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Regarding the first part, I'm pretty sure that Steam had an offline mode from the start. Perhaps it required an initial connection to set up an account, though.

I was lucky to be in an area that had very early access to DSL, so it wasn't a problem for me. The "always on" features was actually pretty awesome and novel if you had a permanent connection. In general I've been impressed by Steam from the start.

On the other hand, we can see what the success has caused down the line. Now every publisher wants to replicate it with their own proprietary launchers, undoing all of the cleanliness and centralization that made Steam awesome in the first place.

If anything it's now more confusing than ever to keep track of which launcher has which game and which friends had been added where.

I suppose the total Steam hegemony was always going to be a temporary thing.

HL2, Portal, CS:S. Valve really hit it out of the park in those days. I wonder how much of Steams success can be traced back to it. Just the Valve catalog alone carried it for me and my friends.

I'm more talking about opinions framed as "how could anyone do that" or arguments beginning with "I would never".

A good example is malicious actions by companies. You could probably follow the entire decision tree in a lot of cases and not find a single individual that was acting differently than the average person would in those same circumstances.

Systemic issues are becoming obfuscated because human nature is disregarded in favor of ideals. It's much easier to just nail someone to a cross than to empathize and find real solutions.

Sometimes it feels like people are confused about the nature of themselves. We have this idealized version of ethics and rationality that maps poorly onto reality. Yet everybody (especially on social media) talks as if this idealized version is the obvious natural state of all humans.

Our intellect as a species is a blessing and a curse. We are self aware, but only to a certain extent. The blanks are filled in by wishful thinking and hopelessly logical rationalizations.

It's fine and serves its purpose well as something to strive for. But it significantly hampers our ability to understand and empathize toward those that for whatever reason goes against the ideal.

Video compression is typically not about "take each frame, and make it as small as possible". Video compression revolves around cleverly making use of deltas and segmenting the image so that you can reuse as much data as possible from previous frames/keyframes.

I agree, there are probably a lot of advantages. It would be interesting to see a boilerplate structure for this workflow. Maybe it already exists in some form.

In my experience, for regular libraries, you usually want to pin version ranges and not always use the latest of every library. But when the main business logic and a whole team is dedicated to one of the "service libraries", whose responsibility is it to make sure that the version stays up to date across other service libraries? Do you leave it up to the main host app? Do you allow a multitude of service library versions? Do you skip versioning all together? In microservices you have an opaque facade in the form of an API that makes this a non-issue. Perhaps you'd want some simulacrum of this in the form of IPC between service libraries?

Do you use some sort of contract based testing between service libraries? Put all integration testing in the host application?

It's not obvious to me what the best approach would be.

Well of course. That is one of the primary benefits of the cube rule. Finally we can all be that which we desire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOsWfzzvlkU

You can use a conveyor belt style toaster to toast your mobius toast. What's even better is that you can toast it forever.

What is makizushi? Is that some local variant of maki? Traditional maki (with seaweed on the outside) seems to be sushi indeed. California rolls though (inverted maki, rice on the outside) are arguably salads.

You never look at every single character while reading, your eyes only dart between select tokens. Your peripheral vision and your brain fills in the blanks. I think the idea is to aid your brain quickly parsing these tokens.

A nice side effect is that it also helps your vertical tracking of lines by adding more visual anchor points.

I wonder how messy it would look to combine the two? BeeLine really works, especially in cases where the designer has disregarded the need for reasonable column widths. I feel this works too, but as with BeeLine the visual appearance is a bit jarring at first.

I suppose that's true in a way. There would have to be some serious scaffolding for it to work though. For a web service, for example, libraries would have to be able to register route handlers and such that they handle independently. Perhaps they could all be initialized in a common way using DI or something from a base gateway application. Versioning and interop testing would have to be figured out in some clever way.

Something like this would be the architecture I imagine.

Alright, I agree completely. But I still don't see how it causes the same issues as microservices does. It is definitely conceptual crack (which is a genius term btw), but it isn't an ominous foot gun the same way the allure of microservices is.

