Blocking file-based installations was never planned. It's fake news and always has been. It's all about requiring code signing for all code so that malware-spreading authors can be easily blocked by adding their signing key fingerprint to the blocklist.
It doesn't matter whether the app is installed via Play Store, Huawei's or Samsung's store etc., or from APK.
This is a drastic misrepresentation of the situation. All Android apps already have code signing, you cannot install an app unless it has a signature, and any future updates are blocked unless the signature matches. This is how it's been practically since the start of Android, it's part of the security model to prevent something like a malicious Firefox APK stealing your cookies.
What's new is that they were gonna block installations outside of Google Play, unless the developer has signed up for Google Play Console and has gone through a verification process there, whitelisting their signing key fingerprint. However, they've walked back on this and said they'll create a new "advanced flow" for "advanced users" that's "designed to resist coercion" to bypass this restriction. Door in the face technique IMO, the existing 12-step process to installing an app was already complicated enough.
So effectively the result is that file based installations will be blocked unless Google has specifically whitelisted their key through the Google Play Console verification process, or the user goes through this "advanced flow" which we're yet to see any details of
I am currently in process of "verifying" my identity with Android Developer console.
In addition to proof of identity (e.g. passport/driver license) Google is demanding a proof of address, government registration, this month's rental agreement, foreign passport... The process is stuck in limbo because months-old documents are deemed "outdated", and I am constantly threatened that my verification request (!) will be denied because of "exceeding allowed number of attempts" (!!)
It shares the same principle as silent Discord account bans and other "verification" harassment schemes, such as Upwork account verification. The excess developers — Google's potential competitors — need to be banished from platform as quickly and cheaply as possible, so that Google can peddle their own spyware unimpeded.
Ask your president. I suppose republicans will soon block VPN apps, adult apps and whatever comes to their minds as non-compliant with their medieval mindset.
I skimmed through it. Note that this book was written right before Tinder launched (2012), which might have skewed the demographic data points found in this edition (2010). Although dating apps have definitely existed before then, that (and popular internet adoption) have by far been the most influential to society at large.
Rust came first, so people who didn't like Rust flocked to Zig as an alternative, and were keen to promote it as an alternative to Rust by criticising Rust, as wider usage would provide them more of an ecosystem to use in their own Zig programs.
People who were happy with Rust didn't have same need to criticise Zig in online spaces as Rust is the established player in the C alternatives space. (Though Rust is on the other side when compared to C once you expand the space to "all low level programming languages").
Also for people who don't care about the space at all, Rust has had years of exposure to promote fatigue, while Zig hasn't (yet).
Zig's BDFL was an early major supporter of Rust. It was Rust's core maintainer group who excluded him and warred against his language. The leaders decided any "memory unsafe" language was against "consensus"; first C, then Zig. They even posted on Twitter, calling Zig a "step backwards". This Language Supremacism was even worse in conferences and in private.
Today, you can see a lot of the core ex-leaders still sniping at at other language and even successful OSS projects based in those languages. The Zig community has its faults but Rust takes the cake for relentless gamesmanship.
The beef you're talking about here is between pcwalton and Andrew. Patrick posted those things after he had left Rust leadership.
Andrew and I literally got some tacos last week. I mean, I'm not in Rust leadership anymore either, but this sort of thing just isn't recognizable to me outside of, again, a few posts by one person who no longer even worked on Rust.
Yes, he was free to express his bigotry once he stepped down. Before that, Patrick was the leader and he hated non-memory-safe languages. He was not the only one, and that hate got worse after he left.
It's nice you got tacos with Zig's BDFL and I don't categorize you as a "hater". Rather, I think the Rust Core Group altogether was toxic. Unable to see their hate as hate, and having memories largely selective and largely untrustworthy.
> people who didn't like Rust flocked to Zig as an alternative, and were keen to promote it as an alternative to Rust by criticising Rust, as wider usage would provide them more of an ecosystem to use in their own Zig programs.
> People who were happy with Rust didn't have same need to criticise Zig in online spaces as Rust is the established player in the C alternatives space. (Though Rust is on the other side when compared to C once you expand the space to "all low level programming languages").
I think that this effect is...more real and intentional than I wish it was or think is healthy.
