I once had an idea to build an "probabilistic routing" system that "predicts" the likelihood of arriving at your destination. I.e. "you have a 85% likelihood of arriving in Berlin over Route Y instead of the official Route X because it uses train connection Z, which is historically always late". Obviously the bahn.de routing will only get you the "quickest calculated connection", but then during the travel I rarely have one day where there's no "your connection is not available anymore, please look for an alternative" error in the DB App. Especially if you have to change regional trains 3, 4 or 5 times.
Basically, my method of traveling with Deutsche Bahn has now gotten me back to improving my geography, because I developed an instinct of "try to get as physically close to where you want to go because as soon as you step outside the train, you have no guarantee that the next train will arrive". Rather than immediately planning the entire trip in advance, I'll say "okay I need to head roughly east and I know that larger cities have more frequent connections, so if anything happens, I prefer being stranded in a large city rather than being stuck in No Mans Land just because bahn.de says it's the fastest connection". This is very important when traveling late in the day, to not spend the night at a station.
The downside is obviously that German traveling has now degraded to a state of "medieval mode" traveling, where you have to plan your overnight stops at the local inn while fighting robbers, peasants and bicyclists for a spot in your horse carriage (sorry, I mean "RE3"). But when you are eventually stranded in Knitschendorf-Unteroblingen main station at 23:59pm because bahn.de said that there should be a train here and then staring into the night sky above you, at least you remember that traveling beyond the horizon has finally become magical again. Onto new adventures, travelers! See y'all at Mt. Doom.
It's not ready yet (it does layout HTML semi-properly, but it still needs some polishing and the desktop integration is currently not working, only the layout), I hope can get a release of it out before Christmas.
Not really, I mean I don't "complain" about companies using my code and I don't demand much. I'm happy if they're honest enough to send me patches back. But if I know that my code is being used by German companies, then, as a German, it's only fair to ask for some breadcrumbs back (about 40-50% of your income goes to the state in Germany, it's not like the US). We could make "everything private only", but then it becomes very hard for people to start their own startups as they have to pay for every little thing, like in the 90s.
I do take responsibility for the code I write, often way more than some company CEOs ("just sell it bro"). I try to make efforts, but in the end I have physical limits. And many open-source developers are like that. It's more "well if we would put some miniscule effort to supporting open source, we'd all be better of, more sovereign, more independent of Big Tech, more innovation, etc. etc." - sure, not every GH project is "innovation", but many are, so just make some org where you could more easily apply for public funding, problem solved.
What I do at least demand is that the Jobcenter stops bothering me to "get a real job" (thankfully they're very lenient at least where I live). Or that there are more opportunities for funding Open Source. There are initiatives like the Prototype Fund, which is at least a start, but they are only spending about €1.8 million per year, which is literal pocket change for the German government. Meanwhile literal billions go to weapons development for random foreign countries.
Do I understand correctly that you're living on the government dole? Then wouldn't that support my original point? You can't do free volunteer work for unrelated party A and then turn around to unrelated party B and demand that they pay you for that. That's just wrong.
Apologies if I misunderstood, but your comment on Jobcenter gives this impression.
> "You can't do free volunteer work for unrelated party A and then turn around to unrelated party B and demand that they pay you for that."
The parties are absolutely not "unrelated". You are missing that, at least in Germany, the state is effectively a majority shareholder in every single company. For an average German SW dev salary of €80k, the state gets: €16k in social contributions (calculated on top of the salary) + about 32k in corporate tax, income tax, social security (again, on the worker side), sales tax, etc = 48k in total. So, in total, the German state gets about 50-60% of all money earned. It's not like in the US where taxes are lower.
Now, I "live on the dole" (because nobody wants to hire me for some reason) and create infrastructure that German companies use. I receive about €800/month (subsistence + health insurance), which is €9,600 per year. That is the cost to the state to keep me alive while I maintain infrastructure used by German companies.
Looking at the ROI for the German State, if only one single developer at a German startup saves a few weeks of work using my code, or if a startup can launch faster because of my open source work, the state makes that money back instantly. That is, assuming only a single company uses my code, while in fact, many do so silently.
And on top of that economic unfairness, the current system classifies Open Source work as "unemployment/leisure," whereas economically, it is unpaid R&D that fuels the very companies funding the state. There are strong differences in how "tech infrastructure" gets built in Germany vs the US:
- In the US, corporate taxes are much lower. Monopolies (Google, Meta, etc.) amass massive capital reserves. They effectively privatize public R&D (Go, React, PyTorch). They can afford to hire devs to work on OSS full-time because the state leaves them the money to do so.
- In Germany, the state takes ~50% of the money out of the ecosystem (between high income tax, social security, and corporate tax). Small and medium businesses (the "Mittelstand") do not have the surplus capital to fund "public good" R&D like Google does.
