Good list. And if you support both portrait and landscape, you need to support twice that, and you need to be able to switch on the fly.
But for the apps that don't currently support both orientations, it's possible they don't have support for switching aspect ratio on the fly. This design might help with those apps not completely breaking when folding/unfolding.
Yeah to be fair I'm all for the 1/sqrt(2) aspect ratio, I just think it's funny that it's treated as some kind of holy design constraint when they're all over the map on phone sizing :)
And the extra irony is I'm currently shipping an app that doesn't deal well with different size phones (just pads the edges), heh, so do as I say, not as I do.
I'm a coder and a daily driver of ChatGPT and I don't really know what Sol is or how I can access it. I follow discussions here and know of its excistence, but I can't remember its relation to other models or tiers by heart. What ever the default thing the website is giving me has been good enough for my needs for years.
That's what I do. But I don't write enough code these days to spend time on anything more complicated. For the odd shell script or python program I have ChatGPT write it, then I copy/paste it, make it actually work, and deploy it.
Lots of companies have security policies that forbid installing a local agent/harness. So employees still only have access to the web chat interface, and copy paste content yes.
Yes! Though I mainly use it for one-shotting full files, so I'm not copying over small diffs. I did try copilot at some point in vscode, but after a week or so I felt like it was slowing me down. Something I knew would be a simple and quick change was now slow since I didn't have enough ownership of the code to do it quickly myself, and prompting for the change took longer than changing it manually if I had had full ownership. So I went back to coding by hand things that aren't a one-shot file.
Thanks for the reply. I'd suggest you improve your workflow with better tooling like Codex or Claude code, and if you have some kind of weird constraint they'll easily follow an AGENTS.md with that.
Copy pasting ai code from the browser is not perfectly acceptable. The only reason to do it is because you haven’t tried agents. It shows a lack of imagination and a willingness to settle for inferiority.
“Terrible inefficient workflows”, like having to prompt Claude to change one or two words in a file rather than just manually editing it, because it gets confused when the file changes out from under it and will later overwrite the changes?
That's what I used to do (copy and paste from web ui and with copilot in my code editor).
I started using claude code a couple of months ago and now almost exclusively use it. My workflow is mostly creating a md file describing what I want then telling claude code to look at it and implement it. I simply use the default model 95% of the time.
Using ChatGPT.com for coding tasks has to be a joke in 2026, right? I assumed everyone is using Codex/Claude Code/OpenCode/Pi by now if you’re using these tools.
Yeah! Seems like that's the assumption in this ongoing discussion, so I thought my point of view would be interesting. I'm not saying I'm doing it the right way, possibly I'm being very stupid, but the point here is that it's not just the "normies" who don't know what Sol is.
Lots of large enterprises and organizations have security policies that make it very hard to self-install these tools and haven’t figured out they should add them to their approved software list yet. Federal government in particular is still very slow
This might depend what you mean by code. In the sysadmin space I ask a web interface for poweshell to generate specific information multiple times a day, and pasting it into a terminal is really the cleanest workflow on a corporate machine where you have to justify running an executable.
There are ways to make copy-paste ChatGPT usable with things like AI Badger. Also, ChatGPT web is unmetered, so you can do review/planning work and only delegate the actual implementation to Codex.
I code by hand (sigh) and copy paste some snippets once in a while from a web chat LLM. This also means every single line of such snippets gets reviewed and anaylzed. Usually, these are some arcane Win32 API usage where otherwise I'd have to dig into old forums. I don't want to become a prompt engineer so I stay away from "agentic" workflows.
As an engineer, the enjoyment from the process is not less important, or should I say more important, than the enjoyment from shipping a final product.
That's probably the single thing that I found to be biggest difference between those who are very pro AI vs. those more reserved or negative.
A colleague has openly stated that he very much does not care for the process, he just want the product. Where I only care about the product in the sense that I have to, because it's my job and for hobbies I pretty much only care about the process. So an LLM pretty much doesn't make sense, because it help by removing the part I care about. They are good tools for debugging and if you're hopelessly stuck on a detail of some weird and obscure API or configuration.
As an engineer, I know what I'm getting paid to deliver is the work product. I don't have too much attachment to any particular set of tools to get there.
If we follow that logic, I believe it means that you would be quite happy in the Product Owner role, or in the role of a client who outsources the actual development activities. I wouldn't.
Its mostly used with Codex so you can give finer control over task delegation.
its definitely worth learning the different strengths and weaknesses for each one and which you should use for planning/building/testing/documentation updates etc.
No point in burning excessive tokens using a high tier/expensive reasoning model like Sol/Xhigh if just updating a readme file.
