dazzawazza

> While it’s far from perfect, writing it taught me more about UI systems than I ever would have learned by sticking to established solutions alone.

This is a great attitude to have. Keep up the great work.

That's a great story. Thank you. I hope you've had the opportunity to give someone else a leg up.

Accepting that people change, and that people are inherently full of contradictions, is part of growing up... and changing.

Alas my work will not allow me to mount a random NFS share but I take your point, simplicity is a virtue.

Nice. I self host using Navidrome, FreeBSD and Wireguard. I have a decent Fibre connection to my house and a static IP so it's "free" to serve.

I primary do it because Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry and I love heavy metal.

Indeed we are. I wish we interacted with the other industries more. There is a lot to learn from video game development where we are driven by soft real-time constraints.

Alas the standards committee is always asking for people like us to join but few of our billion dollar companies will pony up any money. This is despite many of them having custom forks of clang that they maintain.

I'm really enjoying some of the innovation in the BSD space at the moment.

I recently migrated one of my FreeBSD servers to hetzner and it was a breeze. The only wrinkle was that, until you've completed a billing cycle, you can't host an email server as the required ports are blocked.

For me this was fine and I understand why they do this but it wasn't clear to me at the start.

yep, it's the permanent nature of the recording put in to the public sphere that is the game changer for me.

I accept I am visible in public to all who share a space but I do not accept that the ephemeral nature of my existence in that space should be violated.

I agree with you but somethings are missing from the BP experience.

I've implemented many VPLs in video games and I've used Blueprints extensively. I've probably made all the classic "mistakes" designing VPLs, many of which are mentioned in this article. I don't think I am very good at designing VPLs despite having done it on and off for 30 years.

I think BPs are the best example of a VPL out there at the moment. Certainly in video games. However it still falls short of the ideals of VPLs.

Essentially BPs trick people in to being programmers. They still have to understand the "ways" of programming (for loops, if then, etc). With a little context switch and training they would probably be more productive with a text based interface. So the abstraction BPs provide is very limited.

BPs are a general programming tool used for materials, game play logic, animation trees etc. Because of this there are few, if any, high level abstractions that relieve the user of the burden of programming. Don't get me wrong, this is hard, very hard, so I am not calling anyone out. It requires sitting down with a non-technical person and really understanding how they think and what they need. Turning that in to something that isn't node + wire is hard. The fact that the industry has created technical artists to fill the void says to me that BPs are failing to a certain extent (and TAs can just use text based programming and do in many studios).

Overall I agree that the field of VPLs is stuck at a local minima and the 10x productivity improvement for non programmers is still illusive.

I think you are correct. I work in game dev. Almost all code is in C/C++ (with some in Python and C#).

LLMs are nothing more than rubber ducking in game dev. The code they generate is often useful as a starting point or to lighten the mood because it's so bad you get a laugh. Beyond that it's broadly useless.

I put this down to the relatively small number of people who work in game dev resulting in relatively small number of blogs from which to "learn" game dev.

Game Dev is a conservative industry with a lot of magic sauce hidden inside companies for VERY good reasons.

yep, in London it's pretty normal to be driving at 30 and be overtaken by a teenager on a scooter with no insurance, no protective equipment and not a care in the world. They can kill themselves for all I care but they can easily kill a pedestrian or cyclist which doesn't seem reasonable to me.

There is the old adage that every bit of friction increases the chance something won't be done.

Swarm feels like a minimal effort to me and just isn't as frictionless as GitHub. Id rather have Swarm than not, but it's not great.

I mean it might work but you'll still get pull time-outs constantly with LFS. It's expensive to wait two or three days before you can start working on a project. Go way for two weeks, it will be a day before you can "pulled" up to date.

I hope this "new" system works but I think Perforce is safe for now.

> People should use the VCS that's appropriate for their project rather than insist on git everywhere.

A lot of people don't seem to realise this. I work in game dev and SVN or Perforce are far far better than Git for source control in this space.

In AA game dev a checkout (not the complete history, not the source art files) can easily get to 300GB of binary data. This is really pushing Subversion to it's limits.

In AAA gamedev you are looking at a full checkout of the latest assets (not the complete history, not the source art files) of at least 1TB and 2TB is becoming more and more common. The whole repo can easily come in at 100 TB. At this scale Perforce is really the only game in town (and they know this and charge through the nose for it).

In the movie industry you can multiply AAA gamedev by ~10.

Git has no hope of working at this scale as much as I'd like it to.