Thanks for writing this up! It still assumes a lot of prior knowledge, but it's a good starting point to approaching these problems. How JavaFX works on different platforms really looks like dark magic from the outside. I wrote an app in Clojure using cljfx. I can jpackage it and run it Linux/Windows/macOS .. it's quite easy to get working. But once you step outside of the standard platforms it gets complicated really fast. Trying to get it to Android or a native build and suddenly you have to be an expert in several build systems and JVM internals.

JavaFX is supported by Gluon and not Oracle

It seems more Oracle than Gluon: https://github.com/openjdk/jfx/graphs/contributors

Oh hmm, I'm honestly not super sure then. I know Gluon is the one that's seemingly has a business providing JavaFX support, while Oracle.. as far as I know doesn't offer a license or anything services in that direction? But I could be wrong. Gluon is mentioned in the article.. they have a very Qt-style confusing licensing situation where it's probably all free.. but you're never quite sure :)

The whole space is a lot more icky than one would like it to be.. Which is unfortunate b/c while it doesn't have a billion features, it's a nice composable reactive framework to use (at least from cljfx/clojure)

It is complicated.

There was a time Oracle decided it wasn't worth the investment, note that it started as E3 scripting under Sun and it was only finalised after the acquisition.

So a few Java champions took over it at Gluon.

Then when Java 26 was released, Oracle reintroduced support for JavaFX,

https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-releases-jav...

It’s all a circle jerk in the JVM space

is there a good metric of model degredation over time?

Im a bit lazy and only use the free models different companies host and the biggest difference i see is that some models (Gemini, OpenAI) get progressively stupid in long chats. You end up having to start a new session every oncr in a while. Or they get really hung up on a theme and cant shift to a new topic.

By contrast, Ive been impressed with Qwen. I have some chats on research and code architecture that have stretched for weeks without any noteable change in quality (though occassionally it seems to "rush" to an answer)

Im just looking at all the listed benchmarks and im unsue which i should be looking at

Isn't HarmonyOS a fork of Android? I've never seen anything about the apps being half broken - do you have more info?

The newer versions of are no longer based on Android. So it's either quirky VMs with hundreds of papercuts or nothing.

Huawei Global is still a thing, and in some markets they keep releasing phones using Android 12 and no GMS. That is probably even worse.

I hadn't seen the blog post at first and was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to upload data for a paper (uploads hang and will just reset periodically)

I found a nice workaround though. You can upload data to Github - though sometimes you need to split this across several commits b/c you can't push several GBs of data at once. You then link your Github account to Zenodo and make a release. The data is then copied over as a .zip (the Release "Asset"). Takes under a minute.

The Zenodo-Github connection is still working just fine.

Maybe this will be useful for someone!

Seems this would make it possible to make a relatively cheap waterproof actuator if you made it out of something corrosion resistant?

I've been looking for actuators to use in damp/wet environments and sealed actuators are rather expensive and supposedly don't last too long

Some hot water radiator systems use wax actuated valves made from brass (Taco brand is common). They are extremely simple and robust.

thank you for the pointer!

I've struggled to protect eletronics. Waterproof enclosures all fail over time. Though I have some ideas for immersion in mineral oil. But finding actuators that could work has been a bit of a struggle. These look cool, though maybe not something one could run off 5V :) Ill keep looking around

This is why wax motors are used for washing machine door locks.

how does it work for a door lock?it seem it works pretty slowly.

Mayne you know, are the internal components already designed with corrosion in mind?

In washing machine application the locking action is quite fast as the heating element is PTC connected more or less directly to mains, pretty substantial amount of energy gets dumped into the wax over few AC line cycles. In that application (and also in most industrial automation situations) ~100ms is more than fast enough because when most of the effector components are AC powered you end up with ~40ms worst case actuation delay just from the physics of AC electricity. On my washing machine it is quite noticeable that when you press "start" the door gets positively locked well before the capacitive sensing "button" finishes playing its haptic feedback non-sense. (the fact that front panel of cheap-ish toploading washing machine is actually a huge touchpad with haptic feedback that is designed to look and behave like five physical buttons says many things about economics of manufacturing stuff for that somewhat hostile environment at these scales)

oh interesting - I didn't realize PTCs can be used that way safely. I thought it hits a target temperature and then will continue heating at that temperature (which in your scenario would be unsafe). Maybe for my usecase it'll be hard to find a suitable actuator b/c I have a 5V system running of battery (looks like 12V ones do exist though)

From the linked page:

> When a cycle is started, a wax motor is actuated pushing a pin outward and locking the door. This design has cost, reliability and safety advantages. In moist conditions a wax motor costs less for equivalent reliability than an electromagnetic solenoid or motor latch. It has a predictable passive release delay. If power is lost the door remains briefly locked, designed to be longer than the high speed spin cycle coast-down time, then reliably unlocks as the wax cools.

furthermore, couldnt you do parallax from the multiple cameras as well as flicker the flash?

seems pretty easy to make it sufficiently difficult to trick the system

There's very little incentive to switch. When people release for Linux they almost always first/only test it works on Ubuntu - hence it's going to be the least buggy. (ex: GOG only seemingly tested games on Ubuntu)

So the switching cost is buggy software. You'd need something radically different that brings enough new features to the table to make it worth it the switch and dealing with bad/non-existant support.

I think something like Nix/Guix but with stable library versions that matches Ubuntu/Debian LTS ones 1-to-1 could get traction

Then you would have to embrace their bad decisions, such as this one, and if you do, what’s the point?

Everything just needs to run from a container with their expected runtime environment.

It's less about the specific issue and more indicative of bad/insufficient test coverage

Isn't Mincecraft basically that? I've never played it, so would be curious to hear from someone who's played both. From the outside both look very dull/soulless and yet people spend hours playing Minecraft building things - just engaging with their imaginations

Minecraft is Lego without threats to your feet because the pieces are virtual not everywhere on the floor :)

And I mean the old freeform Lego, not the paint by numbers sets they're selling now.

I think one thing that Minecraft does very well is that it does not push the player towards any of its game systems, which allows the player to make up their own fun. No Man's Sky on the other hand throws a lot of different game systems at you. Just having points of interests pushes the player into just going from one to the other instead of them exploring what might make the game fun for them.

Basic Minecraft is basically that imo

Modded Minecraft is a very different beast, depending on the mods

It's pretty cool to see what modders have done with it over the years. I genuinely think Minecraft + Create is the best factory game.

Even vanilla minecraft is a far superior experience to NMS. Minecraft's approach to procedural generation poduces more meaningful exploration because its terrain, resources, structures, and building system interact far more deeply with the gameplay than NMS linear number-go-up grind.

Of course, introducing mods makes Minecraft the most compelling entry in the genre by a huge margin, but not necessarily a fair comparison since the combined human effort involved in the minecraft mod ecosystem vastly eclipses what the NMS team could do on their own.

Building in Minecraft is a very different beast than building in NMS though. The prebuilt cabins and machines of NMS aren't the rabbit hole of redstone engineering that Minecraft has.