mablopoule

Awesome !

My favorite "movie withing movie" idea is "Wormhole X-Treme", the Stargate TV-show within the Stargate SG1 TV-show.

They use it for self-deprecating humor, by e.g. lampshading the sometime easy scenaristic shortcut they take, with some episodes where the "real" Stargate SG1 cast would (secretly) serves as advisor for Wormhole X-Treme spoof tv-show.

On top of that, the justification for it is absolutely genius: Because that way, the (in-universe) army could quell any rumor of the existence of the Stargate Command by simply saying "No, that from a TV-show, duh!".

I haven't seen it mentioned, but the 'zone-rainbow' packages never fail to put a smile on me, with it's silliness.

Spoken like a true carbon-based lifeform.

This is such a silly take.

Yeah, you can look at current blockbuster movies, and mostly see Marvel stuff, except that now there is a thing called "superhero fatigue" because it's not 2010 anymore.

In the meantime, the clothing has changed, the music has changed, the zeitgeist has changed, and new medias are Twitch, Tiktok and discord.

Not op, but I agree with him too: it sounds off for no good reason.

It's as if instead of saying "John walked to the park", the editor wrote "John was moved to the park by walking".

And I also find asinine the idea of stripping the sense of agency in someone's last moment, as if it were more respectful. Suicide is a sad, touchy subject no matter how the sentence is constructed anyway.

Disclaimer: I'm not a native English speaker.

But the office suite is good.

> That's the issue - people should focus their limited time, brain power and "bullshit tolerance" on actual work stuff rather than wasting it on dysfunctional software.

Exactly. Which is why Excel is king in finance, and not a free alternative with half the important features missing [1]

Microsoft do many things wrong, but they also do many things right, and I suspect that you underestimate a suite that really does contains power tools.

Add to that the deployment story for a big enough company, and it's no wonder why it has such a huge market share.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

The window XP. The ricing, the stickers, the business / quirky users, everything is so on point. I'm saving this, thanks you.

Thank you so much for the reminder.

I actually plan on buying a X1 Carbon Gen10 in the following weeks, and use Arch as my daily driver, and yet I didn't think of checking the (honestly amazing) ArchWiki.

Are you using it on linux ? Because I too experience the indicator that won't refresh, but only through ArchLinux/Firefox. No problem whatsoever on Windows 10.

Well, big companies who expect stability in their tools, and good support do.

The Google suite isn't bad, but Google Spreadsheet is no Excel either.

Microsoft Team in itself is clearly behind Slack, but it's also nice to have a single sign-on solution where your Chat app (Team) is well integrated with your mail app (Outlook), and your shared file service (Sharepoint).

Add stuff like PowerBI, Yammer, and of course the main Word/Excel/PowerPoint applications, and you can clearly understand the value proposition for companies that aren't cash-strapped, while on the other hand Google is more famous for their habit of sunsetting their products.

I say that as someone who's been mainly on Linux for more than 15 years now, loves 'artisanal' TUI tools, and who quickly gets annoyed at Windows 10 bloat and adware.

/rant mode on

On the opposite side of the single sign-on solution, I've also seen an extremely startup-ey company using Discord as the official chat app, and having the displeasure of realizing that Discord doesn't really allows for multiple accounts using the same phone number for 2FA. I already have a Discord account, I just don't want to use it in a professional setting. Single-sign on is indeed nice.

/rant mode off

Be it family, hobbies, religion, other topics of interest, the scope of things to do in life is near-infinite.

You could spend your evening honing your skills for a while, yes, but even then at some point you might feel tired of just spending all your time on computer-related stuff.

Then you log on HN, like you did for the last decade or so, and see another "Ask HN: I don't feel passionate about coding anymore" post. It's okay buddy, passion will come back, or might not in a way that makes it okay, you just need a breather.

Sorry, went on a bit of a tangent, cause I do agree with you in fact. I do expect my colleagues to meet a baseline of competency, one that usually only met by "doing your homework", and at the same time, I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to do it out of habit.

If you let the penis visible, there is still not that much remarkable. The picture was mainly about a baby swimming toward a bill used as a bait.

