vanderZwan

Wasn't one other neat thing about Snap! and Scratch that you can translate the entire code (except for the user-named parts) to any other language on the fly without worrying about it breaking? Because in a sense the language is just part of the "presentation layer" of the blocks?

Oh, so you're team IVAR?

BILLY gang forever!

(just kidding, I actually have both, and way more IVAR shelves than BILLYs at that(BILLIES? What would be the proper plural here?))

Is this an ironic "tell me you don't learn from history without telling me you don't learn from history" joke?

The author has a severe case of being oblivious to the fact that not everyone knows what they know, or views the world the way they do. As shown for example by their assertion that "we all stopped coding manually around December 2025", as if AI critics don't exist.

As a result you have to look at what they share about themselves to infer where they're going with things, because they never explicitly state it. All traits amplified for the worse when people use chat bots too much, in my experience.

Scrolling to the end, they write:

> In 2005 a dozen version control systems fought to replace Bitkeeper, and the winner ended up ruling software development for two decades. Nobody in that race predicted that the decisive factor would be a hosting site with a social network on top.

They had a VCM start-up around their own technology, then Git displaced all other technologies, and then Github ate everyone's lunch. So the first revolution not-so-coincidentally overlaps with the time they ran a SCM startup, and they ignore anything that happened before they entered the space. Funny that.

So the implicit context is the business case and programmer culture around VCM systems.

Meaning the second revolution is anything that challenges Git and Github.

They also keep bringing up gigantic mono-repos and how Git can't handle the scale at which AI increases the amount of code bloat or commits.

So what I read between the lines is that they believe that there are enough people who don't want to actually address the automated hyperscaled Wirth's Law in the room, and are willing to pay services and technology to adapt around it instead.

That's their new business case that will power the second "revolution".

Which sounds horrifying to me, and the worst part is that I can actually see it happening if this AI bubble doesn't pop fast enough.

Similarly, according to my mom, by the time I or my sisters were five we rode our bikes to school by ourselves. Granted, that was in a Dutch village with less than a thousand people, where everyone knew everyone by their first name, so it probably was one of the safest places in the world for children to ride bikes, but still.

> Switching to the monthly view

I'd hardly consider fluctuations between 2.2 million and 3.3 million dowloads "flat".

Also, the metric used in the article was "downloads in the first week after a new release", which apparently broke a record. Regardless of the reason behind that record breaking number, switching to monthly dowloads to see if there is a sudden surge in popularity seems like the wrong metric.

Also, before he got famous for inventing diagnosing everyone with penis envy, Freud spent a summer trying and failing to find the eels' reproductive organs.

Using personal websites read by a handful of programmer nerds that work fine if you turn off javascript to justify literally everyone else being forced to navigate bloated, broken company websites isn't particularly convincing as an argument against memory-safe C imo.

We live in a world where my laptop is forced to waste tons of computational power on immensely bloated websites even with ad-block, with now even having to worry about agentic bullshit that I didn't ask for, and plenty of others apparently still think throwing computational cycles at cryptocurrency is good for anything.

Complaining about a relatively small performance price for Fil-C in that context honestly feels like that one famous newspaper photo of a smoking pregnant woman drinking a beer with a caption saying she's wbrried about the effects of the loud construction noises next door on her unborn child.

Except even that is wrong, because at least she had a point about the construction noises, while this is more of a "refusing to eat your vegetables" kind of situation.

> and even for your lightweight game consoles (Firefly Zero).

On that note, does the "shape" of the benchmarks change on lower-powered hardware in any way? (Aside from the obvious change if memory overhead requires switching from direct to indirect threaded code)

Well, I can think of a couplo of reasons why a black Ghanaian man would not be likely to pursue his PhD at the University of Georgia in the 1950s, but I'm not sure if that was the question you were begging for.

> If blue light actually impaired vision, that would be very notable.

It is extremely noticeable for me at night because I can never fully focus on signs using blue LEDs, while red LEDs give me no problem.

And did those studies use the same methods as this one? Because this makes it look like they didn't:

> Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, which is a subgroup analysis of a large prospective trial about visual impairments in European car drivers, we included 853 persons between 20 and 80 years of age and without a history of ocular surgery or any eye disease including cataract. Subjects participated in an ophthalmological examination, grading of lens opacity, and the measurement of visual functions such as IOSL, CS, and BCVA. Dependent on iris color, participants were divided into four groups: light-blue, blue-grey, green-hazel, and brown.

