evanmoran

This amazes me since I switched to go because its builds are so insanely fast and the module system is quite clean. Out of all the languages, go probably needs it the least!

I did use bazel long ago for c++ and it was quite good at it, but we didn’t have very many dependencies.

This post reminded me of this killer btree implementation for swift. The analysis on GitHub is fantastic and reads like a thriller novel :)

https://github.com/attaswift/BTree#why

Gathering all that together sounds worthwhile, but let me encourage you to share more of yourself in small parts as well. It takes practice to find the right amount to share (it’s a balance and depends on you and them), but taking an extra moment after dinner to ask what they have been up to or share a thought you’ve had recently can really help you connect better to them while you’re alive.

Netflix is curated and not user created, so I’d say TikTok is more like YouTube. Then of course everyone copied the format including YouTube, IG, X, and even LinkedIn (saw this one just today). But even with that slight naming difference, I couldn’t agree more with you that MMOs are rich cultural hubs compared to endless short videos. It’s a low bar :)

I’ll try to be a bit more direct than other answers, so apologies if it is too much, but let me say that such a move would make more sense if you want to switch to a developer role. I’d say it is not a good plan for a PM role as honestly PMs don’t need the tech depth to be great and two years isn’t enough to be competitive technically with devs with 4yr degrees and 10+ years experience, etc. Instead consider taking an online data structure coding class to feel how it feels (coursera has good ones) to become technical. If you love it, you can choose to go further in that direction if you want. Hope that helps!

As someone who has worked in the game industry for years both in AAA and indie, I’d say the switching costs are quite high and proportional to the team and code size. The reason it can be so challenging is a late change can easily double your preproduction time as you have to port over existing systems/tools/workflows and the bigger teams have many more of these systems. Usually this means bigger studios only changes engines at the start of new franchises or when fully rebooting old ones (For example, the new Mass Effect is porting from Frostbite to Unreal 5, but it’s only viable because it’s a super high budget reboot with new creative direction and the time to do it)

It easier to switch if you’re indie, of course, but the reality is if your game is great it’s better to launch with the engine you have. And if your game is struggling gameplay-wise porting it to another engine isn’t going to help make the game better and puts the release at risk.

The difference is that web/social media is branded as an intelligent being you can ask any question of. We all agree the web is _also_ not reliable, but many people will think GPT / Gemini are verifiably accurate when they aren’t.

I’ve seen this before as well, but as a parent with two kids who loves to wonder about this very question, I can assure you a five year old (a kindergartener) is much, much smarter then a dog. They are filled with ideas and imagination, math / reading / writing capability, creative drawing and of course a massive spoken language advantage. Sure, they’d still lose in a fight, but then they’d (correctly!) tell their parents what is happening and we’d call animal control :)

I like the sentiment, but human children who are 2 completely dominate all known animal intelligence. They can speak in sentences and use tools in complex ways. There may be studies that show a raven might use a stick to help it find food. Well, a two year old will carry a stool halfway across the house to reach the scissors that will open a bag of veggie straws :) At 3 they can recognize letters _easily_ and start learning how to read. At 4 they can with a bit of practice learn the piece moves of chess and start strategizing.

Animals can definitely be intelligent, and we should learn more about them and how they perceive the world, but when you play with a 2.5 year old for five minute there is no doubt that humanity is beyond special.

Yes, I’d say “sucks” means “bad” more than uncool. Clearly using stuff that your friends think is bad is immediately uncool so I can see how these can seem to mean the same thing :)

I would add that PMF is an investor signal more than a founder one. Basically it says the product is good enough and the company is executing well enough to show extremely strong traction. It’s easy to spot this because the traction is too big to ignore, so any investor paying attention would be immediately interested.

The challenge, is even with this obviousness, it’s hard to run a company searching for PMF. All you can do is continue improving the product, its positioning, marketing, pricing, and so on, looking for strong interest and traction. This is what you’re probably doing already (what else is there), so PMF usually is phrased as a cautionary tale of people who never talk to customers, or never set a price, or never launch, etc. These all will sink your startup for sure, but all PMF will tell you is investors won’t be interested if you have no customers and no traction.

