gyomu

so much this

Most AAA videogames seem to teach people "mash attack button until enemy goes away, move forward to the next shiny dot on the map, repeat". It's crazy that when a game asks the player to actually take stock of the situation and learn from their mistakes, it gets billed as "brutally difficult".

For what it's worth, I find Silksong challenging, but I really don't get the "impossible difficulty" complaints. I think I'm about halfway through the main game and the most I've spent on a single boss is ~30 minutes.

And I don't think I'm a crazy pro gamer with insane reflexes - I play only a few videogames a year (I mostly care about the art), every time I've tried a multiplayer FPS I get utterly destroyed by other players.

This is cool and a nice writeup but - Liquid Glass is the totality of the design language, including elements close to one another merging together meta-balls like, the different tinting/clear modes, the controls being on a distinct layer from the content...

This is "just" a glass shader.

Your plan sounds lovely, but I think you are greatly overestimating the amount of time you’ll be spending inventing shit, and underestimating the amount of time you’ll be farming food/fixing roofs/chopping wood/writhing in pain due to lack of medicine/etc.

There absolutely are communities around learning Finnish! /r/LearnFinnish has 40k members and get daily posts, plenty of FB groups etc too.

Why would you expect opinion pieces from different people to agree with one another?

I’m curious about exploring the topics “What if the war in Ukraine ends in the next 12 months” just as much as “What if the war in Ukraine keeps going for the next 10 years”, doesn’t mean I expect both to happen.

> We'll soon get to a point where it's no longer necessary to review code, either by the LLM prompter, or by a second reviewer (the volume of generate code will be too great). Instead, we'll need to create new tools and guardrails to ensure that whatever is written is done in a sustainable way.

The real breakthrough would be finding a way to not even do things that don’t need to be done in the first place.

90% of what management thinks it wants gets discarded/completely upended a few days/weeks/months later anyway, so we should have AI agents that just say “nah, actually you won’t need that” to 90% of our requests.

Oh yeah, my experience IRL in Japan is that 80% of Japanese learners are Chinese (and 15% are from other Asian countries, eg Thailand/Vietnam/Korea/India/Pakistan).

The “culture” around learning Japanese is so different from other languages. There’s a large amount of software engineers studying the language, so there’s tons of apps/websites that center around it (for better or worse).

The communities are also… particular. People tend to espouse certain deep beliefs or attitudes that you just don’t see for other languages (and I don’t think complexity is the reason; you don’t see that for Chinese or Russian or Finnish, to name some other notoriously hard languages).

Heh, at that level the job is just meetings and emails. You can do 996 of meetings and emails for a few millions a year without burning out.

Actual craft tasks like writing code tho? Definitely a recipe for burnout and shittier output, yep.

If you take a typography class, they will drill it into you that unjustified is the norm (and you will spend some time learning how to make pleasant rags), and that you need a VERY GOOD reason to make text justified.

How much of it is convention vs based in measurable outcomes is up for debate (maybe), but at least that’s where most every formally trained designer/visual artist in the west comes from.

I wonder what year they’ll sunset Gmail. Nothing is forever, surely some PM in 2033 will decide that email is over and it’s time to push everyone to Gemini Messenger.

Notch, Carmack, Spolsky may have engineering in their skillsets, but they are also product (game) designers and executives (and world class ones at that). I don’t think that’s really what people want when they’re looking to hire an engineer for their startup.

As for Bill Atkinson… looking at his Wikipedia page, looks like he was indeed a top notch engineer in the 80s, but doesn’t seem like he worked on anything noteworthy after that? Definitely not in the same league as the other 3 IMO.

I feel very grateful that I live in a country where the social contract between the government and its constituents has guaranteed extensive, affordable public transit and biking infrastructure for everyone.

I do feel quite sorry for people living in countries where that is not the case, often due to extensive lobbying from car manufacturers — and as a result are subservient to the severe constraints of car ownership.

Having lived in such an area earlier in my life, my quality of life was absolutely worse off for it, and having to bike on roads only suited to motor vehicles in the southern US summer heat to go grocery shopping or go to school did induce anxiety, yes.

It’s okay only if you’re okay deferring all power and agency to people who control the production and distribution of the tools.

Yeah, strong Xanadu vibes: cool philosophical idea in principle, in practice comes with heavy technical requirements + wouldn't be that useful to 90% of users 90% of the time.

