273 karma · joined November 17, 2022
But quickly looking it up it’s a social-oriented disorder. Elon is making dubious social-oriented decisions.
Not sure why no one mentions his asperger's syndrome because that’s an obvious mastodon in the room.
Back then, the screen was a playground one could poke and prod—without distraction, with a singular focus. This is especially important for children. Now we’re competing with the nearest iThing.
I always think of the parents who buy their children the latest-and-greatest toys, only to find their child is more interested in the box. Or perhaps a stick and some bugs in the back yard.
It’s one thing to die from doing something stupid—it’s something else entirely to inflict pain and hardship on others.
Meta’s bread-and-butter is selling peoples data, irrespective of whether teens are committing suicide on their platforms.
A lot of millennials value freedom of choice and open collaboration ad nauseam, but this is the danger of too many voices—nothing gets done. No singular purpose. No authority—or rather, no respect for authority. The reality is: we are not all equal. Some people are just better at what they do than others. Perhaps we should listen to what they say?
But that’s how politics goes—some schmucks who have no idea nor vision, nor experience, nor know-how, rise up on the backs of engineers who do all the work. Typically out of insecurity or over-ambition they trample on-up.
And who would want to deal with the cutthroat bullshit of trying to deal with these people?
Go Carmack—create something amazing with your startup. Meta will rot away in the next ten years because someone else will invent a better VR headset. Just like Linus helped invent a better OS—free to use, open to collaborate, with vision and focus. With attention-to-detail and quality-engineering as a first-class citizen.
The problem Meta ran into is that it’s difficult/impossible to make money on it. It’s a niche market at best, and it’s much more difficult to prove the value when compared to something like Facebook. Facebook is easy to use and provides social value to everyone on the planet. And I say that not using it myself but I live in a small town and all business here rely on Facebook; the municipalities use it to communicate; elderly use it… it’s accessible.
I’m sure the wall Carmack ran into was the shareholders. To shareholders it’s more often than not about profits. To Carmack it’s probably about the product he envisions, not the profits. But you can’t have both sustainably when folks can live without VR.
I would jump on the bandwagon if my VR headset was mine: like a computer I can install whatever I want there—not in a walled garden owned by Evil Corp.
The proper VR solution needs to be open source hardware and software. By the people, for the people. Reduce the barrier to entry and people will use it.
One more thing: those virtual avatars are impossible to take seriously. If I’m in a virtual boardroom filled with those, I might as well be playing Minecraft.
It’s cool in concept but whose going to shell out cash to be tethered to a machine wearing goggles sitting in a chair?
AR has potential but even that is marginally better than alternative solutions.
Also, I don’t know about y’all but I don’t trust Facebook so I don’t trust Meta. They are a data-leach.
We still probably have a decade or more to go with this technology it has to be affordable, lightweight, AR glasses not tied to a company that sells peoples data!
Unfortunately, even though we engineer with code, reading long streams of text is actually a terrible user experience by itself.
Good user experience should hold the user’s hand through the process so they don’t need to sift through a haystack of configurations.
VS Code has the power of emacs and an autogenerating UI which maps to the configuration files. To me, that’s the easy way out—make the UI map one-to-one with the data underneath, obviating the burden of considering the UX of each configuration path, and missing out on the benefits of good UX.
If my goal is to program in language X then I should be able to grab a product and get started without fuss. VSCode is a whole lot of fussing about.
That being said, it’s very stable and performs well—I will give the devs a massive kudos for that. Also if I did a lot of NodeJS dev work it would probably classify as a proper IDE for that.
But all-in-all I would prefer something purpose-built with minimal configuration out the gate for development workloads (C/C++, Java, C#) and a more minimal editor (nano, vim, eMacs, notepad++, geany, etc) for editing configs.
Gamifying browsing habits, monetizing MSN celebrity gossip on stock widgets and built-in search capabilities… etc… how are we supposed to be productive with such childish garbage?
I suppose the question is: how much time does it take to master stock HTML5/CSS/JavaScript versus mastering a framework, through-and-through.
Frameworks are constantly in flux but the foundation they are built upon is a more lasting skill set. But the more we spend learning framework X we are spending time away from foundations.
Web frameworks are more like… clever hacks to HTML to wedge in a “new way to do it” more clever than the last attempt.
Game engines are also somewhat different because the level of abstracted complexity there is vast and heavily domain-specific. It targets multiple platforms like ORMS and multiple GPU backends as well. It provides physics APIs and other heavy maths capabilities too.
But the browser standards-bodies provide that for us now. HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript will run well across all modern browsers.