There is at least one picture of me (not on social media, admittedly), as a toddler, buck naked in a pool with another toddler. It was (and still is) and innocent picture even with the visible genitalia. So no, it's not automatically "depravity" to show nude people, even kids.

Don't be mistaken, I'm not for child exploration, stuff like kids beauty pageant, or over-exposed young people are downright creepy, but I'm reacting at the idea of making any representation of kids taboo.

Yeah, society would absolutely be culturally impoverished if this would be considered off-limit.

Limiting the space of 'allowed' expression and saying it's okay because culture is not essential isn't really the best path to take as a society.

Yes, let's narrow even more the kind of content allowed in platforms with draconian laws.

"I'm sorry mister, but we can see chidren playing in the park at 44:28 in the hour-long documentary you've produced, so we had to remove the video."

/s

Agreed.

I like CSS, but the article (while interesting and informative) give me PTSD thinking about a previous project with "typed" CSS. Maybe I'm an old fart, but I never saw the appeal in having such a thorough level of typing.

The downside is longer time to analyse your Typescript code, having to reference some ungodly type if you need to pull your value from a config file, while the upside is just... something that most IDE already did anyway?

In most case, I'm pretty sure it's less of an hassle to say it's a damn string and check that your code give some correct value there, instead of trying to rube-goldberg Typscript into auto-generating the correct code.

Typescript is powerful, but KISS is good too.

As someone in the "kinda fat kinda fit" category, I'm a bit disappointed by the amount of people so quick to brush off the semi-bullshitness of BMI.

I believe it's a good measure for statistics over population, since it's easy to measure and tend to work for a large number of people.

On the individual level tough, you really don't need to be a world-class athlete for BMI to become less relevant for you, contrary to what some commenters seems to imply.

For the last 10 years I've been to the gym around 2/3 times a week, walked a lot more, cut down the junk food, and yet I'm 10/15 kilos heavier than at my 'fattest'. I'm far from being a powerlifter or a professional rugbyman, yet when I see people around me, I'm usually the beefiest guy in the room.

I do believe that some people went overboard with "body positivity". In the same time, as a french guy living in Paris where the expected look varies from 'slim' to 'extra-slim', I'm glad to see more things for people with an even moderately wide frame.

How is giving financial leverage to people with not enough cash in the bank, but a solid forseeable revenue stream "a form of deliberate rationing and enforced political hierarchy"?

It's like wishing that healthcare system wouldn't exist because you imagine a world where people were just healthy instead.

"The pragmatic Programmer" is one I would recommend.

That, and "Team Geek", in term of relationship with codes and teammates.

It's the main point of the (excellent) book "Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World" by Dan Davies: That the optimal amount of fraud is above zero.

The optimal amount is the one where you lose less value from fraud than you would have lost with overly-strict checks and false positives.

Well, you were right :D.

Couldn't agree more.

I think it's the reason why the "Joel on Software" blog is still relevant even 20 years later, because it's a tech blog that is at his heart about business, and it's crossover with software engineering.

Like, in this discussion about TDD[1], you can feel business consideration being the source of pragmatism in Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood thinking, and as a result avoid dogmatism based on purism.

I've also had the luck of working with a CEO who had business sense, salesmanship, industry knowledge (for Luxury & Fashion), and understanding of the technical limitations and possibilities.

This resulted in smarter technical choices for our product, because it gave a laser focus on what are the important things in our product, and even more importantly what are the features that looked sensible from an engineering point of view, but really had no added value in a business sense, and thus not worth the effort.

[1] https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?pg=pgWiki&comm...

Interesting. Thanks for the detailed comparison, and glad to be proved wrong.

Maybe not then, I haven't done my homework on this subject to be honest.

I mostly said that because of a gut feeling that CS is their main cash cow, while their others series are solid but with a more niche player base.

It's on my bucket list since, but I was afraid of falling down the rabbit hole, same as Anno, Civilisation and other cool games.

I'm so glad City Skyline had such a success, because I feel that other Paradox Interactive games wouldn't have existed otherwise.

As an avid player of Stellaris, and as someone eyeing the Crusader Kings series or Europa Universalis, I'm feel that Paradox games have DLCs done right. They are clearly on the expensive side, but they are contentfull, and feel less shameless than EA counterpart (especially with the Sims who has the same DLCs over and over again).