> The straylight function of the human eye depends on eye color, especially at larger angles of scattering. As a potential cause for this dependence, transmission of light through the ocular wall was measured, using a psychophysical method.

Even if this paper turns out to be the "boring" science kind that refines earlier results with different methods, it would still be science.

> Many factors, like light scattering and imperfections in the eye’s optics, keep light from coming into sharp focus on the retina, Buabeng said.

> The study also found that iris pigmentation influenced how far apart the two light points needed to be before viewers could distinguish them as separate points. Using a standardized iris color chart, researchers classified each participant’s eye color before analyzing the results. Participants with lighter-colored irises, particularly blue eyes, experienced greater light scatter than those with darker brown irises.

Sounds like the research took a next step beyond previous studies on the same subject. You know, basically how science is supposed to work. Something anyone giving a flippant reply here could have figured out if they actually had read the article.

> and hilarously, our dogs did too.

Tangent to your tangent, but this is one reason why a guard llama works so well together with guard dogs for protecting livestock.

A llama is much more alert to potential danger than, say, sheep. Which actually is an understatement: sheep have the added problem of not making any noises when attacked or eaten by predators, and therefore not alerting guard dogs.

Dogs can teach themselves to interpret the llama's body language and pro-actively chase away coyotes or foxes or whatever it is that the llama spotted.

I've seen this in action on a family friend's sheep farm.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_llama

I know someone whose partner was murdered in an extremely horrible, brutal way. Years later they told me in a completely unrelated discussion that they have aphantasia. I always wondered if in their case it might be trauma-induced, but obviously don't want to ask given the topic. Either way I think it's for the best in their case.

Is this presented by The Yes Men! by any chance?

I suspect that 50% at no risk of demonetization is quite a bit more than 55% with it for quite a significant chunk of those content creators.

You know, it just occured to me that technically we're all inside all of his Klein bottles. Or all Klein bottles, really.

I dated someone studying at a conservatory (the music kind) around that time. IIRC the Zune was quite popular with the students - even if most of them had an iMac - because it had one of the best microphones for recording live performances in an affordable package.

Not everything has to be a business. Our local library has "repair café Sundays", and most of the people involved in it are volunteers. There are some "pensionados" among them (and they are cherished for their institutional knowledge), but they are definitely not the majority. There is a strong community of interested tech nerds that like to help each other out and learn how to fix things themselves, and who also want to learn from the previous generation.

> I had a high-end webcam that flickered. There should be switch in the software to switch from 50hz to 60hz that'd fix it but it was nowhere to be found.

Similar issue, although I'm not sure if it's the Logitech webcam or just how webcams are automatically configured on Linux these days in general: if I use a really bright LED lamp, the automatic exposure time goes down to the point that it doesn't matter if the webcam is set to 50hz or 60hz, it's going to catch flickering from other subtle frequencies affecting light output. I've also had situations where I wanted to use it to film a white piece of paper that I'm writing on, but it automatically adjusts exposure to make it gray instead.

It took me forever to find something with a straightforward GUI that lets me manually override this behavior on Linux. I ended up settling for cameractrls.

https://github.com/soyersoyer/cameractrls

(too late to edit my comment, but I obviously meant increasing the spool size near the end, not reducing)

I think the idea is that at the end the sling starts to unwind too, increasing the effective arm-length (that non-linearity is one of the reasons trebuchets are so efficient to begin with). As a result it's possible that decreasing the spool to near zero is like putting the gears of your car too high. Reducing the spool size ensures there's enough torque left to put more power into the final swing.

I've never seen a NAXALT fallacy used for the concept of engagement metrics before.

It's not relevant to this discussion that in certain contexts, useful engagement metrics exist that supposedly aren't toxic, because it doesnt apply to the current context. We're clearly talking about the larger systemic issue of companies maximizing all engagement at all costs, and the consequences of such a policy.

Are you sure that wasn't referencing "grue" from this philosophical thought experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction

Perhaps the "hits like an x on a y" family is larger than any of us thought?

Could be a regional thing. I've heard the pliers-on-a-pig version too, might be more common.

So in Dutch one expression for "that makes no sense" is "dat slaat nergens op", which literally translates to "that doesn't hit (slap, beat) anything".

A ruder variation of that is "dat slaat als een … op een drumstel", or "that hits like a … on a drum set".

For some reason I felt like sharing this trivia.

From what I've seen from the outside looking in, I feel like game development has it's own variation of Wirth's Law where level designers push game engines to their limit faster than the people making the engines can optimize them.