Spell check is fine - highlight misspelled words, offer corrections when asked. What's incredibly harmful is autocorrect, as it slowly but surely causes vast majority of computer users to become partly illiterate. And nobody gives a damn, because hey, we're efficiently saving time!
It didn't cause me to become illiterate, it caused me to give up using it and find something else since it was "correcting" a lot of things that were correct to begin with, and going back to re-change them became a chore in the only 10 minutes I used it.
TextEdit prefs (not systemwide prefs) have easy checkboxes to disable all that, also the smart quotes. Also gotta make it default to plain text.
The reason I dropped it was cause of a bug where I'd highlight text, copy, and it's actually copy the wrong block of text. Idk the trigger but seems related to larger files.
Thanks, I'm a decades-long user of gettext from both developer and translator point of view, and have encountered several of the drawbacks to some extent.
It's very good, and has certainly been good enough for most practical purposes, but innovation needs to happen, and things can certainly get better. Thanks for your work in this direction!
Yeah, some sort of pluralization support is pretty much the second most important feature in any message localization tool, right after the ability to substitute externally-defined strings in the first place. Even in a monolingual application, spamming plural formatting logic in application code isn't exactly the best practice.
It's not hard to make a case against gettext, despite its maturity and large ecosystem.
IMHO pluralization is a prime example, with an API that only cleanly handles the English case, requires the developer to be aware of translation gotchas, and honnestly confusing documentation and format. Compare that to MessageFormat's pluralization example (https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/blob/main/s...) which is very easy to understand and fully in the translator's hands.
> IMHO pluralization is a prime example, with an API that only cleanly handles the English case
That’s not true at all? Gettext is functionally limited to source code being English (or alike). It handles all translation languages just fine, and competently so.
What is doesn’t have is MessageFormat’s gender selectors (useful) or formatting (arguably not really, strays from translations to locales and is better solvable with placeholders and locale-aware formatting code).
> fully in the translator's hands.
That is a problem that gettext doesn’t suffer from. You can’t reasonably expect translators to write correct DSL expressions.
> Gettext is functionally limited to source code being English (or alike). It handles all translation languages just fine, and competently so.
The *ngettext() family of functions take two strings (typically singular/plural) and rely on a language-wide expression to choose the variant (possibly more than 2 variants). There's no good reason for taking two strings, this should be handled in the language file, even without a DSL. Ngettext handling a single countable makes some corner-cases awkward, like gendering a group with possibly mixed-gender elements. The Plural-Forms expression not being per-message means that for example even in English "none/one/many foo" has to be handled in code, and that a language with only a rare 3rd plural has to pay the complexity for all cases.
Arguably, those are all nitpicks, Gettext is adequate for most projects. But quality translations get cumbersome very quickly.
> You can’t reasonably expect translators to write correct DSL expressions.
This feels demeaning. Translators regularly have to check the source code, and often write templates, they're well able for a DSL like MessageFormat's, especially when it's always the same expressions for their language. It saves a trip to the bugtracker to get developers to massage their code into something translatable. You can't reasonably expect a English-speaking developer armed with ngettext to know (and prepare their code for) the subtleties of Gaelic numerals.
This. If you use a modern frontier model like Opus 4.5, there's nothing to learn. No special prompting techniques. You give it a task, and most of the time it's capable of solving a big chunk quickly. You still need to babysit it, review its plan/code and make adjustments. But that's already faster than achieving the same results manually. Especially when you're at low energy levels and can't bring yourself to look into a task and figure it out from zero.
Corporate has been using the term "best-shoring" for a couple of years now. To my best guess, it means "off-shoring or on-shoring, whichever of the two is cheaper".
Since Signal lives and dies on having trust of its users, maybe that's all she is after?
Saying the quiet thing out loud because she can, and feels like she should, as someone with big audience. She doesn't have to do the whole "AI for everything and kitchen sink!" cargo-culting to keep stock prices up or any of that nonsense.
How can a service like Signal live and die by the trust of its users when they openly lie to them. Signal refuses to update their privacy policy to warn users that they store sensitive information in the cloud (and more recently, even the contents of user's messages in some cases).
Lying to users by saying that signal doesn't collect or store anything when they actually do doesn't sound like something a company who expected you to trust them would do. It sounds like something a company might do if they needed a way to warn people away from using a service isn't safe to use while under a gag order.
And there's nothing wrong with it. That is what wireguard is meant to be - a rock-solid secure tunneling implementation that's easy to build higher-level solutions on.
