All these trackers (rings, watches, wrist bands) seem so… useless. Do you really need to know your heartbeat every minute of the day? What does sleep tracking tell you, can’t you just tell if you’re tired? For athletes there are garmin type watches, which I understand during a workout. But the lifestyle trackers I don’t get the point.
I get this point of view totally, so I'll give you a different one. I pretty much wear one (cheap Fitbit) as a gentile constant reminder to do my workouts, keep active, and to increase my fitness. I also noticed that if the readiness score is very low, like single digits, I tire extremely quickly during a workout and it feels very frustrating so in that case I will give myself some extra rest. I cannot even a little tell the difference between high readiness and low readiness by the way I feel waking up or going through the day, but I also have anemia due to a genetic defect and am going through perimenopause, so not being able to tell is likely a "me" thing.
Sleep tracking isn't useful as far as trying to improve it for me, because, again, I'm in perimenopause, so my sleep is all over the place and my body just does whatever it wants. But I'm sure it is part of the readiness score or whatever.
Many of these are extremely useful/lifesaving for people who are at risk for medical reasons (cardiovascular conditions, fall detection for elders, etc.) and the lifestyle tracking features are basically extras to market the device to a wider audience and bring the price down.
I love my whoop band. Has noticeably made my day to day life happier than before I owned it. The insights pushed me to sleep much better, which makes each day brighter and less overwhelming. The insights also pushed me to up my cardio fitness metrics in general, which has made me overall more athletic and capable on strenuous hikes, trips, and activities.
YMMV but for me it might be my favorite product I own
I have my Galaxy watch linked to myfitnesspal so that calories from workouts get added to my total calorie budget for the day. It is pretty convenient.
What’s the story for Rust-C++ interoperability these days? That’s what kills adoption. Most C++ devs I know like the idea of Rust, but no one is going to go rewrite 30 years of working code. It needs to be something you can incorporate gradually.
There's an interop initiative by the Rust Foundation, there is a project goal to map the problem space, there was an effort to introduce an attribute (`#[rustc_splat]`) to allow calling overloaded functions, and there are various community-generated tools for more or less automated bindings generation.
There's a huge push for this from the big companies adopting Rust. Google has been developing https://github.com/google/crubit. The older cbdingen is still usable if more limited (it's what Firefox uses for some pretty involved interop).
Rust's raison d'être is to improve the confidence of the security-critical parts of your system. You don't need to rewrite all 30M lines of code to benefit from it, you just need to identify the 1% of your codebase with the greatest attack surface (e.g. any internet-facing string parser), cordon that part of the codebase off with a C ABI, and then convert that part to Rust. This is similar to how Firefox incorporates bits of Rust into its own C++ codebase over time (e.g. for parsing URLs).
To be fair to the committee, upgrading C++ compilers is already a chore, even with the changes as small as they are. Would you rather spend time updating your lambdas because they changed how capture works (a real breakage not long ago), or doing something of actual value? The only reason we finally updated from Python 2.7 to 3 was that the OS vendors dropped it, but it was effectively a waste of time.
That aside, I don’t understand why ABI breakage is a big deal. There’s probably a good reason, but ABIs are already so fragile, you can’t mix and match different compiler versions anyway, or even the same compiler with different flags. Why does it matter if setting -std29 or whatever breaks ABI when -fno-rtti does the same?
The C++ committee should really stop adding esoteric features for library writers and focus on stuff for normies. Tooling is one as the article says, or how about finally getting Networking TS? This is probably the only mainstream language left that doesn’t have even basic networking support.
> Why does it matter if setting -std29 or whatever breaks ABI when -fno-rtti does the same?
I think it's the distinction between can and must. Right now you can preserve ABI across compiler versions if you want to (and that is indeed a desirable quality for some users). The pushback is against changes to the standard that would require an ABI break.
I spent quite a while trying to learn Common Lisp and I really wanted to like it, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it. The first problem is finding good learning materials, as most are out of print. On the language side people complain about the parens, which turns out is no big deal. There’s a lot of other weird or needlessly tricky stuff though. The function names are convoluted (e.g. there’s map, but also mapc, mapcan, mapl, maplist). Image based development was interesting, but you might waste an hour debugging because your image diverged from the actual code. Building an actual executable is more complicated than you’d expect, and there’s a lot of magic with packages. There’s some elegance there if you squint, but other lisps are probably better.
