This hasn't been my experience either. I personally find the max plan is very generous for day-to-day usage. And I don't even use compact manually.
However, when I tried out the SuperPower skill and had multiple agents working on several projects at the same time, it did hit the 5-hour usage limit. But SuperPower hasn't been very useful for me and wastes a lot of tokens. When you want to trade longer running time for high token consumption, you only get a marginal increase in performance.
So people, if you are finding yourself using up tokens too quickly, you probably want to check your skills or MCPs etc.
As a regular user, I hit these walls so often. I am experimenting with local model and open code. I am hoping to see some good results with qwen3 coder
The situation for Desktop development is nasty. Microsoft had so many halfassed frameworks and nobody knows which one to use. It’s probably the de facto platform on Windows IS Electron, and Microsoft use them often, too.
On MacOS is much better. But most of the team either ended up with locked in Mac-only or go cross platform with Electron.
I guess it shows how geriatric I am with desktop app development these days, but does no one use Qt anymore? Wasn't the dream for that to be a portable and native platform to write GUI apps? Presumably that could abstract away which bullshit Microsoft framework they came out with this week.
I haven't touched desktop application programming in a very long time and I have no desire to ever do so again after trying to learn raw GTK a million years ago, so I'm admittedly kind of speaking out of my ass here.
Qt is still used, but I think part of the reason it is less used is that C++ isn't always the right language anymore for building GUI application.
That’s actually why we're working on Slint (https://slint.dev): It's a cross-platform native UI toolkit where the UI layer is decoupled from the application language, so you can use Rust, JavaScript, Python, etc. for the logic depending on what fits the project better.
How can C++ not be the "right" language? It seems to meet all the requirements for event-driven GUIs - event handlers are function callbacks after all...
C++ works, but compared to other languages it's often no longer the most productive choice for UI work.
Modern UI code is mostly glue and state management, where fast iteration matters more than squeezing out maximum performance. And when performance does matter, there are also newer, safer languages.
For teams comfortable with C++ or with existing C++ libraries to integrate, it can of course still be a strong choice, just not the preferred one for most current teams.
But desktop C++ isn't difficult or slow to write...
It seems odd to me that the software world has gone in the direction of "quick to write - slow to run". It should be the other way around. Things of quality (eg. paintings by Renaissance masters) took time to create, despite being quick to observe.
It also seems proven that releasing software quickly ("fast iteration") doesn't lead to quality - see how many releases of the YouTube app or Netflix there are on iOS or Android; if speedy releases are important, it is valuing rush to production over quality, much like a processed food version of edible content.
In a world that is also facing energy issues, sluggish and inefficient performance should be shunned, not welcomed?
I suppose this mentality is endemic, and why we see a raft of cruddy slow software these days, where upcoming developers ("current teams") no longer value performance over ease of their job. It can only get worse if the "it's good enough" mentality persists. It's quite sad.
The part that takes time in UI isn’t wiring up components, it’s the small changes like something is a pixel to the right or that gap is two pixels wide. Changing those in a C++ project means recompiling and that adds up to significant overhead over a day of polishing the UI. If C++ was able to get builds out in less than a second, this wouldn’t be an issue. People value performance in their own tools more than the tools of their customer.
In modern Qt you don't write UI in C++ anymore - you do that in QML. It is far simpler to create amazing pixel perfect UIs with drooling-inducing animations in QML. I wrote a blog post that talks a bit about this[1].
In wxWidgets you use sizers, so you don't work on pixel-level alignments. I can understand if you're using an ancient framework like MFC, but even then I seem to recall there was a sizer equivalent system (or it is easy enough to write a class to do so, moving components).
I think it is a daft thing to move to shipping a colossal web framework and entire browser simply because of 1px UI alignments (which have been a solved problem for decades in C++ anyway).
Qt means C++. I'll take Typescript over C++ for a GUI task any day.
Qt is also pretty memory-hungry; maybe rich declarative (QML) skinnable adaptable UIs with full a11y support, etc just require some RAM no matter what. And it also looks a wee bit "non-native" to purists, except on Windows, where the art of uniform native look is lost.
Also, if you ever plan extensions / plugin support, you already basically have it built-in.