> Apple seems to be abandoning its Xerox PARC influences as the old guard retires and passes away (RIP Steve Jobs, Larry Tesler, and Bill Atkinson)

Haven't those people not had any influence on Apple for a very long time now? Steve has been dead for 15 years, Larry & Bill last worked there ~ 30 years ago.

There's definitely been a "change of the guard" at Apple, but it's not from Xerox PARC people...

So sad when something that could be fixed with a few lines of code/a pref toggle if the software were open entirely kills an otherwise great product experience for someone.

As a EU citizen, it is kind of exhausting to read all the pro-EU legislation rhetoric on US-centric websites like HN while witnessing our governments destroying all our institutions and values at home.

EU legislators might not get checks from lobbyists as big as their US counterparts, but they are just as rotten of a bunch.

As I understand it, "return" is a shorthand for "carriage return" - as on typewriters, going to a new line meant returning the carriage to its original (start of line) position.

I wouldn’t look for anything. As I’m reading a text, something in my brain would immediately go “this is probably written by a non native speaker” when coming across certain awkward turns of phrase.

That wouldn’t be confirmation bias, just pattern recognition.

If I teach English as a foreign language, am familiar with the kind of mistakes non native speakers make when writing in English, and can easily identify texts written by non native speakers - that’s not confirmation bias.

Yes, this is a key thing to clarify anytime these conversations take place.

The reason we want to preserve the environment, biodiversity, all that jazz is FOR US. It’s for our own comfort and survival that we should care about not polluting, stopping climate change, etc.

The planet and life on it will be just fine, it made it through many extinction events and will make it through many more.

Yeah the “No _____. No _____. Just the ______.” is such a dead ringer for AI writing these days that I just ignore any writing that features it.

If you don’t care about your craft as a writer to the extent that you can’t even realize how straight-out-of-a-LLM your writing sounds, I’m not going to care about it either.

Yep, exactly this. If I have anything with sugar in the house, it'll get consumed in 24-48h. The solution is to just not have anything with sugar in the house.

If I want to splurge with a chocolate or ice cream bar, I take a walk to my corner store and buy just one, and eat it right away. It's extremely cost inefficient compared to if I bought a gallon of ice cream from the store, but that's not what I'm optimizing for here.

Well, millenials and younger saw their parents kill themselves at the job when giving a rat's ass, and still saw them get laid off/their bodies destroyed by the toll of a lifetime of manual work/a whole life of hustle leading to a meager retirement, and they realized none of it was worth it.

> the edge employees —- ie the people who interact with paying customers —- don’t own anything, and are 12 levels of management away from anyone who does.

Bingo. I found the breakdown in terms of the owner/renter/maintainer classes [0] very useful.

When the owner/renter/maintainer of a business/service/etc are the same person/community, incentives are aligned and quality tends to ensue.

When those 3 roles are clearly delineated and separated, no one gives a shit and owners care about maximizing their profit, maintainers care about getting the job done asap regardless of whether the maintenance will hold in the long term or not, and renters are left out to dry.

[0]: I first encountered it here, not sure if he got it from somewhere else.

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/getting-to-gnome-mod...

The rise of premium mediocre[0].

Everyone wants to feel VIP, and there's lots of money to be made in making people think they're going to get the VIP experience, so we get a flood of shitty VIP experiences like airport lounges.

If you don't like this state of affairs, you basically have two choices:

1) hustle and try to make enough money so that you're an actual VIP with access to actual VIP experiences

(OP in the article says "Charge me a premium, I don’t care.". Buddy, if you could afford the premium, you wouldn't be writing this article)

2) drop out, and don't patronize those experiences in the first place. Question why you are in a fake VIP airport lounge waiting to head to your fake VIP Disney/Vegas/Venice/whatever vacation in the first place.

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...

Crazy high functioning people pretty much came up with every technical and social innovation modern civilization runs on.

No crazies = no Newton, no Dirac, no Marx, no Descartes, no Curie, etc etc etc.

> This is why I utterly detest media outlets who amplify those people by reporting on petty "shitstorms", giving them way more power than they deserve

My thoughts exactly when “highbrow” outlets like the NYT started making headlines out of every silly thing Trump said in 2015/2016. All those media sources who professed to be against what he stood for didn’t realize that the words were meaningless, and merely by reporting on his inanities, they were implicitly endorsing exactly what he stood for.

It would be “plateau marin”, not “plateau de mer”. “Plateau de mer” does sound like a seafood restaurant special.