Just curious if other people feel the same way? My kid is right on the edge of the Minecraft-Roblox divide and I don’t have a strong opinion either way (he’s almost 7)

I like this write up. Nicely done! One think I have enjoyed doing is using named parameters as the options, but it does require a second struct only for the option parts:

    NewObject(
      required1, 
      required2, 
      &ObjectOptions{
        Option1: “foo”,
        // Option2 skipped
        Option3: “bar”,
    })

I can see the merits of both (two structs is tedious, for sure), but I wanted to share in case others had thoughts or alternate ideas!

I have always thought it helpful to think of the first 3 years as a parent as an emotional and mental low point. Kind of like how buying a house is often a financial/savings low point (those down payments are brutal) having kids hits you really hard right at the beginning. And it hits you in the mind, something I was used to relying on that suddenly is actually struggling. I’d say much of the challenge is sleep deprivation, and there's also new responsibilities and not going out, etc, but it is actually even harder than that.

That said, I absolutely love being a parent. So if you ever are considering it, just know that 3 year old is _much_ easier than a 1 year old. And then before you know it your 7 year old will out-build you in Minecraft and it’s even more fun :)

Amazingly, her immortal cell line was instrumental in polio eradication! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa#Polio_eradication

You can now detect field presence in several cases: https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/field_presence/#pres...

This is very solid with message types, but for basic types you can add `optional field` if needed as well (essentially making the value nullable)

They pulled the voice because it sounds similar enough, even if you don’t hear it. There are also several long form articles about it this morning to confirm further that it’s resonating as a major tech story because of those similarities. Probably most importantly the “voice of Her” is probably the #1 voice you shouldn’t try to emulate without permission (with Samuel L Jackson next). It is wild this has happened honestly, but I don’t think people are wrong about who it sounds like.

This fork is LGPL. Does anyone know of a fork that remains BSD? I’m sure this is fine for many people, but it isn’t ok for what I’m working on.

Update: it looks like KeyDB is a good one.

https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB

It looks great. I’m curious did you have any trouble with iOS app approval?

If you like this, my other favorite essay by Joel is Making Wrong Code Look Wrong:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

T* (T-star) is a great name.

I can’t either because I’m using a strange new device called a phone and it says my device width is too small to support.

On a related note, here’s a paper by (Hugo award winner) David Brin that I came across recently that talks about why we do not hear communications from other life forms in our galaxy. Not being found is a pretty good strategy for survival:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Brin/publication/...

I don't believe you're accurate. All apps that could charge money through Apple payments stopped doing so long ago and now are "free" with an external subscription or ads: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Microsoft Office, Slack, Google Docs/Drive, Dropbox, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Hey Email, etc. Only free-to-play games / gambling / scam apps stayed in the App Store, and the rest are gone.

This 100%. I promise you that I’m not secretly very interested in Dragon Rider episodes without my kids present. They have their own accounts, but it is hard to share family movies or when they just use the wrong account.

I also think half of my viewing is with my spouse. We are pretty aligned in some shows but we are different enough where “My List” really means when I’m alone, and we are missing an “Our List” for when we are together.

This is the most insightful take. Licenses like this prevent certain businesses in certain countries, but it is quite harmful as it adds a powerful tool for propaganda/scammers/etc who don’t care about the laws.

Additionally, it only really hurts small businesses & startups as the big companies all have teams that can make their own version or pay for 3rd party apis for easily. So yeah, us startup folks won’t like this license much as it basically is aimed at us the most.

Either way, congrats with the tech. It does look very impressive!

I’m not the author, but my sense was that the word theory was being used because it was it couldn’t be explained fully. An “understanding” would instead but potentially full known and documented or made into an API, etc. This theory idea is to hint that there are even bigger ideas than can’t be written and you have to feel them and learn them from the original team to use them well yourself.

I’d love to hear from the original author how they think theory compares to a mental model. The biggest different is theories are known to be wrong, which fascinates me as an idea!

I have seen many pieces of code only make sense for a moment in time. The theory was right then, but wrong as the business evolved. Or sometimes visa-versa where the business was wrong, but the code worked beautifully for it.

This is what returns are for! It is definitely worth the hassle for a better chip

Yes, but it’s 100% that bad and they are closing stores because of it: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/90-target-workers-be-displa...

I believe you mean tentacles.