Yes, a Qt-based program may be wonderfully responsive. But an Electron-based app can be wonderfully responsive, too. And both can feel sluggish, even on great hardware. It all depends on a right architecture, on not doing any (not even "guaranteed fast") I/O in the GUI thread, mostly. This takes a bit of skill and, most importantly, consideration; both are in short supply, as usual.
The biggest problem with Electron apps is their size. Tauri, which relies on the system-provided web view component, is the reasonable way.
I don't get this HN worship of Qt. Have you ever used Qt apps on macOS? They don't feel native at all. They feel sort-of native-emulating in the same way wxWidgets apps on macOS feel: they use native controls but all the little details including design language are off.
I'm not saying this is a huge problem for me even if it bothers me personally. But if you're here on HN advocating native over Electron, then it seems logical to me that you would care about being truly native instead of merely "using native controls while feeling off".
This is even before getting to the point that Qt isn't truly native. They just draw controls in a style that looks native, they don't actually use native controls. wxWidgets uses native controls but they don't behave better despite that.
This is not because of Qt - it is due to some (most) Qt developers not caring enough. I created my Qt app feel native both on macOS and Windows[1]. It did require a lot of tuning - but those are things I'll reuse across other apps.
And GTK4 is even very usable from Rust too. It’s not a bad development experience, but these companies probably find 100 webdevs for every system programmer.
I didn't want to call it backend, because it's not that. Maybe desktop programmer? Anyway, if you're doing GUI in Rust or similar, you're at least handling memory and syscalls, which is closer to systems programming, I'd say.
One reason why I personally never bothered is the licensing of some of its important parts, which is a choice of either GPL or commercial. Which is fair, but too bothersome for some use-cases (e.g. mobile apps which are inherently GPL-unfriendly). Electron and the likes are typically MIT/BSD/etc licensed.
Qt is still pretty good, but it's dated in comparison to newer frameworks like Flutter and React Native. No hot reloading of changes, manual widget management vs. React where you just re-define the whole UI every frame and it handles changes magically, no single source of truth for state, etc.
You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/
You can just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx. if you didn't want to write the rendering yourself there are plenty of libraries like skia, flutter's renderer, nanovg, etc
Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for highly optimized apps like e.g. Sublime Text, but you can clearly see that the companies behind them are struggling.
>Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
I see complains about RAM and slugginess against Slack and countless others Electron apps every fucking day, same as with Adobe forcing web rendered UI parts in Photoshop, and other such cases. Forums are full of them, colleagues always complain about it.
the people that USE the software the most are not the people BUYING the software. it’s why all enterprise software has trash UX.
do you think i as a software engineer like using Jira? Outlook? etc? Heck even the trendy stuff is broken. Anthropic took took 6 months to fix a flickering claude code. -_-
Not relevant point though. I was answering to this "I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years", I wasn't arguing that such apps don't make money.
Not seeing complaints doesn't mean they don't exist.
Not to mention ui latency that is common in electron apps that is just a low-level constant annoyance.
He who holds the purse strings, decides. The people who pay to have the apps made get to decide and they have decided that what geeks want doesn't matter.
And every time a geek tries to change that, he only wins for a short while and then we're back to the primordial soup.
Oh, and regular users obviously don't care enough.
I don't bother complaining about Electron-based applications to the developer, and I expect that's not an unusual position. It's not like the downsides are hidden, unique, or a surprise, and if the developers' priorities aligned with ours, they wouldn't have picked electron in the first place.
I use web-tech apps because I have to, and because they're adequate, not because it's an optimal user experience.
> Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
Nothing is worse than reading something like this. A good software developer cares. It’s wrong to assume customers don't care simply because they don't know what's going on under the hood. Considering the downsides and the resulting side effects (latency, more CPU and RAM consumption, fans spinning etc.), they definitely do care. For example, Microsoft has been using React components in their UI, thinking customers wouldn’t care, but as we have been seeing lately, they do care.
That just means your feedback system is trash if it fails to surface such an obvious and common pain point in user experience. Tough that's an extremely common state of feedback systems.