Since the German state extracts the capital that would otherwise fund this innovation, I can argue that the state has indeed an obligation to reinvest it into the ecosystem. Currently, they don't and they just waste the money on complete nonsense, wars, etc. and then tell OSS maintainers to also "get a real job and do OSS in your spare time".
Apologies, but I don't buy it. It's very easy for you to say that your programming is very beneficial and then in an extremely round-about way claim that your government gibs is what they rightfully owe you.
I enjoy painting, and could of course go and hang my paintings in the public square. Some very important lawyers and engineers might walk past my paintings on their way to work and be edified by them, thus increasing their productivity with 0.3% each day. That would translate into thousands of euros in increased tax revenue for the German government, so it's only fair that they keep paying me my gibs each month for me to keep painting, and stop bothering me about getting a job....
But I'd like to assume that your open source code is very important and essential for some IT applications. I wouldn't doubt that. That also means big businesses are using your code and making a lot of money from it, paying their engineers juicy salaries with that money. You should go to those businesses and demand a job, and not take government gibs, which is tax money that has been extracted by oppressing people who work low salary jobs.
Of course you are unemployed then, you're working for free for big businesses and letting the tax payer pay for your upkeep! Why would they hire you when they get your labour for free?
> The aim is to protect young people on the internet from age-inappropriate content such as pornography, violence, hate speech, incitement, and misinformation.
Hmmm, I doubt they really care about pornography and more about censoring certain stuff that politicians do not like. But what do I know, I'm probably just a conspiracy theorist.
Well considering you can go to prison in Germany for posting a meme on social media, that ship has already sailed. This has been a thing for a while. The only difference with this is this gives some parents control over what they allow their children to see on their computers
I think they should criminialize porn instead and leave the machines alone. Since that industry (conspiracy theories aside) value money above all else, massive fine and taxes on the owners of porn production is the way to go imo.
I mean, porn completely ruined my teenage years and it took me 8 years to get rid of my addiction. It warps your expectations of real-life relationships, it ruins marriages, it ruins both women and men, it's garbage poison and should be outlawed. So I would be in favor of such laws, but then again, I also know, it's not really about porn and more about the whole "we can't let the youth become radicalized by this Internet thing" stuff and just more censorship.
That part also caused my tin foil hat to heat up. At least they get the credit of including it directly instead of adding it in a later revision that gets even less news coverage. It is hard not to grow cynical when you see this.
I am also worried about another detail:
> The states also want to prevent the circumvention of blocking orders by erotic portals ... using so-called mirror domains – i.e., the distribution of identical content under a minimally changed web address. For a page to be treated as a mirror page and quickly blocked without a new procedure, it must essentially have the same content as the already blocked original.
Note the part "quickly blocked without a new procedure" so there is a way to block sites with even less process and oversight. That just invites overblocking without accountability.
Update VSCode to the latest version and click the small "Chat" button at the top bar. GitHub gives you like $20 for free per month and I think they have a deal with the larger vendors because their pricing is insanely cheap. One week of vibe-coding costs me like $15, only downside to Copilot is that you can't work on multiple projects at the same time because of rate-limiting.
Willing to relocate: Anywhere, as long as the salary matches the local living costs, I'm not bound by family or similar
Technologies: I have about 6 YOE in Rust, so that's my daily driver and it's what I'm best at. Other than that, Python, general frontend tech (JS / HTML / CSS, but I don't use frameworks), SEO and graphic design
I am mostly a self-taught Rust engineer who tried (unsuccessfully, so far) to build a cartography startup. But I still need a regular day job, even if everything goes well, but I have lots of experience in Rust by now. After school, I only had some training in government administration, but never wanted to work there. Learned C++ in my free type, then switched to Rust in 2017 to create my own GIS / graphics applications. That work resulted in the https://azul.rs GUI framework (still working on it).
I finished multiple smaller projects for the German government (had to get "some" job because I ran out of money building Azul), but sadly all my designs got rejected due to German bureaucracy. I am good at thinking through systems, ownership and understanding the entire product, as well as rendering, performance, Linux / open-source and software architecture.
> Free audio editing software that requires hours of learning to be useful for simple tasks.
To be fair, the Audacity UX designer made a massive video about the next UX redesign and how he tried to get rid of "modes" and the "Audacity says no" problem:
So this problem should get better in the future. Good UX (doesn't necessarily have to have a flashy UI, but just a good UX) in free software is often lacking or an afterthought.
You're making application for yourself and somewhere down pipeline you decide that it could benefit others, so you make it open-source.
People growl at you "It's ugly UX but nice features" when it was originally designed for your own tastes. The latter, people growl at you for "not having X feature, but nice UX".
Your own personal design isn't one-fits-all and designing mocks takes effort. Mental strain and stress; pleasing folks is hard. You now continue developing and redesign the foundations.
