Documentation is so important. I have been treating documentation in the same way I handle code. I found mkdocs works pretty well and integrated with a github job that updates the docs when I commit changes to my main branch. It also allows contributors to correct errors or add helpful instructions to documents. I think I have not paid enough attention to my biases though and like the idea of hiring someone to go through the process. I think my instructions are sound but maybe not so much for a user who is not as familiar as I am. I may not be doing things the optimal way but I have used a lot of documentation over the years and feel what I have done addresses gripes I have had with "Big Tech" provided docs.
mkdocs still uses "web fonts" for icons. This hack was required for compatibility with Internet Explorer, but is just cargo-culting these days. It's an accessibility issue in that users who disable web fonts (for readability) don't see icons, they just see unicode placeholders everywhere ("tofu").
I don't know man, seems like a cool project and is open source. I guess he could have just sat on it and used for himself exclusively. It's auditable and totally fine for an open source project and nobody is forced to use it. It's free to use under the MIT license, what else can you really ask for.
I actually don't mean to bag on the author, but I think my complaint is valid. Maybe if they had a note right next to the curl command that said "This installs a single bun bundled executable. Here's a link to the GitHub releases if you'd like to install it yourself", that would be helpful.
My point about interpreted languages stands though. These bundled javascript runtime "apps" eat at least 500M of RAM on boot. That's totally not needed for a CLI tool. If it's not bundled, then it's even worse as you hit the supply chain and tooling interference problems (and you still use the same RAM). There are a lot of good, modern, compiled languages. CLI builders should pick up those stacks imho.
In case the author is, like so many people, sensitive to this kind of criticism, I will say this:
Thank you for giving the world your free software. Feel no compunction to undertake extra work to please people who criticize your work. They are not paying for your software and are not paying your bills. If your install eats enormous amounts of ram or uses a programming language they do not like, that is their problem. In your case for example they are free to get Bloomberg.
If you want to do free work to please critical people, ok. But I wouldn’t bother. Thank you for all the work you did to write your software and then the even more work you did to share it. I write my own software but don’t bother sharing it because it’s a lot of work, so I appreciate you.
I don’t know, man. Maybe if they’re that sensitive to criticism they should leave the industry.
This kind of hug boxing might have been fine five years ago during the ZIRP era, but in an age where two sticks of RAM is becoming $800 (and data centers are causing dirty sin power that can wear down electronics), I think the developers have a duty to be efficient with their programs and to do what is necessary to not ship a 500 MB ram sink with every single app.
It is frankly unforgivable and it’s a drain on the skill of the industry to just say “yeah no man it’s OK. It’s OK don’t worry don’t worry about your app being completely inefficient and a drain on your users resources. Don’t worry about it. Your app is so good that nobody will ever be using any other application on their PC“
Is this developer paying for my RAM? I run local models on consumer hardware. I can’t afford a 500mb of RAM for a CLI app. Thank you for that. Thank you for writing your CLI software in a way that I have to close it in order to use other parts of my computer.
Not to mention interpreted languages are slower than compiled languages, and we are talking about a financial terminal. Talk about not even understanding the functional requirements of the thing you are building. I might go get Bloomberg terminal instead of this just because I know it’s gonna actually be faster and make me money. This might actually lose me money.
Just because they built an application that “competes” with a closed source tool does not mean that their open source tool is good or worth adopting.
I mean, have some respect for and actual thought about who your end user is.
Imagine in the 80s or 90s telling a software developer not worry about porting their Amiga fintech application to another architecture like sparc. Imagine telling a developer in the 90s and 00s not to worry about browser compatibility and thanking them for making it only for IE to protect their fragile ego.
Imagine telling the creators of UNIX “yeah, no PDP 11 is good. You could stop there anyone who wants to run it on a different architecture is just an ingrate who doesn’t respect the effort you put in.” Because they already did so much work.
This is a farce. GP had a valid constructive criticism and a valid input worth considering when you take into account the functional requirements of a financial terminal.
Just because you are willing to cut corners on things that you don’t release does not mean that it is OK to release a piece of software with cut corners. But you know that, or you would release your software. I’m certainly projecting because I know that that’s why I write tools for myself that I don’t publish, but even then I use compiled languages and go out of my way to avoid JavaScript type script, python, and all of that.
But if this project were to ever take off and they were to monetize or start charging enterprise licenses the very first thing I would ask for is the compiled version that doesn’t rely on interpreted languages or a 500 MB node folder.
......But why would I fork a stack I want nothing to do with and is the wrong stack for the domain?
I mean, not everyone who's sensitive, but certainly anyone who can't stand another engineer pointing out poor technology decisions. If they're going to be ego babies about it instead of taking the feedback humbly and making their product better, then yeah maybe they should leave the industry.
I've worked with people like this before and they don't belong in the industry.
Idiots that don't even take the time (and perhaps aren't capable of the empathy required) to consider the end users and are personally attacked when confronted with the end users' needs.
One guy I worked with implemented a parts picker as a Python CLI app (a ~1500-line-main if-then-else monstrosity with no back navigation, so closing it was the only way to go back) built and apparently only tested on a Windows 10 PC.
