eestrada

A while ago I checked to see how much gold actually exists in circulation. It is less than 22 meters cubed. That's it. Diamond mines regularly dump more than that in the ocean to create artificial scarcity. And at the end of the day, it is just carbon, one of the most abundant elements on the planet. Diamonds can just be produced in a lab with raw carbon, heat, and pressure. Companies even exist to make a diamond from a deceased person's ashes. Diamond value is amazingly artificial.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/chart-how-much-gold-is-i...

https://lifegem.com/

That moment when you learn natural diamonds are literally dumped into the ocean by the boatful to created artificial scarcity...

Lots of studios still build engines from scratch for this very reason: get exactly what they want and avoid vendor lockin. A good FOSS engine that gets them 50% of the way there for free? Seems like a pretty good deal to me. So long as the engine can be extended to get the features they want, it makes sense to use a FOSS one instead of building from scratch.

Also, inhouse tooling will need to be built regardless, whether the engine is commercial, in house from scratch, or FOSS.

If the studios give back to the FOSS engine source code, it creates a virtuous cycle, like with the Linux kernel. Everyone wins.

I think more than anything it is the nickle-and-dime frustration of being charged multiple times along the way. It would be more like if McDonalds charged per bite instead of per sandwich. Even if the final bill isn't much different, it changes one's eating habits and likely makes the whole experience less enjoyable in the end.

With Unity, users don't like the new labrynthian TOS. It doesn't help that multiple times people have said "I need to pay if I release a free to play game?" And Unity has clarified "no, that isn't what we meant, you won't need to pay for those." It is either on the Unity legal team for writing the terms so poorly or the marketing team for translating them poorly. Either way, trust has been lost. If Unity builds in a legal back door to charge later for phantom installs or retroactive usage or whatever, that makes an operational risk that devs might want to avoid.

Also, separately, the masses will send idle death threats for nearly anything. Given a large enough consumer base, idle death threats will be sent for any change (even a positive one) or no change at all. I'm guessing that McDonalds' CEO doesn't make noise about it when it happens.

It seems like they fell more inline with Semantic Versioning when that format came in vogue. Semantic Versioning is what most devs expect now; it makes sense to communicate the version in a format that has a broadly understood meaning for devs.

Physically based rendering support is already pretty robust. The bigger things holding Godot back were more game centric, like screen space occlusion object culling to help with rendering large scenes. However lots of those sorts of features have been added in recent releases.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/list_of_feature...

Yes, this.

So many devs get caught up on which language is used. I have my pet languages that I prefer too, but at the end of the day a game engine is about creating games. So long as the language offered is reasonably usable and one can deliver a fun and engaging experience with it, the language bindings don't matter much. Everything I've read about GDScript indicates that it fills the need, is fun to use, and generally gets out of the way so devs can focus on creating fun and engaging experiences.

The only reason I see having C# support is critical is if a Dev is porting from another engine (i.e Unity) midway through development or if the dev/studio has lots of boilerplate code or libraries already written for prior titles. If starting from scratch, I don't see a good reason to stick with it.

> For smaller indie studios, there are definitely better alternatives, but when it comes to the big packages, there's really just Unity and Unreal.

Or big studios can just build their own engine. Lots of big studios still do this. Once they run the math on how much licensing will cost them, they realize they can pay several inhouse devs to just make a bespoke engine for the same cost. And then further amortize that NRE cost over several titles.

Will this licensing change hurt big studios in the short run? Unlikely. Could it hurt Unity in the long run once big studios realize they can just build exactly what they want inhouse for the same (or less) cost? Much more likely.

As for small studios: small studios eventually become big studios. If they burn the small studios now, they won't have big studios buying from them in 5-10 years.

> Uber's CEO says his time delivering food for his company revealed a "lack of quality" with its product from a driver's perspective.

Dogfooding can't ever stop. "Why is our product terrible?" Because you stopped dogfooding it, or maybe you never did to begin with.

> tell kids how/why to be “good” , and largely they won’t be bad.

That is only part of the solution. Kids do more modeling than critical thinking. Parents and other role models need to show kids a good example. Bad behavior in kids is largely from bad modeling by the people they look up to, not insufficient instruction. Certainly the "why" should be explained, but saying "don't lie" means nothing if the person saying it then goes around lying constantly.

There is also the question of children becoming more peer oriented than parent oriented, which has become an increasingly prevelant situation the past century or so. The kids with better behavior tend to seek instruction, modeling, and self-worth from their parents. Kids with worse behavior tend to seek instruction, modeling, and self-worth from their peers (which is generally a terrible idea).

> Everybody in the US likes to talk about the golden age of the 50s. The top marginal tax rate was pushing 90%.

The effective tax rate was never actually that high. There are always carve outs to lower the rate.

https://www.aei.org/economics/public-economics/were-taxes-re...

https://checkyourfact.com/2019/01/09/fact-check-90-percent-t...

> Empirical data answers your question. Trickle down economics has been a provable disaster with the VAST majority of wealth accumulating in the hands of a few.

At no point did I mention "trickle down economics". I mentioned innovation and productivity, things that are easily measured. The gap between productivity and wages in the US only widely diverged once going off of hard money. This is because the upper class own assets (largely unaffected by monetary inflation) and the lower/middle class own currency (heavily affected by monetary inflation). If the empirical data you speak of is so evident, please provide some references for it. I don't subscribe to "trickle down economics" so I don't know anything about it.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Thomas Jefferson said "...the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors."

Disenchantment with the news is not a new thing. More people are figuring out how useless it is and are disconnecting.

