WorldMaker

It's not that roundabout compared to what `git history split` is doing. It's sort of the missing tool in a lot of the rebase discussions (in the Stack Overflow answers). Basically `git history split` is most useful for "split an older commit in this branch", so it's a higher level complex dance of, essentially:

- `git rebase -i`

- Change the TODO list to `edit` the chosen commit (everything else to `pick`)

- At the `edit` point:

  - (simplified) `git add -p`

  - `git commit`

  - `git add -u`

  - `git commit`

- `git rebase --continue`

That "simplified" `git add -p` in the middle and that assumption that everything else not selected is the "other patch" is fine for quick splits, but there's still power user super powers in knowing the full rebase workflow and `git add -p`.

GitHub's wikis are just git repositories with folders full of Markdown files. That's the easiest thing to pull out of GitHub. Just git clone the wiki repo. At that point I often just use a git headless merge to merge the second repo into the main repo under a docs/wiki/ folder or similar.

As I recall, in GHE I remember finding that you could even turn off the repo's wiki at that point and then reset it to point to your docs/wiki/ folder and still have the Wiki interface but pointing it to a branch in the same repository. That was a while ago and I don't know if it is still supported in GHE. I also remember it was work managing that wiki branch because Wikis didn't directly support PR workflows if you have branch protection policies. Also from the documentation it doesn't look like it is supported in Public GitHub right now, which seems a shame to me, as someone who likes all documentation in the same repo as the source. I haven't needed Wikis in public GitHub much, so I haven't tried to do anything like point them to a main repo branch.

Z-Machine is also useful to point out because it's one of the clearest lines to draw from it to the modern JVM and .NET CLR. Whereas AGI/SCI/SCUMM all have very game specific virtual machines, Infocom's was Lisp influenced and even built it with business/enterprise apps in mind, though Infocom's one attempt at doing exactly that with their database app Cornerstone was a market flop. (It's heavily enhanced fork of the Z-Machine was also only released for a fraction of the machines the game Z-Machine supported.)

I still think it's an interesting question if Infocom had not tried to keep the Z-Machine proprietary "secret sauce" if it would have been a larger platform of general computing for much longer and broader than Infocom's own lifespan and primarily games focus. If Infocom had taken a Sun-like stance on the Z-Machine being a JVM ahead of its time and building a broader compatibility ecosystem "write once, run everywhere" might have been an earlier part of computing.

The vector art also included some complex dithering patterns that balloon RLE-encoded bitmaps. Dithered drawing is actually one of the worst cases for simple, pure RLE. For dithering compatible bitmap encoding you would want other more complex compression schemes than simple RLE. Some of the palette-based compression techniques of "modern" GIF were reused from such early predecessors, even though there's a belief today that RLE was most of what games at the time used. (It's useful to point out that early AOL was also heavily dithered, especially in monochrome versions. AOL also spanned the gap between dithered, heavily palette-based graphics to "early modern graphics".)

Yeah, I think overall it is trending better again, with the strictest terms being the Xbox 360/PS3 era. (Especially under the banner of Accessibility.)

Yeah, it is starting to become more acceptable again, which is great. I think the "accessibility options" phrasing has been a key to why Xbox relaxed a lot of their earlier, harher standards on it. Which is a great thing, I appreciate Xbox's commitment to accessibility in the last several years as it has done some neat things.

From my perspective that's not a reason to give up on ad blocking if Firefox wanted to bundle that out of the box, that's another reason that the Chrome hegemony is bad for everyone and ad networks that want to block Firefox "as an ad blocker" probably deserve to die. I was just pointing out that the fears in this thread of how ad networks would react to Firefox blocking ads out of the box are already here whether or not Firefox increases its ad blocking defaults.

Admiral and several other of the more obnoxious ad networks already claim that Firefox is an ad blocker simply because of its out-of-the-box blocking support for third-party cookies and those ad networks nag you to use another browser. If Firefox added actual ad blocking out of the box I can't imagine the havoc that would cause and how many more websites would claim that they don't work at all in Firefox.

Examples of B were found in open source, including some versions of the OpenJDK.

Mac OS was said to skip 9 on the way to 10 due to a combo of some Asian numerology (just as Western numerology often encourages skipping "unlucky" 13) and also trying to make a clean break more obvious between System 8 and OSX. (The X being the 10, as Apple's favorite way to write 10 for various reasons. Which is why "OSX" was always a misnomer, accidentally burning the version number into the operating system name. Part of why Apple has been trying to get everyone on the "macOS" brand lately to pull the version number back out.)

Yeah, one of my learnings that took a bit is that as much fun as learning the classic lispisms like car/cdr/cadr/cadar/caadr/etc was, with their long history and particular "early punchcards typing efficiency" at some point it is useful to learn the newer sides of the language that could afford entire-words and cool modern DSLs like loop.

My push into Common Lisp was a current revision of a classic AI textbook that mixed up usage of nearly the complete history of lisp because some of the examples presumably dated to the 1960s/1970s with moderate adjustments to make sure that they still compiled in SBCL or the like, so it was a natural lesson from that textbook. Maybe not the best way to learn Common Lisp, but that was an interesting semester for me. (I and the few other people in the class that semester decided to learn Lisp by choice for the class and I think I was the only one to also decide "I'll do every assignment with implementation language choice in Common Lisp this semester", which was most of my classes, just to keep grad school interesting.)

