boondaburrah

There's also that Haxe is older than a lot of the stuff we take for granted today. It's roots are in ActionScript, and it started as basically a successor to AS2 before Adobe came out with ActionScript 3. It did "same codebase on server and client" by compiling to flash bytecode and PHP before node existed. It's ECMAScript/AS roots + static types + type inference make it feel like alternate-timeline TypeScript as it also compiles to JS.

So it's completely comfortable for me. AND I can hit C++ if the platform demands it!

I feel just like people become unable to see any image on a website that happens to be exactly the dimensions of a banner advert, if they hear muzak every day, they probably don't even notice /anything/ is playing if it's using the same midi instruments/sound profile. It's just adblocked noise.

It's weirder than that; I watched the Silicon Cowboys documentary about compaq, and the archived footage quality takes a sharp dive from the 70s to the 80s as they switched from recording on film to videotape.

Tape quality was good and a lot cheaper, but it doesn't last as long before the video signal gets munged

I wish the stupid youtube compressor hadn't hit it with the "SD doesn't matter" settings. VHS should look way better than this, but there's digital macroblocks everywhere, and as sibling comment said, no longer 60i.

I agree though, for a videotape that old, it must not have been played very much for the tracking to still be that solid. Also modern "record NTSC Video to your computer" USB dongles tend to be unable to deal with even slightly unsteady CSYNC signal, so they must've used good equipment. Too bad about the youtube.

How comfortable are you with functional programming? I've found digital logic to have more in common with describing data transformations than C/ASM, though understanding bitmasks/bitflipping helps.

Yeah I've got beef with Unicode. It doesn't support CJK*. Since I work in games and there are a lot of Japanese games that want to be sold in the Chinese market (and vice versa), this is A Problem. I don't know where they got off thinking those character sets were the same, because if I treat them the same, I don't get paid.

*in my particular example, you can say unicode doesn't support Japanese, /or/ doesn't support Chinese. The answer depends on what font you're using. "Han Unification" affects more than just those two languages, but that's what I have experience with.

Whether or not there is a god, the phrase "being religious about" something exists for a reason. I imagine a lot of the discipline in practicing religion allows you to make yourself keep going. Heck, it's even called "practicing" religion for a reason.

In my gentoo days, chromium would take longer to compile then the rest of @world combined.

similarly, webapps have eaten desktop software because you don't have to raise a ticket with IT to get approval for a software install.

I mean, the BIOS sets up a perfectly usable text console back in the day when they were adding KMS, and even now UEFI will run one at the native resolution of my laptop, so you can get by without it.

My public highschool CS course was an honors elective taught by the calculus teacher, so I think that made it unattractive as a playground spot. However, I think it was really that the teacher was incredibly patient, kind, and unable to resist tacky puns. I think that helped us students see him more as a teacher than an authority figure to be resisted.

Thats

A) really fucking hard to do, I tried it once*, and I wasn't cut out for it. Teaching takes a special kind of person and a fuckton of effort, and deserves to be paid honestly more than I make as a programmer of computers which at least stick to their syntax rules.

B) the class was small enough that he could put in the individual attention and working-together to make it happen for us.

Unfortunately for the public school system the teacher left a year later.

* I did a boot camp for middle through highschool, and while highschoolers are tough, they were far more willing to work together towards an abstract goal than middle schoolers, for which every day is a bad time for everyone involved.

Note that game credits sequences are sometimes just a list of who works at the company at the time of release, and not an actual reflection of who worked on the game.

This has resulted in a few problems where people get their name stripped off of a game they worked hard on but left the company prior to release etc. Also people may appear on the credits that were in fact in a different department on a different team and never touched the game.

Yes, but without WSL you had to install SUA (Subsystem for Unix Applications) which gave you a shell and all the Unix things you like, so it's really not different (even if the POSIX it gave you was really old and crusty).

I actually liked SUA more than WSL, which I like more than WSL2, since it seems like they keep moving farther and farther away from making Windows actually POSIX compliant and instead just offering a container for your pesky POSIX needs.