There's no denying that Rust benefited greatly from heavy "language evangelism" from around 2014-2022 or so (rough subjective range of dates, ending with when I feel like Rust became sufficiently mainstream that "comment section evangalism" is no longer the primary driver of the language's growth). The atmosphere that surrounded the language evangalism during this era -- from my recollection as someone who was aware of Rust but explicitly not interested in it at the time -- felt like one of curiousity and exploring new innovation in the programming language design space, and it didn't come across as pushy or some kind of moral imperative.
Additionally, most of the evangelism was not driven by the Rust project itself, but more of a grassroots thing from:
- Early users
- People who thought the language was interesting without having used it
- The attention that came from prolific early Rust projects like Servo and ripgrep
- The attention that came from the language's technical innovations
(The only person I remember regularly seeing in Rust threads who was actually associated with the project was Steve Klabnik, and I consider him a stellar example of how to represent a project online in a way that's respectful and not pushy or combative.) And eventually I had a programming task where, thanks to those deep, insightful, and respectful comment threads, I recognized that Rust was the right tool for the task I was trying to accomplish, learned the language myself, found it a joy to use, and began using it more regularly.
But once Rust became mainstream, the eternal September kicked in. Now there seem to be quite a lot of people who are more interested in "language wars" than in healthy, technical discussion of programming languages, and it's exhausting. Many threads about C or C++ or Rust or Zig or Fil-C or whatever seems to get overtaken by these obnoxious, repetitive, preachy, ideological comments about why you should or shouldn't be using Rust, often with very ill-informed armchair takes.
I think this is just something that comes from mainstream Internet culture and is not very representative of "the Rust community", and especially not the Rust project -- most of the serious writing and comments coming from people actually involved with Rust have that spirit of respect, openness, and curiousity about programming language design that I remember from the 2010's. A lot of people who work on Rust are deeply interested in the tradeoffs and innovations of new programming languages and fundamentally excited about the possibility of Rust becoming obsolete because something better has come along. But now that Rust adoption is increasing and the broader Internet culture is being forced to consider it, you see a lot of unhealthy reactionary takes from people who act like programming languages are a zero-sum game and they need to pick a side.
Now Zig is where this gets a little bit odd to me. My impression (as an outsider to the Zig community as well) is that Zig's leadership has chosen to view adoption as a zero-sum language war. It's as if they considered:
- How Rust benefited from language evangelism during the 2010's
- How many other "C-replacement" languages over the past 25 years have failed to gain large-scale adoption
- How "language war" discourse is extremely effective for enagement on places like HN
...and decided that the best way to increase Zig adoption is by intentionally leaning into that high-engagement "language war" discourse. Maybe it's not intentional -- and there's certainly a lot of cool ideas and high-quality technical discussion that comes out of the Zig community -- but I've also seen a consistent pattern of snarky or hostile comments from Zig leadership towards Rust people (such as calling Rust users "safety coomers", or jumping into in-depth technical discussions of Rust's downsides like compiler performance with substance-less cheap shots). Whereas I can't remember ever seeing anything but respect and curiosity from people involved in the Rust project towards other communities.
I'm just tired of seeing people draw battle lines around programming languages instead of promoting a spirit of learning from each other and making our tools better.
That's one hell of a post. I'm reading that Rust deserved to be evaluated on its technical merits (which I'm happy with), but Zig has some community issues in closer examination?
I've looked at the major rust implements from big corp. It's all Arc, copy/clone, and people getting fired.
I think that both languages deserve to be evaluated on their technical merits, of which there are many. I would say they are both very well-designed languages that occupy different points in the design space and each have unique innovations of their own, and are worthy of the attention they get. I also think both languages have strong communities and good technical leadership.
What I'm frustrated about is a general pattern in online discourse of treating programming language adoption as a zero-sum game and pitting the communities against each other. This is nothing remotely new -- holy wars over tooling are just about as old as computing itself -- but Rust seems to have become right at the center of it in the last few years, and I think this is likely just a result of it becoming "mainstream" enough for people to care about it outside of a niche circle. I consider that a community issue with Rust, but probably an unavoidable one given the scale of the Internet.
