• 3 Posts
  • 104 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 11th, 2024

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  • In the last 5 years we have blocked access to the internet through bot checks and ad networks. We block screens with ads or consent forms which aren’t even enforceable and make the user bark on command to get past.

    We have become trained seals. Captcha popped up? Better bark. Cloudflare challenge appeared? Better bark like the trained seal and click the checkbox.

    Nobody even talks about this. The fact these things are annoying is constantly discussed but I have yet to see any article covering the fact we have trained our species to bark when asked without question and what the ramifications are down the road.

    There isn’t even a planned offramp from this trajectory, these things are going to get more pervasive and annoying while technology improves. Where doea this actually end?






  • I would agree with you on the civic duty part if the news was just the news but it has morphed into a amalgamation of ragebait, social media content, and updates so granular to be worthless and just noise. Even the “good” sources of news do this. RSS feeds are nice but not a viable solution to the average person.

    At a concept level I think you are right that a well informed population is better. I just don’t think our current handling of news and journalism is at a spot where that is even possible without a ton of extra work (hence this thread).

    Choosing a level of engagement that prevents you from turning into a screaming asshole is key and unfortunately that level varies from person to person.


  • We have an enormous problem with software optimization both in cycles and memory costs. I would love for that to change but the vast majority of customers don’t care. It’s painful to think about but most don’t care as long as it works “good enough” which is a nebulous measure that management can use to lie to shareholders.

    Even mentioning that we’ve wiped out roughly a decade in hardware gains with how bloated and slow our software is doesn’t move the needle. All of the younger devs in our teams truly see no issue. They consider nextjs apps to be instant. Their term, not me putting words in their mouths. VSCode is blazingly fast in their eyes.

    We’ve let the problem slide so long that we have a whole generation of upcoming devs that don’t even see a problem let alone care about it. Anyone who mentors devs should really hammer this home and maybe together we can all start shifting that apathy.





  • I think pretty much every dev understands the issue but they are limited in what they can do about it. Quitting a job because they won’t let you optimize is noble but unrealistic for the vast majority of devs.

    I would love for optimizations to start being prioritized. More specifically, I would love to see vendors place limits on memory use in apps. For example, Steam could reject any game over 50gb. I do not believe for a moment that any game we currently have needs more than 50gb except maybe an mmo with 20 years of content. Or Microsoft could reject apps that use more than X ram. They won’t ever do that but without an outright rejection, this won’t be fixed.


  • Unless you want to get fancy for the sake of not being fancy, you will likely be best just sticking with Kate.

    Basic editing can be done in vi or nano or even piped to a file via she’ll. I don’t think any of those are necessarily better or worse than using Kate. Vi and nano would probably be faster but you would need to be in a terminal already.

    That said, I am curious as well if anyone has a better answer.



  • Holy shit, ok I’ll state it yet again and then I’m done. For the 3rd time, this isn’t about who can afford what drives or who has what drives or what drives exist in our universe. Pretend drives doesn’t exist if that is easier because the drives don’t matter. Drive space is a symptom of the underlying issue.

    This is about the near universal trend of software companies destroying a decade plus of hardware performance gains because they refuse to properly optimize their software. Full stop. Anything else is a side effect of not properly optimizing things. The drive type arguments, drive space arguments…they disappear once the fundamental issue (optimization) is addressed.

    Holding these companies accountable is how this gets fixed. It’s how this particular instance got fixed. This thread wouldn’t even exist if these weren’t legitimate complaints because the devs wouldn’t have bothered with this round of size reduction if there wasn’t a problem affecting their bottom line.


  • They need 15% of that space.

    It isn’t about the drives or if people can afford a certain size SSD (although that matters more than you are admitting). It’s about asking better of people and companies responsible for destroying over a decade of hardware advancement due to bad optimization (to save money), overly-abstracted frameworks (to save money), and improper handling of assets (to save money).

    They made a mistake in not prioritizing this, they fixed it and admitted there was a problem. That’s good. What isn’t good is people polishing their knobs as if the devs did this out of the goodness of their heart. They didn’t, they were losing players because people were speaking with time and money. Just like you wanted. Just like people in this thread are doing.

    But glancing through your other replies I’ll just stop here. May your drive space remain vast, and your tolerance for badly-optimized software remain stronger than mine.


  • No the issue isn’t with the user having a 400GB drive. The issue is the devs chose to leave 131GB of unnecessary duplication in the game artifacts when published. That is a fundamental problem with software in general but games especially.

    Blaming the customer for expecting to have a decent product is laughably misplaced. Part of software being a decent product is it being optimized. This was an absolute failure and they should really be putting out an apology instead of patting themselves on the back.

    It’s great the game is so much smaller now but it should have been this new size at launch. Certainly not 131GB bigger than it needed to be.


  • What’s funny is if you added another “level” to this going back another 15 years there would be someone complaining about the same things but with Java as the target. “Java is slow” wasn’t just a joke for no reason after all.

    There are some funny parts in the post as well as some true statements to the current state of things. We’ll see another post like it in 10-15 years and it will be a chuckle. Then we’ll all continue as we always have and deal with whatever comes down the pipe next.

    It’s what humans do and it isn’t restricted to technologies or programming languages.