It's nice to know that even in the end the CPB lived up to its mission and promise and swallowed its poison pill rather than be corrupted by partisan politics, but it's also gross to have seen that forewarned poison pill needed in my lifetime. There's some hope that we can still find the next Mr. Rogers to put a heart on a sleeve in front of some future Congress and build a sequel CPB with similar strong core principles.

Steam has the weakest enforced terms of all the three that I mentioned, but it does have terms in its contract with developers for how Achievements are supposed to unlock.

But most "triple A" games don't just release under Steam's weaker terms, they also want Xbox and PlayStation certification, which have been strongly enforced.

Big O notation predates Computational Complexity. It was originally used to guesstimate asymptotic behavior (limits as they approach infinity). The related Little o notation (even more specifically limits of already large values as they approach infinity) is directly related to early attempts at defining differentiation and differentiability and still sometimes show up in Calculus next to derivatives to explain how derivatives work.

The visual interpretation/intuition of Big O notation can be a useful way to build a visual intuition of what a function's derivative and integral "shapes" may look like, so some Calculus books teach Big O notation, too.

> With AI, "bad" engineers can now amplify their "bad" engineering x10 across the organization.

I think the real pain though is that AI also often removes the feedback loop between "good" engineers and "bad" engineers. A lot of "good" engineers started as "bad" engineers that learned, sometimes the hard way and sometimes with patient mentorship, how to be better engineers. Patient mentorship becomes harder as code reviews become less personal. "The Hard Way" becomes harder when the consequences get divorced from actions. For a bad engineer it becomes "Claude broke Production" more often than "I broke Production" and learning mostly ceases.

We're starting to recognize how many junior developers AI is replacing, making the pipeline to senior developers harder (if not disappearing), but we also maybe aren't focusing enough on how much we are also losing the pipeline from "bad" to "good" engineers.

I think the other big thing that killed in game cheats and debug screens was Xbox and Steam Achievements/PlayStation Trophies. Some of the "value" in such tokens of game completion are the "skill checks" it takes to complete them. If a game provides cheats inside of it, it either needs to disable those Achievement systems, or it loses the ability to unlock them, and that's platform enforced by Xbox/Steam/PlayStation. So it's easier for most games to just not include cheats so they don't have to worry about accidentally violating platform terms on Xbox/Steam/PlayStation should players discover and "abuse" the cheat systems.

Similarly PC games with mod support often have to disable Achievement systems as soon as any mod is installed just in case the mod happens to offer cheats. Which also seems to have impacted mod culture to some extent with entire classes of gamers not installing mods ever to make sure that they still win Achievements.

It's an interesting social dynamic and I think one of the clearest lines in the sand for when cheat codes disappeared, especially in genres like the FPS where "God Mode" and "noclip" codes were genre staples until Achievements. (Because DOOM offered them, every FPS offered them. Until they stopped.)

That's assuming inaction doesn't have intentionality behind it. Meta has proven many times that its inaction is often intentional.

But also, maybe more importantly, as soon as money changing hands is involved, that's a business transaction and if you aren't watching like a hawk who your business transacts with, then yes that is often assumed intentional (and classically a sign of a bad business) because it shows up in your accounts and impacts your bottom line.

Yeah, unfortunately in the US economy most of the rest of the easiest directions to start over are also knowledge work and also impacted by AI layoffs and reframing. I've got 20+ years of software engineering/software development. Three or four years ago I probably could have easily taken a side step into Technical Writing (presumably at the time for a pay cut). In the current economy, in reading between the lines of so many job postings, Technical Writing jobs are also getting replaced by Claude, Gemini, GPT, Qwen, and friends.

I was offered an MBA for relatively cheap, but the sort of PM/Middle Management roles that most easily opens up are also feeling pressured by AI Layoffs and seeming to disappear from the job market. Even "relatively cheap MBA" doesn't at the moment look worth the opportunity cost.

Of the suggestions from friends and acquaintances, the one that would have sounded bizarre to me four years ago that somehow sounds like one of the most viable suggestions I've heard is applying to Law School and getting a JD. That doesn't sound like a great use of my time either, and I do still have a mortgage to pay (even if no kids to worry about) if I did go back to school, but suddenly in this economy it sounds like one of the more useful suggestions I've heard in recent months since my last layoff.

The problem the article restates is that having more time to make art/play music/enjoy time with friends isn't accurately incentivized by this economy. Rather than employ more people a smaller share of the work week companies are optimizing for fewer people at the same share of a work week. That's what the AI Layoff Waves have been for: companies reminding laborers that they aren't desired if a company can use fewer of them.

This current direction seems to be bad both for workers and for long-term health of companies. If they layoff enough workers and can't easily replace them because they find other uses of their time like art and creativity they risk sustainability by not being able to hire back the people they need and the skills that they trained those people to have in the first place.

The article stops short of offering proposed solutions to this current crisis, though.

