What is this, a Butcher for ants? He should be at least three times as big!

Are you sure you are addicted? I'm sorry, but to me it seems like you only have a problem with games that are deliberately designed to be addictive (WoW is basically a giant Skinner box, no wonder). In that case you would be just as susceptible to lots of things: like infinite-scrolling feeds on social networks, or recommendation algorithms on TikTok and YT.

Maybe if you find a way to filter out games that exploit your psyche for engagement, there will be a way to enjoy your very clearly beloved hobby in a healthy way?

Also, have you talked to a professional?

It's not that native UIs are lagging behind, there is a whole set of reasons.

TL;DR: browsers, as opposed to desktop apps, are stardartized - because they were originally designed to display and deliver text documents. We were never supposed to build complex application UIs on a web stack.

First, there is no standard way of making native UI on a desktop. Every OS uses it's own solution, while Linux offers several different ones. Browsers rely on a set of open standards developed specifically for the web, and even there not everything works exactly the same.

Second, browsers are designed to draw a very specific kind of UI through a very specific rendering mode - they run an immutable hierarchy of elements through layouting and painting engines. It works great for documents, but it becomes extremely unweildy for most other things, which is why we have an entire zoo of different UI implementations (crutches, most of them) for browsers.

On the desktop we often make a choice of what UI technology would fit best our purpose. For a game engine I would use an immediate-mode UI solution like ImGUI, for the ease of prototyping, integration and fast iterations.

For consumer software I might choose between something like QT or GTK for robust functionality, reliable performance, acessibility and community support. Mobile platforms come with their own native UI solutions.

For data-intensive UIs and heavy editors (e.g. CAD, video and music production, games) I might need to designan entirely new rendering pipeline to comply with users requirements for ergonomics, speed, latency etc.

It is also easy to notice that as a team or employer, it is often much easier to hire someone for web stack, than for native development. Simply put, more people can effectively code in JS, so we get more JS and tech like Electron enables that.

If you are interested in a single solution that will get you nice results in general, no matter the platform - you might see some success with projects like Flutter or OrbTK.

UI rendering in general is a deep and very rewarding rabbit hole. If you are in the mood, this article by Raph Levien gives a good overview of existing architectures: https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/gui/2022/05/07/ui-architecture.html

Hey, imagine growing up in an environment that deliberately stunts your emotional development since early childhood, encourages you to hide your feelings or mask them with anger, ties your essential worth as a person to your utility, neglects and ghosts you as punishment for transgressions, models all relationships either as transactions or conquests, and constantly flirts with an idea to kill you in the name of some belief, policy, dogma or tradition. All that with ZERO PEER SUPPORT, and zero solidarity amongst your gender.

Identifying with a banished Greek god of War sometimes helps me trough the day. If he can transcend a moldy curse of war-mongering masculinity to focus on those he loves, so can I. I expect no judgement.

We learn and teach inferior personal computing practice, and most people don't realize how much they are missing.

The vast majority of people outside of enthusiast circles have absolutely no idea what a personal computer is, how it works, what is an operating system, what it does, and how it is supposed to be used. Instead of teaching about shells, sessions, environments, file systems, protocols, standards and Unix philosophy (things that actually make our digital world spin) we teach narrow systems of proprietary walled gardens.

This makes powerful personal computing seem mysterious and intimidating to regular people, so they keep opting out of open infrastructures, preferring everything to come pre-made and pre-configured for them by an exploitative corporation. This lack of education is precisely what makes us so vulnerable to tech hype cycles, software and hardware obsolescence, or just plain shitty products that would have no right to exist in a better world.

This blindness and apathy makes our computing more inaccessible and less sustainable, and it makes us crave things that don't actually deserve our collective attention.

And the most frustrating thing is: proper personal computing is actually not that hard, and it has never been more easy to get into, but no one cares, because getting milked for data is just too convenient for most adults.

The future's wasteland will be covered by bodies of web stalkers who were naive enough to get tricked by mid-2010s shitposts.

