flipgimble

If you value learning about the strengths and weaknesses of different algorithms then I recommend reading this counter-argument against one species of heavily extended L-Systems used for city road network generation: http://nothings.org/gamedev/l_systems.html

One conclusion is that Unity's technology stack is more like a Tower of Jenga with pieces in random state of readiness and compatibility. More and more Unity comes out looking like a mismanaged mess that lost its way from the goal of "democratizing game development".

I'm guessing the studio was pressured to release on a hard deadline to make the publisher their promised profits. This game would have been a guaranteed first day purchase for me, but the bad press coverage now made me move on to other games in the limited time I have. So I may check back to see if the updates fixed the pefromance in 6mo or never. What I'm saying is that the person who decided on this release date likely made a long term strategic mistake for short term profit, or was forced to do so by another idiot up the chain.

It strikes me that this Penny Arcade cartoon is more prescient that I originally gave it credit for: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2023/09/18/undercraw

On the surface the cartoon is silly and extreme but speaks a deeper truth. Consider that SilverLake is the entity that has proven itself to care only about extracting profit and nothing about games as cultural expression of the community and welfare of those who make them. Riccitiello was incompetent in how he made the exploitation of game developers obvious but given Unity's funding structure they will keep doing the same. Maybe now they're scared that they are losing a valuable resource of developer trust, but they consider it only as far as it is a resource for profit extraction.

This is another example enshittification that Doctorow is popularizing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4) and is so well illustrated in the cartoon above.

Please observe that in my post I only recommend reflection, and describe how their communication sounds like to me. Seems like I'm not the only one. I am specifically trying to avoid the overtly adversarial language of telling someone off, or telling them what to think or do, so please don't ascribe that unnecessarily.

As an outside observer without any connection to any of these project I'd recommend that you step back from posting strongly held negative opinions and reflect on your biases and assumptions here. It sounds like you are unreasonably disgruntled against zig and derailing tangentially related threads, then claiming unwarranted victimhood.

We are talking about two projects (zig and bun), likely years before 1.0, and you complain they're not perfect, or improving on your timeline. Projects improve security and quality by increasing adoption and thus human resources available for auditing and fixes. You seem to be advocating against adoption, or presuming current users are uninformed about the project's status.

My hobbyist-level interactions with the zig community indicated nothing by calm professionalism and enthusiasm for quality software.

tinygrad and Hotz came on my radar only recently, so I looked into it. the most insightful comment, thats proven even more accurate with time, is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36066136

quote: "he gets excited about the currently hot thing in tech, makes his own knockoff version, generates a ton of buzz in the tech press for it, and then it fizzles out because he doesn't have the resources or attention span to actually make something at that scale"

I don't see the difference tbh: tyrannical Christianity and tyrannical ideological governments are on opposite sides of the same coin. It is a time honored ploy to use one as the reason to favor the other.

What they share in common is that they both reject the value of a lived human life in favor of some totalizing ideology like a "god", church or the "state". Both can be credited with millions of lives lost. Lets not forget centuries of religious wars, or what role Christianity played in Western colonization. Both excuse those deaths because of proposed ideas like "god's will" or "the after-life", or the "good of the many" etc.

In my own life I try to hold some of the skeptical views of what technology is doing to my attention and time. I am striving to enact a discipline and focus of attention that sounds very much like the Askesis he describes. Sometimes it works, and then I'm back here.

However I am concerned about the conservatism and religious overtones of the anti-technology reactionaries. To me (and a large and growing demographic) modern major religions are at best irrelevant, or morally bankrupt and malignant. Its a shame to because we lost some deeper dimensions of human experience this way.

The core teaching of Buddhism is the middle path: neither absolute asceticism nor hedonism.

I also like how John Vervaeke puts it: "Neither utopia, nor nostalgia" (is the path to wisdom, presumably).

Their inability to ship their printers in any reasonable time frame is indeed what kept me from ordering one, even though I saved specifically for getting into 3d printing. The same is true for about a dozen of my work colleagues that shared their purchases on our company chat group. Any new person asking about hardware recommendation now hears about Enders and other clones, and is dissuaded from a Prusa, even though years later the shipping problems (for older models at least) have been resolved.

you just explained why its not particularly wise or desirable to be a "absolutist" about anything and Musk either doesn't know what that word means or is an example of a performative contradiction.

"say whatever you want" does indeed include talking about your private messages, if you have access to them like Musk may with private DMs, and if that is what you want. You may want to reflect on the meaning and implications of your words.

The sad state of affairs in modern medicine is that patients now need to be weary for scams like this where a multinational pharmaceutical conglomerate will pull a bait, addict and switch prices tactic. It leads to patients avoiding what could be the best medical advice in order to avoid predatory business tactics.