I now generate ALL of my hobby projects in CL (SBCL on windows). I tell the LLM to 'over-comment' the code, so I get to learn as I read the output. It has been glorious. I generally use the web browser on an unused port on localhost for user IO (beautiful pages), and the app just hooks to Hunchentoot to serve.
Any 'real' programming language (meaning, one that is truly general purpose: numeric stacks, Web front and back ends, system code, utilities, etc) will always have some cruft. In CL, at least you can understand why some cruft exists. And you get used to it, because it's not like e.g. C where there are some very dark corners indeed. Check out Peter's book!
CL lets you build real apps, for real. No toys. This has value.
CL was recommended to me here. I had only played with Scheme over the years (SICP and Little Schemer - which, I used to recommend to every engineer that answered to me). I quickly bought Practical Common Lisp in hardcover (used). The language has a LOT to love. But it's caused me to go back and revisit Scheme(s). I put down my CL book to look at The Scheme Programming language and Chez Scheme. Going through all of this without an LLM has restored some joy. But I can understand reluctance to use this unless I could assemble a team with a ton of knowledge. Prompting for Lisp sounds like fun. But not having the deep understanding means I'd be blindly accepting its suggestions. I can't say what Lisp would be better. Clojure maybe?
Common Lisp is unfortunately a merge of multiple competing Lisps from the time period, much like Unix (SysV and BSD stuff). It was probably reasoned that a messy, imperfect standard is better than no standard or a restricted standard that is useless without proprietary extensions and requires constant revisions by a standing committee. There are good reasons to deviate from it and come up with a cleaner Lisp, but people better learn all the lessons Common Lisp has to offer before they do so.
Yeah, one of my learnings that took a bit is that as much fun as learning the classic lispisms like car/cdr/cadr/cadar/caadr/etc was, with their long history and particular "early punchcards typing efficiency" at some point it is useful to learn the newer sides of the language that could afford entire-words and cool modern DSLs like loop.
My push into Common Lisp was a current revision of a classic AI textbook that mixed up usage of nearly the complete history of lisp because some of the examples presumably dated to the 1960s/1970s with moderate adjustments to make sure that they still compiled in SBCL or the like, so it was a natural lesson from that textbook. Maybe not the best way to learn Common Lisp, but that was an interesting semester for me. (I and the few other people in the class that semester decided to learn Lisp by choice for the class and I think I was the only one to also decide "I'll do every assignment with implementation language choice in Common Lisp this semester", which was most of my classes, just to keep grad school interesting.)
Setting aside the “why” that everyone is so focused on, I want to know, how? I can’t get Claude to do anything even a fraction of this complexity. How are people setting up their agents, Claude.md, etc to do such big projects? There are a lot of lessons to be learned.
> I can’t get Claude to do anything even a fraction of this complexity.
I remember writing a postgresql compatible DB with Opus 4.5, that used S3 as storage and local caching to make it speedy.
Ironically, Opus 4.5 is by todays standards is antique. If you have some knowledge about Databases, it goes a long way.
But you need to do it step by step. Getting the core to work, getting a Pratt parsing going. The whole pgwire protocol ... the data format ...
Step by step ...
With todays Models, your can probably get away with using /goal and telling it to make a postgresql compatible database, while having it run a few days.
Now, making a fun database test project and having it production ready! Big difference!
I don’t understand why the Steam Machine is getting so much hate. The form factor is amazing and a huge part of the value proposition. It’s slightly bigger than a box of Kleenex and you can put it next to the TV, on your desk, etc. I’m tempted to get one just to free up the floor space used by my ATX case. The graphics capability seems good enough, most people can live without 4k gaming.
>I’m tempted to get one just to free up the floor space used by my ATX case
if you're willing to spend a grand just to free up a few inches of floor space I don't think you're going to understand the reaction of the average consumer to prices in the current economic climate
Apple is proof that people still like spending money on expensive little nice things, even in this economic climate.
I understand there is a segment that is disappointed that the Steam Machine isn't being priced as a discount item, but there is a large segment that still wants to pay.
I don't think the majority of ppl are giving it hate tbh - I think it's just a HN thing. everyone I know that is into gaming is excited about it. I would chalk it up to consumer misunderstanding around the pricing, but I actually think most consumers that are interested in buying a steam HW product are fully in the know why there's a chip shortage. I am in the group that is waiting for the price to drop, but I am excited to get mine!