But also, the general computer knowledge isn't that high for every end user to connect some sluggishness in another app to your app wasting ram and causing disk swaps, that eliminates a lot of end user complaints
> reinventing the wheel
what exactly are you inventing by using a framework "invented" decades ago and used by countless apps in all those years?
They don’t care, or they don’t know? What they do know is their computer that’s only 5 years old goes to shit with only a few apps open. Time for a new laptop.
Thanks for contributing to the obsolescence cycle.
People absolutely care, but the issue is that no single company/app is really responsible. It's the tragedy of the commons, but for users RAM. No one electron app uses all the RAM, but just a couple are enough to make a common 16GB machine slow down massively.
Even with SublimeText, most popular IDE is VSCode, most popular interface design tool Figma, all popular chat platforms and so on are all electron based. If people were desperate for faster platforms they'll be migrating to them.
Your mistaking supply-side path dependent outcomes that produce a lack of consumer choice with consumer preference. No consumer prefers slow, bloated, non-native software, but they're stuck with what they can get.
Don't forget that these Electron apps outcompeted native apps. Figma and VSCode were underdogs to native apps at one point. This is why your supply side argument doesn't make any sense.
Seems clear to me that Electron's higher RAM usage did not affect adoption. Instead, Electron's ability to write once and ship in any platform is what allowed VSCode to win.
Because reality is not as primitive as you portray it to be, you can have hindrances and boosts with the overall positive even winning effect? That shouldn't be that hard!
> Seems clear to me that Electron's higher RAM usage did not affect adoption.
Again, it only seems clear because you ignore all the dirt, including basic things (like here, it's not just ram, is disk use, startup speed, but also like before with competition) and strangely don't consider many factors.
> Instead, Electron's ability to write once and ship in any platform is what allowed VSCode to win.
So nothing to do with it using the most popular web stack, meaning the largest pool of potential contributors to the editor or extensions??? What about other cross platform frameworks that also allowed that??? (and of course it's not any platform, just 3 desktop ones where VSc runs)
So nothing to do with it using the most popular web stack, meaning the largest pool of potential contributors to the editor or extensions??? What about other cross platform frameworks that also allowed that??? (and of course it's not any platform, just 3 desktop ones where VSc runs)
I'm not even sure what you're arguing at this point.
Are you arguing that Electron helped VSCode win or what? Because Electron being able to use a popular web stack is also a benefit.
I care. I refuse to use Electron slop unless it is literally the only option available (usually due to some proprietary locked-in platform eg Discord). I will happily pay significant sums of money for well-made native apps that often have fewer features than the Electron versions, simply for the pleasure of using tools that integrate seamlessly with my operating system. Not all of us have given up on software quality.
Heck, not even just a separate card or whatever, back in the terminal days where you practically had a whole separate small computer just to display the output of the bigger computer on a screen instead of paper.
> Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about microplastics in the past 10 years.
> You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for safe, environmentally-friendly products, but you can clearly see that the companies that make them are struggling.
How is File Pilot for accessibility and for all of the little niceties like native scrolling, clipboard interaction, drag and drop, and so on? My impression is that the creator is has expertly focused on most/all of these details, but I don't have Windows to test.
I insist on good UI as well, and, as a web developer, have spent many hours hand rolling web components that use <canvas>. The most complicated one is a spreadsheet/data grid component that can handle millions of rows, basically a reproduction of Google Sheets tailored to my app's needs. I insist on not bloating the front-end package with a whole graph of dependencies. I enjoy my NIH syndrome. So I know quality when I see it (File Pilot). But I also know how tedious reinventing the wheel is, and there are certain corners that I regularly cut. For example there's no way a blind user could use my spreadsheet-based web app (https://github.com/glideapps/glide-data-grid is better than me in this aspect, but there's no way I'm bringing in a million dependencies just to use someone else's attempt to reinvent the wheel and get stuck with all of their compromises).
The answer to your original question about why these billion dollar companies don't create artisanal software is pretty straightforward and bleak, I imagine. But there are a few actually good reasons not to take the artisanal path.