This solves basically all the issues I have with JSON.

> There’s a very large chasm between being successful, and having $10s of billions of dollars in net worth.

Because of marginal utility, there really isn't such a large chasm. Every additional dollar has less utility than the dollar that preceded it. Capping what producers can earn or use their means/money on is a good way to stifle innovation and productivity. Also, what indication is there that the government won't squander taxes from this in the same way they have squandered taxes from so many other things?

So long as the cost (fines, legal fees, lost revenue due to bad press) is less than the increase in revenue they receive from forcing users to buy their overprices cartridges, HP's behavior won't change.

My most recent printer is an HP I bought at Costco because I knew it worked with CUPS and HPLIP on Linux and macOS. Given how many times I've seen HP pull this stunt though, I'll most likely shop for a different brand next time.

Part of this is also that HP has captured a LOT of corporate printing locations. The cost of migration for those businesses, universities and organizations is huge. I think that is why they keep getting away with this. Even if individual consumers move away from HP, they still own a huge chunk of the corporate printing market.

An obscure hippie commune would like to talk to you about an early stage investment opportunity. /s

Seriously though, to your point, existing and historical communes require 100% voluntary buy-in to work. That doesn't scale beyond a couple hundred people. So, as you say, it becomes "non-voluntary" beyond a certain size, which is a nice way of saying it is made possible via force.

> with modern networking, data speeds and computing capacity, a centrally-planned economy could work.

Ludwig von Mises' whole point is that you are working with unknowable inputs, so you can never calculate correctly. This is why a socialist, centrally planned economy can never work.

For example, people's preferences are unknowable before a transaction takes place. And, no, surveys don't work because what people say they want and what they actually spend their money on are different things.

No amount of computational power can create outputs for unknown and unknowable inputs.

> When I was younger though (and child free), I'd jump at these sort of events, and loved them.

I think this is the key point. After hours parties only focus on one demographic (young and/or without children). Some non-zero percentage of the workforce will not fall into this category. People organizing such parties should not be surprised that such people don't show up.

This is how I get my news. Not every news source has an Atom or RSS feed, but plenty of aggregating sites (like HN I might note) do have feeds. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing this now. But apparently, this is not how the masses want to consume media, including news media.

That is a good point. It would be interesting to see these same numbers as a ratio against worldwide album sales over time. That would give a better sense of popularity relative to their time.

This reminds me of the Is-Ought problem defined by Hume. "Ought" has to do with value judgement, and that is squarely in the realm of human morality. Only humans know what humans value; generative AI can't replace that and it would be an enormous mistake to try to do so.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

I thought the original title meant that people are less likely to order excess food when ordering online. Still an interesting article, but not what I was expecting.

To bolster this point, the bestselling album of all time is still Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982. So it has been literally over 40 years and nothing else has topped that for mainstream popularity, musically speaking. It has sold over 70 million copies. The next nearest album is AC/DC's Back in Black, released in 1980, at 50 million copies, a 20 million copy difference. A present day musician would be over the moon to sell 20 million copies. If I'm reading the charts right, the only musician to break 30 million sales for an album since 2010 has been Adele.

So, while mainstream creations may be homogenizing, independent creators are finding a larger audience than ever before. I see that as a good thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums

I think the reason Unreal Blueprints and cousins work and are useful is: they are used in a relatively narrow domain, the primitives of that domain are well understood/defined, and the primitives are easily compossible.

Once you create a general purpose no-code option, it is so complicated and sprawling that the mental burden to understand it is just as great (if not greater) as just using plain old code again. Or conversely, it is so constraining (for the sake of "simplicity") that it can't do anything useful.

I'm guessing the stickiness of Unix is that a lot of useful software, espescially FOSS, just compiles and works on Unix-y operating systems, assuming the right syscalls are implemented. There is far less reinventing of the wheel by going that route.

Also at Amazon currently. Similar situation; I have coworkers across all timezones in the contiguous US.

Because native multithreading is expensive when it comes to (a) memory consumption per thread of execution and (b) context switching. Also, if your program spends a lot of time just waiting on outside resources (most notably slow/blocking IO), coroutine concurrency is bother faster and more lightweight. If your program is CPU bound, then coroutines/async have little-to-no value over native multithreading.

That being said, yeah, most async workflows are obtuse and difficult to follow and they force all consumers of your interface to also use the async primitives if they want the benefits. Go seems to be one of the few languages that does async/coroutines right.

See: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/go-hits-the-concurrency-n...

I would argue that using your own product and talking to your customers is the only way to make good and useful products. Telemetry may have a good use case (although I struggle to find one), but it isn't a substitute for dogfooding and direct customer interaction.

Looking at the GCC docs, it seems like it isn't possible to have zero optimizations at any point, even at the lowest optimization levels. To quote the docs "Most optimizations are completely disabled at -O0", so it seems you can't assume you can force correct behavior just by turning off optimization passes.

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html

> Our Hosting provider, Hetzner, has recently started charging for public IPv4 addresses - as they should! Those numbers started getting expensive. This prompted me to try and set up a new server cluster using IPv6 exclusively...

I think what OP went thru is what will make the transition happen. Market forces are ultimately going to be the thing that drives wider adoption: IPv4 addresses getting so expensive that it drives people to try IPv6, and when that fails they complain in posts like this and directly to their service providers. The fact that OP names names of services failing to offer IPv6 is a good thing. Ideally it will start creating pressure on those services/corporations to fully support IPv6. If complaining doesn't work to motivate them, users moving away from their services to providers who do offer IPv6 support will motivate them.