> And, those people are often trying to leverage worker passion to staff their companies.
Is there usually a good reason for an average employee to pour their passion into work? Seems like it's better to do a better job than your peers/coworkers but not shoot for the moon, unless you're getting a significant amount of that profit.
Most passions I see are usually poured into something separate from your earning potential, i.e. working a service job while writing music, auditioning for a movie or play, etc.
Unless they can afford to go all in, via startup funding or savings while working on their own project.
I guess there is a lost art of writing for optimal code/memory/execution time, especially as our resources increase.
I think the idea here is to write code quickly that's inefficient, and re-write it to be efficient if the performance is required down the line. For companies where there's bigger fish to fry, i.e. customer acquisition, it's more useful to pump out more features (even at the expense of bugs) because that draws customers.
But in places where performance is important, you do see developers squeeze out more cycles/memory. I.e. kernel/OS development, database servers, video games. It's just that most developers aren't in those areas of specialty anymore.
Btw, have you heard of https://handmade.network/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene ? Wondering what your thoughts are in those areas. There are probably more communities like the ones I mentioned, where developers are interested in writing the kind of code that you are talking about.
This is like the Kindle with Ads model from Amazon. You can pay Amazon an extra $20 (or request via support) to not have advertisements on the device forever. Or save a few bucks and deal with the occasional ad. And from what I can tell, the Kindle with Ads is still a pretty popular product.
Have you ever tried learning a spoken language by doing this? Like another commenter mentioned, it sounds a lot like Anki Spaced Repetition. It's very cool that you just rediscovered it, though.
I think there's a point to make on good PMs. Those are totally worth their weight.
The issue I have with bad PMs is the same issue with bad engineers. They can cause so much damage to a product or codebase, especially when they have free reign and an ear from higher management.
Maybe MacOS isn't a good push for gaming for either developers or Apple. I definitely think iOS is. The Apple Arcade Subscription plan seems to be part of that for gaming. I've seen a lot of people on the subway and even at work sometimes playing mobile games on their iOS device, from Call of Duty Mobile to racing games to tower defense.
I imagine when Apple expands their desktop and laptop lineup to M1 chips, it's going to include many of the games that are available from their mobile catalog.
Are you talking about the Superfish vulnerability? It's never affected the business class Thinkpad lines [1], but it has affected a lot of the other laptops that Lenovo has shipped.
Is it 1GB of text + source code? I can't imagine that much plaintext from one person unless binaries, images music, or video is involved. Github Pages is probably fine for most people even with the 1GB limit.
Btw, cool website. I didn't realize there's an N64 homebrew game development scene until looking at your blog.
This is pretty nice. It's effectively working as a blocklist from top domains.
It would be interesting to see a curated version with an allowlist of domains as well, like how Angelfire and friends in the 90s used to be with a "web ring" of peer websites.
This makes me think about how Yahoo Groups is shutting down in December 2020. Or Geocities in the past. All the content on both platforms is user generated.
The companies that offered those services have the right to shut it down. It's not really a public utility that's funded by the people using it or tax payers or anything like that.
It's up to each individual to archive what is important for them. But a lot of what we publish online is across different devices and on different platforms. It's not as easy to manage all that data as it could be.
I think for some search terms, SEO and AMP support make a difference on how high your website ranks against other search results. I think it encourages a certain kind of website (referral links, modest length article with buzzwords, lists with not a lot of depth).
These aren't advertisements, but I think they feel a lot like an advertisement in terms of what Google encourages others to post on their website.
So I am a fan of vim and have used it on and off for 15 years at this point. I generally use IDEs or VSCode these days instead for writing code. Here's my take.
I think the popularity of learning vim might be similar to what jiggawatts mentions as the 'perception of speed', especially for tools in the UNIX world, as well as being 'the hard way' like you mention. But I think there is value in learning how to use vim. I see the advantages of learning vim are programming language agnostic. Vim is focused around words and text, treating them as objects, and creating a mental map of keystrokes to modify those objects. I think it's somewhat analogous to typists that hunt-and-peck vs touch typists. Opens up a lot of productivity, but it's definitely not needed to be a writer.
I agree vim has many limitations. It has a not so great language for scripting, no out of the box setup for stuff like refactoring or renaming symbols in your codebase, GUI feels like a second class citizen (IMO, compared to the terminal version). In a lot of ways, it might not hold a candle to the likes of VSCode, Atom, Visual Studio, XCode, IntelliJ, Eclipse, etc.
The nice thing is that you could add a vim-like plugin to any of those IDEs/editors to match the spirit of vim, at least in terms of navigation. It's not like you need to stay in vim to reap the benefits of the mental model.
I think that's where a lot of the power and appeal of vim is. Vim is still drawing a new generation of programmers, artists, and hobbyists to learn this strange text editor, with its unique but powerful way of interacting with text.
I think video games fit in the area of 'completed software'. Most video games today rarely see updates a few years after they're released. And older video games were on read only mediums, so you would hope whatever you release is very stable and feature complete.