artyom

> All to say I just dont think CS principles down to the physics level is the root and all is an abstraction.

Not my point either. I was just referring to the tooling changing over time, with the discipline constantly evolving forward nonetheless.

Once upon a time there were engineers that used software. Just like any other tool, and usually in combination with electronic, electrical and mechanical equipment, all of them being very well aware of the laws governing it all.

But it was so great as a tool that some engineers didn't want to deal with the burdens and limitations of the physical world, and started focusing on software more and more.

Then the software engineers came, for whom the physical and mathematical aspect of the whole thing was just a distant history lesson (and preferably a problem in someone else's computer).

And after software engineers, the only constant in the entire ordeal will remain: engineering, in a shape or form that very likely nobody can predict right now.

I'm from the times when you had to purchase a separate chip to perform floating point math. It was called a math co-processor. [1]

After a few generations (and over a decade) that was indistinguishable from the CPU chip itself.

It's a long hyperbole, I know, but I think local inference is inevitable; and the big fishes know it.

Will that be a complex technical setup? An appliance? An additional chip in your motherboard? So transparent it's burned right into the CPU? Those are just implementation details. We're probably just one generational breakthrough away from it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87

Correct.

If you were there, you'd remember the UTF8/Unicode fiasco (how long it took, how many people was both relying and struggling with it, and how they needed to cover it up after even some hosting providers attempted a beta upgrade and had to roll it back).

There was a PHP 6 (I'm including the non-updates in PHP 5 "waiting" for it), they just had to rewrite history as of PR damage control back then. That's what the article you linked describes, pretty much.

I agree, as I was one of them. Rightfully so, because PHP 20 years ago was the prime example of a complete disaster. Not just occasionally, there were long years of incompatibility, missing implementations, incoherent errors, security issues, fragmentation, etc.

Paid my share of dealing with those problems with PHP 5 and 6 (after coming from PHP 4). I think it became a more sane ecosystem around very late 7.x to 8.

I won't touch PHP ever again, but I'm glad (no irony) that they finally were able to pull it off. There were some good ideas there, then they quickly became victims of their own success.

Nowadays, there's places (Amazon) where PHP is just forbidden at a company-wide level (not joking) because of their early, long-standing reputation of being a mess. Or places where they just gave up and re-implemented their own PHP (Meta). I don't see that changing any time soon.

Same as with the "good internet". It's still out there, only under layers and layers of mediocre and/or terrible stuff nobody has the time to go through.

Agreed.

Also Lars Von Trier is objectively not involved in this (only in Dogma 95, which this is "based on").

Inland Empire

Invariably, this "simpler life" type of reasoning is unmistakably the product of an urbanite.

There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated.

The world is a complex place, but if you find it unnecessarily complicated, scientific and technological progress are not the problem.

It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.

Well, I was sitting here expecting the Redis creator have an opinion on still-unannounced Dark Souls 4.

Maybe he actually read it.

Look, I agree with a good part of this article. I also agree that the whole "unregulated internet" is terrible for humankind in general. Crypto is a scam. Meta should be, plain and simple, shut down. Twitter is a madhouse. The list is endless.

However, every single time I feel like stricter regulation should be in place, a congressman speaks about "servers"... and yeah, maybe not.

I understand that your advice comes from the right place. However "High-agency" is the "Full-stack Engineer" of the AI era.

A single salary covering many disparage positions and roles. It's been reworded b/c with AI, apparently you don't even need to be an engineer (or expect to be paid as one) anymore!

Nothing new under the sun.

Them staying in the sidewalk is free. Or the cost is so indirect that nobody is responsible for it.

Facilities like asylums and jails are super costly though. And extra expensive to operate if you don't want to treat the inmates as cattle.

Is that a thing anymore?

Humble Bundle 100% does both, sells games cheaper and redeemable through Steam keys, and has been doing so for many years.

Not naive at all. I'm pretty well aware of the monetary incentives and that they're focusing on their own use case.

But the improvement has been so great (and so downhill in Windows camp) that now Proton is the performance benchmark apparently...

I was expecting another AI rant. I got really great writing instead. This escalated quickly.

> Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music?

I think such business model ultimately doesn't scale well for games (several million-dollars production budgets sharing minuscule pieces of a ~$20 all-you-can-eat subscription pie).

Microsoft always knew this, they didn't try to win the market, they tried to subvert the business model, probably expecting the industry as a whole moving towards it -- which didn't happen at all, at least not yet.

Simple math would prove this. There's no way acquiring half the good studios in the world and make them release flop after flop was a break-even operation. It's several orders of magnitude behind.

And I forgot to mention in-game currency.

I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.

Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady sites, including Half-Life 2. Steam was hated with a passion back then. They won by ultimately providing great value and service.

It's the other way around.

Valve is the company where we spend a lot of money and they deserve it.

The rest is companies that trick people into giving them money (battlepass! lootboxes!) and they don't deserve it.

People often forget that consumers as a whole are the ones holding the power, and the sad part is that rewarding a company with a good product with your money stopped being the business model and it's now the exception.

Antirez is 100% the creator of Redis. And not only that, it's the kind of mind that you probably only get "a handful each generation".

Everyone is talking about the agents part. I'm going to praise this post for describing it very clearly that some people, from a young age, don't need phases, growing up, trying things, figuring out, exploring the world, finding themselves.

Some people are just born something (engineers, in this case), and they're that something for life.

I always have a hard time explaining to "normal people" that such life is not boring at all, in fact, I can't remember a single time in my life where I was actually "bored".

Hatred for a corporation is as useful as hatred for a nuclear bomb. No matter how harmful or destructive, it lacks any sort of free will that would make it a reasonable target for such hate.

There's actual people making it happen, though.

What you call snarky, I call individual accountability.

I agree with you in very general terms, but I'm not sure you can reach the level of "market share" VSCode has had the last few years with just the very young.

I'd like my tools to not have a time-bomb attached to them, no matter if it takes 10 years to explode.

And honestly I think this case is just a perpetually clueless manager getting over-joyous with vibecoding (to the point of being marveled at changing two lines of code without blowing everything up).

It's probably going to be reverted in the coming days. Which doesn't change the fact that it's a very Microsoft way of operating.

To everyone who bought the "developer-friendly" Microsoft of VSCode fame from a few years ago: this is what they forever did, and forever will do.

This company has been pulling these tricks since the early 90s.

If you fell for this once again, there's nobody else to blame but yourself.

Yeah, pretty much. I used it, but one day I opened Warp and it looked like a half-baked Cursor.

I liked it for the ability to type "git one-liner logs with date and author, no messages" and get the output without having to remember or look for actual formatting parameters.

I also get that's too niche of an use case, and not sustainable as a business. But still.

I'd say that for the majority of old-school, established, non-tech organizations (oil, steel, manufacturing, governments, etc), it's not only an issue but it's the de-facto standard, along with Exchange, ActiveDirectory and all the nice things that come with it.

There won't be any.

I'm old enough to remember this happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

Basically, Microsoft furiously bribed their way into formally standardizing the utterly broken MS Office formats, so EU and potentially other regulators couldn't mandate them to be "interoperable" with existing standards (e.g. OpenDocument, based on OpenOffice, which was on its normal way to become standardized with no fast tracking and no bribing). They even called it "Office Open" to foster confusion.

They can do whatever they want and get away with it because a big part of their business model is, much like Oracle and SAP, based on bribing government bodies across the world.