I see this upcoming election will be the final one. Nice work.

How do we know this post isn’t fake? Perhaps it’s all part of the ruse.

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Sounds like they lucked out into an awesome job with no real work required.

This is definitely a sink-or-swim moment for Lemmy. If this is going to work, this is the chance. Twitter and Reddit are imploding. Users have a reason to try something new and are willing to deal with young, buggy platforms because it’s better than the alternative and they needed an Internet home. My upvote taking ten seconds to register is itself the knife’s edge of creation, a new birth.

Just not using the app is better than using the app.

I love that a service that isn’t making a buck off of us gets levels of engagement that for-profit social networks would kill for.

This is happening because:

• Novelty, because new is fun. This will go down over time.
• The most passionate users are more likely to be early adopters. More casual users are coming.
• Smaller network means your content is less likely to be covered before. This factor will go down over time.
• Fediverse encourages multiple related communities, which means your specific contributions are more likely to be seen by other users.
• Lack of bots/astroturfing leads to more positive interactions. Bots will likely increase over time.

Therefore, I expect engagement will go down over time, but I am hopeful it will reach a higher point of stability because the fediverse design seems better at getting more varied content seen by its users, and it makes it harder for a small group of people or posts to dominate the discussion space.

PS: Anybody know how to add a space after the last bullet in a list?

I swear there’s at least one of these ladies in every restaurant I’ve attended in recent memory. Now I’m going to be imagining what their salad just told them.

Somewhat, but it’s just the “how’s the weather?” of this community because most everyone is here from Reddit, so it’s a starting point to me. I don’t think Lemmy exists just to spite Reddit, and I participate in discussions having nothing to do with the subject.

QED, I think this response completely addresses my concerns. I often miss the social aspect of systems that involve people. I can’t think of any further questions.

I reverse native binaries across a few different platforms for a living, but I’m just getting into Android. I will definitely take a look at those systems!

Underrated comment. I picked it because I had no idea what I was doing and it sounded all-encompassing and I wanted access to everything. I didn’t even know what an instance was. I just picked it because it sounded like a good guess to get access to all of Lemmy.

Hello, and thank you for taking the time to compose this response.

I think that I may have conflated the choice of language with the choice of distribution. I believe the choice of language is independent of the choice to distribute apps as native or not, for at least Java because Java has solutions for AOT compilation not the least of which was actually used before in Android 5 according to another response, and it was used prior to Android 7 according to this resource.

For the sake of discussion, I propose that this existing AOT compiler for Android Java applications (used today in the hybrid solution) be run in its entirety on a server instead of on the user devices. I don’t see a motivating reason to have the compiler on every user device to include a complex profile-guided optimization framework and hybrid JIT compiler (described in my third link in the original post) when we could ship the finished code and be done with it.

The benefit would be lower maintenance of the Android platform through a simpler design. (This benefit might shake out, but I get to that later.)

The migration process would consist of doing nothing for the typical app developer making this change quite cheap. The same languages would be supported as they are now. Indeed, this transition has already happened before and shows that this approach works, except with the build process happening on the device in earlier Android versions. I don’t understand why Google did not go a step further and ship the binaries, instead choosing to take a step back and ship a JIT compiler with the AOT compiler. Why ship the intermediate bytecode representation and insist on a complex on-device build and optimization runtime?

From the responses that I have received so far, I think the true answer as to why distribution isn’t native is likely composed of a combination of the following factors:

• Android’s heritage and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it mindset (very respectable IMHO).
• Android practically supports more platforms than arm64 even if not officially stated, such as Chromebooks and some x86 tablets. Shipping native would make this cross-arch support a lot more complicated.
• Loose coupling between hardware and software platforms as a good design decision.
• JIT performance can actually exceed AOT because more information is available at runtime.
• Backwards compatibility is very important to Android, and the impacts of not shipping bytecode to these old versions could be profound or practically impossible depending on how far back we wish to consider.

I’m sure that I’m making further assumptions, and surely there are oddball apps out there that really depend on having dynamic optimization to be performant, but I suspect these apps are in the minority. At a glance, the current solution seems too complicated, but I think understanding the history of the platform and the selection of devices that are supported today mostly answers my original question. Briefly, arm64 is absolutely not the end of the story even if it’s listed as the supported CPU architecture, and officially committing to just one now and forever could come home to roost.

Thank you; I will definitely add this to my reading list.

Thank you for the insight, however, I think that my question is somewhat different because I’m interested in the implementation choice rather than the language choice. To answer your question, I don’t think Android should switch to C/C++. Instead, I don’t understand why Android goes to such great lengths to avoid compiling whatever language is in use in advance. Naively from the outside looking in it appears this would greatly simplify the platform.

For example, I think it would be an improvement to use Java but compile the whole thing to a native image in the cloud and distribute the compiled binaries. We already have Java AOT capabilities in Android, therefore this appears to be technically feasible. Only one ISA is targeted officially. It’s not a great academic leap to think apps could be built off the phone instead to avoid the complex optimization problems.

I am ignoring Chromebooks a bit. I did not know that you could run Android apps on that platform and didn’t think to consider it because I didn’t see x86 listed on Wikipedia as an officially supported architecture.

We do have privacy laws today (USA user), but they are so weak that near my office I regularly see ads advising businesses to treat it as a liability problem and instead buy insurance as a faster and cheaper alternative to good practices.

And it works! This approach should not be feasible to address the costs of violating user privacy. It reiterates to me that we are far too lax.

Reddit is the best thing to ever happen to Lemmy. By making their product so terrible, it just keeps making Lemmy look more enjoyable because it’s incendentally rather than actively trying to be terrible.

It’s nice, but I feel like this is temporary. I don’t see Lemmy being more bot resistant. The bots will probably come. I think that’s alright because it’s just not the main problem that Lemmy is trying to solve.

This is hilarious. On my Desktop, which is quickly becoming my preferred interface for the moment, I just keep opening new tabs and letting it work when I post so I can move on with reading other content.

I ain’t even mad. You’ve got a good heart, soldier.

The purpose is backward and forward compatibility respectively.

The minimum version is the easiest to explain: any older, and your app just won’t run. Don’t even try. I (app) don’t have the compatibility code to work with you if you are older than my minimum version because I didn’t choose to include it, and you (Android) don’t know the changes that were made in the future platform versions, so you can’t help me.

Target version is a little more complex. This is the version of the API that I am designed to run with. You can use this information to set compatibility parameters for forward compatibility. For example, if I try to use API that doesn’t exist in your version or that would have had different behavior, you would know what I’m expecting because I declared to you what it was designed for at the time. This allows the system to tolerate your outdatedness better.

However, that compatibility feature sometimes leads to security issues because the new API tends to be more restricted or improved in ways that enhance security and privacy, hence the argument why there should be a minimum target version to express that you cannot use the less secure API even for the sake of compatibility.

I recently experienced this while building an upgrade for my 3D printer. The upgrade kit included a touchscreen. I found out later that the touchscreen was effectively its own separate computer with more than 10x more resources than the actual computer inside the 3D printer that was doing the most important calculations.

The compute and memory resource constraints were basically nonexistent factors in the design of the printer and the upgrade kit. Merely, a simpler computer was easier to design for and characterize, so the printer itself had a very simple computer, and for the UX, a “beefy” computer was much easier to program. It’s bizarre seeing how little the amount of computer resources mattered. It might as well have been free.