The thing that feels different to me about Zig is that the language's leadership participates in the "holy war", which is different than what I have observed from Rust's leadership. It's one thing if random netizens are trash talking the "opposing team" like a sports fan, but I would expect people who are deeply involved in programming language design and representing their community to know better and behave better than that. It's surprising and disappointing to me; it drags down the overall quality of discourse and sets a bad example for the language communities.
Maybe my own perspective on this is skewed, perhaps I'm looking at Rust's past with rose-tinted glasses. But I think my experiences are comparable. From 2015-2020 I was primarily working with Swift and closely following that language's design and development, and the Rust community (which I was not involved in at all) felt like friendly neighbors. The two communities shared similar goals and had a lot of like-minded people, and because of that there was a lot of overlap and amicability between the communities. Both languages' teams were frequently comparing notes and copying features from one another.
Now I'm primarily working with Rust and closely following that languages' design and development, and it seems to me like the Zig community (which I am not involved with at all) should be on the same friendly terms for the same reasons, but the vibes I see from them are "this town isn't big enough for the two of us", and I'm bothered by that.
> I've looked at the major rust implements from big corp. It's all Arc, copy/clone, and people getting fired.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Are you saying you've seen projects implemented in Rust go poorly? If so, I don't know what to say without any context, besides that I don't think there's a "one size fits all" for programming languages.
Or are you saying big companies' contributions towards the Rust project itself have gone poorly? I don't really know what to say about that either. I have felt that the direction the project has taken over the past few years has represented me and addressed my needs well, so I have confidence in their technical direction and leadership for the time being.
Agree with your take on Zig, as it's clear their leadership promotes a foul filled war on other C alternative languages. Not just Rust, but others like Vlang, Dlang, C3, etc... HN has become dominated by them, where other languages (outside of Rust and Zig), can get very little shine. When they do, their light often gets snuffed out quickly.
The perception of Zig and Rust within different communities can vary, and Zig may not attract the same level of "lukewarm response" as Rust due to several factors, including their design philosophies, target use cases, and community engagement.
Zig's appeal lies in its deliberate simplicity and explicitness, offering a different path to high-performance, low-level programming compared to Rust's safety-first, more complex approach. This divergence in philosophy and implementation leads to different reception within the programming community.
This will be anecdotal. However both in the academia and in the semi-professional space, I encountered certain type of programmer who is a bit more "religiously minded" (both in the technical space and quite often in their personal beliefs too). Unix, although being a quite commercial project, its academic origins attracted a kind of followers, who believe there is a certain purity we can reach with computers or software that's not bound to the practical and economic use-cases. This forms an identity and they tend to regard programmers who are in this ecosystem as gods or prophets. The origins of Unix is also mixed with the free software movement due to both academic origins and regarded as a one continuous movement.
C language is strongly tied to Unix ecosystem. C language and current compilers give this illusion of "ultimate control" to the programmers (although C has been interpreted quite freely for the sake of optimizations). With GNU C compiler finding a niche (i.e. being a free as in beer C compiler and a userland that's not bounded by the original Unix or BSD licensing / patents) and taking off in many servers the beliefs were kind of validated.
Rust attacks those beliefs in multiple fronts:
First and foremost, Rust comes from an inherent distrust to the programmer's abilities to write secure software. Rust creates strong obstacles against writing "magic" programs that freely interpret memory. Programmers are not treated as gods but fallible mortals who needed to be guided. Many C programmers interpret this as an insult to their abilities to manually check and verify a program. Rust is no less capable than C, it has all sorts of escape hatches that can be used in performance critical parts.
Rust compiler itself and the most of the programs written in Rust are permissively licensed. This is to avoid possible issues with copyleft licenses combined with statically linked binaries. Without having a stable ABI or ability to incorporate third party libraries post-build, GPL and LGPL create hurdles that doesn't exist in the mostly dynamically compiled world of C.
Rust has a more equal regard of the operating systems, including non-POSIX ones like Windows. Despite most people in the world interact with non-POSIX APIs the most, accepting it as another step.
Rust community tries its best to create a safe space for marginalized parts of the society. Go to any Rust conference and you'll see an over-representation of LGBTQ people. This probably rubs majorly white male subset of strongly identifying C programmers up wrong way.
The community also welcomes a bunch of different ways of thinking and questioning the basics of every single decision we made when we were building the systems of today.
