rimunroe

> But it can be, that's my point. It can be!

You have not explained how. You've just described ways you think we could incentivize longer-lasting products. Having incentives doesn't make materials science or engineering magically be able to do things it couldn't before, especially when such incentives aren't new.

I'm interested in hearing your actual technical points as to how we can address any of the problems I've mentioned, not just your assertions that it's clearly doable somehow.

> We had products which lasted longer in the 60s in some cases, "over-engineered", yet our manufacturing capabilities and tolerances and quality control were not on par, not even close with our capabilities now.

I never argued things didn't last longer in the past, and I'm not sure why you're acting like I did. I do think appliances are more prone to failure today, though I also think the reputation for things in the past lasting so long is heavily biased by the fact that repairing devices (i.e. maintenance) was more common back then, and because we didn't worry about safety or efficiency nearly as much, and because of good old survivorship bias.

> I am literally more than doubling down on my statement, my 100+ years compared to 40 years. The motive isn't there, it isn't a lack of capability.

As an example, humans have been trying to prevent corrosion of metal objects for literally thousands of years. The global annual economic impact of corrosion today is estimated at $2.5 trillion. We've made major advances in materials science and have alloys, coatings, and other technologies which have allowed a lot of applications which just wouldn't have been possible in the past, but most of those have still happened over the course of centuries.

There are enormous, unfathomable incentives to come up with better materials and components outside of the home appliance industry, but they have to deal with the same problems and struggle just as much or more.

> Then I firmly believe, under that failure cost, that in under a decade fridges would last 100+ years without maintenance.

Again, you'll need to explain what materials we'll use for this, or how tighter manufacturing tolerances would allow such an enormous increase in longevity, much less without increasing costs astronomically.

Overall I think you're being far too optimistic about how long components which need to run nearly constantly for decades can last even under ideal circumstances. I think you're being unbelievably optimistic in thinking that even if such products were possible they could be done for anywhere even near the price the average fridge costs these days.

> But I do believe you'd agree that there isn't a profit motive in many aspects of our market for tireless improvements?

To a degree, yes, but I also think people who argue that we don't make devices like we used to miss that as a society we don't want the devices we used to.

> And that, even if you think my statements are fantastical, you still may agree that we could do better?

I'd never argue that we can't do better. I will argue that your idea of a fridge (especially a modern one) which lasts 40-50 years (much less over a century) is ludicrous. It's certainly possible you'd have an individual fridge which lasts an incredibly long time without maintenance, but such survivals will always be the rare exception rather than the norm.

I was never arguing that we couldn’t make things more reliable, just that a fridge which lasts 40 years without any failures isn’t realistic

If anyone's a fan of papercraft models and the game Homeworld, you might enjoy this collection of models from the games. I remember my sister put together several of these back in the early/mid 2000s.

https://www.homeworldaccess.net/infusions/downloads/download...

> Well OK, but you starting out by discussing the B-52, so I responded in kind.

...because you used B-52s as an example in your argument that fridges could be made to run maintenance free for decades.

> Unless the documentary I watched was wrong, and of course it could be, that isn't "just replace things because". Instead, it's "if those components need replacement".

Yes, that's how maintenance works. Why would you have thought I was saying it was just for fun? The every-four-years maintenance (PDM) involves a deep inspection of the whole aircraft and replacing parts that are fatigued or otherwise showing signs of wear. I would assume they're doing this because they've found that four years is a good rate to find and replace parts that are going to fail well before they're likely to. Airplane parts wear out after use. Frames experience stress from flying and become fatigued.

Similarly, refrigerant can leak when seals fail. I imagine that on the span of decades outgassing might be a problem too. I haven't dealt with compressor failures personally, but they're mechanical components and I assume eventually lubrication gets to be a problem. Rubber gaskets degrade over time. Fungus/algae can grow in the lines used to drain condensation to the evaporation pan and eventually block them, causing the fridge to build up ice and eventually leak water. Fans will fail over time because bearings wear or insulation on windings degrade.

> My point is, some of those B-52s are being inspected, but not having much done to them, where as others a lot more.

That inspection involves nearly complete disassembly. Which documentary did you watch? Aerodynamic surfaces and structural elements get replaced from fatigue and wear. Parts get removed because of corrosion (airplanes get exposed to a lot of moisture). New components get introduced because systems get upgraded. This is normal and expected, but it's all maintenance. From an article[0]:

---

> Foreman said it typically takes a B-52 between 220 and 260 days to go through depot maintenance, depending on parts availability and whether a bomber has any age-related stress fractures or corrosion that need to be repaired. The Air Force is still trying to figure out how much more time the upgrades might add to that schedule, he said.

