kungtotte

Going back to the OP though that talked about settling on the WIMP model, you're not really contradicting their point.

If you take a hammer from 1920 and lay it next to the most jazzed up hammer from 2020, they would be recognised as the same tool/having the same general purpose. A carpenter from 1920 wouldn't need to change the way he used a hammer if he picked up the 2020 model, even if the 2020 model might enable new ways of actually using it (or improve old ways of using it).

So while there is evolution and development going on, we're not replacing the hammer metaphor as it were.

The WIMP model has also seen evolution and refinement, but it's still recognisable as the same model. I think the analogy holds.

Hm? All titles on Steam when played with Proton are registered as being played on Linux, not just the ones available officially, and if you do this with something you just purchased it will show up in Steam's statistics as a Linux sale.

This lets the publishers and developers know that there's a market of Linux gamers because they can see that X thousand players play their game on Linux. So when they make their next game, hopefully they'll pick technologies that lets them release with proper Linux support and not "hope it runs under Proton"-support.

Sure, but my point was that this shows the value in making a game that's easily portable to begin with. This is more for future games rather than converting existing ones.

Yeah, there's never any issues keeping games working on Windows...

One thing that's important for Linux gaming is that games played under Proton on Steam are counted as Linux sales, so publishers and developers get accurate statistics on how many Linux gamers there are.

If the market is big enough, cross platform development is viable from the start.

Here in Europe they're experimenting with using EVs to deliver goods to restaurants and shops at night, since they're so quiet they can operate at night without disturbing anyone. This massively cuts down on the hours needed to get everything out since there's no traffic to worry about, which cuts costs too.

It also alleviates traffic during the day by removing those trucks.

It would be easy for governments to subsidize parts of this for the good of society.

Roughly 1/3 of the operating costs of trucking is the fuel, another 1/3 is wages, and then the remaining 1/3 covers everything else (facilities, maintenance, repairs, purchase cost of vehicles, insurance, etc. etc.).

So ~33% of a truck's cost is spent on fuel.

One point to consider there is how poorly managed our elderly care is, well before this crisis. It's hard to determine for sure but I can't imagine that it didn't factor into our high mortality among the elderly.

Staff went to work without PPE, and some were ordered to go to work despite showing symptoms.

The effects of COVID19 are not tied solely to the immediate actions in March and April but are affected by systemic issues too.

Sure, that's true.

In that scenario it would also be appropriate to wait for a driver to sober up before driving you to the hospital if neither ambulance nor taxi were available (or delayed). One glass of wine would be out of most people's systems after two hours.

Thus poking hole in the "drunk drive someone to the hospital" argument, which is what this was all about in the first place.

Maybe we should, as a society, invest in taxis equipped with medical facilities and trained personnel so that they can provide first response medical treatment while on the way to the ER.

I'm sure that would save a lot of lives. An ambulatory medical service, if you will.

Animals who die to feed us aren't really relevant, are they? These 200-ish animals killed by housecats are on top of the food they're already receiving at home, which is made from slaughtered animals.

A sports hunter who doesn't eat their kills but only hunts for fun is an apt comparison, but do they really kill 200 animals per year? That's more than one every two days. Typically that would be a weekend hobby and even if they went hunting 52 weeks of the year that's almost 4 kills per hunting weekend. You really think that's plausible (or even legal, given restrictions on hunting)?

Yeah, but this behaviour is not really bred into cats the way we've bred behaviour into dogs. Cats and humans is more of a mutually beneficial arrangement where we get pest control and they get shelter and a steady food supply.

They kind of just moved in with us several thousand years ago and stuck around because it worked out well for them.

Common housecats that are allowed outside are some of the bloodthirstiest predators on the planet.

They can kill up to 200 animals per year, despite being well fed and cared for. They're doing it for sport essentially.

They will hunt and kill common shrew for example despite not eating them. They'll eat mice and birds, but shrews they kill just for the hell of it.

I absolutely agree that performance matters a whole lot, it's one of the most important considerations in software.

It's also true that many developers are not very good at spotting where and how to improve performance, and what trade-offs are appropriate, and that's what I meant.

Write the straightforward version first that's easy to read so that when you need to improve performance, it's easy to use a profiler to go in and rewrite the non-performant parts in a less readable but faster way.

I think a lot of the time people think they have performance issues when they in fact don't, likewise with stability and flexibility.

In most cases, writing the readable and straightforward version first and only moving to the less readable but more X version (for any given value of X) after it's evident that you need to is the optimal solution.

It's the programming equivalent to buying cheap tools first and only buying the expensive version once the cheap one breaks: If it breaks you used it enough to warrant the expensive and more durable one, and if it didn't break you didn't have to spend more money than necessary.