This is a joke right? tell me it is please
Yes
Chrome bumped its versioning numbers to overtake Firefox back in the day, that’s how we ended up with stupid version numbers like 124.1.2 instead of meaningful versions.
I’ve started using CalVer (so a relase in October 2026 would be numbered 26.10). This is just so much better for end-user applications.
What’s the benefits here? Why is the semver even bad to begin with? I’m not sure why I’d care that it’s in the hundreds. It’s a number, right?
Dates - I can just look at the release date if I want that.
It depends. If your software lives in a rapidly evolving ecosystem and gets buggier with age, CalVer tells the user how important it is to update. If the ecosystem is stable and you want to inform the user about feature sets and bug fixes, SemVer makes more sense.
SemVer simply has no meaning to end users.
By definition, SemVer is supposed to have meaning to end users. If you see the third number increase, no worries, it’s just bugfixes.
If you see the second number increase, well, in theory no worries, it’s just cool new features but doesn’t break anything you were doing, whatever you were doing should keep on working as always, and you can explore the new features at your leisure.
The first number changes: beware, something you may be used to can change/go away so it’s not necessarily a slam dunk to update that.
The problem is that many projects just call it SemVer when they just play with arbitrary numbers. I’ll call it “Marketing Versioning”.
In a GUI application every change is a breaking change…
You leave Visual Basic alone!
I just don’t see what the point is of making the version the date. If I care about time then look up the release date metadata associated with the version.
Semver shows breaking changes. That seems more important than time to me, and I’d think for most people. Calver implies to me that people are manually reviewing releases and going “yeah this date is more recent so I think I’ll go with that one” which makes no sense to me. Basically everyone has some automated update system.
What does matter to me is if an update with break anything or includes new features.
The only correct system is 0ver.
I honestly love this idea unironically because its not really 1.0 until the bugs are gone and all desired features are present. If there are ever 2.0 plans, those are actually 1.0 plans and you were further behind than you thought
IMHO, the leading number should always be a fully distinct version from its preceding iterations. But, there are very few tech-fluent (much less capable) people pulling those levers, it seems.
SemVer isn’t bad, but it’s kind of pointless in the browsers. The value in SemVer is if you realistically promise to take bumping that first number seriously. Implying you take backwards compatibility seriously, and bugfixes seriously enough to keep patching an ‘old’ version. If you just maniacally bump the ‘backwards incompatible change’ number and never bother to revisit old releases, then I don’t really care about the SemVer.
Of course, I also don’t necessarily care about the CalVer either if there’s update notification in play, the browsers will aggressively let you know you need an update. However if update notification isn’t working or otherwise isn’t in play, then CalVer can at least make you think “24.7… that seems like it might be old, maybe I should look for updates”. In Windows world the CalVer has been informative as the system or corporate IT screw up has frozen a device at 22H2 and trigger some manual effort to figure out/fix whyever the hell the system won’t go to new functional levels.
Will the trend stop before we have to start using scientific notation?
version 1.345435e+12 just dropped, time to upgrade.
A sane pre step would be using epoch time as version number.
Not really, Chromium’s version just increased by one with every release. It’s kinda the same as the second number in the semver designation.
It is worth noting that the same metric is the exact reason that web browser version numbers are so ridiculous.
What’s that saying? Something about the moment a metric is used to measure performance, it ceases to be a good metric.
That’s what’s happening here. In one of the stupidest ways possible.
Here’s an episode of the excellent “99 percent Invisible” design podcast that interviews a philosopher who ho has written about this topic! https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/673-the-score/
Oh yeah, Firefox used to take years to change major version number, then they changed to… what was it now, a 6 week schedule? To keep up with Chrome’s versions.
I hate their versioning schedule so damned much
It’s gone to a 4 week cadence, now down to a 2-week cadence.
So… apparently Dragon Naturally Speaking (version 16!) has them all blown out of the water…

God that app was such trash. Voice recognition simply did not work in the 2000s yet everybody and their mother tried to push it upon us 20 years too soon, just like they’re trying to do now with LLMs.
Remember when windows vista itself came with a voice to text assistant / keyboard thing?
I remeber trying to train that software for hours as a kid just for it to still not understand me half the time lol.
That was incredible. I had no idea it could be so easy.
Ironically, it was LLMs that made voice recognition work, but nobody is interested in pushing them anymore.
There’s a significant minority of us who relentlessly demand a TTS computer with Majel Barrett’s voice.
Good thing it’s not Morgan Freeman, then. Even naturally sounding like him can get you sued for impersonation, IIRC. 🙃
I don’t know to me the level it worked, is what makes it really silly to me that so few things can handle local transcription today without cloud services. I felt like it was 99% accurate running on a crappy win XP system with like 256 MB ram. Seems to me that it’s crazy that 20 years later we’re “well we need to hook you up to a supercomputer to do that”.
We literally have Enterprise wide systems where I work that had version upgrades over the last few years that moved transactions from our servers to cloud based ones. It’s been a fucking mess for every single application that did that. Regular outages with no real communication or ETA, and there’s nothing my team can do about it
unexpected factorial
Version 20,922,789,888,000 ?
I used to work with a pathologist who was so old and stuck in his ways that when the practice was shifting to Dragon, they allowed him to remain on the old transcriptionist service, even though it cost them more.
I’m literally the oldest I’ve ever been in my entire life!
More people have been to Berlin than I have
They are not ready for my Xbox 360
Meanwhile, Atari is off the scale
My old Amstrad CPC6128 isn’t too shabby either
Transylvania 6-5000 is in shambles.
They were ahead of their time, but even that couldn’t save that legendary version.
“Crap? I like crap. I love crap. I need crap. Crap is what sells newspapers. Look around you. Crap, crap, crap. Crap, crap, crap, crap.”
smirks in amiga500
Has anyone checked on Bonzi Buddy lately, I think it’s time to unfreeze him
Wow, blast from the past.
I sorta remember that I think… But my mind keeps going back to kittens shoved into glass vases for internet shock value. Bonzai kitties was a whole thing in the wild west of the internet and it shouldn’t be forgotten.
wild west of the internet
you mean the free internet
Hunh. So it tracks, then? Throwing the gates wide for the desperate plebs to run amok across the lands, chasing dreams of a better life —just softening up the resistance of those who came long before and effectively paving the way with their blood, sweat, and sundry lives.
The playbook hasn’t changed in centuries.
Clearly no AI can maintain an erection the way I do. It’s like a baby’s arm holding and apple, if the apple was of the Butchered Circumcision variety. Not as good for baking as the Grannie Smith or the Dutchmeal Sweets, but it holds turgid enough for penetration, so it’s whatever. And no AI can replace me, and you’re stuck with me for eternity cuz I know the true nature of reality and it’s a dog shit fucked in my ass cream last night, lengthwise in order to support the Huns invasion of Bulgaria.
crushing at saying stupid shit? both are gleefully sloppy
I would like to welcome Sashi to try my new Ollama modelfile, HehoAI 69420
This is also why I use AMD over NVIDIA.
Why?

Not the devices fault, weird-pauldrons guy.
AMD consumer GPU numbers are I think in the 9000s while Nvidia’s are only in the 5000’s or maybe 6000’s.
Nvidia’s really fallen hard, too, they’d reached the 9000s over 18 years ago and just plummeted after that
I’m an idiot.
Shit like this would be laughed at by my professors. What a bunch of goons
Windows 2000 has entered the chat
Heh, guess Gemini wasn’t even worth including
TMBB