A theming engine you think. This becomes top-priority as integration of such becomes a PITA when trying to couple it with future features later.
That itself becomes a black hole in how & schematics. So now you're forever doomed in creating something you never desired for the people who will probably never use it. This causes your project to fail but at least you have multiple revisions of the theming engine. Or you strike it lucky and gain a volunteer.
the "modal disruption" is misguided - he cites as the challenge a very poor implementation in a MS app where the modes were barely visible!!! That's not a proof that modes are bad, just a statement that invisible information makes it hard for the users to adapt! Brushes (another mode he cites as great) are great precisly because their state is immediately visible in your focus area - your primary pointer changes
Now he got rid of the modes by adding handles and border actions - so 1) wasted some space that could be used for information 2) required more precision from the users because now to do the action you must target a tiny handle/border area 3) same, but for other actions as now you have to avoid those extra areas to do other tasks.
While this might be fine for casual users as it's more visible, the proper way out is, of course,... MODES and better ones! Let the default be some more casual mode with your handles, but then let users who want more ergonomics use a keybind to allow moving the audio segment by pressing anywhere in that segment, not just in the tiny handle at the top. And then you could also add all those handles to visually indicate that now segments are movable or turn your pointer into a holding hand etc.
Same thing in the example - instead of creating a whole new separate app with a button you could have a "1-button magicbrake" mode in handbrake
Having actually used Audacity, the modes were horrid and not at all intuitive to use and everything demonstrated in the video only looked like vast improvements (aside from the logo). I am failing to see how adding handles wastes space that could be used for any extra information especially when the tradeoff is an incredible degree of customisation for my UI. In terms of precision, they're working on accessibility issues but I'm not sure how this change is any special than any other UI.
> I am failing to see how adding handles wastes space that could be used for any extra information
What is there to see? You add a bar that takes space. That space can be taken up by something useful. Just like you have apps that hide app title bar and app menus so you can have more space for your precious content. This is especially useful for high-info-density apps like these audio/video/photo authoring ones.
Note how tiny those handles are in the video, why do you think that is?
> tradeoff is an incredible degree of customisation
You don't have that tradeoff, neither of the 2 solutions are anywhere close to "incredible customization", so you can pick either without it.
> In terms of precision, they're working on accessibility issues
Working towards what magic solution?
> but I'm not sure how this change is any special than any other UI.
why does it have to be special? Just a bog standard degradation common to any UI (re)design, nothing special about it.
> the modes were horrid
Of course they were. Just like they were horrid in that MS Paint app the dev worked on before. But you can make any UI primitive horrid, even buttons, that's no reason to remove them, but to improve them!
> wasted some space that could be used for information
The space is used for information. The fact clips in Audacity finally have names and you can see those names is a fantastic improvement. The space taken up by the clip title is the handle.
But sure, if you need names permanently right there and are ok to lose space to show them, and if the handle is inconveniently small to only fit the text, then yes, you wouldn't lose space in that case. You'd only have other issues.
But that coupling likely has other design implications, e.g., you're unlikely to get an option to only show names on hover instead of having a bar, or to show names as an overlay (in many cases the names aren't that long to need to take the height of the the whole segment)
The problem with the new Audacity isn't the new version, it's that it replaces the old version. If the new version came out but it was called "DARing" and Audacity continued to be the thing we have now, people might question the name but no other eyes would be batted.
Pre-emptive anti-snark: yes, the old version will still exist... if you can dig up the right github commit and still make it compile in 2030.
Well, Tantacrul did answer that objection: it just shows you a popup dialog on first start: "which theme do you want" (colorful or colorless, light / dark) and "which experience do you want" (classic / new). So if you pick the "colorless, light, classic" option, it's going to look pretty much like the current Audacity, except that they moved from wxWidgets to Qt.
Basically, my method of traveling with Deutsche Bahn has now gotten me back to improving my geography, because I developed an instinct of "try to get as physically close to where you want to go because as soon as you step outside the train, you have no guarantee that the next train will arrive". Rather than immediately planning the entire trip in advance, I'll say "okay I need to head roughly east and I know that larger cities have more frequent connections, so if anything happens, I prefer being stranded in a large city rather than being stuck in No Mans Land just because bahn.de says it's the fastest connection". This is very important when traveling late in the day, to not spend the night at a station.
The downside is obviously that German traveling has now degraded to a state of "medieval mode" traveling, where you have to plan your overnight stops at the local inn while fighting robbers, peasants and bicyclists for a spot in your horse carriage (sorry, I mean "RE3"). But when you are eventually stranded in Knitschendorf-Unteroblingen main station at 23:59pm because bahn.de said that there should be a train here and then staring into the night sky above you, at least you remember that traveling beyond the horizon has finally become magical again. Onto new adventures, travelers! See y'all at Mt. Doom.