"Turns out they never used this to make their metal cutlery darker - who would have thought the ancients were so casually cruel?"

"After months of research we have concluded, that despite all their technical achievements, the ancients never figured out, what does the fox say"

"Today porf. Drobyshevsky is going to tell us about their newest work in XXI cent. anthropology - what is 'streamer dent' and why do we have such long heads 2300 years later?"

"Ass, coochie and the rich - dietary practices of homo sapiens on the age of over-production"

Pretty much the entire discography of Imagine Dragons. No offense to the fans or musicians - I can see the appeal, it's genuinely good music. It is hard to explain, but their signature rythmic melodic and vocal makeup evokes some sort of visceral reaction in me, to the point where I could identify an ImDrag track I've never heard before just based on my body's desire to stop hearing.

Again, I treat it as more of a tragic circumstance preventing me from enjoying some unique and well -produced music. If you like it and it makes your soul go bop-bop, more power to you!

Housing is a human right. Along with access to food, nutrition, healthcare and education.

Y'all just have no idea how complicated the process is. In 2004 it was OK to just "ship a working game", - in 2023 you have to include all of the software stacks you have partnering contracts with, deploy an entire cloud infrastructure to deliver updates and short purchases, design and launch automated targeted ads campaigns, pay union-busting lawyers, accommodate for all the "fun" senile execs want to put in the game, pay handsome compensation to these senile execs, pay more lawyers to bury workplace toxicity-related incidents. At the end of the day, you have to sustain the company somehow when 95% of your workforce goes on a sick leave after a 3-month-long crunch period. All of that takes money, time and effort. And y'all don't get a lot of time in-between autumn release windows.

Hey, we've been at it for 20 years, and we have just managed two months of 16-hour workdays without anyone dying, it looks like it might be one of those projects we actually manage to ship - what an important internal milestone!

PS: I don't actually work at Ubisoft, I love my life too much - this entire comment is a satire

Nanomachines, son!

As someone who has built a career in building and maintaining digital services, a lot of what Carmen talks about rings very true to me, especially this part:

"The platforms make money based on the time we spend on them, and they don’t hesitate to use unethical, addictive resources, so how are you going to ask a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old to stop, if it’s even hard for us adults?"

I've struggled with social media and technology addiction myself, so in my mind, allowing a child a smartphone is akin to teaching them how to smoke - that is how toxic and generally "bad-for-your-health" modern internet is, I think.

At the same time, I am not (yet) a parent, so I really don't know how am I going to be making such a decision when the time comes.

All software is political, riddled with biases and potential security risks. Most of the time we ignore the policy of the software, because we either agree with that policy, or are conditioned not to clock it as a "policy", because "this is just Common Sense(TM)".

I suspect, if the author would have been more honest with themselves, they'd write something along the lines of "turns out, software is a platform for political action, and it scares me" - an opinion that is very valid, valuable and thought-provoking.

Posted without a proper citation - how dare you!

White RC, Remington A. Object personification in autism: This paper will be very sad if you don't read it. Autism. 2019 May;23(4):1042-1045. doi: 10.1177/1362361318793408. Epub 2018 Aug 11. PMID: 30101594.

Go on, my siblings, make this paper happy!

It looks like a disguised Umbrella logo. Creepy, I like it!

Was just about to comment the same thing. Unix philosophy should be taught in schools. Every high schooler that doesn't experience education-induced gag reflex when they see Windows is failed by the system.

Fascinating, as a developer, where can I read more/contribute?

Gyro has been present in Sony controllers since Dualshock 3. All of the Nintendo controllers I ever used had it. Steam deck has it. I honestly assumed it is a standard feature.

For me NVIM has several really cool advantages: NVIM is really fast. With a good terminal emulator I can open enormous log files and be able to navigate around/search immediately. I have recently pivoted to DevOps, and using VSCode to interact with large log files made me realize how slow and sluggish it actually is.