John Carmack leaving your organization with a resignation letter like that is an undeniable sign that it is permeated with the rot of ineffective and self-deceptive middle management. If you've followed John's career you know that he has enough FU money and respect that he doesn't care about performance reviews, your promotion ladders or departmental politics. As he writes, he cares about shipping cutting edge technology nobody else thought possible that delivers exceptional value, and brand new experiences. His ethos is egos be damned, and breaking down organizational and cross-corporate boundaries.

Carmack should have been invaluable at Meta as the speaker of hard and uncomfortable truths. Likely Zuck & Boz have no idea whats really going on with their technology and are insulated by layers of self-deceptive status reporting. Once you step into management and away from the visceral struggle of building and using nascent technology daily, you are likely to make the stupidest and most illogical decisions. Setting that hard shipping deadline to coincide with your conference feels like you are making your team more efficient, but likely you are also forcing them to take on eventually crippling technical debt, or make rushed and ill-informed choices.

Its likely that top engineering talent, the ones who actually know how to build the next several generation of VR technology, already left or will leave soon. Those that remain will drown in so much clueless bullshit that they will pop out another VRML or Second Life and call it the metaverse.

I don't think you get the point of this app or the check box. This is for an app that is meant to foster habits and the checkbox animation is an infrequent reward for completing a habit forming task. Secondarily the goal was also to win over the Apple user demographic and win a design award.

You're thinking of user interface in an app that you have some intrinsic motivation to use, and the UI in that case is just a means to an end.

Metal is great. Of the current generation of modern low-overhead Gfx APIs I think Metal was the easiest to get started with, great documentation and examples. While it takes more specialized knowledge to get started compared to OpenGL, I think there are now several good cross platform libraries like bgfx and sokol to satisfy the need for a higher level cross platform library (including shader transpiling) that fill the need that OpenGL used to serve.

I'm glad OpenGL got deprecated across the industry, despite the patchwork of extensions it was based on a model of GPU + CPU capability from the 1990s and became obsolete.

For years I was musing about a camping trip to Shenandoah National Park which is only a couple hours away from me. However due to family, busy work, and laziness I would start planning too late and saw most spots booked on rec.gov. I would usually blame myself for lack of organization

This year I decided to just pack my car with equipment and drive to SNP one very early morning. At worst I would spend hours in the car for a day hike. However it turns out that many camping spots are available on first-come-first-serve basis, and not online. Another group without reservations joined my camping spot bordering the forest and it was a fun hanging out and chatting with strangers. You can also find plenty of camping space near hiking shelters, or with a permit in the back-country provided you're aware of the regulations and bear safety.

After that first trip, I was kicking myself for forming a mental model of camping as severely constrained by space and crowds. I think that false model formed by relying on only rec.gov and some online articles about how crowded the Appalachian Trail has become. I hear the hiking crowds visit SNP in May-June, so we'll see how it goes.

For me one of the first breakthroughs came when I realized that I had biases about how mental effort functions, and much different understanding than physical effort. I had an unspoken expectation that I should just be able to focus with enough effort and I was somehow morally deficient if I was distracted. My realization was that focus is like a muscle that could be trained with repetition and without the value judgment when I fail. The moment of coming back to focus from a distraction is the most valuable part of mindfulness training. I started thinking of my mind like a puppy that can be kindly and reliably trained with enough practice.

My second useful realization was that the most popular mindfulness and concentration practices like sitting meditation were not working for me. I had more success with walking meditation, long hikes, martial arts and purposeful reading time.

Another recommendation is to look at latest cognitive science and philosophy for better understanding on how our cognition functions. Lectures by John Vervaeke on YouTube were a great starting place for me, and I recommend them if you’re into that academic style of wisdom. But more important is to find some source of wisdom you trust and willing to take seriously and put effort into making it a part of your life.

"every video game company" = Epic Games, and mostly because they don't like to pay overhead for their Fortnite loot boxes that most parents wish they could have some control over. I don't have allegiance to either company mostly because they don't care about me, just my money.

This is an interesting example of emotional frustration pretending to be a technical argument. I'm fascinated by the mechanics of irrational hype and subjective downward spirals of dissatisfaction on technical topics. It's very similar to how many people consider the best music of all time to be the one made by their own generation or what they grew up with through their parents. Most of us are employed by building more and better options and features, but as a community there is a streak of what I call cranky senior developer that is just tired of all the new features and would like it tear it all down. You can also call it "complexity fatigue".

I don't use Swift full time and I had no problem reading that method signature.

This is something that you would write if you were a library author interested in providing generic and flexible data structure. The part after "where" expresses a non-trivial idea: "the type of the first element parameter should be the same as the inner element of the homogenous collection (second parameter), and we need to compare elements to other instances of its type but other than those constraints this code will work on any element and collection". It does that in about 6 swift terms, and the compiler has a full understanding of what you meant and will prevent errors that violate these constraints. Notice that you never have to write this type of code if you're using the library. Swift has decently organized progressive disclosure of language features. For example I never had to write unsafe pointer arithmetic or interop with C, but I'm not going to complain the feature is there for those that need it.

