jpetso

I haven't really spent much time on simulation games past SimCity 2000, but I find this odd. Even the most winsome cities and countries in the world are struggling.

Instead of scenarios or AI, why wouldn't it be the case that success invites more problems? You've got issues with immigration happening too rapidly for the population's taste, inflation devalues your accumulated resources at a more rapid pace, essential workers' pay isn't keeping up with FAANG, inequality is rampant, lots of homeless druggies appreciating your shelter & food bank infrastructure but locals are fed up, and also the next level up in government works against you out of envy or simple lack of appreciation for you contribution to the public purse. Power structures crumble because citizens get lazy and entitled, not knowing how good they have it, populism and self-interest rule the day.

Design success as the enemy of success, and you never run out of issues to solve. That said, it would be nice to see the winning endgame in real life for a change.

The company/organization/government capable of making the robot wouldn't hand it out to random people, and would instead reap the paycheck by themselves.

There are a handful of these companies out there. Collabora, KDAB, D. Richard Hipp's SQLite company, and if you're lenient enough you could also include companies that productize their open source package such as NextCloud or The Qt Company. Heck, Red Hat (sorry, IBM) regularly gets pulled in to improve software across their stack, kernel or otherwise.

You could also include non-profits like the Linux Foundation, Blender Foundation or (new!) Godot Foundation, which do the same thing but without having to disguise as consulting, because development of the software itself is important enough to the industry that can pool its resources by donating to the respective foundation.

Still only works for important enough packages. I don't think there's a way around that. An open source project generally has to provide massively outsized value so that a handful of developers can capture a fraction of that value for paid maintenance.

It's not just practicing leetcode though. It's also putting your considerable skills to work for an entity that will funnel the world's attention into advertising (Google), create platform lock-in and undermine repairability (Apple, Nvidia), successfully lobby governments against use of open standards (Microsoft), etc.

All companies pay you to put its interest before your own interest, but some companies are much worse and much more effective at working against the greater good than others. I'm not selling out to those just to add another few years to my already very achievable retirement.

The problem is that there is also a steady supply of people coming in who don't give much of a damn about any of this, and just want to do what their friend group does. They might get more aware later, but by then there's already a new generation out there making the same mistakes.

Unless we can push ethical (and FOSS) software over the point of critical mass, it's a never-ending losing battle. And even if we get there, the battle for daily attention is much fiercer than, say, Blender or Godot permanently winning mindshare among professionals. Trends are fickle and even just by not being the next best thing, we can lose the masses to the next best Skinner box.

Meanwhile, my 500-person company switches from MS Office to Google Docs like it's no big deal. Because it isn't. Excel isn't the main skill, using spreadsheets is. Formulas, tabs, references, filters, sorting, pivot tables, scripting, blah blah blah.

Apart from Excel specialists with highly specialized workflows when the rest of your finance department is also using the same, nobody cares whether you're good at Excel. They just want something to easily tabulate rows and columns of data and get some insight of out if. LibreOffice does that as much as Google and MS.

Don't put "LibreOffice" on your resume, put "spreadsheets" and 95% of the time it won't make an actual difference anyway. You can learn the location/naming of most relevant functions of your employer's preferred spreadsheet app in a matter of hours and then you know several tools, which is always better than just knowing a single one and puts you ahead in other ways.

> Is that why they're so unresponsive to user needs?

It's because Wayland is a set of protocols, rather than a single dominant implementation.

In order to do it right, cross-compositor and flexible, you have to get different actors with different interests and bandwidth agree on a standard. This takes time.

In order to get it working fast, developers need to make a compositor-specific implementation first and then put in the extra work of getting it through the standards discussion as well as switching their compositor ecosystem to the new standard.

Until this happens with all parts that you care about, you're going to be annoyed either about interoperability or functionality. Pick your poison, and cue Moxie's "The Ecosystem is Moving" blog post. Also, keep using X11 until Wayland has the features you want. Most DEs/WMs haven't ripped out X11 support yet, and hopefully won't until their support of Wayland protocols is solid enough.

With Coreboot and the ChromeOS Linux kernel running well on the device, how much would it take to release a Framework Laptop Linux Edition based on the Chromebook mainboard, but with a standard keyboard and somewhat optimized for a pre-installed Linux distribution?

