itsboring

There’s this bubble where people who work with AI seem to assume that everyone else also wants to work with AI on their PC. It’s strange. Let NVIDIA have their CUDA and their datacenter GPUs, most of us just want to put pixels on a screen.

Somehow this reminded me of when I worked at a bank some 20 years ago, and there was a ton of VBA code with “On Error Resume Next”. People would just pop that in there to “fix” their errors.

Also HTML parsing and Postel’s law. To me, that’s the real “billion-dollar mistake”.

As a kid, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said programmer. So that’s what I did.

The money vs. passion thing rings true, but at the same time, I’ve found that channeling passion to my employer doesn’t really reward me in the way I want. When I go “above and beyond” my job description, the reward is actually a punishment: more of the shit I don’t want to be doing.

Instead, I set aside some time to work on open source stuff. I actually feel a sense of ownership then. I’m not working to make somebody else rich, and I can do things my way and in my own time.

Whoa, is this why The Bobs wanted to promote Peter?

At least flipping burgers you don’t have to have a morning call where you say, “Yesterday I flipped burgers, today I’m going to flip more burgers. No blockers.”

Or a Jira user story titled “As a burger eater, I want to eat a burger that’s been flipped so it’s cooked on both sides.”

I hate to say it, but I think we (as in, developers) did this to ourselves, or we were at least complicit. People like to think that these massive piles of abstractions we’ve built are for the benefit of future developers, but I’m starting to look at the software landscape more like a landfill with layer upon layer of waste output.

Checked my order history, the one I got was a “SCHLAGE FE575 PLY 626 ELA Plymouth Keypad Entry”. I don’t remember having any trouble installing this on an interior door (and I’m not very “handy” at all). That said, I don’t know much about doors, so can’t say for sure if it works everywhere. Maybe some interior doors are thinner or something.

I went a step further and installed a keypad lock on my office door. I mean, I’ll admit that there are simpler ways to keep the kids out, but it looks cool…

I’ve grown comfortable with the idea that the win32 API is simply a gaming runtime now. I’m okay with this situation because A) I don’t have to give up any performance (or at least none that I’ve been able to measure) and B) the Proton/WINE stack is still open source all the way down.

It could certainly be argued that I’m doing some mental gymnastics here, but I look at Proton/WINE as simply being part of the game engine. Traditional engines like Unity/Unreal have all kinds of translation layers and indirection.

Seems like AI is becoming pretty effective at undoing the “lack of error” part…

I disagree. I don’t believe that distinction is relevant. My reasoning is that the large number of SteamOS users allows Valve to justify spending time and resources improving things like Mesa and amdgpu (edit: and of course Proton, which is huge), which benefits many Linux gamers that do not own Steam Deck. I use the SteamOS compositor (gamescope) on my desktop PC because it’s great—-and it probably wouldn’t exist without SteamOS.

The only reason I care about the number of Linux users is because more users means more development resources. Using that criteria, Steam Deck users very much “count”.

This feels like a double standard to me. If you exclude Steam Deck users because it comes with Linux by default, then you should also exclude all the people who bought laptops that come with Windows by default, no? They’re not Windows gamers, they’re just using what came with their computer.

Wow, software 3D rendering must have really gotten fast then. I play all my Steam games on Linux using the open source amdgpu driver. Or maybe I just imagined all those extra frames in RDR2. Someone should tell Valve that the Steam Deck could be a lot faster.

Or, I guess the other option is that you’re spreading misinformation.

We call them scabs.

Using mailing lists no less.

I would contend that the Linux kernel is the most successful and prolific piece of software in the world.

Meh. I worked from home while we had a toddler and an infant, now a first grader and pre-schooler. I’m not going to claim it didn’t have its challenges, but even at its worst it was better than commuting. I did some of the best work of my career during COVID lockdown. I was genuinely happy with life.

I only care if software serves the user when I’m the user.

This is the real reason I like the idea of UBI. It’s not because I want to do nothing all day, it’s because I want to shift the power dynamic. For example, imagine a worker living paycheck-to-paycheck who needs their employer-provided health insurance, with an asshole boss who refuses to let them take a day off to attend a family member’s funeral: the UBI improves their ability to tell that boss to get fucked without ending up broke and homeless.

Basically I’m for any system that allows people to tell bad bosses to get fucked.

Also a good argument for universal health care.

What, you’re not “Making the World a Better Place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols”?

In seriousness, I wish there was more self-awareness like this in our field.

I’d like to add the phrase “solved problem”.

Used to dual boot, but with the combo of steam/proton and VFIO passthrough + looking glass, it’s been really solid to just run both at the same time. File sharing between the two is pretty easy in that case, because it’s just the usual rsync/scp tools or SMB share.

Although, I’ve found I very rarely need the guest for gaming anymore, more so for opening the odd Photoshop file and similar tasks.

I still think there’s a big difference. If asked to speculate on the architecture of Sharepoint, my response would be “I have no earthly idea.” If pressed further for an answer, my response would be “It’s probably some over-complicated mess and I don’t care enough about Sharepoint to spend any further time on this line of questioning.” I have yet to see ChatGPT just admit it doesn’t know, but in this case “I don’t know” is the most trustworthy answer I, as a technical person, could give.

Bob should master Crusader Kings III.

Leadership is a worthwhile activity for sure, but if “Bob” doesn’t get enjoyment/satisfaction out of it, then it could be perceived by him as more of a punishment.

I’m not sure it has to be one or the other extreme. Plenty of places have the “20% time” where you’re free to work in a self-directed way, learn about new stuff that interests you, etc. Maybe for this hypothetical Bob, that 20% is more like 50%, but it doesn’t mean that everything has to go totally wild west.

Bob shouldn’t be working at a place where he’s only allowed to work on tasks that are assigned to him by a manager, and twiddle his thumbs when he has none. He should be able to create his own tasks, do some experiments, R&D, self-directed training, open source work, whatever he finds compelling.

Who cares?

Oh wow, that would drive me mad. That's one of those subtle human-machine interaction problems where sometimes people don't believe you (and maybe you start to doubt yourself even). And then people start throwing around studies saying humans don't perceive this or that under some millisecond threshold or whatever.

Before high refresh rate screens, I was one of those people that would turn off v-sync in games because the additional input lag bugged me just enough, JUST on the edge of perception. I wasn't even a competitive player or particularly good, but it felt....mushy. Similar problem with playing old NES games on modern LEDs.

For many years I had a mechanical keyboard I loved, but slowly and subtly over time the enter key would miss a keystroke. It was like 1 out of 300 times maybe, but it was just often enough for me to start doubting my own fingers. Finally couldn't take it anymore and just bought a new keyboard.

Just goes to show that very subtle problems in a computer interfaces can have a big impact.

I agree, but I feel like discussions about latency always focus on competitive play, while for me at least, low input latency is important even for single-player FPS games. Before 144hz+ screens were popular, I’d turn off v-sync and deal with tearing just so the mouse movement didn’t feel “mushy”. It didn’t make me a better player, but it FELT better and therefore increased enjoyment.

I agree with the other responses here, but they missed one reason: because it’s funny.