I mean the Gimp in particular. My point is that if we could suddenly wish the Gimp into non-existence (a counterfactual) then we could get a do-over. But because the Gimp actually exists it occupies a niche that could go to something better. Instead of banding together to create a better tool, people just grumble a bit and then use the Gimp (or hand over their wallet to Adobe).

I think my biggest issue with the Gimp is that it simply exists. If it didn’t exist there’d be a huge hole in the free software space and people would get together to build software to fill it. But of course there’s no guarantee that would actually produce something better.

Maybe the real problem with the Gimp is that it’s built to scratch an itch for its own developers who are used to its bizarre UIs and workflows. For all the people I’ve seen complaining about the Gimp over the years, none have stepped up to create an alternative. I think this is likely due to the intersection between visual arts people and software engineers being extremely small (and likely most working for Adobe already).

Haskell does both! Most people prefer to use whitespace when writing Haskell but it’s not required. Braces and semicolons are preferred if you’re going to be generating Haskell code.

A 1000Hz display necessarily has a latency of 1ms between frames. For 100Hz, that’s 10ms.

But this is only the lower bound. You have to include all other sources of latency, such as software, input hardware, drivers, graphics card, etc.

You absolutely can tell the difference between 90Hz and 1kHz. Just draw a squiggly line! See this video for a rather dramatic demonstration:

Microsoft Research: High Performance Touch

What’s annoying about them is that there isn’t a simple way to clear a register which means you have to use both “r and “R in macros.

The issue is that you don’t want to give some random untrusted process root access. You, the user, have root access as long as you’re capable of running processes as root, but that doesn’t mean you should.

There could be tons of apps on the iOS App Store or Google Play Store that are completely benign under the existing security model but do nefarious things when run as root. No one knows that for sure because they aren’t tested under root by Apple or Google.

The problem with root is that it’s giving the process the keys to the Ferrari. That’s long since been decided to be a bad security model. Far better to have the process request permission to access particular resources and you grant them on a case by case basis.

Definitely check out Link’s Awakening when you get a chance! It has a really cool mechanical evolution beyond LttP: you have 2 equipment slots that you can swap independently! So instead of always having the sword + 1 item, you can have 2 different items with no sword!