On a side note, there is also Caesar III (& Pharaoh) on Gog, and it's still a gem.

I played SimCity 2013 a few months after launch, and I quite liked it, especially the gorgeous visuals.

I've read TFA, and honestly they also failed to mention maybe the worse issue of SimCity 2013: how limited it was compared to the previous instalments. The playable area was tiny, so you quickly felt constrained by the border of your playable area. The fact that you could build multiple cities in the same region alleviated it a bit, but it really felt limiting compared to it's predecessors.

Another point, which I feel is a good representation of an 'EA'-fied game: I was a bit miffed to discover that you couldn't create a subway system, you were limited to roads (I don't even remember if you could create a bus system). A few months in, I see that there was a 'Subway' content pack, which got my hopes up... until I realized it was to add 'Subway' sandwich shop in your city.

Same, they had a cross-promotion with Nissan, so your Sims would feel happy when they recharged their electric car, and the charging station has the effect of a park in your neighborhood.

Add to that the server issues, the fact that they said it was because so much computation was offloaded to their servers (which was quickly disproved, and felt bogus to being with), and the whole affair had a vibe of "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining".

It was particularly sad, because it really still is an enjoyable game.

EDIT: After a bit of fact -checking, I realize that I've mis-remembered the "Subway" DLC story. It was instead the "Metro" content pack (metro is french for subway), which was for a newspaper distributed for free near French subway entrances. There is also a Subway sandwich mod, but for SC4 only.

Yes, exactly.

Typescript managed to be the best of both worlds, as you can be both lenient when you're still in the design/prototyping phase of a project, and need to test idea quickly, but also add as much type-check as you see fit when you're maintaining a project, and need to interface with lots of existing code.

As such, I'm always a bit miffed when I see so many people adamant on setting it to maximum strictness by default, under the guise of "best practice".

Yes, I wonder how we went from "9/11 never forget" to "Don't even mention the subject if you want to keep earning money for your effort in creating content" [1].

YouTube is weird when it comes to completely arbitrary demonetization (and the absolutely braindead idea of removing the downvote counter) because it's one of the rare plateform that get so much negative goodwill from content creator who depends on it to make some money.

[1] One famous french Youtubeur, "Joueur du Grenier" has to playfully bypass the subject by joking that "Nothing whatsoever happened between the 10th and the 12th September" while showing 2 plastic bottles being hit by paper airplane and then crumbling. He originally put real images of 9/11 while describing the early 00's zeitgeist, but had to do that instead since it caused the video to not be sent to subscribers (or demonetized to oblivion, I forgot which)

Agree, It's the perfectly balanced between "too dry/academic", or "too vague/gimmicky".

It's often mentionned in HN, but in the same style, I cannot recommend enough "Money stuff" [1] which is Matt Levine's newsletter at Bloomberg. Highly entertaining.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-06/musk-g...

I kinda hop on this bandwagon to recommend the book "The righteous mind" by Jonathan Haidt, specifically the notion that there tends to be 3 main 'modes' of morality: a logic of individualism (Especially in the western word, and doubly so in affluent classes), the logic of community, and the logic of sacrality.

I feel that this back-and-forth about public pajama-wearing is really at heart a back and forth between a logic of pure individualistic moral (if nobody is hurt, then what's the deal), and more community-focused moral (yeah, nobody is hurt, but it's not bad either to uphold some standards in society).

I've never been to America, and I'm also living in Paris, where clothing is kinda important, but honestly I'm a bit shocked at the idea of going out in public in a pajama. I feel that, unless you're in a really bad place in your life, you should put some effort in presenting a 'good' version of yourself in public, and public pajama-wearing would be a huge signal that you're letting yourself down/are having a huge breakdown, or have mental health issues.

Oh, nice.

On french words I got way too late, there is the fact that "Gendarme" (a kind of policeman) is "gens d'arme" (people of weapon)

And also, thinking about the word "Breakfast", as in "Breaking the fast", I realize that the french "Déjeuner" is also literally "Dé - jeûner".