I'd love to see some opensource projects actually do a good job of this. Its a lot of work, especially if you want:
- Good cross platform support (missing in filepilot)
- Want applications to feel native everywhere. For example, all the obscure keyboard shortcuts for moving around a text input box on mac and windows should work. iOS and Android should use their native keyboards. IME needs to work. Etc
- Accessibility support for people who are blind and low vision. (Screen readers, font scaling, etc)
- Ergonomic language bindings
Hitting these features is more or less a requirement if you want to unseat electron.
I think this would be a wonderful project for a person or a small, dedicated team to take on. Its easier than it ever used to be thanks to improvements in font rendering, cross platform graphics libraries (like webgpu, vulcan, etc) and improvements in layout engines (Clay). And how much users have dropped their standards for UI consistency ever since electron got popular and microsoft gave up having a consistent UI toolkit in windows.
There are a few examples of teams doing this in house (eg Zed). But we need a good opensource project.
The proof that rendering is not _that_ hard because the flutter team did it when they switched off skia (although technically they still use skia for text rendering, I'll admit that text rendering and layout is hard)
Every space company manages to shoot spacecrafts into space, does that mean it's easy? Obviously not :)
Cross-platform native GUIs are still hard, although maybe not rocket science, but there is a reason most individuals/companies don't go for that by default and reach for other solutions.
That'll work great until your first customer from a CJK or RTL language writes in, "Hey, how come I can't type in your app?", or the blind user writes in "Hey how come your app is completely blank?" then you'll be right in the middle of the "Find Out" phase
These strategies are fine for toy apps but you cannot ship a production app to millions or even thousands of people without these basics.
“Render yourself with GPU APIs” has all the same problems with a11y, compatibility, inconsistent behaviour that electron has - the only one it might fix is performance and plenty of apps have messed that one up too
They’re all iterating products really fast. This Codex is already different than the last Codex app. This is all disposable software until the landscape settles.
It's essentially asking application developers to wipe ass for OS developers like Microsoft. It's applaudible when you do it, understandable when you don't.
Even though OpenAI has a lot of cash to burn, they're not in a good position now and getting butchered by Anthropic and possibly Gemini later.
If any major player in this AI field has the power to do it's probably Google. But again, they've done the Flutter part, and the result is somewhat mixed.
At the end of the day, it's only HN people and a fraction of Redditors who care. Electron is tolerated by the silent majority. Nice native or local-first alternatives are often separate, niche value propositions when developers can squeeze themselves in over-saturated markets. There's a long way before the AI stuff loses novelty and becomes saturated.
"native" is used for different things, from "use the platform's default gui toolkit" to "compile to a machine code binary". the former is a bit of a mess, but the latter is strictly better than wrapping a web view and shipping an entire chrome fork to display and interpret it. just write something in qt and forget about native look and feel, and the performance gain will be enough to greatly improve the user experience.
Should just use javafx or swing. Take a leaf out of intellij which while it as it's own performance problems (although not from the fact of the ui framework) has a fantastic ui across Mac / windows / nix
It really was Oracle’s fault – they neglected deployment for too long. Deploying Java applications was simply too painful, and neither JLink nor JPackage existed.
As I outlined in a sibling comment. You can still use React and your JS developers. Just don't ship a whole browser with your app.
May be an app that is as complex as Outlook needs the pixel-perfect tweaking of every little button that they need to ship their own browser for exact version match. But everything else can use *system native browser*. Use Tauri or Wails or many other solutions like these
That said, I do agree on the other comments about TUIs etc. Yes, nobody cares about the right abstractions, not even the companies that literally depend on automating these applications
Given how much money they have, and the reach they're attempting to achieve, is it really asking too much that they hire native development teams? It's not like an application of this scale requires an army of engineers.
Do not give a shit about how they excuse doing a bad job. If their tools make them that much more productive, and being the developer of those tools should allow you to make great use of them.
Use native for osx
Use .Net framework for windows
Use whatever on Linux.
Its just being lazy and ineffective. I also do not care about whatever "business" justification anyone can come up with for half assing it.
This. Even Linux is nasty. Qt and GTK are both horrible messes to use.
It would be nice if someone made a way to write desktop apps in JavaScript with a consistent, cross-platform modern UI (i.e. swipe to refresh, tabs, beautiful toggle switches, not microscopic check boxes) but without resorting to rendering everything inside a bloated WebKit browser.
