Microsoft already switched its release support to the "series" model. There are still big games coming out on PS4. With the PS6 expected to be very expensive, we may very well see games simultaneously released on the 4, 5, and 6. We may be moving away from discrete console generations. Older consoles still have a massive library you can cycle through as well.
Yeah, the console companies want to be profitable, but consumers are pushing for new stuff, too. I don't care a whole lot about graphics improvements, but going from HDDs to SSDs was a huge improvement and worth the upgrade for me. And software engineers as a whole have long favored requiring new hardware over optimization for current hardware. I hope the great electronics crunch will curtail that.
I was talking about game compatibility and you brought up an utterly unrelated point and referenced non-specified “recent moves by Sony”. Forgive me for giving you the benefit of the doubt and inquiring if there were platform changes that would affect compatibility.
Clawing back games isn’t a particularly new risk. If you issue a chargeback, Sony bans your account, losing your library and any wallet funds you may have. And I already indicated that if I have to go all digital, then Steam is far more attractive. But there’s no guarantee any given game I buy on Steam is going to play on any given device. If I purchase a PS5 game I can be fairly certain it will run on a PS5 and what the performance is going to be like.
But, yeah, thanks for reminding me: physical games are still a major benefit for consoles. I buy Switch cartridges almost exclusively because Nintendo's DRM implementation is horrible for a family library. I lend games to friends and family members. I've even sold games and bought used ones. Steam Family is great, and the best of the current DRM options. But, while physical still exists, it's a good reason for favor consoles that has nothing to do with technical acumen.
Can you please elaborate? The recent moves I’ve seen have been announcing a shift to digital-only and another about clawing back movie purchases. Neither are appealing to me, but also aren’t related to game performance or compatibility.
I don’t think the appeal is just to the less technically inclined masses. I’m a developer with a MacBook Pro and a Linux workstation. Proton has come a long way, but consoles just work for the most part; I never have to question whether the game will function and perform well on the console (setting aside the random buggy messes we see).
Then there’s the convenience. I don’t want to play games where I work. I want to play on my TV. I have no interest in moving my workstation into my living room. Streaming with Moonlight works well enough, but there’s still lag. Even if I wanted to move my PC to the living room, the setup isn’t as nice. The Steam Machine has HDMI CEC and can power on with a controller — all the major consoles have had that for years.
Even if I accepted all that, no one else in my household could play anything while I’m working on my computer.
Things are a little weird now. If I’m going to have to go all digital, Steam Family is by far the best option of those with DRM. But, due to the astronomical cost of components, consoles are still pretty attractive.
I’ve regularly used an M1 Max, M4 Pro, and M5 Max. They all get pretty loud when driving local LLMs. “Jet-engine” would be hyperbolic, but it’s definitely noisy.
He didn’t ask for it, as far as I can tell. It looks like a Rovio customer asked how they treat downstream partners. I think that’s allowed under capitalism.
Be that as it may, plenty of engineers don’t understand the full ramifications of their open source license choice. Undoubtedly some, if not many, regret it afterwards. Companies change the terms or revoke licenses all the time. But, the dumb, naive engineer that gave their work away didn’t pay a lawyer to advise how to best give their work away, so screw ‘em.
If I made a boatload of money on the back of someone else’s work, I’d reward them. You wouldn’t. Neither one of us is legally required to. I’m not fond of taking advantage of people that don’t realize their worth. And I think the whole open source thing works best giving and taking, whether that’s code, money, or time.
But, this cutthroat approach to open source also hasn’t always been the societal norm. IBM and others made sizable donations to groups like the Apache Software Foundation back in the 90s and 00s and were more or less expected to do so. It seemed to me more a case of both sides agreeing a bunch of money could be spent on lawyers to iron out whatever terms or we could keep the licensing simple and have a gentlemen’s agreement on how to conduct ourselves. I’ve never heard of the Box2D guy so I hope that fame was worth something. It sounds a lot like being paid in exposure.
To your point, I don’t know how to codify a “leave a penny, take a penny” approach to open source and really don’t have the inclination to spend either the time or the money on a lawyer to figure that out. So, nowadays I just don’t release open source code anymore or, if I do, it’s AGPL just so I can protect my interests. I don’t think I’m alone in this. The camaraderie aspect of it has been supplanted by maximum value extraction and I don’t think that’s really sustainable. But between LLMs and an endless source of naive optimists, maybe this is fine.
You can’t export save files on PS5. You can’t transfer licenses, so you’ll have to repurchase any games you want to continue playing. For trophy/achievement hunters, those are going to be locked away. And a lot of the online game accounts are locked to the platform so you’ll have to start any progress/reputation/level over.
