Fr0styMatt88

This particular iOS thing has also been annoying me since I upgraded to iOS 13 (which for the record, has otherwise been very positive for me). I really wish they had done some kind of "Here's what is new" tutorial.

Rearranging icons in folders is still a clusterf--k though - am I the only one that ends up fighting sometimes just to a) get the icon into the folder I want and b) actually keep it there without accidentally scrolling the screen, accidentally dragging it out of the edge of the folder because I'm trying to page it to a particular place?

What I'm noticing with iOS in particular is that lots of 'hidden' functionality is creeping in. This is something I remember Microsoft getting criticism for with Windows 8 -- non-obvious gestures like swiping from the edge of the screen to bring something up. Apple seems to have wandered down that same road.

The way I like to re-frame it is that picking someone to be on your team — to join your company — is very much like picking a housemate to live in your personal space. It’s a huge risk for the person or company hiring, so of course they’re going to trust their gut feeling.

If you had to pick a housemate, how impartial or emotionless would you be, honestly? (not referring to any particular ‘you’ in this conversation — it’s just the hypothetical question I’d ask to demonstrate the re-framing).

Discussing politics at work has NEVER been a routine thing for me and as far as I know that's always been the cultural norm, at least where I live. It's handled very carefully. So I just assumed that this was the norm and discussing politics at work was the exception.

The Longest Journey (the game) on iOS :(

Does anyone here remember an old DOS program called Cartooners [1]?

It let you do animated shorts with predefined characters, different backgrounds, music, speech bubbles, etc. I used to love playing around with that as a teenager.

I found the workflow ingenious: You placed a character on the screen, selected what action you wanted it to perform (like ‘Walk’), I think you selected how you wanted it to move, then you held down the REC button and watched the character act as the animation was being ‘recorded’. To do something new, you just stopped recording, set the character up for the next action, move, etc, then do the whole REC thing again. Repeat this as needed.

Adding another character? Scrub back to where you wanted that character to appear and repeat the above process.

New background? Scrub to where you wanted the new background to appear, set the background and then ‘record’ over the old one.

It was similar for everything. Put a speech bubble down where you wanted it, hold down ‘REC’ for as long as you wanted it on the screen, then just remove it and record further as needed.

It was so damn intuitive. Never seen anything quite like it since and I’d love to know if there’s a clone of it or something out there that I’ve missed!

[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Cartooners_1989

There are options, at least if you want something to begin coding with; they're just a bit hard to find for the layperson that isn't following developer news.

For example, apps that run directly on mobile platforms (specifically, ones that don't need to connect to the 'cloud' to do their compiling):

- For iOS: Codea [1] (Lua), Continuous [2] (.NET), Swift Playgrounds [3] (Swift), Play.js [4] (Node.js + React Native) plus probably more (on that note, I really hope Continuous isn't abandoned, but it doesn't seem to have been updated in awhile).

- For Android: AIDE [5], TIC-80 [6], probably others (I'm not as familiar)

Moving up from mobile, you have FUZE4 Nintendo Switch [7] for the Nintendo Switch (excellent, but needs a bugfix update as there's lots of little annoyances). Probably the most kid-friendly thing there is right now IMHO, if you take into account the platform.

On the PC, there's just a huge amount of stuff. Minecraft [8], GameMaker [9], GDevelop [10], Godot Engine [11]. These are at least suitable for early teens.

[1] https://codea.io/ [2] http://continuous.codes/ [3] https://www.apple.com/au/swift/playgrounds/ [4] https://playdotjs.com/ [5] https://www.android-ide.com/ [6] https://tic.computer/ [7] https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/fuze4-nintendo-switch/ [8] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/ [9] https://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker [10] https://gdevelop-app.com/ [11] https://godotengine.org/

Note: Yes, obvious game-making bias here :)

Is this what Apple Shortcuts is trying to achieve?

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/shortcuts/id915249334

Psychology is like trying to debug a program with nearly zero tools, not even a reliable ‘printf(..)’. I don’t think it’s ego-stroking so much as it is just frustration at the seemingly intractable complexity of human behaviour.

As someone trying to lose weight, all the conflicting advice out there is so frustrating. Should I eat ‘n’ times a day or just once? Is fasting good, or will it put me in ‘starvation mode’? Why is it that when I was young I didn’t even need to think about my food intake and stayed really, really lean? Do we have a set-point and if so, has mine gone up and am I going to be forever hungry if I want to get back to a sensible weight? Do antidepressants cause weight gain, or don’t they? Is there a way we can measure actual calories-in with a device?

Sorry, just needed to vent.

Might be slightly off-topic, what’s the latest state-of-play for AMD/OpenCL? I hear in various places that AMD is fantastic for compute, but everyone seems to be using CUDA.

I’ve got a very expensive Bitcoin mining rig paperweight at the moment with two Vega 64s (along with another Vega 64 in my main rig) — it’d be great to re-purpose them for something potentially useful.