I'm not sure about the listed facts... I opened up Helsinki where I live, and got this: "Every residential building has a sauna -- it's not a luxury, it's basic infrastructure, like having hot water."
Certainly it's very common, but certainly not "every" residential building has one.
I looked at some other cities I know a bit. Those "facts" are typical AI slop. Not always completely wrong, but stereotypes you will easily find on the internet.
It might be fine for pure navigation to addresses but business addresses and other metadata are often missing or out of date because people only bother to update Google Maps. Also that’s where all the reviews are.
I don’t want to use two different apps for navigation vs finding businesses.
I've used it almost exclusively since around 2019, but that has been in the Bay Area and LA area where the data has presumably been very good relative to other areas.
I had the same knee-jerk reaction. "Did I read that correctly?"
But yeah, I guess it can be used to increase certain aspects of quality by letting them go wild. But I think I mostly hear about security or crash issues. In my experience they don't outweigh the number of other issues they cause. Like UI bugs. I've seen more than one service constantly rolling out features that are completely broken, just to have a completely new, still broken, solution available the next day.
Ok but a task that works fine on qwen 397b can be finetuned on qwen9b. But in every case so far when building the eval for evaluating the traces I’ve discovered a better prompt that closes the gap better than the finetuning.
Compromise is the last tool in the designer's toolbox. Before settling with a compromise, the designer should relentlessly try to narrow down what the problem being solved is, while trying out all possibilities, until it looks like there is no solution that matches exactly the problem (or they run out of time).
More often than not, a compromise means that the problem wasn't scoped out well enough, and it ends up partially solving a problem that didn't need solving.
Edit: I do think it's about trade-offs though. Choosing to solve one problem, acknowledging another problem will be disregarded.
That’s not my experience. Every decision favors one use case or principle over another. The best design is when you have the vision and confidence to say what’s important for each those decisions and what you’re ok leaving out.
It depends on how you define compromise. Is it a compromise to consider things like screen size, load wait times, or the average expected user's attention span? If so, then design is a big juggling act of compromise.
If not, and compromise is just stuff like "add yet another floating ad footer to make the c-suite happy," then absolutely it should be the last tool.
I disagree, we are faced with "true dilemmas" every day numerous times, not even limited to work and creation — e.g. you might be going to a shop to buy crackers, and while you have a preferred brand, a new entrant might be half the price — do you use the opportunity to try the new one, or get the tried-and-true?
These types of things are ubiquitous when designing and building products — how do you communicate to your users, how much you communicate and how much you automate, how do you target slightly different users (new customer vs old one used to old patterns in your product), what use-case is the most important one (by customer type, customer numbers, and how commonly they do something...), etc.
Finnish technology students played an elaborate prank when the ship was being lifted. Just before the event, a group dived down to the ship and planted a statue of Paavo Nurmi, also known as "The Flying Finn", on the deck. When the ship was finally lifted, the legendary Finnish runner was one of the first things they discovered. This played well with the friendly rivalry between the neighbours, though the Swedes did not appreciate it as much.
I used to work at Rovio (the creator of Angry Birds). Everyone was telling the story of a talk given by Peter Vesterbacka, the head of marketing. When it was time for questions, a man from the audience asked what physics engine the game uses. Vesterbacka gives the correct answer, Box2D, to which the person replied with another question. "Why isn't it mentioned in the credits? And by the way, I'm Erin Catto, the creator of Box2D." To this Vesterbacka replied "Come talk to me after the show". Maybe that's when Erin was given the hoodie? Also, his name was soon added to the credits.
But one thing amazed us all. It was impressive that the marketing guy knew which physics engine was used!
To the larger point, do you know if Rovio did support/pay Eric in any other way than that hoodie?
Angry Birds generated $500M [0], supposedly.
I would also not be surprised if the Rovio developers, designers, testers, etc. who worked on this game did not get a share of that $500M pie - I actually assume they didn't.
But still, you know. Dare I say it - what about "fairness"? :-)
I find it odd how we frame fairness in regards to open source software. He licensed his software as MIT. It says anyone can you use it without owing the author anything. So how is it unfair?
To be clear, I think that open source maintainers deserve much more, but I don't understand why we rarely inspect the licenses as the source of the problem.
He got his name in the credits. The question was if he is owed anything else. The contract he created says he was not. I’m simply suggesting he might need a different contract.
At least a dozen times this season I've personally witnessed small kids talking about what they could buy with the money they would get from selling a foul ball that someone gave to them (out of guilt or public pressure) while their parents asked if they wouldn't rather keep it for the memories.
However, my home team is the Dodgers, so the experience is probably different in other markets where the local team sucks and nobody cares about the players (like the Anaheim Angels, where fans are more likely to throw the ball back onto the field than keep them).