Yeah, you can walk away, but let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as buying orange juice at a new grocer because your regular one only sells it with pulp now. People aren’t being irrational in being annoyed by this.
Part of the point the article makes is that most other popular languages have a comprehensive standard library. JS has an astonishingly small on. Rather than have one vetted set of libraries that ship with the language, applications either need to roll it themselves or pull from a 3rd party package repository. We've drilled NIH into people, so they tend to reach for packages. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it often means they're pulling in more code than they need. The JS ecosystem has also favored smaller modules, so you need many of them. And everyone builds on top of that, leading to massive growth in dependency graphs. It's a huge surface area for things to go wrong, intentionally or not.
With many other languages, you have a lot of functionality out of the box. Certainly, there have been bugs and security issues, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to what you see in the JS ecosystem. With other languages, you have a much smaller external dependency graph and the core functionality is coming from a trusted 3rd party.
The lack of a comprehensive standard library for JavaScript also results in projects pulling many more third party dependencies than you would with most other modern environments. It’s just a bigger attack surface. And if you can compromise a module used for basic functionality that you’d get out of the box elsewhere, the blast radius will be enormous.
They’re definitely playing catch up, but the IDE integration makes interactive development really nice. Claude is good for one-shotting things, but I find JetBrains AI integration really useful for working with large codebases where I may be unfamiliar with things.
I think they’ve been caught in a bad spot. They’re a profitable company, but nowhere on the scale of Microsoft. And they don’t have billions of VC to effectively price dump. Other tools that can focus on one thing and burn cash are advancing quickly and some of them don’t really need an IDE at all.
The semi-recent introduction of ACP integration in the JetBrains IDEs has been a nice bridge. But now it’s confusing how everything comes together. I really hope they can survive.
Based on another reply I can’t tell if there’s a clever window-based pun that I’m missing. If not, I think you want “shudder” and not “shutter” here. I’m sorry if I just ruined the joke.
CheapCharts is really nice. I find discovery in the Apple TV store pretty bad otherwise. They earn their affiliate revenue.
I do wish we had DRM-free purchases like we have with MP3s. But this is a big step up over streaming services. The Movies Anywhere integration is handy as well.
After getting scammed on Facebook Marketplace, I look at the profiles of sellers, particularly if they don’t have much in way of reviews. That seems more prudent than creepy to me. I’m not stalking anyone and I’m not looking to be their friend.
Is there a better way to do seller verification? It does seem like an information leak to me. Craigslist and eBay don’t share my identification as a potential buyer. I don’t love the marketplace being tied to a social network, but it’s what many people are using these days.
In case anyone's wondering, the TruffleRuby project is still going strong. It undoubtedly would be going stronger were Chris still with us. But, some of us that worked with Chris in the early days of the project and others that joined later are still pushing the project forward.
If you're interested in the project, please give it a try. Or, if you just want to chat Ruby compilers, feel free to drop into one of our community channels (Slack or GitHub Discussions).
I'd imagine you don't want to look like you're self-promoting, but I'd really love to read more about the JPEG project. I think it could be quite good for the community. As a whole, I believe Rubyists need to stop reaching for native extensions so quickly. Whether on YJIT, ZJIT, JRuby, or TruffleRuby, all of them will benefit from having more code in Ruby. Incidentally, Chris's final conference talk¹ made the case for moving to a Ruby-based implementation for the Ruby core library.
For those cases where you're writing a native extension to primary bridge over to a native library, you may find either FFI or Fiddle handle your use case quite well.
Just in case you were unaware, there is and was a 100% open source variant of the GraalVM referred to as the "Community Edition (CE)"¹. RedHat built their own distribution based on that source tree called Mandrel². The closed source version is faster in many cases, but the CE release in very capable.
What makes plasma the obvious worse choice? I have a 50” plasma that still looks better than just about any non-OLED TV I’ve seen. I understand price was a concern, but OLED TVs sit in that price category now.
The only real downside with the TV is that uses more power than I’d like and, consequently, throws off more heat than I’d like. Otherwise, it’s been very reliable and looks fantastic. I’m curious what I’m missing.
My experience with small police departments in the US is that they either don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with small property claims. If you’re a business they’ll be there in 10 minutes, but individuals aren’t afforded the same courtesy. Eventually, citizens realize it’s just not worth the cost or the hassle to report a crime unless it helps with an insurance claim.
Working on ZJIT & TruffleRuby at Shopify.