But here we are, with stacks-on-stacks-on-stacks of layers emulating what truly should be a native application. “Web Application” should not be a thing. HTML/CSS were supposed to be for content and presentation; JavaScript was for sprinkles of functionality.
So no matter how you spin it—each framework is a workaround making the browser do something it wasn’t designed for.
When I say that I don’t mean “abandon all APIs”—I’m just stating why things are so complicated in the web space.
Moral of the story—give us more static content please. “Dynamic” means ads and wasted CPU cycles.
People often have it ingrained in their psyche that reinventing the wheel is evil, but it’s not—we do it all the time when we write paragraphs.
It’s of course tempting to grab a library but there’s a learning curve and an often hidden long-term cost with using libraries.
But yeah most grandchildren auction off their parents belongings anyway. That’s why birds make nests and then they go somewhere else and maybe return, make a new nest.
People are fixated on permanence—perhaps that’s another way to build housing: design it so it is sustainable, then tear it down and recycle the materials every 10 years.
And regardless, modern features are pretty much frivolous crap anyway. I mean, a smart refrigerator? A smart oven? Please. Older ovens are designed to bake—not sell ads.
When my TV just magically started showing ads I decided it’s time I go to the library and read more books. Books were designed to better humanity.
Minimalism is a good thing for an OS as it really makes it easier to use.
Another thing to note: there’s a lot or duplication in modern software. For instance, each OS file browser has a search bar to help find files. But tragically, the browser also has one, and so do many websites in the browser. So we have a recursive, ever-expanding set of search bars—yuck.
And also tragically, so do many apps have built-in file browsers. Ideally there should be one mechanism to find things, one mechanism to organize things, etc. It should be simple but flexible, and apps shouldn’t have to roll their own, they should be able to gracefully use the one provided.
We’re at a weird point in software where the browser is basically the OS for many people. ChromeOS was an interesting thought but it’s more like a limited-feature OS designed to sell Google services.
We need to take a step back and kind of assess the situation more—and then make a nice little OS :)
But The Internet is plagued with the disease of infinite moving adverts, and when we log in with the intent of performing some task, it is simply too easy to get distracted.
Not only is there supplemental content-oriented distractions—but form factor dictates the speed with which we read. Newspapers are indeed perhaps a bad example because the short columns of prose encourages rapid reading and potentially encourages misinterpretation. On a mobile phone with the delight of accessible, responsive websites, the shrunken column is now how we read articles of all shapes and sizes. Shapes that would traditionally be designed for a larger form factor, for slower rate of consumption.
Perhaps if they sat at the table, coffee in hand, and read a well-thought-out article in a newspaper or journal without digital noise they would have actually spent the time to understand what they’re reading.
I used to have high hopes for some of Microsoft’s innovations like Zune, Windows Phone, connect, Rosalyn—that glimmer of open-source-hope from the Evil Empire.
But it’s obvious now they are not really good at anything in the consumer space anymore: Hopping on the ad bandwagon because that’s what Google does; stealing the OS X taskbar placement for no good reason; turning the OS into the spyware folks used to dread at the turn of the millennium; now we need apps to remove Windows features just to use our computers.
I feel like Rust has similar pitfalls in that vein—instead of defining the user experience first, they went for a symbol that is not used elsewhere—making it easier on the engineers while satisfying the “functional requirement” of namespaces.
So—Rust will not be the language-to-end-all-languages because it is not beautiful enough. Perhaps it is almost there in functionality, but i foresee a problem with any language’s longevity unless it’s literally perfectly thought-out user experience.
I’d love to jump on the hype train with Rust but it’s not really that exciting. It doesn’t really feel all that natural. Well-thought-out user experiences should feel natural through-and-through.
Guido got a lot right with Python because it’s clean and easy to jump in. Minimal cognitive load. But still very powerful.
But it’s probably too crowded I dunno. Maybe people should start eating the rats… lol
Rust is safe but it’s at least as ugly as C++.
https://www.doverbooks.co.uk/point-and-line-to-plane
Consider h::i::j::k versus h.i.j.k
Two :’s is an extremely loud combination of visual elements compared to the subtle point. :: drags the eye away from the content and says “look at me oscillate”
In addition, humans group similar visual elements together so a combination of anything::doesnt::matter::what::between::clumps it is impossible to escape the common pattern and the eye jumps between the ::’s. Therefore it takes double the cognitive load to read.
What’s worse, the eye gets trapped within each :: because it’s a combination of four dots, which naturally creates an implied circular pattern which draws the viewer in further.
Compare to something like: use HashMap from std.collections
Or… more obviously the python import statements.