Qt is not a horrible mess to use, the problem is just people don't bother to learn any tech stack outside web. It's so obvious that this is the issue to anybody who actually does native development.
Impressive work! The idea and the UI is very intuitive.
Though, as a guy who speaks perfect mandarin from Beijing, I’m struggle even to pass the easy ones… So it can definitely used some improvements. The example 你好吃饭了吗 returns hào → hǎo, fān → fàn, le → liǎo. The first two are the model listen my tone mistakenly, and the last one should be le instead of liǎo in this context.
Also I see in the comment section people are worry about tones. I can guarantee tones are not particularly useful and you can communicate with native speakers with all the tones messed up and that’s perfectly fine. Because as soon as you leave Beijing, you’ll find all the tones are shuffled because of every region has their own dialect and accents, which doesn’t stop people from communicate at all. So don’t let tone stuff slow your learning process down.
Please allow me to share some of my views. I'm a native Mandarin speaker.
> I can guarantee that tones are not particularly useful and that you can communicate with native speakers with all the tones messed up, and that's perfectly fine.
Not at all. Tones are extremely important. If you have all the tones messed up, you can hardly communicate in Mandarin. It's true, as you said, that different regions of China have different dialects, and you'll find that people can communicate normally because: 1) The tonal differences in nearby regions are not too significant, and people can still try to understand based on context. And 2) In many cases, people switch to regular Mandarin when their dialects cannot communicate with each other. This is why Mandarin exists. It is an officially regulated dialect that all Chinese people learn, to solve the dialect problem among different regions. Chinese people may speak their own dialects at hometown, but when two Chinese people meet and find that their dialects cannot communicate, they immediately switch to Mandarin. Therefore, the tones in Mandarin are very important. To a considerable extent, Mandarin exists because of tones. You cannot communicate in it with messed up tones.
> If you have all the tones messed up, you can hardly communicate in Mandarin.
> To a considerable extent, Mandarin exists because of tones. You cannot communicate in it with messed up tones.
These statements are false. If they were true, it would be impossible to understand written tone-free pinyin; in reality, it's not just possible but easy.
Well, as a northern guy, I do find myself able to understand Mandarin even from Yunnan easily without prior learning. The harder ones for me, like the Hefei dialect, are because the pronunciation is very different, not the tone. Nanjing dialect, on the otherhand, is also from the same Jianghuai Mandarin group as Hefei, which is perfect intelligentable for me.
Even for non-Mandarin/Guanhua, such as the Shanxi dialect, I can understand them because the pronunciation is much closer to mine, just the tones are completely novel.
Yes but Regular Mandarin has different tones, Beijing Mandarin is not Hong Kong-style Mandarin is not Taiwanese Mandarin and so when a foreigner chooses "Reference Mandarin", they are choosing what, exactly?
Point being, this idea of a Universal Reference is exactly the kind of linguistic erasure that is wrongheaded to begin with. Nor does this completely prevent comprehension, these debates underestimate how much human communication is contextual, you read what I wrote above and most of it was your mind already filling in (gasp, like an LLM) the next words enabling you to read relatively quickly.
As a person who lived in Taiwan and reached C1 in Chinese, I can also say that the tones are indeed less important than one might thing once one can say more and communicate more context. In the beginning when you're very limited in your expressive capacity and only can say simple sentences there's less context and getting the tones wrong does produce confusion.
"Because as soon as you leave Beijing, you’ll find all the tones are shuffled because of every region has their own dialect and accents, which doesn’t stop people from communicate at all. "
Isn't this in fact one of the reasons why China relies heavily on the written language because the different regions lose vocal communication ability as the changes in tones and pronounciations render the language understandable to people from other regions?
The point about being a beginner and having limited capacity to express oneself is an important point. When you can say more, you will also have learned more about the language's tendency to use words of 2 syllables, rather than 1 syllable words. Using 2 syllables instead of 1 already removes a lot of ambiguity, and people will understand you better.
> Also I see in the comment section people are worry about tones. I can guarantee tones are not particularly useful and you can communicate with native speakers with all the tones messed up and that’s perfectly fine.
