Arelius · HackerTrans

le mois dernierdiscuss

It's a neat piece of hardware, but honestly I never wanted to play any of the games. I don't really know for to do discovery for it, and none of the ones I tried stuck for me, honestly, I prefer to emulate games from my childhood, or retro/indie games I already have on my back-log.

Arelius

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

At some point we will have to stop treating universities as tests to pass, and actually what they claim to be: places to learn. Ultimately it needs to be on the student to want to learn.

Obviously this would be easier if our entire school system before university wasn't seemingly designed too destroy every last ounce of a child's curiosity.

Arelius

il y a 3 moisdiscuss

> My Chrome binaries are about 700MB on Mac and 500MB on Windows

That's kind-of the point though right? An application that has been say <700 MB for decades, suddenly deciding it'll take a multiple of it's size without asking seems pretty unreasonable, I think it's pretty fair to say the expectations for Chrome were set already.

It'd be similarly unreasonable for a video game that once took 50 GB, to suddenly decide to take 400 GB.

Arelius

il y a 4 moisdiscuss

And actually to add, I've been finding myself going to nixpkgs first for reference on how to build and/or configure packages even outside of nix.

Arelius

il y a 4 moisdiscuss

> I work on projects with terrible documentation because somebody pays me to do so or there is a significant potential that I can unlock.

I mean, I'd argue there is significant potential, but really, for me it's just easy because I've been doing it for 20 years, and documentation is always fundamentally worse than code in some important ways.

> If Nix project really cares about being competitive and adopt users, they have to document their stuff.

This is one of the good/bad things about OSS.. most users don't provide positive value to the project. So do they really want to adopt users? Shrugs but the project is certainly competitive.

Arelius

il y a 4 moisdiscuss

You know, I used to agree, but what I realized, is I am a software engineer, and I'm used to working in large projects with source-code as the only documentation.

And that's what's great about NixOS, you just clone nixpkgs and treat it like any other underdocumented software you might work on.

Arelius

il y a 5 moisdiscuss

It's like most things in software, if you constrain the problem enough, focus on the problems you actually have and make some smart choices early on, it can be a very modest lift on the order of a week or two for a 90% solution, but on the other end of the spectrum, it's a lifetime of work for a team of hundreds...

Arelius

il y a 5 moisdiscuss

Except not in the USA. To bad the rings looks nice.

Arelius

il y a 8 moisdiscuss

Copyright isn't some axiom, but to quote wikipedia: "Copyright laws allow products of creative human activities, such as literary and artistic production, to be preferentially exploited and thus incentivized."

It's a tool to incentivse human creative expression.

Thus it's entirely sensible to consider and treat the output from computers and humans differently.

Especially when you consider large differences between computers and humans, such as how trivial it is to create perfect duplicates of computer training.

Arelius

il y a 12 moisdiscuss

Been looking into this for a while myself, very cool. It seems .nl has a lot of resources and support for this sort of thing. Any similar resources like coloclue in the San Francisco Bay Area? It seems confusing to find just a couple of U of rack space in SF that you could peer in and out of?

Arelius

il y a 12 moisdiscuss

I'm actually not sure the Northridge earthquake was cited in the Richter scale, most references I see have it as about a 6.7, which based on the USGS catalog, was it's moment magnitude 6.7 Mw

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci3144585/...

And today's earthquake for comparison:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000qw60...

And some information of Magnitude types: https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/magnitude-t...

I think it's probably safe to assume, that today's earthquake is much more energetic at least.

Arelius

l’année dernièrediscuss

Great, so now I need a special editor plugin, and a compatible editor just to be able to properly view code?

No wonder why spaces "won"

Arelius

l’année dernièrediscuss

Yes, this. Which the counter point is either, Don't align things, or use tabs for indentation, and spaces for alignment.

And maybe you can enforce no alignment, but that's a hard fight to win.

And as far as tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, I've found no practical way to enforce this via tooling/linting. And a rule without enforcement becomes inconsistent, which is how we get files full of mixtures of spaces and tabs, which is how people get frustrated with tabs, and we decide to throw it all out.