If the comment above is correct, he was only added to the credits after he had to ask for it after the fact.
So the ONLY thing the license asked for is to be named and that was supposedly violated. So a multi million dollar company can just violate a generous license and then after a fact cling to this exact license while arguing to not pay a single cent more than the license asked for. Alright...
But you probably depend on over 500 open source libraries and tools, mostly ones you're not aware of. (Do you ever use a linux VM to run or just develop your stuff? Ever use git or curl etc? Did you know that tools and components in turn use other open-source libraries that you didn't pay for?) The main reason you use such things is so that you don't have to worry about this question.
I find it baffling in the other direction. The whole point of licensing is to ensure you’re a decent person.
If you’re creating something new and you dare try to copy anything without a license, the pushback is unanimous and universal: everyone agrees you’re a bad person for even thinking of it.
This is the same argument in the opposite direction. By fulfilling the terms of a license, you’re ensuring you play by the rules. In fact, licenses are the only real protection that open source maintainers have.
So why diss on someone for following the license terms? This whole moralizing and tut-tutting is a weird branch of the convo.
Sure, but contracts is the remedy society has developed to the problem that there are lots of indecent people around (not to mention that reasonable persons can disagree without being unreasonable).
That’s a fine perspective, but the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes. The license could easily say “if you make more than $500M, you must pay me $1M”. Why is that not an acceptable solution here?
An interesting approach is the dual GPL and commercial license. This is used for example by the CGAL geometry library [1]. In this case, a user of the library has the choice of either paying for the library, or open sourcing the code of their software.
Have you ever taken part in a legal dispute? The "whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes" sounds like someone who has not.
The easiest, most "acceptable solution" is to obviously throw the oss maintainer who made your hundreds of millions possible a bone. It's not that complicated. Why you find this such an odd notion I find rather strange.
I find it strange you’re arguing for something beyond the licensing terms. Imagine if companies were run that way. "Hey, we did an especially good job mowing your lawn, so please pay us double. You have a rich house, you can afford it. Oh and if you don’t pay us, you’re a bad person and should feel bad."
This is exactly the same argument: you’re saying the open source maintainer who knowingly released their code as open source (and got famous for it being open source) should be paid way more than they asked for ($0) based on vibes. Society doesn’t work that way. Companies don’t work that way. And it’s baffling people are saying open source should work that way. He already got the fame and free publicity from being the maker of Box2D, which he wouldn’t have gotten unless he released it for free. You can’t get the major benefits of that and then ask for a million dollars because "kindness".
If you want to be professional, keep it professional. Otherwise everyone here saying that the company should feel bad are fooling themselves. You’re owed what you ask for.
Tipping culture has obscured this somewhat. You’re supposed to give more money if they do a really good job. But it’s that way so that the business can pay employees less money. Tipping, like identity theft, is one of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time: you’re considered a bad person if you don’t tip, and that it’s your fault if your bank fails to verify your identity. Both of these are bogus.
I tip, because 15% is the normalized rate. But it shouldn’t be our problem. It’s the company’s problem to pay their employees. And it shouldn’t be the business’s problem that they made a lot of money using something that was knowingly given away for $0.
He didn’t ask for it, as far as I can tell. It looks like a Rovio customer asked how they treat downstream partners. I think that’s allowed under capitalism.
Be that as it may, plenty of engineers don’t understand the full ramifications of their open source license choice. Undoubtedly some, if not many, regret it afterwards. Companies change the terms or revoke licenses all the time. But, the dumb, naive engineer that gave their work away didn’t pay a lawyer to advise how to best give their work away, so screw ‘em.
If I made a boatload of money on the back of someone else’s work, I’d reward them. You wouldn’t. Neither one of us is legally required to. I’m not fond of taking advantage of people that don’t realize their worth. And I think the whole open source thing works best giving and taking, whether that’s code, money, or time.
But, this cutthroat approach to open source also hasn’t always been the societal norm. IBM and others made sizable donations to groups like the Apache Software Foundation back in the 90s and 00s and were more or less expected to do so. It seemed to me more a case of both sides agreeing a bunch of money could be spent on lawyers to iron out whatever terms or we could keep the licensing simple and have a gentlemen’s agreement on how to conduct ourselves. I’ve never heard of the Box2D guy so I hope that fame was worth something. It sounds a lot like being paid in exposure.
To your point, I don’t know how to codify a “leave a penny, take a penny” approach to open source and really don’t have the inclination to spend either the time or the money on a lawyer to figure that out. So, nowadays I just don’t release open source code anymore or, if I do, it’s AGPL just so I can protect my interests. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The camaraderie aspect of it has been supplanted by maximum value extraction and I don’t think that’s really sustainable. But between LLMs and an endless source of naive optimists, maybe this is fine.