> Cracking and other structural issues are common on the six-decade-old B-52, Foreman said, and sometimes require components to be replaced. But the Air Force is used to catching and fixing those problems, he said, and the aircraft should be able last well into the 2050s — perhaps to 2060 — without more in-depth structural upgrades.

---

> So you can see why I was specifying how this can be mitigated.

No, I can't, not to the degree you claimed. I don't think your argument about being able to make a maintenance-free-for-decades fridge--pardon the pun--holds water[1], much less without significantly increasing the cost. If you're expecting them to do all the work of discovering issues upfront, why would the cost of doing that not inflate the price significantly? Also, ongoing inspections of the fridge would cost money.

If your argument is that eventually we would be able to make humanoid robots where the maintenance costs are negligible, then sure, maybe. That seems within the realm of possibility.

But again, you said we could make fridges which didn't need maintenance for several decades. I don't think that's within the realm of possibility. You used something (the B-52) which needs regular maintenance as an example of why we should be able to make something else (a fridge) which needs almost none. This is what I was responding to.

[0] https://defensenews.com/air/2024/02/20/tinker-air-force-base...

I was responding to you saying we could make fridges which could easily last 40-50 years without maintenance (and somehow not cost much more).

> Yes but how old are the B-52s? And how much maintenance?

They get heavy, months-long maintenance where they replace major components (often including major structural ones) every four years. Presumably there is more frequent minor maintenance before then. I don’t imagine their age of 70ish years is really relevant since I assume they’re approaching Ships of Theseus at this point.

> A generic example, fridges could easily last 40 to 50 years without maintenance. They wouldn't be all that more expensive either. Volvo, and the B-52 bomber program showed this, with Volvo having some models unchanged for 20 years. The B-52 has been in service longer than most people have been alive.

B-52s require regular inspections and maintenance just like any other aircraft. A fridge is less complicated, but it's still a machine. Even my grandfather's clock needed some work done every couple decades, and it didn't contain refrigerant, a compressor, fans, or have to deal with condensation.

Because when people get priced out of their existing homes they often find that they can't afford houses elsewhere either.

I appreciate the response! I have no defense against the charge of pedantry. I do stand by my points, but I definitely didn’t need to argue it for so long

It does mean that a majority or a large percentage of people believe it's one of the best of all time though. That Wikipedia article is a bad example for reasons I've explained in the sibling thread and which you haven't yet addressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186805

> Most of which you would have anyway.

Data caps exist and also higher service reliability tiers cost more.

Agreed. I'm glad that I at least get reimbursed for a portion of my home internet connection and for office equipment.

> Again, you don't have to believe the people who are sharing their sincere opinion, but A LOT of people regard Hollow Knight as one of the best games ever made.

Why do you think I don't believe that? It's undeniably popular and was critically acclaimed. I never said it wasn't. What I did say was that that Wikipedia article didn't support your assertion that it was widely regarded as one of the best of all time. Just because there are many people who think it's one of the best doesn't mean that most people (or even a large percentage of them) think it is.

> You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games".

I, in fact, did not miss that. If you look at that article, it references over 90 lists. By my count, a bit under half of the lists were written after the release of Hollow Knight. Of those lists, Hollow Knight appears in only seven of them, which is tied for the lowest number of appearances of any game in that list released in 2017 onward other than Baldur's Gate 3, which was released in the last year the list has entries for.

> i.e. there already is agreement across all time.

Eh, fewer than a fifth of lists with what appear to usually be 30-100 games each doesn't seem like good evidence of agreement to me. There are degrees of agreement, and I think "widely" implies a pretty high one.

I think GamingBolt having Hollow Knight on their 2022 list at #14, but then it being completely absent from their 2023 and 2024 lists is testimony of how silly these lists are in the first place.

> The combat in the original is really bad/way too easy, and the exploration is just okay

Personally I find combat to be one of the less important aspects of Metroidvanias. I prefer the main source of difficulty coming from platforming around environmental hazards.

I felt like exploration in Hollow Knight was a bit too broad, and lead to too much unnecessary backtracking. Backtracking is a balance. It's a staple of Metroidvanias, but if the backtracking search space is large enough and places aren't distinctive enough then the search for a previously insurmountable obstacle can start feeling like looking for a needle in a haystack. That was my experience in Hollow Knight, and something I felt like the first Ori game did better.