The Steam Machine is a victim of RAM prices exploding. It's price is fair considering the price of its parts but also causes it to be in a price segment where I am not sure who it is for.
People that can afford a Steam Machine at the current price point are likely to already have stronger hardware.
A Mac Mini a similarly sized with like half the price with dramatically better CPU. Or if you could get a PS5 pro, still for cheaper with vastly superior gaming performance.
Valve could have started with a premium model for the hardcore fans that are less price sensitive and released a budget version later when maybe the RAM apocalypse has ebbed.
I don’t understand who the target is. I can afford one but I’ve already got a PS5 Pro and it just works. I’ve got a threadripper+blackwell running Linux too, but it gets 2/3 the framerate of when I boot it to windows for games. When I had more time and less money, I would have built a gaming PC that would be better and cheaper than the steam offering. So the market isn’t me.
Who is it? Who wants a gaming machine connected to their TV? Every PS5 and Nintendo owner. Are they the target market? Why would a PS5 owner spend $1100 on a machine that places games worse if at all? So I can FPS with a mouse? DRM doesn’t work. So I can play RTS? No I’m sitting at my desk over my keyboard.
Who wants a Linux PC connected to their TV that doesn’t already have a Linux PC connected to their TV? Who wants a smaller, less customizable box? That you can’t swap out the graphics card when they inevitably become a lot cheaper? Who wants a last gen AMD GPU and not be able to swap it out for a 5080 once things are cheaper again and the 6060 comes around?
Who is this for? I’m not hating on it. It’s not for me and I don’t know who it IS for.
Define lots? You are describing someone who: 1/ has spent many years building a steam collection (has $$$) and 2/ has a collection of console-playable games but never bought a console to play them. (Suggests doesn't have $$$). and 3/ doesn't already have, or desire building, a SFF upgradable PC?
Like, the sweet spot is they have to: 1. have $$$ of games, 2. have $1200 to spend on a second PC and 3. not have, nor desire to have, an upgradeable SFF PC.
$1200 is a 5070ti or a 5080 (just). We know they have a PC already (they have $$$ steam games). If I have a PC already and I play games, and it doesn't have a 5080, then I'm spending my $1200 on the 5080, not a living room console. So, now we're talking about someone who either has a 5080, or plays the kind of casual games that don't need a 5080. My experience is that those kind of games aren't great on a TV and a joystick. I'm not playing Factorio, Civ, Rimworld or Citizen Sleeper on a TV with a controller!
I've got quite a steam collection, but they are all non-console games. That's the distinction for whether I bought it on steam or for a console.
Is there a large demographic who bought console games on steam because they don't own a console?
Anyway, valve themselves have the demographics, so presumably they see a target market. I just don't know what it is! =)
Yeah man I think your logic is massively flawed. You’re making assumptions based on your own preferences. Not every gamer is going to prefer the latest gpu and yes there are plenty of gamers whose libraries are filled with games that are meant for controllers and consoles, in fact I’d argue that this is more common than your choices.
And we don't know yet, but I am hoping for reliability. My gaming PC is a nightmare. Sometimes it works great. Other times, I have to sacrifice a goat to get the thing to work.
Today I had to disable dual band WiFi on my windows gaming machine because PoE2 has this bug when a group of mobs surround you, network latency suddenly spikes, but only if the network card works on dual band... Sigh.
I assume many issues like that will still exist on Steam Machine, as it's kind of unrelated to what's running the buggy software.
That issue cannot be a bug in the game, because the operating system should not allow a game to (by any means) produce that type of behaviour. So it's a bug in your OS, potentially the network card driver.
There are fewer of those on Linux but they still exist.
It does get easy to read, but then you unlock a deeper level of misery which is trying to work out the semantics. Stuff like implicit type conversions, remembering the rule of 3 or 5 to avoid your std::moves secretly becoming a copy, unwittingly breaking code because you added a template specialization that matches more than you realized, and a million others.
This is correct - it does get easy to read but you are constantly considering the above semantics, often needing to check reference or compiler explorer to confirm.
Unless you are many of my coworkers, then you blissfully never think about those things, and have Cursor reply for you when asked about them (-:
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