whatever_dude

I jumped right into that, didn't it? Goes to show my ignorance about the world of basket-weaving and its aficionados, and what I consider to be "niche". I'll need to adjust my examples in the future...

Thanks for pointing that out!

I think that whole article is a pretty shallow take, accusing Patreon of things that are not Patreon's fault (and I say this as someone who thinks Patreon is shady).

Yes, people who make some stuff that takes a lot of time and effort might not get a lot of money on Patreon. But you know what? They're doing what everybody else is doing.

I feel that nowadays everything want to think of themselves as "creators". They'll create a few photos, some drawings, put it out there, and expect to get paid.

Maybe it's just my 3rd-world-country upbringing, but I think that's a BS expectation. Real world living is tougher than that; the online public is already drowning in "creative" content, and producing more of the same is not going to give you an income.

Some of these people might be pretty talented, but that's not enough. If you're simply doing what everybody is doing and bringing nothing of actual value to your sponsors, there's not much you'll get back. Spending 16 hours a day doing basket weaving and posting it on YouTube is not worth much.

This is a similar picture of what happens on Twitch, or Instagram. Everybody thinks they can be a successful streamer, or an influencer. The reality is, just a tiny percentage of people make money doing that, either by sheer luck, some almighty external influence, or because of a niche interest they seem to fill. This is not Twitch, or Instagram's fault either.

I applaud GitHub because this is a way for people to almost passively support developers they want to. I know there's plenty of devs whom I've benefitted from their work. I'd loved to have a way to support them, even if just a little bit.

I don't think most devs would expect to become professional-code-warriors-for-sponsors. That's the wrong rabbit to _chase_. But having a bit of an extra income for a beer or tea or two on some OS project they work on is nice.

As someone else said, "GOOD."

It's just interop, so I'm assuming it means if you compile for platform X, it can target native APIs you have exposed inside that platform.

Yeah, I'm seriously still dumbfounded by this. I mean, it's such a positive, future-aware decision, it's confounding. Impossible to say how relevant .NET it will be in, say, 4 years time, but development will certainly be much better than today when you have several disparate runtimes to target depending on the platform.

If this is "5 years ago in Asia" why are they talking Portuguese?

Articles from the WSJ get to the front page often. I don't get it either.

The USA's ethos in based in the motto of doing it their own way. Sometimes that's good: when everybody is doing the same, it breaks from the status quo and can become a leader in an industry, or just generally break ground in scientific and civil progress. That has happened many times in the past.

The flipside is that there are many things are a consensus worldwide because they _are actually better_ but that the US still refuses to adopt, generally because it would mean following others' lead, or because there are special interests in keeping the current status quo.

To me nothing is more emblematic of this problem than the country's refusal to adopt the metric system: the alternative is objectively worse, but the country is pretty much the last developed country on earth to refuse to use it.

Not sure of their business model or their quality now, but content wise they were definitely a decent company. I grew up learning to code with their books about 30 years ago and they were great books, really made with care. An almost heroic effort given the niche market for that at the time.

> I don’t think I would create ‘likes’ in the first place.

_You didn't_. It was called "Favorites", and you later renamed it to "likes".

Jack can introspect as much as he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that they keep making the platform _worse_, not better.

Another indication is that the official web/client is a cesspool of unrelated content I don't want to see, and somehow they now think they need to double down on that effort - oh, sorry, "make it a interest-based network" - instead of take a look at whether that's users want.

Twitter is a prime example of A/B testing gone wrong.

It has always been like that. Remember then the Macintosh didn't have arrow keys? When they dropped disk drives?

They try being ahead of the curve and are know to ignore market interest. Sometimes they get a hit, sometimes they fail.

Wow this is a library of conspiracy theory ads.

Surprised I didn't see a chemtrail one in there.

This is a problem I've been running with my in-laws and it infuriates me. It feels like every year we agree to have fewer gifts, then many of us don't follow the rule; the ones who do follow it get pissed that they only bought 1 gift for each person and got like 3 times as much.

