Better support for variable form factors wouldn’t force anyone to do anything. It would incentivise them to use that support.
Danox is just saying (IMHO) that Google can’t be bothered because they don’t need Android to be good, they just need it to be good enough to continue existing.
It might, but if you look at other AOSP features in that vein (split-screen multitasking, popout volume sliders, standard dialer app) they're all largely ignored by downstream OEM Android ROMs. I wish that wasn't the case, but it's also clear why this happens.
Google has led many horses to this spring, only to watch Samsung ship some godawful monstrosity and refuse to drink. It's part of Android's identity, not Google's.
It very much depends what projects they are coding. One thing agentic coding is really good for is developing highly specific custom applications specifically for your own use case. This can include the kinds of decision support and analytics tasks a C-level relies on to understand how their organisation is functioning, what's actually going on, and where the gaps are.
My team is using coding agents to develop analytics and reporting applications, and an engineering automation application, specific to our needs, that simply would not exist otherwise. The cost and time would be far too great. I can easily imagine there are plenty of cases like this, for all sorts of roles, including managerial ones, where only the person doing the job understands the job well enough to specify a requirement and guide an agent to code exactly what they need.
That definitely happens, but also many people are also using this stuff to get some amazing work done.
I think AI is an incredible competence magnifier. If someone knows what they are doing that competence can get magnified massively. If they do not know what they are doing, that gets magnified just as much. The tricky part is getting people with a low level but real degree of competence, which is all of us when we're starting out, to learn how to reliably magnify that.
Suppose you have a 6 months lead time to order volumes of parts for a new product launch. 4 months before the launch you see a new use case developing that's going to dramatically boost demand at launch.
Even though you saw this coming 4 months before the launch, at the launch time itself you're still caught off guard. Demand is still dramatically higher than your capacity to meet it, and that's still going to be true for at least another few months, and there is nothing you can do about that. What you can do, you did 4 months ago to increase parts orders, but you're still caught flat footed right now.
So, the developer updates both the free version and the paid version with the latest features (the only difference is the free version is sans GUI), and continues to serve the older free keyboard only 0.47 version on his website, and I'm supposed to be upset by this? Because he dropped the keyboard UI feature?
This DFHack command just toggles the 'enable keyboard cursor' feature. The issue is that the new keyboard cursor only works under specific scenarios, like designating digging sites. I don't think there's a way to use the keyboard cursor for everything like in 0.47.
(I agree with your broader point that it's not reasonable to be angry at Bay12 for dropping this feature.)
I think it is fair for die hard fans to be annoyed if they paid to support and that way triggered a timeline where devs drop features they like in favor of friendliness to noobs. When economics kicks in, there's more money to be made from noobs.
Also it's not either or. If it is paid or free it's irrelevant. For example even if you pay, the seller doesn't owe you anything than what you paid for. And by contrast with totally free software we still file tickets and want things.
We can be frustrated by somebody's actions knowing we can't really demand something.
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