EDIT: Oh I get it, you aren't talking at all about the consequences for the implementers. Only the massive effort required to turn the alluring V=f(S) into the React we have today. Got it.

I find the organizational arguments to be pretty convincing, but surely there must be a way to reap these rewards in a monolithic infra setup as well? Maybe someone should develop a "monolith microservice architecture" where all the services are essentially (and enforced to be) isolated, but once deployed is built like a single unit.

You could do it with docker-compose I guess, but optimally your end result would be a single portable application.

I've been at a place where a single person is juggling twenty microservices to power a product with barely any users. Just the infra cost alone makes it insane.

"But one day, when we get massive growth, it will all be worth it", he says.

Alas that day may not come, since he is busy configuring load balancers and message queues instead of developing features.

How do you mean that this causes 'nightmarish complexity'? I guess it's true if you measure the amount of complexity that powers the framework, but the visible API's, the resulting project structure and the implementation itself is incredibly simple and versatile.

I'd say it's one of my favorite properties of component frameworks as opposed to raw element modification, templating solutions or classical MVC.

The reasons for the immediate action might be logical, but looking at the medium term consequences it breaks down completely in my mind. The only two possibilities I can see going forward is either a forever-war as in Afghanistan, or a forever-sanction situation like Iran or DPRK.

I don't see how any listed benefits would outweigh the costs of either option. It troubles me a lot, because Putin has seemed to me to be a carefully calculating player up until this. It makes me wonder if he has truly lost it. Or if there is some grand plan which this is only a small part of. Both are scary.

I read an incredibly thorough book about Putin a year or so ago, and what stuck with me is how political his career in the KGB was. In those final years of the USSR, everything was in shambles, and any position of power became so through-and-through political. That makes his rise so interesting and frightening. He has been forged in a dark web of covert slush funds, power projection and kompramat. He was obviously very good at that game, and it continues today.

EDIT: The book was "Putin's People" by Catherine Belton

Is that true though? I was under the impression that two surfaces with the same perceived brightness would bombard your eyeballs with the same amount of photons. Regardless of whether or not the surface is emitting or reflecting light.

On the other hand, maybe there is some filtering taking place when light is bounced off materials. I.e. blue wavelengths being absorbed by the paper.

I'm not dismissing it having an effect. But isn't it probable that the light profile would be somewhat different for an actual monitor and a back/sidelit eInk dislay? If so, the effect may differ as well.

Shade throwing would be justified in my opinion. "E-reader" isn't normally used to describe tablets. The light profile of a dynamic LED screen is probably very different from the ambient steady backlight on a Kindle.

I wonder if the type of illumination used for traditional book reading is relevant. I.e. would a bedside lamp with cold light provoke the same effects?

The VAERS reports might be the most malicious and poorly used data set in existence.

> Could you sustain a development team capable of creating this with a limited market and revenue stream?

Market wouldn't be limited and potential revenue streams would be huge. So yeah. Just as a reminder, this is still assuming that there is a significant window where the big options aren't available for Europeans.

In most cases the underdog is running on investment funds, and has handed over a significant amount of the company control to investors. When a buy is proposed, those investors have to weigh the really quick (probably really large) profit of selling versus playing the long game fighting an uphill battle against the giant.

This is how promising companies are swallowed by the market leaders.

I think you misread the comment thread. You are just restating my point. I agree with you. I was talking about the current (previous?) situation, where US and EU companies are on equal footing on the european market.

A big reason is that competing with them on equal footing is a monumental task. You are working against network effects, heavy duty marketing, integrations into other products and a whole army of developers.

Developing the product itself isn't the reason.

Microsoft has done the leg work for this already. They currently have a completely contained Azure environment in Germany. I think it was deployed to ensure compliance with german/EU health data protocols.

I have first hand experience of this, migrating between their global PaaS and the contained German one. The bulkheads are quite air-tight (much to my personal detriment).

Europe isn't drained of talent by a long shot. It has surely been tapped to some extent by the bay area exodus, but there's plenty of tech success stories and talented people here still.