I remember KMS becoming a thing and wondering why anyone needed or wanted this. I still don't exactly know, since it seemed natural to me that the kernel shouldn't be doing any graphics things until I actually wanted a graphical console. I suppose this is more of a microkernel view of things, since similarly you could argue that the kernel doesn't need to know about disks and filesystems, only programs that need to access pesky files need to do that.

Just like Abiword's document format doesn't cover all of HTML, but it is itself perfectly parseable as HTML, I don't think this editor has to.

It's love2d(ots)

I got mandatory training in Microsoft Office as part of the state curriculum for highschoolers. I don't think basic training really promotes lock-in with Office suites. (well, except for Excel, but that's a programming environment)

It's surprising how non-obvious office suites are, because I regularly see people in a professional setting who don't know how to use them well enough. However, I don't really think training in any particular office suite isn't transferable, since the major skill is knowing what the ruler, styles, and various line/page breaks are actually there for apparently. I had no trouble using LibreOffice or whatever, but people definitely don't seem to know the concepts of word processing well at all. This isn't their fault, as it does /kinda/ work even if you just keep slamming shit into the page until it's right.

Forcing people to work it out on their own is just training people to put up with "I don't know, I got it to look right but if I put a space between these words my entire layout breaks 4 pages later." when they don't have to live like this.

Does that not also cause you to lose source code access? That's kind of a problem for people who need this for work.

This is at least the second time this has happened. I even have a "wallet incident" folder in gmail for this.

Exactly. I built my first 8-bit computer after watching Ben Eater's 6502 series and the first thing I did after "Hello! World" was look up what bare minimum serial transfer I could implement that would yell if I fucked up the code in some obvious way (cant check if the data is right on the other end if the RAM is volatile and the transfer code itself is unproven). XModem fit the bill (entire spec on Wikipedia and dumb enough that an assembler beginner can do it).

TBH I think people get stockholm syndrome with whatever their first assembler language is. I can't stand X86, but similarly find 6502 absolutely bonkers. My first ASM was MIPS-I, and apparently that makes me one of the few people that /like/ delay slots.

Access to quality food is a problem. Unhealthy food is far cheaper than healthy food.

required to use windows for work (the software I produce must run on desktop windows machines), and only have my personal PC to do work with. I'd like to have money for a second machine but I don't.

The thing with the linux community, is that once linux covers 90% of the perceived use-cases for a desktop/laptop/workstation computer, it really feels like it should be enough to see a big switch. We can relax, right? But that 10% of use cases where windows is the /only/ option is the other 90%.

"without increasing the number of potentially fraught officer–citizen interactions"

My dude, this /is/ a potentially fraught officer-citizen interaction. The police have done something unusual, therefore a chilling effect is going to kick in.

IIRC this font is available in the linux kernel. Every time I build one for my laptop I set it as the system's text-mode font because it makes using a 1080p screen in 15" quite nice (and I usually have to spend some time debugging why nvidia drivers have fucked up again (damn switchable graphics))

I thought it was taken out by everyone defending against WannaCry

Did they give up on GTK? I remember Suse Linux Enterprise in particular shipped with a bunch of nice .NET/GTK apps that seemed to work well.

firefox containers is both the killer feature of firefox for me (I can't leave it) and also the jankyest. I don't think mozilla knows they have gold on their hands (but do they ever know?).

I lived through the firefox extension debacle in 2019 or so when FF accidentally let a cert expire and it helpfully uninstalled all my "unverified" extensions, of which container tabs was one. When everything was fixed, my settings were erased.

Except they weren't. To this day, I still get random ghost-like behaviour from my old container tabs settings. Google-contained apps will try to open in my banking container, as I gradually realise all of my containers were deleted but the URL-to-container mapping wasn't, and it was by ID not name, and the IDs have been reused.

Containers should be a core feature because they are /the/ feature ff has over the chrome army right now. I know they were (are?) trying to prove that core features aren't necessary because you can write anything in a web extension (IIRC that's how they justified getting rid of RSS), but it just hasn't been so in my experience.

I wonder for how many people Mojave is the last Mac OS they can use simply because Adobe stopped selling software for anything later (you can only rent), and other various 32-bit reasons.

Adobe products are sadly required for industry work.

parsing was never so much the problem as what was rendered afterwards being different.