Certainly, but at the same time -- it wasn't a free-for-all. I was lucky that I'd been taught to be suspicious and to have boundaries long before the Internet. Of course that doesn't preclude anything from happening and luck does play a part. It just means I wouldn't have engaged in some risky behaviours - I wouldn't go giving strangers my phone number (this was before mobiles, so my phone number was my parent's phone number) or home address, for example. This was at a time when people hadn't even warmed up to the idea of using their credit cards online; my folks using their credit card to pay the monthly Internet bill was a way out-there thing at the time.

I also wasn't _that_ young - I don't think I touched IRC until I was around 15 or 16.

I remember the first in-real-life 'meetup' was a big thing; it was with members of an IRC chat group from our local area. I was real-life friends with some of the people already, so it wasn't an entire group of strangers. I don't think that even happened until I was out of high school.

One of the most exciting things I remember about first getting the Internet in the 90s was (especially as a socially-anxious introvert) being able to jump on an IRC server and chat mostly anonymously with just a nickname, to people I didn't know, without the awkwardness that real-life interactions could bring me at the time.

As a high-school kid, I could be on the same footing as a distinguished scientist. Or I could make friends in other countries.

Even my parents, who aren't technically-inclined, were excited by that and thought it was amazing.

I sometimes feel like the Internet went from being a place that you explored to find new people and new viewpoints, to one where many people just stay in their own bubbles.

No, this is not a bug. How did we get from there, to here? :(

So much this -- and it applies not only to bookstores but to retail in general. So many times I've thought "I should give these retail shops some support"; I go looking for something particular I want, spend several hours of my own time only to come up empty-handed because nobody had what I wanted in stock. Example: I read about some really cool Etymotic musician's earplugs. I thought great, there's actually an instrument store near my work. Walked there; nope, none in stock. Or reading about one of those induction cooktops. Went to my local big-box electronics/appliances retailer. Nope, nothing. Pretty much anything that's even slightly niche, it seems like retail just doesn't have it.

As for books in particular - Kindle wins hands-down on convenience and portability for me, over bookstores (the 'walk-out' part is definitely covered). In my particular case, as I'm vision-impaired, Kindle ALSO wins hands-down on usability, because I can make the text any size I want. That's important enough for me that it can mean the difference between actually being able to read a book and not being able to read it.

I think I have 451 Kindle books. I can carry all of those in my pocket on my phone or in my backpack on my tablet, if I want. That's another huge advantage.

I should probably mention that given all that, I _still_ like physical books! I remember walking the aisles of Borders, but that was because they were huge and they had books in the niche I was looking for. I fondly remember a small bookstore that used to specialise in software development and IT books and they had a great selection of game development books. I used to love that place! For me though, that was all before I got a taste of the convenience of Kindle. Getting the book is worth more to me than stopping and having a nice coffee at the bookstore.

Agree with your second paragraph and that's actually been my real-world experience. I also think there's another effect where commoditizing a technology leads to the creation of jobs that specialize in that technology. With easy-to-obtain game engines, suddenly more companies are interested in using them, which itself leads to an increase in demand for engineers, just with different skillsets.

I wouldn't put money on this balance lasting forever though. To me, that's too close to dismissively saying "it's different this time", with regards to our profession.

I'm not so sure. I think this is something that's happening right under our noses -- it's just easy to miss it if you're not looking at the right thing.

Software engineers aren't being commoditized by being replaced by machines that write software. They're being commoditized by their own frameworks, libraries and tools.

Take the game industry as an example. Twenty years ago, your game company needed a big team of software engineers employed to write a game engine with advanced graphics capabilities (let's assume you want advanced graphics). Today, a single developer can just download Unity or Unreal Engine and have at least the technology available to them immediately (art is different but in many ways similar; automation and process improvements are coming for those jobs too, I'm sure).

So you don't need the same number of engineers for the same result. Sure, you have a big team of engineers employed at Unity Technologies or Epic Games, but that's now a shared resource. That employment is no longer duplicated at the companies that decide to use those engines.

Another example is the push for 'DevOps' and 'Cloud'. Think of all those system administrator jobs and IT departments being made smaller because now you can just spin up a server on AWS or have your CI infrastructure managed by BitBucket.

A friend of mine runs a charity [1] that deals with providing AED (Automated External Defibrillator) devices to organisations. These things save lives. They can deliver shocks to the heart if necessary and can guide laypeople through giving CPR until help arrives (I think many models now actually tell you if you aren't giving strong enough compressions, for example).

I would also highly recommend people go through this app [2] to get some familiarity with CPR. Then take a proper CPR course (I need to take my own advice on doing a proper course, actually).

[1] https://responseforlife.org.au/

[2] https://www.resus.org.uk/apps/lifesaver/

To this - surely this would be part of any psychological testing done to screen dispatchers for suitability, no?