"Society doesn't work that way" from the guy who says "the whole point of law is to guarantee outcomes".
Ok buddy. Why is tipping the analogous model? Do the economics fit at all? Why is it tipping that is teaching us about the economics of oss? I also don't give the grocery store extra money just for "kindness". Why not go with that one? You think an oss maintainer reflecting on someone making hundreds of millions with their work is analogous to a server waiting to see what you write down on the check? Is that it? Who is the business (not) paying the server in this case? The oss maintainer is both the emotionally manipulative server and the benefiting business owner? Because "exposure"? Or are you saying they are stupid for not acting more like a business in the first place, meaning the two should become the one? Why are you putting a human in front of me and making me come to some sort of pseudo-moral judgement? What does my contract say? Is that your point?
I just have to level with you and say your argument is deeply unimpressive. You also repeat maxims like "you're owed what you ask for" as if this is self evident. Then you call other people fools and say what other people can and can't do, all from this position of supposed hard-nosed knowledge of the the real world and how things work when it's pretty clear you have no idea what you're talking about. Trying to go from grandstanding about tipping culture (go off) to some self evident law about how humans should share rewards in something like oss is not obvious, despite your brilliant legal and economic insights.
And feeling bad is not something you can legalize your way out of. Another comment already touched on this. You don't seem to understand the point being made. No one is claiming there is a legal obligation or there was some company to company transaction. You know not everything in life is a contract, right? Morals and law are not the same. Your inability to acknowledge this basic fact feels pretty antisocial to me. I'm not really impressed by your shallow attempt at diagnosing society, or whatever your move from tipping to identity theft was supposed to prove... it seems to me underlying your replies is a resistance to feeling guilt. Not to psychoanalyze you but frankly, the degree to which you don't seem to understand how simple this is and instead seem to think this is some kind of emotional scam (why are you making me feel bad about giving you pennies on the dollar when the contract said it was free) makes me, at the risk of violating the HN equivalent of the Goldwater rule, simply wonder who hurt you.
I don’t think this is about fairness so much as a wish that developers would look out for their own self interest just a tiny bit.
We all get the full-court open source brainwashing during our early years of learning about programming, so it’s hard to ever step back and look at creating something from any other lens than “I should release this as open source”.
That’s the default, and anything less might get you grumped at by “the community”, so it’s the safest option.
But if your thing can be picked up by a megacorp and used as the basis for their $100M product, it might be in your best interest to carve yourself out a little clause that lets you capture some of that.
Because there’s a clear mismatch between the value generated from Box2d vs the value the creator receives, and that’s common for open-source in general.
It would be common decency to donate even a small portion of that $500 million, even if the license technically doesn’t require it.
MIT is simple, open, and common which is a big benefit for indie projects, small studios, and anyone with limited legal resources.
It means there’s lots of info on the internet explaining how to use the license and they can be relatively certain they won’t accidentally fall into some legal trap or misinterpret the license. It also means there’s legal precedent around the license.
All that to say, custom licenses are actually a big issue for small players.
You seem to be confusing what is legally/contractually required with what is fair. Fairness, in general, isn't defined by law or contracts, although some laws try to codify it.
> I would also not be surprised if the [staff] on this game did not get a share of that $500M pie
That's almost certainly the case, yes. Anything like royalties / residuals is pretty much unheard of in gamedev. You do the work, you do the crunch, you don't talk about conditions, you don't talk about pay, you are actively hostile towards the 'U' word, your boss _________ ____ __ _____.
For your service, you get the chance to be in the credits, provided your service continues after going "gold"[0], of course. Then you get laid off which is actually a win because you get to leave the company without getting blacklisted. Please forgive the gentle hyperbole, it's illustrative.
The situation may have improved (slightly)[1] with ~actors as SAG-AFTRA was a growing influence in the industry some years ago. I'm a bit out of the loop on that side of things, though.
[0] not that anyone ships after going gold anymore
[1] improved slightly relative to "I'm the voice of Niko Bellic and I got paid in Famista cassettes" -- no this is not a true story, I'm actually not even a voice actor.
I was looking for the same thing. There is a replay mechanism, so it seems to be deterministic. But with floating point physics, not across platforms. Though -ffast-math is unsupported according to the documentation, so maybe it is intended to be deterministic across platforms? https://box2d.org/documentation3d/recording.html
But for the apps that don't currently support both orientations, it's possible they don't have support for switching aspect ratio on the fly. This design might help with those apps not completely breaking when folding/unfolding.
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