Software engineer (video games). Likes dogs, DJing + EDM, running, electronics and loud bangs in Reservoir.
It’s the same for people who don’t understand basic electronics or mechanics. Any problem just becomes “it’s broken” and the only solution is to take it to an expert and pay for their time, or toss it and buy a new one. It’s expensive to be ignorant.
To kill any competition and ensure they retain control over future standards. Money. It’s pretty straightforward.
The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they’ve captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They’ll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don’t control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What’s left is a “dead” open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.
I can’t speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they “handle it” by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there’s an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.
One of the biggest challenges with online marketplaces is personal safety for physical meetups and scam prevention for online sales. It’ll be interesting if there are any efforts to solve this, such as an escrow system or other process to keep buyers and sellers honest.
What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.
To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.
… until you finally track down who wrote this mess, and it was you 5 years ago.
Where this game shines is in storytelling and art. I thoroughly enjoyed it and rate it very highly, but I also really enjoy the walking simulator genre. It’s the perfect game to chill out and play on the big screen over an evening or two, very watchable for spectators too.
Haha, love the last paragraph. It’s hard for software engineers to release code publicly knowing their work is going to be scrutinized by other engineers, without adding a disclaimer or caveat of some kind.
“We had very little time and were crunching for months”
“I know this is a bit hacky but I was 7 years old”
“I wrote this code in hospital while I was recovering from anesthesia”
It reminds me of a musician playing their song publicly for the first time.
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If you enjoyed Twisted Metal, you will enjoy Fallout. Both are excellent TV adaptations of their respective games, and have a thick layer of dark humour underpinning the action. Twisted Metal was particularly surprising, I want to shake the hand of whoever was looking at that crusty old PS2 game and saw dollar signs for TV!
Spite reading, love it.
A programmer sitting in front of a text-based IDE with millions of keyboard shortcuts at their disposal has to be the least necessary use case for a voice assistant I’ve ever heard of.
Even when you finally think you understand how something works, it’s only temporary. Give it enough time and you’ll look back at mysterious code you wrote years ago and think “Wow, they sure knew what they were doing!”
Thanks for the nostalgia. Haven’t seen the LHA file format in the wild for years!
Between this and gutter oil (Google it, or actually maybe don’t), it sure doesn’t leave me with a great impression of China and hygiene.
You could do what BaconReader did and name your app after a site meme (“France is Bacon”). How about 3DayNoPoopReader?
Absolutely! I spoke to my GP because I was completely functional with my stress and anxiety levels, but I just wasn’t feeling great - I was whiteknuckling my way through each work day, despite nobody knowing or my job performance being affected. I tried to justify the feeling to myself as “well, it’s just busy, I’ll be more relaxed once this rough patch is over”. But the “rough patch” would never end, it was like chasing a rainbow. Once I finally realised that it didn’t matter why I felt shit, if I still felt shit all the time, I spoke to a psychologist and tried some CBT. That didn’t make a huge difference, so my GP suggested trying out an SSRI. I’m now on a low dose of escitalopram and it’s been pretty life changing. If you’ve considered meds before, I’d highly recommend revisiting that idea. Modern anti-depression and anti-anxiety drugs are a lot more targeted than the older generations. You don’t need to be on them permanently either, you can try for 3-6 months and see how you go.
But you’re right - the one downside is potential insurance implications. For example, my life insurance no longer covers me for anything mental health related, which is quite a broad stroke considering I’ve got it under control and it was just garden variety mild generalised anxiety. I’m apparently one of “the crazies” now to them. But considering how much better I feel now, I’d make the same decision a million times over.
Happy to discuss more if you have follow-up questions, more people should chat about this stuff!
I used to have this feeling often with open world games, and it put me off playing them for a long time - it was just too overwhelming, and an activity that was supposed to relax me was having the opposite effect. Now when I play them I don’t care so much and just enjoy whatever I come across.
So what changed? I started taking medication for my anxiety, which I never thought was an issue until a few family members gave me a gentle nudge to talk to someone about it.
Not saying you’re in the same boat, but thought I’d share my story in case it’s helpful.
This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.