> I feel like you're being pedantic here and transforming the statement "X is one of the best of all time" into "X is one of the top N of all time", where N is a number you've arbitrarily picked to exclude X.

> Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games

A) I haven't chosen a specific number. I've even been deliberately hazy about the range because that's how I hear most people discuss their "best ofs" and favorites.

B) As per my previous message I wish you'd stop acting like I'm fabricating this argument just to exclude Hollow Knight. My objection is with your reasoning. I've tried to be as clear as possible about this.

C) You have to bound your category of what qualifies as "the best" somehow, even roughly, because otherwise the term loses what little meaning it had in the first place. I tried to make this point earlier, though maybe I didn't do it well enough:

>> I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further.

If you want to say it's widely considered one of the best of all time, that implies some very large percentage of the general public or critics would say "I think X[0] is one of the best games of all time". If you asked a random person to list which games they personally believed to be the best games, they'd probably only come up with a handful. I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time.

[0] you can take this to mean either an arbitrary game or the Egosoft one :p

> There are 23 entries since 2015 on that page, Hollow Knight included. By definition, it's one of the best 23 games during that period, according to that specific list.

Okay, but that's an argument that it's considered one of the best games of the last decade. Hopefully you can understand my confusion.

> It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong.

*shrug* I don't think it's that weird. This certainly isn't something I'm coming up with on the fly. I've felt like this for a long time, as have the authors of the many articles complaining about the meaninglessness of the even larger number of "best of" lists.

> This doesn't mean you have to like it

You've made several comments which make it sound like I'm arguing this because I don't like the game. I'd appreciate you not doing that both because I did quite like it and because it implies that my feelings about the game are biasing my argument. I'd make this same argument if you'd used that Wikipedia article to support your feelings about Red Dead Redemption 2. I'd probably personally consider that one of the best games I've ever played[0] but would object to using its presence in that article as proof that it was widely considered to be one of the best of all time.

[0] Honestly I'm still not sure if I should compare it to other games I've played or put it in its own category of interactive movie. It was incredibly good, but the parts I think of as being the best are the performances and the technical achievement and clever landscaping of the game world.

> 100 games over 40 years is not a lot.

You continue to miss my point, as your comment about concurrent player count indicates. I think when you ask people to come up with a list of what they'd consider the best of something, most would max out somewhere between five and ten. Most people don't think of things along the lines of the AFI 100 Best Films list. They think in much smaller categories.

> If being one of the top 23 over the span of 10 years of something doesn't make it "one of the best" in your book, you are entitled to think that.

That article doesn't include any ranking as far as I could see, and your use of that article is specifically the thing I'm taking issue with in this thread. Are you referring to a different source?

> By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best?

I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further.

> I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype.

My point is exactly that I don't think most people think of things being "the best" in terms of lists that large, even most people who review things for a living.

I'd be fine if you used that list as support for most people considering it to be one of the best games the year it was released though.

> You are welcome to your opinion.

For what it's worth I quite liked Hollow Knight. I put a bit over 30 hours into it, and plan on revisiting it soon. It's a very good game, maybe even excellent, but there are a lot of excellent games out there.

Not the person you're replying to, but I personally preferred Ori and the Blind Forest a lot, both in terms of movement and story, but also in terms of the satisfaction of the backtracking and world as a whole. I felt like Hollow Knight did a poor job of nudging players in the right direction, and found the combat to be a bit more finicky than I care for from the genre. I'm not a huge fan of the art style either, at least as far as the environments are concerned.

The satisfaction of feeling your set of abilities and options for gameplay increase and grant the ability to overcome previous obstacles is the main thing I expect and want from a Metroidvania. I felt like this was Hollow Knight's biggest weak point. It just didn't feel like you gained new abilities at as steady a pace or as though they opened up enough of the world each time compared to other games in the genre, including Ori and the Blind Forest. I think Super Metroid still has the best progression among Metroidvanias, but it's possible that's colored by my having first played it at a young age.

> You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time.

To the degree that such a concept is even measurable in the first place, I don't think pointing at a Wikipedia list of what looks like around a hundred games over forty-ish years as definitive proof that something is widely considered to be among the best games of all time. My guess is that most people think of categories of "best" media in much much smaller terms, and the only people allowing so many things in their categories are people like the American Film Institute and other people who like making lists.