Zig, on the other hand doesn't attack any of those "base principles". It fixes the most annoying parts of C programming: fluid integer types, really weak type system, hostile dependency management. It still trusts the programmer 100%. The default behavior is still unsafe.
People who choose Rust are also particularly worried about the security of the programs and they would like to prove and validate the language's existence and goals. They do that by reimplementing very popular and very senior projects in Rust and compare its performance and safety against existing C projects too. Many such projects have enjoyed a long time of no competition and now there is one.
Your comment is really quite interesting. Thanks! What you're saying all sounds plausible to me.
I note that, while different circles may call for "purity" (fans of, e.g., Unix, Lisp, or Haskell), I think honestly pursuing the purity of writing programs to achieve one's goals means rejecting dogmatism and accepting pragmatism. Adherence to beliefs is fine if, and only if, the beliefs are fundamentally justified....
It isn't all of the objection, but there is a non-neglible amount of anti-woke people who find some weak technical reason to hate rust. It's silly but you'll be amazed in how often you see it line up when checking a random sampling of people who show up in rust threads just to make off topic complaints about rust.
EDIT: I hadn't fully gone through the comment section on this one yet and yikes it's worse about it than normal.
Non-negligible from what perspective? Is this group of people somehow holding back unbridled adoption and enthusiasm for Rust? Is it possible for tech people to drum up excitement for a newer language without it being political just because you insist that it is?
I think I see most Rust threads here. Perhaps there is a low presence in most threads, but I didn't notice a significant rate as the baseline. Though this thread is burning up, certainly.
I'm not sure if I understand correctly about "thinking in concrete English sentences or words" as other comments have mentioned, so here's a description of what happens to me:
I can visualize things in my mind, and it's almost as if I was playing a video or rotating 3D models in Blender, but they happen as if they were at a 70-80% brightness level. I can verbalize my thoughts or words I am reading from some text as if someone were speaking into my head, but that's not how I "comprehend" them, especially if they have more than a negligible amount of complexity. They have to be converted into a set of visualizations, however vague or abstract, somewhat resembling what GenAI does. This has a noticeable delay and I almost always lose track of, say, what a lecturer is saying in real time. Because of this, I almost always prefer having text or a prerecorded video being available.
I can "render" text in my head too, as if they were being written down in a word processor or like a screenshot of a blogpost, but it's still an image.
I find difficulty trying to manipulate any symbols in my head. Mental math or algebra with more than a miniscule amount of rigor is hard for me to do and I always require pen and paper as a support. Trying to do this requires me to "graphically" move symbols around a written equation, and because of my usual scatterbrained-ness, the context quickly breaks down and evaporates. I have to maintain that context with paper. I find it easier, however, to visualize an algorithm or similar things in my head as a video-animation "playback".
Here's an example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_rotation_animat... - This is exactly what occurs in my brain when I think of tree rotations (extended to larger tree heights), and was the only, singular useful thing for me in the entire wikipedia article on tree rotations.
As an aside, the imagery that video GenAI generates, with spontaneous, random pop-ins of objects is eerily similar to what happens in my dreams and in my mental imagery. Second, I'm not particularly fond of reading books, literature or poetry, but I do find myself semi-regularly reading long blogposts or texts if they interest me, and watching long-form videos or podcasts.
Another aside - I do end up spending a lot of time working on the presentation of a thing like trying to polish things like user interfaces, vector or raster graphics, typesetting, CSS and other visual-ish stuff. It's something I've tried to suppress to actually get functional aspects of a work done. Admittedly, this is the more fun part of a work for me.
Putting aside all logical arguments for and against Linkedin and other social media, when I do force myself to log in to my account, I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
To me, it is the essence of the rat race that I try my best to ignore in my daily life while I try to balance time between my hobbies and work. I know fully well that the rat race takes an interest in me too, but it is so, so incredibly devastating to me that so many people to engage in hours upon hours, days upon days of "grinding", smooth-talking and evangelizing just to sell what essentially amounts to metaphorical snake oil and rake in as much cash and favors as possible. People seem to either support and praise these acts to high heavens, or simply excuse it. They do it because "that's just how the world works" and "that's just how people and businesses are", and they're right.