It's so much waste, and it's overwhelming for all recipients.

My flight simulator experience taught me that landing a big airplane is extremely more difficult than taking off, specially if unassisted by airport instrumentation.

> What, like homebrew? :)

Context for everybody else: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

TL;DR: author of Homebrew interviews at Google, but doesn't get hired because he couldn't/wouldn't invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.

Tangent, but I wish someone would disrupt the movie ticket industry. Fandango's mobile app is one of the worst apps that I've ever seen: it's very unresponsive and full of advertisements, spams and interstitials I do not care about. And yet it's the only way to buy tickets in my area.

I mean I'm already using the app to spend money, why not offer me a good experience instead of bombarding me with crappy ads?

I've been using both for a while and I'm happy with their decision not to try and be "compatible" with NPM. I'm also pretty happy with using Yarn only - things are just faster and in reality make a little bit more sense.

Oh man, I get that all the time, hate it so much.

The writing has been on the wall for a very [1] very [2] long [3] time. Facebook and some consumers of their ecosystem have been holding the fort, but it was inevitable something like this would happen.

1: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=babel-core&package=...

2: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

3: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/18/11/25/017227/micros...

> This sucks because, in the first few years, flow had much better soundness and typescript had some serious issues

Most of not all of the issues had with types have been solved.

Flow had some major tooling/developer comfort issues from day one and none of those are solved. Not to mention a really closed development roadmap (understandable perhaps, but nonetheless bad).

As a developer, I'm glad TypeScript won. I want more tool/compiler/language/etc makers to understand that the developer experience matters. If someone makes a tool that only works well under one very specific setup and ignores everyone else, that's just very limiting.

Same. I've already been on the fence but this would be the last straw.

For someone who likes to work at bullshit companies, absolutely.

Passing job interview is a red herring because it teaches you that you said what people want to hear. It can be very different from being good at your work and a focus on it can create disfuncional professionals who know how to give the appearance of being good while being shit at what they do.

It's easier to plug it in because there's a lot of projects already using babel, so you just need to add a transformer. Previously you'd need to add a new step to your compilation process using tsc, which could be very difficult depending on how you built your project, especially if it wasn't Webpack-based.

For example, you _could_ use TypeScript before with React Native. But it was convoluted: there were 3 different way to do it, none of them perfect, and all really brittle. But with Babel 7, you just add another transformer to your babel file and bam, it's treated as a first class citizen. It's literally a one line change.

I like his take at the end:

> We converted a codebase that was adapted to Flow to TypeScript. This means that we obviously only found things that Flow can express but TypeScript can't. If the port had been the other way around, I'm sure we would have found things that TypeScript can infer/express better than Flow.

So he's aware of the conundrum, and, I hope, his readers too.

Behind a registration wall.

> (...) he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?

I think it doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. You might want to change the direction into something that is not only doable but _better_. Remember Quake? It was supposed to be something completely different, based on their plans [1].

[1] https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2016/...

Literally the last thing Masters of Doom talks about is how Carmack and Romero are still friends. Maybe not best buddies - they have completely different personalities - but I don't think there's much animosity between them.

There's no basis for the claim he's working at a gas station. He runs a game development company in Ireland.

(Changing the subject away from the cut)

I applaud Fabiens' work. I have been following since his blog days on the source code analysis of games and I'm so happy he's writing books on the matter. I will fully support him going forward.

However, the first edition of the Wolfenstein Black Book left me a bit miffed. It had many grammatical errors and even some layout awkwardness that would not pass an editor's review. I understand the reasons: English is not his first language, this was a work of passion, etc. But it still mars the experience. I assume the second edition fixed those; I wish I had waited.

I've been eagerly waiting for his book on Doom. But I recommend waiting for the second edition, once he had time to take the readers' feedback into account.

Living in NY for over a decade and visiting the Bay area often, I have to agree. I'd say the difference is even bigger if you look at Silicon Valley as a whole. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio was more like 10:1.