I would imagine that regular Linux won't do as well as ChromeOS in terms of battery life, but perhaps still considerably better than the Windows mainboard+firmware.

I've recently purchased a monitor with poor HDR that I knew was not worth any cost premium, and I'm using it with an operating system that still has to get basic HDR infrastructure in place. I do not feel like I'm missing out. Other stuff is way more important in comparison, and no matter what you pick, there will always be tradeoffs to make.

On an opposing note, updating my Arch system (pikaur -Syu) recently wanted to install Electron 20 and remove Electron 19, which the element-desktop package was still depending on. I wasn't using it so that's an easy uninstall. But there's nothing inherent about Arch that prevents these issues from popping up every now and then.

I clicked through for the code first, and then got interested in the research. Thanks for doing it the way you did :)

> Most fundamentally, if you want to raise your children without, for instance, an emphasis on educational attainment, you should have the right to do so.

Perhaps that's true if you believe that parents should be the only ones responsible for their children's fate, but that puts a lot of power in parents' hands and doesn't leave much with the kids themselves.

I think there's a middle ground between complete standardization and complete reliance on one or two individuals that prevents the worst outcomes, although it may also prevent some of the best possible outcomes. But generally getting input from a number of different sources is a good thing, and even if "authority" may not be great at comprehensive development of varied individuals, it can still set minimum standards and make sure the child isn't entirely subject to their parents' whims.

Shockingly, years of continued development can indeed resolve a lot of issues with software.

The T14s Gen 3 is apparently using Qualcomm wifi chips instead of MediaTek or Intel this time around, it seems likely that we'll see the same for the X13 Gen 3 as well.

Perhaps not, but they can sell their crypto reserves to other actors who are in a position to exchange them, for stuff that's actually useful to them.

No relation to this project. Just wanted to chime in to say that KDE's Kate editor pulled its Flatpak because the sandboxing makes much of the system integration (terminal, git, language servers) hard or impossible.

A Flatpak may have to ship with an independent copy of a lot of basic developer tools, and even then I don't know whether I want two different versions of git access the same local repository with a chance of incompatible repository formats.

I'd like to note that Microsoft is doing no better with DirectX. If it weren't for the drivers on Windows being distributed and supported by the GPU manufacturers themselves, Vulkan would only be a thing for Linux (incl. Android) and custom niche devices now.

Here's AMD's attempt: https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIPIFY

Naturally, the HIP tooling doesn't support M1 GPUs at this time. We'll see if anyone else tries.

React was doing the right thing for sure, and perhaps in a more principled way than Qt in terms of state propagating downwards and events bubbling up. (CSS still makes layouts unreasonably complex imho.)

But also, React is doing things that desktop GUIs had figured out years ago. It did a really good job at distilling the essence into something useful. Angular started the trend of finally moving towards state-driven views. Kudos to all of these developers for making web development less sucky.

To label it as a new thing that nobody else had done before though, that's going a bit far. New on the web, sure. By the time these got introduced, I had been waiting for years for a web framework that incorporates some of the non-web lessons learned. Let's give it lots of credit, but not more than it deserves.

So, transferable yes, but marketable no. I would classify those as different things.

As an alternative to the sibling comment's suggestion, you could try playing some non-grindy games. There's this general expectation that one doesn't get good value out of a game unless there's at least 60 hours of content and probably an ever-challenging multiplayer mode, but dump those AAA expectations and focus on just having a good time.

Pick an indie game or two with a well-defined end point, one that plays in under 20 or even 10 hours. See the sense of finishing and never going back to it makes you feel any differently.

If it doesn't work, you can still leave games by the wayside. I took several years of a break because I just wasn't feeling it, and ended up coming back to video games with a different perspective. It's all good either way, you don't have to force it.

> Without a relationship you have no future.

Not to take away from your overall point, but I would encourage people to be skeptical of this claim. Relationships are healthy, yes. They can help to provide meaning and purpose. They may end up giving your life the structure that's been missing before.

But firstly, it's not necessary to be in a single romantic relationship for all of these benefits, a tight-knit group of close friends can be just as great of a boon or almost.