I'm Australian and I think a large portion of us use swear words almost like punctuation.

Of course it depends on the social context. I'm not going to be swearing much at all at work and still feel a little startled (not offended, just surprised and maybe vaguely uncomfortable) when my manager drops an F-bomb or two. Yet around friends and family, F-bombs (and C-bombs [1] around close friends!) are almost used like exclamation points, purely to draw emphasis and attention to a statement.

I can only conclude it's one of those cultural things. So while I respect that some people find swearing deeply offensive and particularly only useful to offend, that's a really alien concept to me.

[1] F-bomb and C-bomb are slang terms referring to f..k and c..t respectively.

That is just awesome. I really wish as a software engineer that there were more jobs in my field that could make this kind of a difference to people's lives.

Thank you for posting that Zero Suicide Alliance link. I was not aware of their training but will be checking it out.

I had a friend phone me late at night a few weeks back and it took me a minute to realize what she was saying when she just said "I don't want to be here anymore". Fuck the thought of it is still haunting now.

Thankfully she didn't follow through. Still really really scary.

There's a talk well worth watching by Kevlin Henney called 'Old Is the New New' [1], where he points out that waterfall was initially conceived with design iteration in mind and yet that part was just essentially forgotten and replaced by something overly-simplified in common understanding.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbgsfeGvg3E

I remember when the iPad came out I was incredibly excited. This was surely perfect for RTS games!

There was Command & Conquer: Red Alert Mobile, then....

The only other one I remember was an actually really good StarCraft clone by Gameloft (I forget the name).

I always thought mobile would be great for RTS and then it just wasn't. Though when I think about it, the keyboard is pretty important and that kind of fast control is really difficult on a touchscreen, so maybe that explains the lack of 'classic' RTS games on touch devices.

That phosphor image looks great! I wonder if it could be used to train a style transfer neural network to create a filter to replicate it?

FWIW Google Earth VR on PC does let you walk around the 3D view and you can set your scale to be real-world. I'm assuming it's the same 3D reconstruction that you get on regular Google Maps / Google Earth.

It's definitely a must-try VR application.

The device I allude to in my other comment here is a Cherry Trail device. I did query the supplier as to why the EFI was not 64-bit and was told essentially that "The 2 GB version of the device comes with 32-bit UEFI because it doesn't support 64-bit OS". Another variant of the device with more RAM does come with a 64-bit UEFI, apparently.

I can _kind of_ see the logic -- when you have only 2 GB of RAM, you aren't really going to want to put a 64-bit OS on it.

Part of the issue there as well is, as I understand it, UEFI can only load EFI applications (of which the bootloader is) of the same bitness as the UEFI implementation -- 64-bit UEFI can _only_ load 64-bit bootloaders.

It's a .NET application that still potentially relies on some third-party x86 binary drivers/components that are only on Windows. Ideally in the future the whole codebase could be ported over to .NET Core, with the remaining native components being stripped out (we've somewhat worked towards this).

Really though, it's that we don't have the resources to dedicate to any porting or compatibility effort (I've toyed with the idea of QEMU on ARM) to do it, so unfortunately it's one of those things that gets very slowly pieced together in the background here and there. Too big a project to convince the higher-ups that it's worth the tradeoff of prioritizing it over new features and new customers.

Dealing with EFI issues like this right now! It's made worse because we run Windows 10 IoT Enterprise on the devices and much of the work I did on our 64-bit OS image is mostly invalidated because our next tablet has the exact same processor but only 32-bit EFI.... Oh man, it can really screw with your logistics when you rely on consumer tablets. There's one reason to pay a premium for 'industrial' devices.

I will say this additionally though - the messaging around the Intel Atom line, IMHO has been absolutely terrible. If only our software could run on ARM. I was convinced at one stage they were discontinuing the whole thing and then suddenly they didn't? I don't even know anymore. They have a roadmap so I guess that's something.

TL;DR: Think very carefully before basing a product on consumer-grade hardware, especially with consumer-grade tablets. To the parent commenter, you're probably lucky you DIDN'T push through it :)

There was a really interesting talk I saw a few years back that dealt with this sort of thing. Very much worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7G0OfJUON8

I do sometimes get FOMO - I think it's just natural, but I try and look at it as an opportunity to improve myself and practice being mindful.

Essentially I have two options if I feel a bit envious:

1) Feel envy and get depressed because I start thinking I have a worse life.

2) Share in their joy - send a like, write a positive comment or sometimes just do nothing except focus on being excited for them . By sharing in their joy, I get to experience a bit of their happiness for myself. If I write them a comment, even if it's just 'Congrats!', then there's a chance I might even make them a little happier too - which in itself makes me happier.

This did not come naturally to me at first. I've worked on cultivating this attitude for many years. It's one of the best investments I've ever made in myself.

It's pretty amazing. I maybe should have linked to the pinned comment at the top about how this was constructed; it's really interesting:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/btfhks/wh...