nextos

You need them in some scenarios. For example, lots of car rental companies refuse to take anything but a physical card.

> You can't formally verify your application works correctly under transient network error conditions if you never thought about what your application should do under those conditions.

This is why it's so important to separate functional from stateful code. Functional code is generally easier to specify. And, by isolating stateful code, one can e.g. fail fast and avoid stepping into undefined behavior.

I agree with the core thesis that LLMs + theorem provers might make formal methods cheap enough to be practical in software development.

The biggest issue was always cost. But there's still an alignment problem. Without human supervision, things might drift away from the original specification and intent.

From my own experience, what works best is some kind of Hoare/separation logic (contracts), as these are quite easy to follow and decompose.

Even something as simple as a minimal Haskell subset, plus a bit of LiquidHaskell, can get you really far if you are pragmatic.

Yeah, I heard some horror stories a few years back. Trustpilot and Google reviews had some interesting cases.

Gatwick long-term parking is not expensive if you book in advance. You need to take a slow bus shuttle to the terminal, but it's never more than 15-20 min including waiting time. I've used it a zillion times as I'd rather not give my keys to those meet & greet companies who drive your car 5 miles. It might void insurance and waiting times when you return tend to be over an hour.

It's sadly becoming harder. I've been playing that game for quite long and hope to stick to web apps, but still.

Some banks limit functionality on web apps, which is annoying.

More importantly, many refuse to provide a decent 2FA other than push notifications inside the app or SMS, which is insecure and EU has mandated its phaseout.

The thing that works for me is to pretend to be clueless and get an old hardware OTP generator, but those are susceptible to impersonation attacks on the bank side.

And he effectively killed the last EU platform. Will we ever see another one?

I miss these simpler times when devices were made to serve users, and not the other way round.

I think this is the real problem. I am sympathetic towards automated code synthesis.

But without formal verification and a human reviewing specifications to ensure alignment, I think code will end up being broken in unexpected ways or drift away from the original intent.

Exactly, and it sold really well despite that.

It was Kafkaesque, discontinuing a product before release.

Discussed in HN many times, but worth restating once more. The N9 was fantastic. A joy to use, and in many ways the best design, both hardware and software, I've ever handled. Everything had been designed with care and some UI elements remain unmatched.

I think I was one of the first developers that got an N770 engineering sample (the first product in the N770-N9 saga) and it was really clear that they were onto something. Sadly, internal politics won over company and consumer interests. It took them extremely long to let this be a phone, not just an "Internet tablet". It was bizarre.

The same team is now behind Jolla/Sailfish. It's pretty remarkable how far they've got, but it's obviously not a perfect product given how small they are compared to the other mobile juggernauts. However, it's usable as a daily driver and, with a critical developer mass, it could get somewhere. There are already quite a few indie apps.

Crucially, I think it's the only platform that has the potential to set you truly free. GrapheneOS is the other alternative I can also endorse and tolerate, but it has a different set of compromises, and it's a bit fragile to Google pulling the plug. But it's great in its own ways.

Yes, this is why garden leaves are popular in quant finance.

You get paid for about a year to do nothing so that the trade secrets from your firm (trading strategies) expire.

That's very different from a non-compete. A non-compete is about your own know-how, not the company's.

I have never said they always act as a bloc, but their industry has a strong component of long-term strategic government planning behind them.