tikhonj

I like to tell people that consumer OSes are just Emacs hypervisors. And it's pretty clear which are better or worse :)

Proton is the shim for backwards compatibility with a messy legacy system. We've all been there.

And we've also seen how legacy systems refuse to die :(

or, maybe more hopefully, Windows as a whole becomes a legacy platform soon :)

There are lots of "gaming" monitors that advertise on high refresh rates and low latency. We're talking like 4–5ms input latency and pixel response times <2ms.

Point being, outside competitive games, I do not expect monitor hardware to be anywhere near the bottleneck for latency and response times.

Oh man, there's a real hit of nostalgia. I played BZFlag a whole bunch back in middle school and high school, and it was one of the first places where I got involved in the community at all (mostly hanging around some phpbb forums!)

Good times.

I don't remember too much of what I did, but I made a couple of maps one of which was hosted on a server for a week or something. It wasn't especially good, but it was a pretty amazing experience that somebody else thought something I made was good enough to try out, and that I could log into a "real" server and see it in action :P

I remember object-oriented programming being on the same pedestal when I was younger and first learning programming—a lot of OOP folks and mainstream programmers were definitely hostile to other schools of thought like functional or procedural programming.

Hell, I've worked with programmers who, entirely honestly, treated "object oriented programming" as a synecdoche for good programming...

Yes. Which is why it's so much cheaper to live in Manhattan than in the suburbs.

You also have to believe that population growth is fully exponential. But in practice it looks more like a logistic curve, and the factors that slow it down are a lot less dramatic than resource starvation or violence.

Using today's AI models make games is more like doing a Unity Asset Store flip than a higher-level abstraction. I mean, in a sense, just gluing together bought assets is operating at a "higher level of abstraction", but in a categorically different way compared to using a higher-level language or game engine.

There's a pretty big difference between embedded devices and high-end, general-purpose devices. Apple is very much the latter. Outside specific areas (like cell signal/etc) they are not constrained by hardware to the point that it inevitably impacts software quality—and the complaints people have are not about the parts of the software that are constrained! As far as I know, everybody is actually totally happy with Apple's wireless stack, power management and so on.

Now, is it possible that Apple's software issues are proximally caused by production pressure? Absolutely. That's almost definitely a major contributor. But the production pressure is not inherent to their device business; it's a choice the organization, collectively, makes.

Eh, I live in Berkeley, a lot of the neighborhoods here are amazing, and there are almost no HOAs (besides the kind that keep condo buildings running). It's nicer than the bast majority of American suburbs I've seen. If anything, the amazing yards and cozy houses are only viable because there is no HOA pushing down arbitrary top-down rules on aesthetics. Forcing people to have traditional lawns would have totally killed the place.

I find it very annoying. But not annoying enough to make me stop using Steam.

The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.

You can't rely on Python's type hints for serious verification, but it can be great for expressing abstractions and giving people (and, today, agents) better affordances for using them. Even static errors that will not always fire can still help a lot for using a library correctly and for noticing mismatches in your codebase as it evolves over time.

Target learned the security lesson the hard way, but they definitely learned it. When I was there, security was one of the rare parts of the tech org I found legitimately impressive. (But also: I am not a security guy! Maybe their actual practices were compelling but flawed! But the organization as a whole was legitimately serious about it )