And secondly, leaving a legacy does not equate having a future. Kids are a legacy. Memories that other people keep of you, and changes (hopefully improvements) you make in local communities, society, the world as a whole, that's leaving a legacy. But really, chances are that the world as a whole doesn't give much of a damn about whether your DNA or your work survives. Give it three or four generations and you're at best a footnote somewhere.

And that's okay. Having a future means to shape your life in a way that makes sense to you, that ends up being fulfilling, that lets you experience the good things and the bad things about it conscientiously.

Relationships can help with that. But in no way is having "a" relationship or having kids a prerequite for having a future. Thank you for your time, nitpicking over!

If you get bored by technology but want to give it another shot, see if you can find meaning around making it work for and with other people.

Perhaps you have an offline community that could benefit from some kind of automation, like generating tax receipts from a PDF template or organizing their resources and processes in a way (website?) that's useful for members.

Perhaps you're passionate about user freedoms, you explore an open source desktop environment and related apps but you find that it's still lacking in usability, stability or features. You dive in to make it better and in addition to doing good things for society as a whole, you also form bonds with other members of that developer community, first online, later at in-person meetups.

Perhaps you have an interest in mentoring and learning from each other, so you find like-minded people in your town. It could be coding meetups, pair programming sessions, conferences and presentations, helping tech noobs find their way into the industry. You might learn a bit and also pass on some of your own knowledge and experiences.

Either way, people-focused tech provides a different kind of fulfillment than tech for tech's sake. Worth a shot if you hadn't already tried to make it a focus!

What kinds of changes did you make, what did you learn from it? How do you go about rearchitecting and decision making?

Rejoice, Lenovo is introducing a ThinkPad that finally lets them scrap this excellent setup for a mainstream rectangular keyboard: Z13 and Z16. Doubly sad because those look like a kick-ass AMD Ryzen implementation otherwise. Trippy sad because they also found a way to get rid of the physical TrackPoint buttons and still call it a ThinkPad.

The writing is on the wall, just wait for Lenovo to finally extinguish their ugly step-child of asymmetry and deprive us of the last good arrow key layout left in portable laptops.

S0ix has stronger requirements on the "correct" interaction between firmware/BIOS and OS, it offloads more work to the OS. Poorly implemented S0ix will drain the battery faster, but correctly implemented S0ix is as good as S3 or even better.

Lenovo put out a buggy S3 implementation on some systems that hasn't been tested well because it's only an optional "Linux suspend" setting. Drains twice as fast as Linux with correctly implemented S0ix. And the worst thing is, nobody except Lenovo do can fix it because it's all on the BIOS level, and their China-based firmware team has other priorities.

Well-implemented S3 is nice. But it's going to disappear. Both Intel and AMD are switching away with full force, vendors won't have S3 options in the BIOS going forward and the ones that remain will likely suck. On the other hand, S0ix support is coming together even on AMD platforms which were a little late to the party. Once it's working decently, I'd rather trust my OS than my laptop manufacturer's firmware team to suspend components correctly.

Is there any particular reason that any mention of Fabrice Bellard turns into a praise-fest? I mean, I get it, the guy makes neat stuff and lots of it. But the level of hype is unusual, and I wonder whether there's an origin for this meme that isn't rooted in reading his actual source code.

I might take a risky job if the upside justifies the risk. But even in the US, the amount of stock options granted to employees (apart from the very earliest ones) will only result in a big pay-offs for the most successful of startups, and even then requires a lot of risk and/or sticking it out. EU startup culture appears less generous with equity and growth potential but doesn't make up for it with higher salaries.

Mostly because Jensen Huang was willing to pay a nice premium over what the market would otherwise offer. There are some cough synergies cough that Nvidia could have instrumented for higher profits, Jensen had a clear and enthusiastic vision about how to get there.

Softbank can still sell ARM to anyone including the public market, they just won't get as much money for them that way. Presumably.

Well, apparently worldwide population will peak sometime and then slowly fall. The mitigating factor being that it probably won't happen in most of our lifetimes yet. That said, some countries might experience their population plateauing sooner than others. So perhaps if we kick the can down the road for a while longer, it will indeed have been enough.