That might be true between native speakers of similar enough dialects who otherwise speak "properly" with each other: proper grammar, idiomatic expressions, predictable accents (also regarding tones, which are not random, just different patterns from the standard). Language learners make errors in all these categories and there providing more motivation to neglect the tones is harmful. If tones were completely irrelevant regarding understandably then they would have disappeared long ago.
> If tones were completely irrelevant regarding understandably then they would have disappeared long ago.
Probably because it's a legacy and disappearing slowly? Modern Mandarin only has four tones left and has already lost tone patterns.
Do you know there's a "robot tone" in Chinese? It's simply swap every character to the flat or the first tone. Though it's under the stereotypical false assumption that robots have troubles with tones, kids in the late last century often communicated in that tone for fun without issues.
At the end of the day, vocal Chinese is always ambiguous with or without tones and in practice heavily relies on context. It requires written language to truly fix that.
About the tones not being as useful ... I think there are cases, in which they matter. Take for example 熊猫 and 胸毛: "有 xiongmao 吗？" "Are there Pandas? " or "Do you have chest hair?". Another one: 时间 and 事件. Sometimes it gets comical, but natives can and some will be confused, when your tones are off by too much, and the conversation just started, so that the context is not as narrowed down. Context is key in the language. You can notice that, when you are trying to join a conversation between natives. Until you understand a phrase or most of a phrase, that gives you a hint for the topic they are talking about, you will usually have a hard time understanding anything.
I just tried the tool and it couldn't properly recognize a very clearly pronounced "吃" and instead heard some shi2. I think it needs more training data or something. Or one needs a good mic.
I feel like there is a commonly mentioned idea that "speaking a foreign language is easier after having a drink or two".
I've found that especially true with Mandarin because (I think) a beginner speaker is more likely to speak a little more quickly which allows the listener to essentially ignore the occasional incorrect or slightly mispronounced tone and understand the what theyî're trying to say.
(This is anecdotal, but with n>1. Discussed and observed with other Mandarin language learners)
The phrase "Tibiwangzi" (Character amnesia) was popular long before the digital age. Back when I was a child in the 90s, middle-aged and old people often found themselves unable to recall specific characters.
I somehow kept the habit of handwriting for years. But as a guy in my early 30s, I do notice characters fade away from my brain from time to time, which wasn't a thing at all in the 20s. And to my surprise, some of the characters are fairly frequently used - I was just completely stuck when I was trying to recall them.
Probably that's how brains and organs peaked and will slowly break down over the following decades just like hard drives.
That's not gonna work for real-world projects. Real-world apps often have larger edits than locking individual cells/cards e.g. Move columns or replace large chunks of spreadsheets in Google Sheets, or Ctrl-A to select all and then drag to move.
Also, if you consider latency, locking does not work well because client B might do operations before he/she even acknowledges the lock from client A because of latency.
Solved problem in Scandinavia. I've lived in Sweden and Finland for a while. Both are countries with slightly better birth rates than other modern economies. And a big part of the reason is that things like child care, parental leave (paid and unpaid) are taken care of. So, you see a lot of women have kids and then resume their career a year or so later. In some extreme cases it can be longer. When I started there, our secretary came back from nine (!) years of a mix of paid and unpaid leave after having three kids.
However, what I noticed in Finland was a relatively high proportion of women in tech and leadership roles. That's what happens when people can combine a career and a family instead of having to choose. Most women are basically full time employed.
The Netherlands where I'm from has a lot less of this. Result: a lot of women are working part time (something that is relatively rare in other countries) so they can take care of their kids or pausing their career entirely for until their kids are old enough to go to school. Labor participation of women is lower and working part time means the career perspectives are also a bit limited. Companies don't put part time people in important roles. And of course it means less money as well. Child care is expensive to the point that working barely covers that cost. So, many women just quit their jobs. That's a form of hidden unemployment. It's not counted in the statistics but it has a cost.
I currently live in Germany which has a bit better system going more towards the Scandinavian direction. People moan a lot about availability of child care but it is pretty affordable and mostly people seem to manage to get some in the end. Likewise, parental leave is a bit more generous.
The demographics in a lot of places are not great. Populations are shrinking. And that's also going to have an economic impact. There are two ways to fix that: make it more affordable for people to have kids or just get a lot of immigrants. The irony is that the same people blocking the first are also not that keen on the latter happening.