And inevitably, that's part of how spaces "won"

Arelius

l’année dernièrediscuss

> Legally perilous maybe, although my non-lawyer brain sees that as fair use, especially if the emulator doesn't let you play the full game. Idk, but it'd be a unique thing on the internet.

IANAL, but I think what a lot of people don't understand is that "fair-use" is a defense. Which basically means you have to be prepared to argue in in court. A lot of potential fair-use is quashed before it gets to that point.

It's also a balancing test, which means that it's very fact/context dependent, and subjective, which results in for a lot of cases, you really won't know until you actually get to court.

Arelius

l’année dernièrediscuss

Maybe...

But then, having also lived it, upgrading to newer versions of PHP and it's required modules is also not trivial.

And it's often not just your language, the cloud vendors have a lot of incentives to get you to use their hosted Postgres, or AuroraDB, or GameLift. Or even something as simple as we built all of our deployment scripts/images for our PHP system on Amazon Linux X, and now for reason Y, only Amazon Linux X+2 is supported.

Arelius

l’année dernièrediscuss

It is well known. But also not all developers want to/ can afford the risk to tie all their networking services to Steam.

Arelius

l’année dernièrediscuss

Honestly, it's probably simpler than this, and the root of the problem often comes down to the Cloud Providers to begin with.

It's astounding the frequency I get an email from some cloud provider, or mobile app store that says something to the effect of:

"(Version X) of Dependency Y that we convinced you to use 5+ years ago is getting deprecated on August 1st, if you don't upgrade to Version X+5 you're service will go offline"

And we're stuck looking at the minimal amount of players running of that platform, and the hard choice of do we move precious human resources off of some in-progress game, that's already running late to learn a system that they never worked on, because the original people are long gone?

So, that's often why our network services, and mobile versions of our games are being taken offline while the single binary we shipped to one of the serious console vendors 10-20 years ago is still running, and now running on consoles 2 generations newer.

So, yeah, it'd be great if we could ship a package for Amazon to host perpetually, but first you could just get Amazon to care enough to ship a stable platform to build upon that wouldn't get depreciated.

Arelius

l’année dernièrediscuss

As someone who has firsthand experience:

A. The same reason Amazon had/has such a hard time.

B. Google lacking the same persistence of Amazon (Consider all the products that are killed)

C. Google's hiring process. (They organizationlly do not know how to hire specialists)

Arelius

l’année dernièrediscuss

Ugh, on both mobile platforms, we have/had multiple popular games that their updates keep breaking, and they keep deprecating SDKs for. And each game is at on a different engine revision so we can't combone the work. We'd really like to keep these games up for for our mobile players, but we can't justify the cost, we make some money on these platforms, but nothing that justifies the immense cost.

Meanwhile, our console/steam/gog builds have seen an update or so at our discretion, and have just continued to run happily, and make more money.

Honestly it's hard to justify the maintenance effort to even consider porting out next games to mobile.

But really the people who are hurt are our players that already bought our game, but when the upgrade phones or OSes they no longer have an option to play unless they want to transfer their licenses to PC.

Arelius

l’année dernièrediscuss

I'm actually really curious what the experience is like having not more than 10 tabs at a time, like what thing causes you to close a tab? 10 seems sort of wild to me, it's enough that you are clearly not just monotasking, somehow bounded. Probably in contrast, if you could imagine just forgetting to do that whole closing tabs thing, eventually you have hundreds or thousands of tabs.

Some context, for starters, I have about 10 tabs pinned, discord, 3 slack instances, my fastmail, my gmail, my work mail, spotify, my task list.

Then, there is the things I left open because I am going to read it, a stack of documentation I'm working on. A few random products I'm researching as procrastination. Any search I'm on, and a tree of tabs from different results that I'm working through.

There are the various layers of those things for the things I was working on 30 minutes or a day ago, that I haven't worked back to yet.

And most importantly, there are all the tabs that used to fall in the prior categories, that I just forgot to close, or haven't gotten around to closing yet.

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