It's hard to judge games which came out relatively recently against all the games which came before. I also think there's an abnormal level of hype around Hollow Knight. It's an excellent game which was received well, but I think on the grand scale of games I would be quite surprised if it cracked the top fifteen of most critics' choices of best games of the past decade. Within the Metroidvania genre I'd expect it to be a very different story.

npm ci should be much faster in CI as it can install the exact dependency versions directly from the lockfile rather than having to go through the whole dependency resolution algorithm. In CI environments you don't have to wait to delete a potentially large pre-existing node_modules directory since you should be starting fresh each time anyway.

> Philosophically, checking that a field is required or not is data validation and doesn't have anything to do with serialization.

My issue is that people seem to like to use protobuf to describe the shape of APIs rather than just something to handle serialization. I think it's very bad at the describing API shapes.

I'm just a frontend developer so most of my exposure is just as an API consumer and not someone working on the service side of things. That said:

A few years ago I moved to a large company where protobufs were the standard way APIs were defined. When I first started working with the generated TypeScript code, I was confused as to why almost all fields on generated object types were marked as optional. I assumed it was due to the way people were choosing to define the API at first, but then I learned this was an intentional design choice on the part of protobufs.

We ended up having to write our own code to parse the responses from the "helpfully" generated TypeScript client's responses. This meant we had to also handle rejecting nonsensical responses where an actually required field wasn't present, which is exactly the sort of thing I'd want generated clients to do. I would expect having to do some transformation myself, but not to that degree. The generated client was essentially useless to us, and the protocol's looseness offered no discernible benefit over any other API format I've used.

I imagine some of my other complaints could be solved with better codegen tools, but I think fundamentally the looseness of the type system is a fatal issue for me.

I feel similarly. I appear to have put 30 hours into it at this point, but I don't have particularly strong memories of any part of it. It took me several tries to get into it initially. I've always felt like Ori and the Blind Forest (released only two years before Hollow Knight) was a much better game overall, particularly when it came to movement and story execution, yet it comes up far less often in discussions of the genre.

> Much of Wikipedia is pop culture, I wouldn’t call that knowledge.

Why?

> Others will disagree, but personally I prefer to minimize my exposure to JS by decorating traditional HTML+CSS documents with vanilla JS as needed.

If you don't mind my asking, what sort of applications have you worked on, how many contributors were there, how long was their lifespan, and how long did you work on them for? Personally, I've found the type of "vanilla" JS approach to be prohibitively difficult to scale. I've nearly exclusively worked on highly interactive SaaS apps. Using a substantial amount of JS to stitch together interactions or apply updates from the server has been unavoidable.

The engineering organizations at companies I've worked at have ranged in size from three devs to over 20,000. Projects I've worked on have ranged from three devs to maybe 500-1,000 (it's sometimes hard for me to keep track at a giant company). I've worked on projects using "vanilla" JS, Knockout, Backbone, Vue, and React[0]. The order in which I listed those technologies is also roughly how quickly the code became hard to maintain.

[0] This is not an exhaustive list of which frontend frameworks/libraries I've used, but it's the ones I have enough experience with to feel comfortable speaking of the long term support of[1]. For example, I used Ember heavily for about a year, but that year was split between two projects I spent six months each on. Similarly, I've used Next.js, but only for prototyping a few times and never deployed with it to anything other than a private server.

[1] Except Lightning Web Components, which I've used a lot but hate so much that I don't want to dishonor those other technologies by listing it alongside them.

Photo library permissions have been around since iOS 14. As long as you have an iPhone made in the last ten years you should be able to use it.

Does the "<business logic>" part involve a bunch of irreducible boilerplate too or something? What's it like?

If it doesn't, then I feel like even in the JavaScript world of 2015 you could write "app.put("/mypath", business_logic)" and that would do the trick, and that was a very immature language ecosystem.

> To be more exact, 90% of the _code_ I write is mostly just different types of API glue

I assumed you were only talking about the actual code. It still seems really odd. Why is there so much unavoidable boilerplate?

> 90% of what the average (or median) coder does isn't in any way novel or innovative. It's just API Glue in one form or another.

I hear this from people extolling the virtue of AI a lot, but I have a very hard time believing it. I certainly wouldn't describe 90% of my coding work as boilerplate or API glue. If you're dealing with that volume of boilerplate/glue, isn't it incumbent upon you to try and find a way to remove that? Certainly sometimes it isn't feasible, but that seems like the exception encountered by people working on giant codebases with a very large number of contributors.

I don't think the work I do is innovative or even novel, but it is nuanced in a way I've seen Claude struggle with.