I feel like the answer the world gives me about my discontentment is "There's more to life than the rat race, idiot, but you better come up on top of the rat race or else you'll be a poor, irrelevant loser! It's what life is about!" - There is perhaps some truth to this statement. After all, grand structures and monuments are not built by people who "just want to have a quiet, peaceful life". It's even more true now that it's quickly becoming a de-facto prerequisite to having a career in the first place.
My coping mechanism has been to shut myself off of all noise and simply focus on what matters to me and what matters most for my continued sustenance. One of the measures has been to basically access my Linkedin account only a few times a year, mostly to accept new connection requests. It has worked reasonably well, I'd say. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by not having an entire large-double-digit-number-network of people that can hand me a job if and when I get booted, but it's a risk I'm willing to take for my mental health.
> I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.
A while ago I had a recruiter try to, ahem, coach me on my CV, which apparently had too few details (apparently still enough to have this interview, but the irony was lost on her) and on my LinkedIn profile, which wasn't up to date and also had few details (deliberately BTW, as I was getting spam).
My gut feeling is that while there certainly are people who benefited from using LinkedIn, but for the majority it's just a vessel for being terminally online and a waste of time.
I feel like articles like these almost always leave out the people who want these questions to be answered:
* "Why would I want to network with people?"
* "I don't feel like engaging with anyone."
* "I don't enjoy or feel fulfilled doing any of this. I'd rather be home or by myself."
* "I have never enjoyed doing this. I have to keep up a facade in front of other people at all times. It makes me angry and resentful."
They should expand upon why networking is a thing, why having a social rapport among peers and coworkers is important to healthy relationships both inside and outside of work, how you can have your connection to your social circle weakened if you don't, and spell out clearly why that's a bad thing.
Maybe an article like this should look at it from the perspective of mental health and neurodivergence, but that might be pushing it.
From the article:
"The next morning, I’d wonder if anyone even remembered I was there."
Personally speaking, this question has never popped into my mind. I suppose that's owing to the fact that it's simply not in my nature to actively seek out people or connections.
This tenfold. The premise, the setting, the checklist, the whole thing sounds like torture to me. Life isn't that monochromatic, I'd rather be doing ANYTHING else.
> I have to keep up a facade in front of other people at all times.
This comes down to the idea of whether you believe that if you “keep up a facade at all times” that the facade becomes who you really are.
You don’t need an article convincing you why networking is important. You either need to be curious enough to want to see if your life can be better by doing something that goes against what you believe is your nature or not.
Basically, this. I already spend all the energy I have available for socializing just going to work five days a week. The idea of people socializing outside of work for the sake of work is supremely depressing to me. It's like, so now I need to do something I find utterly exhausting in order to succeed better at this other thing that already completely destroyed me because... capitalism?
I can at least understand on an intellectual level that there could be personal benefits to socializing with people outside of work, but when work already sucks everything out of you then it just feels like a cruel joke to suggest an introvert get into "networking" and here's a list of weird, creepy, manipulative tricks to do it better. Surely the article must be a parody?
You sound like you have your own issues to resolve if you are this exhausted by work, which doesn't mean the article is a parody just because you are not its exact intended recipient. There are a handful of tips in there that can help engineer more comfortable situations for people who are less confident networking. That's only if someone is willing to engage with the advice and wishes to better themselves with it, instead of just blaming... capitalism?
It's not the work itself that is exhausting: it's socializing at work.
This comments deeply resonates with me because that's exactly how I feel.
When I'm wfh I have to put an alarm to remember to stop working because I'm in the flow and can work for +14h without feeling tired.
Whereas, when I'm the office, I have to take a walk mid-day because I'm already exhausted by the socializing.
And to be clear, it's not that I don't enjoy socializing at work, it's just that it drains me quickly.
That's one of the most important reasons I enjoy being able to work from home every once in a while. I'm lucky to have great colleagues and it's fun chatting with them during breaks, but it's still somewhat exhausting at the end of the day.
Meanwhile at home there's some online meetings or a few chat messages to exchange, other than that I can just forget about the socializing for a bit and really get into whatever tasks I have.
It’s clearly not in the author’s nature, either :)
But they seem to be a serial startup founder — so the value of networking’s probably self-evident to them, but won’t match the value you and most others get out of it.