>> I've lived in Sweden and Finland for a while. Both are countries with slightly better birth rates than other modern economies
According to the most recent data from the United Nations Population Fund, Finland has a birth rate of 1.4 which is lower than both Germany (1.5) and the Netherlands (1.6). Sweden is only slightly higher at 1.7, which is the same as the U.S.
> It's a good thing to take care your own children
If you want to, yes.
If you are forced to because you can't afford childcare I would say that's a bad thing
There is economic efficiency in specialisation, it's economically better to have specialist childcarers while other people work in different specialties. The economy should be structured so that people can choose to leave work to take care of their kids if they want, but not be forced to
The problem is that if the economy is structured in a way that maximizes efficiency (as most economists/politicians generally argue it should be), then everyone should be forced to use specialist childcare, even if they don't want to, because they could produce more money/value for society by specializing in literally anything else.
I think that the ruthless pursuit of efficiency destroys a lot of what makes us human.
I've seen Tao Te Ching's translation on the HN front page for several times. It seems people are interested in it.
The thing with Tao Te Ching is it's too ambiguous because: 1) The Chinese language is very overloaded and thus very ambiguous. 2) Classical Chinese is even more so. 3) Tao Te Ching is intentionally filled with clever puns which makes it more ambiguous.
The problem with translations is the translator has to interpret source texts into specific meanings in the target languages. It's like opening Schrödinger's cat box, or unwrapping monads in Haskell and Rust, which essentially deduct multiple possibilities into a single deterministic value.
If you're really into it, you probably want to learn some basic Chinese and classical Chinese (lucky they're not so different from each other), and figure out how to look up in the dictionaries. It's probably not as difficult as it sounds - all you need to do is decrypt with dictionaries.
Maybe there should be a new form of digital translation, just like hovering texts on Duolingo and it will display all the possible meanings of the word/expression.
The ambiguity of the Dao is just the Dao being the Dao. You can not explain something which has no duality with direct words so to try
to translate the meaning of “Dao” will always need puns and metaphors.
Writings at point to the Dow are meant to get you to stop thinking, not to think for. They’re supposed to get you to contemplate life.
But I agree, the language and cultural barriers to understanding Daoist writings as an English speaking American makes it more of a challenge.
Derek Lin has done a translation which might be helpful.
> Maybe there should be a new form of digital translation, just like hovering texts on Duolingo and it will display all the possible meanings of the word/expression.
If anyone's interested, I've already self-promoted on a previous Tao Te Ching thread a tool/website[0] which precisely does that. I've still haven't had the time to add the Tao Te Ching though (and I've just observed one or two bugs. Oh well.)
Same thing with the Bible - to me reading it as a single translation seems making little sense. Reading every verse in multiple versions in multiple languages, looking up multiple meanings of every word feels a whole different story. Luckily reading Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Old English is much easier than reading Chinese. I still feel like learning Chinese to read Taoist texts though, because they are so cool, Alan Watts inspired me to the point I can't imagine giving up this idea.
For people who aren't Christian or aren't as familiar with the various translations:
English translations of the Bible tend to be a tradeoff between making the text easy to read for modern English speakers (at the risk of inserting the translator's own interpretation of the text) versus translating the text literally. The tradeoff is particularly important since some sects of Christianity believe that the specific words of the Bible as originally written were inspired by God. As you might expect, most translations fall somewhere in the middle between literal and readable.
The existence of the King James Version (KJV) further complicates things. As I understand it, most scholars would consider it an accurate translation but not necessarily an extremely literal translation. Being written in the 1600s, it doesn't incorporate the most recent scholarship and archeology; e.g. certain verses that scholars no longer think were in the original text[1]. However, because of how culturally influential the KJV is there can be significant resistance to using other versions. The extreme being the King James Only Movement which believes that the KJV is the only acceptable version of the Bible.
Wikipedia has pretty good articles on a lot of these subjects:
[1] I want to emphasize here: These range from relatively minor differences in wording, to stories that appear to be original but may be in the wrong chronological place in the narrative, to passages (notably the story of "The Woman Caught in Adultery") that may not be original. Although personally I don't think these differences call the reliability of the Bible into question, it's a nuanced subject and you definitely shouldn't just take my word for it.
