invader

You are not deciding for the entire gaming community. They can vote with their wallets, and the industry should better listen to them or going to end up on the wrong side of the bubble. It is not in its best shape anyways.

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My 2015 Chromebook Pixel didn't even live that long.

First, it looked amazing - solid aluminum body, powerful i7 inside, 16G RAM, high-resolution touch-sensitive screen. And that amazing Google-styled LED strip that showed the charge when double-tapped.

Then the hardware started to fail. First, the shiny chrome letters saying "Chromebook" slid aside, revealing a glue-filled depression. I struggled to properly glue it back ever since. Then, the hinge mechanism seal failed, and a sticky substance started to leak from the back. Then the battery started to fail even though it was maybe 2 or 3 years old. And finally, the screen backlight started to fail, and bright spots started to appear from the edges to the point that it can no longer be used. Dead in 3 or 4 years.

For comparison, my also 2015 MacBook Pro 13 still works perfectly, except for the software - Apple also stopped updating macOS, and I'm considering just installing Linux on that otherwise fully functional hardware.

It should be illegal to force software obsolescence on otherwise functioning hardware, increasing the global e-waste footprint.

Yes, they are used as air raid shelters, but they were designed like that in the first place. Some of them lie really deep - especially the ones in the city center.

Kyiv metro is one of the deepest in the world. We have one station that is 105 meters deep. So even with fast escalators, it feels like an eternity to go up and down there.

The slop theory tells us that (slop * slop) = doubleslop.

Sadly, the hype is real and that's what's happening in many places. Businesses are eager to bet on AI cause they'd been promised x100 productivity = fire 99 or 100 devs = huge profit.

I expect one day some slopware will succumb to one of these weird production bugs, no LLM will be able to fix it, and when the biz guys ask me for a fix estimate, I'm going to say "3 years".

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a cakewalk compared to what is going on today. 15k dead in 10 years, and the USSR was twice as big as modern ruzzia, so it is more like 7k dead for ruzzia alone. Now compare that to 4.5 years of the invasion of Ukraine - these wars are on a totally different scale. The Afghan affair was a remote low-profile endeavour; ports and oil refineries weren't burning all over the Soviet Union.

Can't ban the truth, heh?

Did Gilfoyle hack Jian Yang's smart fridge again?

Have we delegated writing code to "AGIs" so we can write code to proof that the slop code works? I have a vague memory of pre-AGI era, when we wrote things called "tests" to verify that our code did what it claimed to do.

Well, it's certainly not completely dead - there are many tools out there trying to implement visual learning from first principles. But I feel the "constructivist" core has been lost over time. Like we forgot the "why" of the equation while still keeping on building things.

Maybe it is not even about the tools themselves, but how they are used. It is like a cargo cult of constructivism that praises mechanical results instead of celebrating creativity, inspiration, spirit of exploration, and confidence that it is possible to build something new.

Yes, like Destroy All Humans, Alien Hominid... Not arcades, though.

I consider Logo an undeservedly forgotten technology that showed the world a glimpse of what computerized education really is, and Seymour Papert is a misunderstood genius ahead of his time.

The whole point was a very visual way of learning with immediate feedback, where you build stuff in order to understand it.

Papert based his own ideas of constructionism on children's cognitive development theories of Jean Piaget, a famous Swiss psychologist with whom he worked in the 50s - early 60s.

Logo pioneered a whole class of tools and languages built around constructivist ideas (e.g. Ozobot, Scratch, EToy, Processing, Design by Numbers...) and I hope these ideas will not be totally forgotten in the era of slop, when people prize ignorance and no longer seem to appreciate the concept of "build to understand".

Not Blizzard. A French game developer and publisher that has been defunct for many years now. But even then, I remember talking to colleagues from other studios and many used Alienbrain - primarily for art assets. We used SVN and later git/mercurial for code.

Since Alienbrain was quite popular back then, I assume they are still around now. Given that git still has no out-of-the-box facilities to handle large binaries and asset previews conveniently.

> Virtually 100% of non-indie devs use Perforce.

Not really. There are better products out there.

When I worked at Triple-A studio, we used Alienbrain, which is specifically tailored for huge binary versioning with previews and stuff. We had terabytes of assets, and Alienbrain handled it well, including seamless integration into pipelines - something a stock git or Perforce would never achieve.