> With AI you can still get into the details all you want. AI won't get offended for being "micro-managed".

Until it does. That's the scifi answer, right: if LLMs lead to AGI, AGI has a right to be offended at being micro-managed. That's a part of intelligence to human experience and if we want the machines to artificially resemble human intelligence, we should expect things like being offended by micro-management.

I have also wondered what sort of dramatizations could come out of Mars, Inc, though I also wonder if there are weird classified twists that won't come out easily. Or at least if you were writing the fictional dramatization there's a rich room to play with the idea of what was really going on in that Chocolate Factory. With Mars, Inc. a private family company headquartered in McLean, VA, it's almost hard not to imagine some complicated history with the CIA as well. The UK branch spin off sounds like a reverse Kingsman/Statesman plot if you assume some spycraft in the company's history.

(Rival Hershey's ties to Pennsylvania history/culture similarly leaves ideas for National Treasure-style conspiracies in the chocolate world in the early history of control over the national identity.)

Free silly plot ideas for Hollywood or a graphic novelist hoping for Hollywood adaptation opportunities.

Vaping brought smoking back and pipe smoking is trending back upwards for the first time in decades. New bars where people can smoke cigars and pipes have shown up in my city again after a recent push to get a dedicated ABC license for that.

Trends are sometimes cyclical. (Not to be light about lung cancer being a trend, of course. I don't get why smoking is back. I'm just pointing out that it is back in the 2020s.)

You don't think GitHub working on seven different interfaces to copilot and vibe coding PR page changes filled with bugs are a good use of engineering time?~

My favorite example already from the trailers was "the lady wearing mirror shades was already done in the movie Johnny Mnemonic in the 90s" and getting to explain that it is literally the same character. (Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story that happens around the same time as Neuromancer and the character Molly crosses between the two. I, for one, am hoping the new Apple TV adaptation gives us an excuse to see at least one ex-military dolphin.)

I still love the parody of contemporaries Vangelis, Wendy Carlos, and Moroder in the Adult Swim "Infomercial" called "Live from the Necropolis: Lords of Synth": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXgNo5Smino

There's an interesting bellwether in mobile games right now. There are two easy statistics to track when trying random free-to-start games: time to first ad (TTFA), time to paywall (TTP).

Most LLM-using mobile games are already at incredibly weak TTP scores and perhaps the only current stratum of mobile games where TTP is almost always ahead of TTFA. TTFA before TTP is almost nonexistent because they claim to need a monthly subscription as soon as immediately after install, despite being advertised as free to start. It's also one of the few types of games where the paywall explicitly does not include "no ads". Some of these games running on monthly subscriptions still need ads for unit costs.

(The bulk of mobile games try for a sweet spot of TTFA in the order of hours of gameplay and TTP in the order of days of gameplay. Easier to get people hooked on your game if you can give them a few hours of uninterrupted fun up front.)

It seems pretty condemning of software economics with LLMs involved.

Related music note that Molly Lewis released a song of the title specifically on August 4th, for reasons of thinking about the story, which includes the story text: https://www.patreon.com/molly/posts/today-is-august-16572971...

Section 230 should have never applied to ads. Ads are a commercial relationship. Facebook and YouTube gets paid by these scammers so why would they want to accurately police them? The incentives are broken. Newspapers had to invent all sorts of ways to make sure that they had clear markers between ads, editorial content, and sponsored editorial content. Such things were enforced by lawsuits and a couple of Ad Bureaus. All of those rules should have applied to Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram) and Google (YouTube). Just as it was a sign that you were reading a bad/unreliable tabloid when you couldn't tell what was an ad and what was an article, Meta and Google should have that reputation already as vendors accepting payments for bad ads and whitewashing them as other sorts of content and it is still sometimes surprising to me that they don't.

The top of the article addresses this a bit: yes, Android in theory is AOSP [Android Open Source Project] which is still Linux based. (For now, lots of rumors every Android release that a kernel switch is coming.) But AOSP has lost a lot of power as Android moved so many things to Google Play Services [closed source], which leaves room for Linux-based phone OSes that disown/disavow AOSP entirely because what's the point of playing ball with a half-closed ecosystem anyway? (The article discusses the Ubuntu Touch fork still seeing some maintenance despite Canonical giving up and decides on Sailfish OS.)

I have autocorrect and predictive text on on the iPad and off on the iPhone and it is fascinating how much better it is on the iPad. One of the things that particularly killed me was the iPhone correcting three or four words away from the cursor. There's an option for it to highlight when it does that (which it really shouldn't) but something about iPhone apps the highlights never work. iPad apps they actually work. (Maybe because every phone app thinks it needs to implement their own half-baked text boxes but iPad apps have fewer "designers" doing stupid things like that? I don't know, it's weird.) Still frustrating that there isn't a way to turn off "don't touch anything too far behind the current cursor), but being able to actually spot them when they do change is a big deal.

It's what felt like what really killed Windows Phone. Too many things became "only available" through an iOS or Android app. Windows Phone was free as in beer towards the end and there's a possibility there would have still been a small but devoted techie audience on it, if so many things weren't already so broken from disappearing/vanished app support.