Motions and modal editing. Plenty of people have already said how fast it is, I will just add that it is also very fun and, if you dig around a bit, not that hard to learn.

Configuration using Lua - I like it because my configs are simple git repos, so the file structure and the logic of configuration is easy for me to work with. I always thought VSCode to be quite awkward to configure. Also, using Lua instead of JSON makes it incredibly flexible, and as a tinkerer I find a lot of joy in customizing things.

NVIM (or VIM) is ubiquitous. You can expect it everywhere, and every other IDE has VIM-like bindings. Learn VIM = be comfortable anywhere.

A personal perk for me personally is that NVIM is designed to be used without a mouse. Mice give me wrist pain, and switching to NVIM made my work a lot more bearable.

If you're thinking about trying it out, I would recommend going for a community-maintained distributions like AstroNvim or ChadNvim. It's also quite cool to go back to your preferred editor, knowing your preferences are now more refined after trying alternatives.

Anyway, good luck

Me and my spouse are getting back into Elden Ring. Created a new character and chosen a build that's enjoyable for both of us, so we sit on a couch, passing the controller back and forth, exploring, doing quests, reading lore and praising the Erdtree. Good Times!

Hello, yes. All eleven years. Yelling, picking, fighting, name-calling, stealing, stalking - never understood why, until I was diagnosed with ASD not long ago. I guess I really was that different.

At one point in middle school I remember being so sick of one guy in particular, - he always kicked and pushed me during PE. Sometimes he would steal my things and throw them in the girls changing room to lock me there when I go to get them (I am a man). One time he pulled my pants down so the other guy could snap a photo of my bare behind on his phone. When I asked them to delete the photo, he punched me in the face.

I had a crush on a girl once. Came clean about it, we even went on a small date. This one time she waited for me after school with two girl friends - they pushed me to the ground, kicked me in my stomach, my back and between my legs, laughed at my pain and threw snow at my head. We were 10 at the time, and I was a lot smaller than the girls. I never told anyone, didnt want them to laugh at a boy who is being picked on by girls.

In middle school I got in a fight with one of my bullies during PE. He kicked me, I caught his foot with my hands and lifted it up - he fell on his wrist and broke it. The entire school started treating me like a plague. No one talked to me for several days, aside from the occasional "maniac" or "break my arm too, I wanna stay home".

There were several kids like me in our school. Teachers did nothing - for them I was a weird quiet kid, and quiet kid always get picked on. Parents did nothing, because nobody knew I'm autistic - they thought I'm just "lazy and weird".

I don't know what is there to learn besides "don't raise bullies".

I am intrigued by your response. I agree completely - gotta pick a right tool for a job, but in my experience Windows is only good at running software that is locked-in by a vendor. E.g. I would use Windows to develop for .NET stack. I am a software engineer, so my experience is limited like that. When you were thinking about things that Windows is right for, what examples came into you mind?

I think I get you. In my opinion it all boils down to praxis: what policies are you advocating for, how, what interests do you align your personal choices with and why. At least, that is something people of different views can align on out of pure pragmatism. We may have different ideas about the perfect future, most of the steps we can and should take right now are, I think, easy to agree on. I'm glad to see that happening where it matters.

As a programmer, I concur. I sit on my arse all day pushing keys , anybody can do that.

Despite whatever your lead/manager says, there is always an option to nuke it from low orbit and start over.

Brace for a hot take.

Most of these points are completely void, not because Linux is the bestest ever, but because the domination of proprietary systems has conditioned most users to comply to a lesser image of "personal computing".

Things evolve too quickly? Sorry, we have to stay on top on security updates, new standards, hardware support, new features and ways of working - the world is changing, and our tools follow. It's not a problem, but a natural consequence of progress. The fact that so many people view this as a source of pain in their personal computing is a problem.

Things break? Well too bad, it's tech - it's supposed to break. And we a are supposed to be able to fix it. If most users think that fixing tech is "black magic" - that is a VERY big problem.