You can tweak rate thresholds for F2B, so that it blocks the 100-attempts-per-second attackers, but doesn't block your three-attempts-per-minute manual fumbling.
One of the most useful steps would be to support codeforges like Github on European soil, and development of the ForgeFed project, so that those forges can talk to each other.
There was a grant in 2023 which was supported by the European Comission. So I think the topic itself isn't entirely unknown.
https://nlnet.nl/project/Forgejo/
> We are seeking project proposals between 5.000 and 50.000 euro's — which should get you on your way.
Am I the only one to think this is completely ridiculous amount of money?
So, you want me to leave my very well paid job to innovate for the sake of EU competitiveness but you don't to invest more than 50k EUR (max grant). And as an individual you don't even stand a chance so this 50k EUR has to be distributed across several people. Did I get this right?
Ah, and I almost forgot about the double standards ... the same EU commission is on a spending spree when it comes to the development of a fkn EU website which you use to apply for these funds. Each Brussels-based developer doing that very innovative work is paid ~100k EUR. What a blasphemy.
No, they don't want to you leave your very well paid job for this grant, they want to chuck a few bounties at some FOSS projects and pay for some people to attend hackathons or conferences if they can fill in a form giving sufficiently compelling reasons. How dare they!
You're missing my point. "Chucking in a few bounties" is very different from what this topic is about. Let me spell it out for you once again:
> The EU faces a significant problem of dependence on non-EU countries in the digital sphere. This reduces users' choice, hampers EU companies' competitiveness and can raise supply chain security issues as it makes it difficult to control our digital infrastructure (both physical and software components), potentially creating vulnerabilities including in critical sectors.
The point you expressed was indignation at FOSS bounties paid by the Fediversity project out of a fraction of a single EUR 3m EU grant their consortium won being less than the full time salary of EU devs.
If you were trying to more widely insinuate that this third party dosing out small-to-modest incentives to individuals to do a bit of hacking on Fediverse stuff was the only thing the EU was doing to support Open Source or represented some sort of ceiling on the amounts EU-funded projects working on FOSS could pay their developers, it would be even more wrong.
Plenty of valid criticisms of the EU's cyber non-dependence strategy or the detail of grant and equity funding programmes for research and building stuff and how they weight FOSS (that's part of the reason for the consultation!) but you need to have the slightest idea what exists to get into those...
I took the Fediversity project as an example because it was mentioned above in the comment and not an example of something I wanted to specifically point it. Truth to be told 90% of other EU funds are similar if not the same in the context of grants, and no, I don't find it sufficient, and no, I don't think such strategy will yield anything worth the salt. You will keep the developers have fun with their projects but something worthwhile? Forget. It doesn't exist at such minuscule scale.
The only bigger denominator in terms of funds is Horizon which is completely political, and not worth mentioning at all, if that's what you wanted to suggest. It also operates under minuscule scale in terms of grants (up to 2.5M over 2 years) or funding (1-30M). No possibility for seed rounds which implies you already must be in the business and already have an almost viable product ready to deploy to the market tomorrow (EU bureaucracy calls it TRL6-8). This is all ridiculous and shows how detached from reality people making decisions there are. They even hire "experts" to weigh your application for which you know ... ta-da ... have to hire yet another "expert" to write that application for you. 100s of pages to prove your idea worthy. Once a year. World innovation runs at much much higher pace.
So, sure the R&D environment in EU is built on a very fertile ground and Brussels is doing their best to "call for an evidence" because open-source software is going to save the economy??? Right.
I'm currently a participant under a NLNet grant. I'm unemployed at the moment so getting a trickle of 1-2K of donation money per month working on my passion project is a pretty decent proposition.
You can also be a participant alongside your well paid job, because once the memorandum of understanding is signed you have a year to work through the proposal at your own pace, during weekends or moonlighting.
I don't doubt that at all and I'm glad for anyone who is managing to make some money from their open-source contributions, even more so in today's age where market is so volatile. I am being empathetic for that cause. But the point I am rather trying to convey is that this is not the strategy that will converge to something substantial that will make EU more competitive on global landscape.
I don't know how I could convince you, or anyone that's educated under the American capitalist system, that working for a commons is better in aggregate than relying on companies to pay for innovation and then keeping it a secret. "Competitive" is a slur in my opinion, I'd rather my work be "useful".
Working on things that make you happy instead of pushing the agenda of your employers, which in majority is unethical, immoral, or plainly unhealthy, is dystopian? It sounds utopian to me. :)
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