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building for the loud users on a forum is generally a losing move. if we built notion for angry HN users, we'd probably be a great obsidian competitor with end to end encryption, have zero ai features, and make zero money.

X11 only is a bit of a bummer although I’m not surprised - i don’t think i’d target Wayland either for this sort of thing if i was a happy x11 user already.

I'm actually curious about that - this seems like something that should at least partially work through XWayland? Blindly speculating, it might not work against existing windows, but I'd expect things like system monitors and launching apps to not care.

I love black bean burgers (bongo burger near Berkeley is my classic), sounds like an interesting twist

Never fried one in bacon grease, but they are good with bacon and cheese. I have had more than one restaurant point out that their bacon wasn't vegetarian when ordering, though.

I think you could approximate a 4d projection onto a 3d display, much like we approximate a 3d projection onto a 2d display. So perhaps one could enjoy a fun and intuitive game of 4d doom if you have an appropriately fancy volumetric display. Pity they're so rare/expensive.

I've commented elsewhere about an 4D maze (https://urticator.net/maze/ - I am not the author) which mimics this by creating two 3D retinas in red/blue stereoscopic mode - when you cross your eyes just right you see a single volumetric 3D retina.

Exactly. I prefer my 4D games projected into my Vision Pro’s surrounding 3D space. Please.

I read a novel when I was 14 or so who's premise is all about creatures inhabiting higher-dimensional space called "The Boy Who Reversed Himself" by William Sleator. I loved Sleator's books, they introduced me to really interesting concepts from theoretical physics as a youngun. If you find 4D Doom intriguing, I encourage you to borrow the book from your favorite ebook library, it's a quick fun read (at least, I remember it that way).

Fun fact: William Sleator's brother is the famous computer scientist Danny Sleator, inventor of the splay tree.

Part of Greg Egan novel Diaspora takes place in a universe with 5 spatial dimensions.

Loved this book! Part of this project started from wanting to make 4D creatures and train them to walk with RL. One interesting fact I learned is that ants would probably have 8 legs in 4D.

Why? Well, apparently ants have 6 legs because this allows tripod-gait, a simple leg movement that always keeps 3 stable points on the ground[1]

In 4D, you'd need 4 points on the ground, hence tetra-pod gait (4+4 legs).

You could of course do with less, I'd guess even as low as 1-2 if you have lots of muscles and good balance.

[1] https://dugas.ch/4d_creatures/tripod_gait.html


I'm still trying to wrap my head around the statement in the book (IIRC) that it takes 8 legs to be stable in 5 dimensions. I'd assumed it would be 6, but this is a layman's intuition. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.

Awesome book regardless.


That’s capitalism too

Technically state-capitalism since it's an industry created as a result of congress regulating commerce with aggressive IP laws (aka rent-seeking)

Where can I see an example of any other kind of capitalism?

Capitalism is always underpinned by a strong legal system which is why most criticism is about constraining growth in legislation, not killing off interference outright. Copyright law is a good example of a law that made sense in it's original form but turned into a monster with scope-creep.

Although, if we're being realpolitik, every time government interference grows in scope and corrupts markets, capitalism still gets blamed and people call for more government to fix it (see: housing). So the capitalism vs state capitalism distinction isn't very meaningful in practice.


A society/country that produces functionally illiterate adults should be regarded as a mistake.

Really? Pretty much all atomics i’ve used have load, store of various integer sizes. I wrote a ring buffer in Go that’s very similar to the final design here using similar atomics.

https://pkg.go.dev/sync/atomic#Int64


They generally map directly to concepts in the CPU architecture. On many architectures, load/store instructions are already guaranteed to be atomic as long as the address is properly aligned, so atomic load/store is just a load/store. Non-relaxed ordering may emit a variant load/store instruction or a separate barrier instruction. Compare-exchange will usually emit a compare and swap, or load-linked/store-conditional sequence. Things like atomic add/subtract often map to single instructions, or might be implemented as a compare-exchange in a loop.

The exact syntax and naming will of course differ, but any language that exposes low-level atomics at all is going to provide a pretty similar set of operations.


What's not guaranteed for "normal" loads and stores on many architectures is the order in which writes become visible to other CPU cores.

Right, that's what the various memory ordering constants are for in C++ atomics, and other languages will likely have an equivalent. On such architectures, those will emit special instructions or barriers.

100% agree +1

yeah that’s why i was surprised by grandparent saying the atomics were c++ specific

Nice one, thanks for sharing. Do you wanna share the ring buffer code itself?

i didn’t buy a steam deck since so i can run Microsoft Office. i like that there’s freedom to open up desktop mode to tinker / install 3rd party software, but not to use it as a business machine.

I just talked about using it on Desktop mode like a PC. I never said anything about doing business on it or using it as your Work PC.

Even the announcement "trailer" of the steammachine showed it getting used on a Computer monitor with mouse and keyboard in desktop mode. They even said they want to improve the "Desktop mode only" experience iirc and for there more apps than just games are important.

And i personally probably wouldnt have bought a steamdeck if it wasnt possible to just go into desktop mode and do whatever.


If the Electron app is pure JS with no native extensions it can be doable. However, many Electron apps contain platform-specific js code, since features for stuff like Dock on Mac and Taskbar icons on Windows differ. Electron apps like Notion also contain native extensions - compiled C/C++/Objective-C code that are platform specific. For example in Notion, we use sqlite via better-sqlite3 (potentially replaceable since it’s open source, but will need more work than “just” repackaging js), but we also write our own native support libraries to use OS-specific APIs for microphone recording in meeting notes feature.

Thank you for the thorough reply :)

I really like the comments on HN, they are very often really interesting and you actually often learn something new that actually matters.


I have seen many people porting such apps, like there is aur package for notion, figma

It's cool that arch users give porting Notion a valiant effort. But as I predicted, custom native extensions will be [a problem](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/notion-app-electron#comme...):

> Could it be possible to make the relatively new AI meeting notes feature to work?

> Right now I get the following error when I click the "start transcribing" button:

    Error occurred in handler for 'notion:get-media-access-status': TypeError: s.systemPreferences.getMediaAccessStatus is not a function
        at /usr/lib/notion-app/app.asar/.webpack/main/index.js:2:631015
        at WebContents.<anonymous> (node:electron/js2c/browser_init:2:87444)
        at WebContents.emit (node:events:524:28)

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