I’m not an expert on this, but there seems to be a custom GPU renderer optimized for dense triangle meshes, with its own occlusion pass. The LOD is also calculated based on clusters, multiple per-mesh with way to fix seams between cluster at different levels. This works best with very dense meshes such as those from photogrammetry or zbrush sculpted.

A lot of information has been released here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Na... and here https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Lu...

There is also a source code release if you want to dive into that level of detail: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/releases/tag/5.0.0...

I don't think the released details are that surprising to those working on realtime computer graphics, but the engineering details and tradeoffs are certainly interesting. Epic has the budget and business case to allocate a team, including some of the best graphics engineers in the industry, to do R&D for over a year to make this a reality.

He actually misunderstands and mischaracterizes the features of the languages he complains about. These features remove the need for a developer to keep track of invariants in their code, so should be embraced and welcomed by lazy developers who don't have to simulate the boring parts of code in their head to make sure it works. "If it type-checks then it works" philosophy really goes a long way toward relieving developer's stress.

For example, if I'm using C or Java I have take into account that every pointer or reference can be null, at every place where they are used. I should write null checks, (or error checks say from opening a file handle) but I usually don't because I'm lazy, or I forget, or its hard to keep track of all possible error conditions. So I'm stressed during a release because I can't predict the input that may crash my code.

In a language like Swift I am forced to do a null or an error check once in the code, and for that small effort the compiler will guarantee I will never have to worry about these error conditions again. This type system means I can refactor code drastically and with confidence, and I don't have to spend time worrying about all code paths to see if one of them would result in an unexpected null reference. On a professional development team, it should be a no-brainer to adopt a new technology to eliminate all null-reference exceptions at runtime, or use a language to setup guarantees that will hold under all conditions and in the future evolution of the code.

Worse than that, he sets up a patronizing and misguided mental image of a common developer who he imagines will use a language with type safety just to disable and abuse all the safety features. Nobody does that, in my experience of professional Swift, Kotlin or rust development.

He advocates for unit tests only and above all else. That is also painfully misguided: a test tells you it passes for one given example of input. In comparison a good type system guarantees that your code will work for ALL values of a given type. Of course type systems can't express all invariants, so there is a need for both approaches. But that lack of nuance and plain bad advice turned me into an anti-UncleBob advocate.

I never recommended Clean Code, but I've become a strong advocate against it on teams that I lead after reading opinions by Bob Martin such as this one: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/01/11/TheDarkPath.... That whole article reads as someone who is stuck in their old ways and inflexible, then given their large soapbox tries to justify their discomfort and frustration. I consider Swift, Kotlin (and Rust) to be one of the most important language evolutions that dramatically improved software quality on the projects I've worked on.

I've seen so many real world counter-examples to arguments made in that article and his other blog posts that I'm puzzled why this guy has such a large and devoted following.

Another sad lesson why no open source developer should trust Google with their time and effort.

Swift is a gem of a language with an unfortunately Apple-centric ecosystem, but at least you know Apple won't abandon the effort.

It sounds like LeCun stepped away from twitter and that thread because he was fed up with the toxic discourse and did not attribute that to Timnit in particular. Its strange that OP post sounds exactly like what LeCun was asking people to stop doing:

".. I'd like to ask everyone to please stop attacking each other via Twitter or other means. In particular, I'd like everyone to please stop attacking @timnitGebru and everyone who has been critical of my posts. Conflicts, verbal or otherwise, are hurtful and counter-productive... " -- https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1277372578231996424?s=20

Of course in a larger than usual turnout election the second place numbers are also going to be larger than before. No demographic is a unified, single minded block of voters. The term Latinos is particular groups so many communities of different race, background, and country of origin as to be nearly meaningless.

But that does not excuse the fact that Trump's policies and public statements were undeniably racist, and filled with fascist and white-supremacy call outs for far right extremist groups. And the whataboutism on the cages is just tired far-right propaganda.

There is a difference between one administration building a 72-hour processing facility and "Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump separation policy" (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/21/trump-separa...)

Just want to point out the diversion tactics used here. This response throws a tangential, obscure point, while avoiding addressing the central topic that Trump incites and encourages violence from his podium, (“lock her up”, standby to white supremacists etc etc) thereby destabilizing the country where businesses could thrive.

If you actually read the email there is no “or else” or any other implied threat in there. So it’s rather disingenuous to add the implication when you simply don’t agree that the current political regime of Trumpism is steadily devolving the US into theocratic totalitarianism and a possible civil war. Given a plot to kidnap a Governor and a refusal to agree to a peaceful transfer of power, one must be in deep denial to not see the justification for this warning.

He expects that a Trump second term and GOP control of government will be an existential threat to his company and the country. Sadly this is a well substantiated prediction.

Luckily in the US we have the first amendment to ensures that expressing your opinion in public like this is never “plain wrong”. There may always be negative consequences depending the the reception, but it’s never illegal.

That is a good point, I updated my comment attribute the quote more accurately.