Way too many choices? No - you just don't know what you need. It's silly to expect a Windows or an OSX user to make an informed choice when it comes to software, because they had these choices picked out for them all their life by the proprietor. An abundance of options is never a problem - our inability to orient ourselves among them is.

TLDR: proprietary computing has normalized a lot of brain-dead practices and expectations, so we crave silly and shiny while turning away from smart and pragmatic. We need better computer literacy, better education and better default computing for everyone.

Knowing Typescript is enough to begin and start a career, you are sure to pick up relevant vanilla JS knowledge along the way. There is no way around JS: you'll see it in tooling, debugging, building etc.

Of course you can really focus and grok everything way in advance, but I would argue it's not necessary.

I find the lack of proghead representation quite disturbing. There are dosens of us!

Handwriting has been proven to enhance learning in humans, so you are doing great by keeping the habit!

I don't have much to recommend, but so far this little tool was very useful for me and my math studies: https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR

I am not a student, but I learn like a student all the time. I also enjoy handwriting (got an e-ink tablet for that) and knowledge management. I am often dreaming of a "perfect setup" where all I write gets pushed automatically through OCR into my knowledge vault (Obsidian, Logseq or whatever I/my peers happen to use). Even came up with a plan. I hope this new year will leave me enough energy to execute something useful.

Would you like to collaborate on that perhaps?

This is very believable, almost to a point when I would love to read something more than a meme

A genuinely cool and somewhat lean alternative to Electron!

Trying to get into Baldurs Gate 3. Never played the original games, never played D&D, and this is the first hardcore RPG of this sort I've played in awhile.

It is a bit of a struggle - the game is intimidatingly big and deep. I am also having troubles wrapping my head around the battle systems, and the random skill checks really don't make much sense to me (am I expected to save scam in this game?)

But all that seems to be a question of habit. I went into the game for the joy of exploration and discovery, and I hope to lose myself in it very soon.

The Linux Foundation hosts brilliant courses on OS virtualization in Linux - after that there is a pretty clear path at a cloud administrator career.

Wonderful reply, thank you! My experience is indeed very limited, glad you shared yours

"I deployed an edge compute environment on this thing, so it can run out SSR backend-for-frontend, but we now have a left-pad issue in our supply chain"

I think it's not the attention. Too little time has gone since the computational revolution of the 70s for us to see any evolutionary changes. The way we communicate and process info had changed very dramatically though. Information travels faster, spreads wider, all the feedback cycles that used to be weeks long have now tightened down to milliseconds. Or culture requires faster reaction, processing and production times of everyone involved.

I am going to recommend, perhaps, my favorite game of all time, Outer Wilds from the studio Mobius Games.

But please please promise to go in completely blind. Your awareness and knowledge of the world is the key mechanic, so almost any info not only spoils the mystery, but also robs you of literal measurable minutes in gameplay.

All I can say - it is a very touching first-person immersive stimulation game in space about, essentially, alien archeology. Expect wonder, discovery, some frights, have your mind completely blown every 10-20 minutes. It will probably make you cry a couple times as well.

It is one of those games when, after finishing it, you immediately get sad because you will never experience it again in the same way. So you start annoying everyone into playing it, just to enjoy discussing it and seeing someone else play.

And the DLC is equally awesome.

Pushups

Number is a simple abstraction: an exercise in conceptualizing a particular part of human experience, - the amounting of stuff and the relations of various amounts.

Its utility shines the most in the practice of measurement: determining, manipulating and comparing the amounts of stuff.

Numbers also useful as a stepping stone in a learning journey, allowing an individual mathematician to transition to using other, more powerful abstractions (like variables, polynomials, sets, functions, vectors, fields, etc.).

Numbers are magick!

I think this is a fun concept, I would definitely play something like this! I suspect it could be just as fun to build. Game like this could be extended in another direction: I always dreamed of a game that would let me cleverly sabotage a powerplant or delivery network to achieve some other goal, like a heist.

Please elaborate, I've been interested in this for awhile - what do you use/recommend for someone who's new?