

Gotta love 90s radio. But... it's not the 90s anymore.

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Give me /events, not webhooks

I'm talking about the elevator pitch of their blog post, not of their company. Which are actually two distinct things (they're not describing their service in this blog post).

historyloop | 4 years ago | on: Give me /events, not webhooks

> It’s great that we’ve went full circle. But make no mistake that this only means one thing: that servers are cheaper than ever. We can now afford to entertain previously extravagant ideas.

We've not come full circle. This is just one blog saying "how about long-polling". While also ignoring that since then we've gained web sockets, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, each of which make long-polling pointless in three different ways.

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