Regarding the Bible, you should read Young’s literal translation. It blew me away how much liberties that king James version took in their interpretation.
Is there a difference between '-th' and '-s' suffixes in English? I thought 'seeth' was just an old fashioned way of saying 'sees' but now I'm wondering if this is saying something about tenses that I'm missing.
-(e)th was the Middle English ending for 3rd person singular and plural present tense. It has mostly been replaced by -s in Modern English, except for a few fixed expressions (e.g. my mum used to say "quoth he" which is subtly different from the modern "he quoted" or "he quotes" which is normally followed by an object that is being quoted as well as the quote itself).
It's also interesting to look at the case system for ME nouns too, as it makes some things easier to understand. For instance the 's in Modern English for possessive is really just an abbreviation for the -es genitive case, which probably occurred when spoken forms had changed from -es to -s, which in turn was probably due to the shift to drop terminal -e from words which had started even by Chaucer's day (some places in Canterbury Tales you need to treat the -e as its own syllable to hear the rhyme, in other places it needs to be silent).
saith is to says as says is to sez, in the sense that each spelling is an attempt to represent English pronunciation in writing and their progression tells us something about how the pronunciation changed over time, but not everyone who uses a certain spelling necessarily also pronounces the word the way one might naïvely expect based on the spelling.
I got to read, shortly after the Tao, a book that compiled for part of the texts something like 4 of the 'best'[0] translations. It was very enlightening to see how different yet similar they could be. If you think of it as semantic vectors, I would say the meaning is probably the common part between all translations. It is definitely a recommended exercise to read different ones.
It's not unique to taoist texts either, as I recommend to check different translations of works such as Dante's Comedy, Beowulf, or Goethe's Faust. When there is meaning, style, sub-meanings and connotations, a translation can only convey some parts accurately. Different translations will usually make different trade-offs.
[0] Note that 'best' is a term that markedly changed meaning these last two centuries, for anyone who would read more in-depth about the subject. For instance some of the earliest translators dismissed more modern taoist authors as having strayed too far from the Tradition, but the attitude changed in a few generations.
There was a period in my life in my early 20s when I dabbled heavily in taoism. The book was a staple read for me and I tried to adjust my Outlook accordingly for a long time.
Finally though, i dropped it and went back to who I was. Your comment makes me wonder if the specific translation of the book I read was a big factor.
I can relate to this comment. The Tao Te Ching had a profound influence on me. Reading it was the first time I engaged on a "spiritual" level with life (I'm a fairly pragmatic and reductionist guy, perhaps to a fault). But this also wore off for me and I returned to being my usual mostly unspiritual self after a couple of years boring my friends trying to tell my friends about the Tao... Without describing it.
I do feel like I have a respect for such things where before I just considered it all manipulative woo or self-delusion. I also think it paved the way to my being able to appreciate Wittgenstein's ideas (the ones I can grasp anyway).
I read through a few different translations of the TTC, two of which had commentaries. Both the text and the translations had somewhat different takes. So it's definitely worth trying a few versions.
Two I recommend: DC Lau's translation and Philip Ivanhoe's.
Interesting. I have always been a religious person but wandered from my own traditions for a while. Those days, my main attraction was taoism. But, like I mentioned, i dropped it.
Traditionally Taoism was a path for the old, for those who had completed their duty. Confucianism is the path for the young, for those who must fulfill their duty. One might say that fulfilling your duty without resistance is in fact following the Tao.
No, I mean, I'm native in Chinese and reasonably literate in classical Chinese, and my assessment is that ChatGPT's understanding and generation of classical Chinese leaves much to be desired.
As an aside, if your reading of the Tao Te Ching does not include possibility of transcription errors, borrowed homophones (words with same sounds at the time of writing), etc. you're probably not exploring the full extent of the intended meanings of the original author(s). ChatGPT does none of that.
It's possible that ChatGPT's training data includes a couple translations of Tao Te Ching, in which case I'm not sure whether that better or worse in terms of results.
ctext.org is great though, no question about that. I've been using it for decades..
Source: trust me bro
reply