During the demo he mentioned that technicians could copy the part number for entry in another form by pressing Ctrl+C. I asked why he would choose to implement copy in a tech floor CLI app using ctrl+c when all the Technician's PCs were Windows 7 based and that would close the application. He handwaved it away. This was a guy who had been promoted from technician. He knew what the functional and technical requirements were.
Two weeks later, a more senior member of one of the tech teams was having full drive issues. I ran windirstat and found that the idiot's python app was storing 500MB of temp python runtime bullshit in the AppData folder in folders named as random hashes on every run, and they weren't deleting. This elder Gen X gentleman didn't understand why Ctrl+C as he was told to do was closing the app instead of copying text and kept relaunching it until it his drive was full. But the whole tech floor shared computers in shifts, meaning that IT was gonna have to come and reimage every machine every 90 days. I did the math.
I submitted this problem to him as a formal bug report with a proposed solution, and I was written up for personally attacking him.
He later went on to fuck up timestamps in a database so badly that there was no recovering it, he took no backups, and 4 technicians spent weeks of man hours manually re-recording the data in the database and he set the launch of a device recycling program that would have saved the company millions back for several months. It was supposed to launch in April. He nuked the database in March. When I left the company in August, that shit still hadn't launched. He affected the company's share price with his crybaby sensitive ego.
So yeah, I think if anyone is so sensitive that they can't take real technical feedback like "don't use wasteful runtimes for CLI applications" it's indicative of a real mindset problem that will infect all other aspects of their work and interactions with technology, and they should consider leaving the industry or humbling themselves and learning how to take feedback and build better.
It's a completely legitimate complaint. If anything, it's an even stronger complaint because of the lack of provenance. And even stronger when you consider that there is intent to monetize: https://gloom.sh/cloud
It doesn't take a genius to realize this entire project was probably vibe coded. What does the script actually do? What assumptions does it make about the user's system? Has any human actually looked at it to figure that out?
Unless you're paying to turn on access to purely a third party feed (which would be odd to me) there's some server side code taking those feeds and that the app is calling. Is that server code MIT licensed?
An open source interface to a proprietary backend isn't really fully auditable.
Been using Openwrt for years, router and access points. Any new AP I buy has to has to be supported by Openwrt. I have probably bought 7 or 8 old AP's at yard sales over the years for $5/$10 and turned them into decent wifi access points back to an Openwrt router running vlans, bandwidth monitoring, QoS, tcpdump for ssh dump with wireshark.
Just excellent, some pretty smart people in the Openwrt forum as well if you have problems.
The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website.
You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away from the worst of social media and the internet is a fairly calm place for me and a tool I wouldn't give back.
The structure is there, but the community is not. There will always be some holdouts (thus the age old trope of the older generations longing for the golden days).
Essentially the internet as we once knew it is a proxy for the world as we once knew it. We older folks can't go back in time to it, any more than someone in the 1950s could go back to their youth in the 1920s.
Yeah, consuming corporate internet you'll get corporate results. The internet of yore is still out there, it's drastically smaller and requires more effort to find but worth it.
You don't even have to go that old. There are so many companies that upgrade tiny pc's its created a whole self hosting community with the tiny lenovo, hp and dell unit's. It's not only Windows that can be replaced with old hardware but also many online services with proxmox for cloud/nas/dns/vpn/multimedia etc. Of course these are not 2GB systems but you can do some pretty cool things with 8 and 9 year old systems that are literally decommissioned because they are too old. Although a friend of mine who works for a MSP gave me a Lenovo m710q tiny a month ago and its made a pretty good Debian Desktop for my workbench in the garage. I lucked out there because even these tiny's are now going up in price. People have caught on.
I've purchased a few HP and Dell slim desktops (typically 2nd or 3rd generation i3s) on Newegg, from refurbished resellers. During the pandemic, they were $50-70 shipped and included 4GB of RAM. They support PCI-express in low profile, so I could plug in a monitor with 4k output using just displayport and a Radeon 7470 or an R5 R240. You could even get an i5 for not much more. I even had a couple work from home companies offering to ship the same size machine, Nowadays they are more likely to send a laptop and possibly a docking station, so it's a lot more portable (although I prefer to do without those too).
Those old tiny/micro PCs make for wonderful TV steaming boxes, and easily replace Fire TV sticks, AppleTV boxes, Rokus and other similar proprietary garbage. They are also great for retro gaming.
I work at an ewaste recycling company. Since I started working there over a year ago, over half the micro/tiny desktops I've seen come in are 7th gen i5 at least. In fact, I was using a Dell Optiplex 7050 Micro until about a month ago.
They could make so much money selling them. I hope they do. I bought a M920 tiny Lenovo with 32GB of RAM and an i5-8500. Stuck a 2TB NVME (when they were reasonable) and the whole thing cost me like $400. It's a proxmox workhorse and a couple of years later I can probably get more than double what I paid for it.
Actually, rich people and not so rich people who don't mind borrowing more than they can afford. I'm not rich by any means and there are much worse of than me dumping a couple months salary for the "experience". Not that there is a problem with it if that's what you enjoy. A bit over the top for my taste though.
I'm very curious how they are going to handle enterprise accounts with mixed nationality / geography. In particular, what about an agent that runs in the cloud and triggers on events, built by a team with mixed people.
That's the reason I don't have an id.me account to check my IRS account. I just use their guest login to play my tax bill quarterly. Not sure how I will pay my taxes once they nix that.
