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> Walls of text are why books pile up unread.

Source on this? Is there research on this, or is this meant to be obvious and intuitive?

>when you do it on a phone the portability and something about the form factor and touch interface seems to supercharge it

I recall reading something a while back (maybe even by someone at Rovio) that the simple finger motions across the small screen that were then novel to Angry Birds and the other early mobile touch games had some unique effect on the brain that other interfaces don't. The game mechanics are similar to those in Flash/Shockwave games going back to the 90s, but they become a lot more compelling on a small touchscreen compared to a mouse.

When I read the title, I thought "morg" was one of those goofy tech words that I had missed but whose meaning was still pretty clear in context (like a portmanteau of "Microsoft" and "borged," the latter of which I've never heard as a verb but still works). I guess it's a goofy tech word now.

Yeah, isn't this why we're told everything "moves so much slower at a bigco" than at a startup?

Was going to say that I hope Joe doesn't end up going to prison for an unspeakable crime, but then I saw it was an acronym.

>they broke all the time

While I was reading the OP I kept thinking about how an accounting firm's entire ability to do business rested on the continued functioning of a parallel-port dongle. I just have to imagine that they had a box full of these.

I imagine this is a temporary gig until the burbclaves build out their own armed security services and he moves on to high-speed pizza delivery.

> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.

Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?

“Initially, Ravel was to create a variation on the music of Isaac Albéniz, but copyright laws prevented him from doing so.” [your article]

“[Koji Kondo] had planned to use Maurice Ravel's Boléro as the title theme as it perfectly matched its speed, seeing as under Japanese copyright law, music is released into the public domain 50 years after the composer's death. However, Kondo was forced to change it in November 1985, late in the game's development, after learning that it had only been 47 years and 11 months after Ravel's death.”[1]

Funny how things rhyme.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_(video_gam...

A few years after this, a documentary was made about some of the men still living at the Sunshine (mentioned in the first paragraph): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0m2FaC8GUs

Great assessment of Dave Barry

> The most timeless thing here is Linux retaining its "highest hacker to user ratio".

More so than BSD? Or still more than just the OSs Carmack listed?

I’ve been seeking out classic phpbb-style forums more and more for community. I just stopped browsing Reddit a few weeks ago after realizing there was nothing I’d truly miss: no characters that I’d come to know, and no reason to maintain a relationship with anyone there in particular. Regarding “identity,” I actually feel that Reddit (and of course Facebook) rely on it too much: maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).

Very sorry for your loss. An uncle had bladder cancer about 15 years ago, and while he survived, it began a very steep decline that led to his passing in 2022.

Right off the bat I get something that sounds like something Frank Klepacki would have used in the Red Alert 2 soundtrack (likely pulled from Methods of Mayhem). Nice.

> For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect.

Are they going out of their way to recreate an aesthetic that was originally the easiest thing to create given the language specs of the past, or is there something about this look and feel that is so fundamental to the idea of making websites that basically anything that looks like any era or variety of HTML will converge on it?

Does this result in a “you get to live but you’re never allowed to fly a plane again” situation?

> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.

People also like to point to how foolish of Blockbuster it was not to buy Netflix when they had the opportunity to, but I’m also inclined to believe that the merged companies would never have made the decisive moves involving streaming video and content production. It’s tempting to say that Amazon would have filled in the streaming video gap (although perhaps late enough for feature film and TV piracy to proliferate a little further into the mainstream), but I wonder whether Apple would have adapted its iTunes service into Apple TV first. (Another dark horse I like to think about here would be RealMedia which may have identified a niche.)

Does it work the way CAN-SPAM is supposed to work (marketing can be unsubscribed from with rules about what constitutes "transactional" messages)?

>app icons are just "advertisement"

You wouldn't believe the volume of actual advertisements that show up as push notifications on my wife's phone

I feel like everyone on the inside knew it was coming very soon which is why it seemed so peculiarly Ozzy-focused down to the cake that Geezer Butler brought out to him at the end of the show (and I imagine the contingency plan was to have vocalists from all the other bands fill in during the Black Sabbath set).

I’m a little surprised that one of the supposed advantages of Laserdisc over tape is resistance to humidity. Wasn’t delamination/corrosion (LaserRot) a not-uncommon problem for LD? I’m guessing humidity issues (particularly mold) were much more pronounced with tape.

It’s a joke (hence the “/s”) on the “[PL name] is [words beginning with the rest of the letters of the Pl name]” snowclone. However as time approaches infinity I’m sure it will get a recursive backronym.

These recursive initialism PL names are getting out of hand /s

These are all Peter Thiel joints, I think.

In a code review a couple of years ago, I had to say "no" to a dev casually including pandas (and in turn numpy) for a one-liner convenience function in a Django web app that has no involvement with any number crunching whatsoever.

I'm working on a little 2D action puzzle game in Go on top of SDL (with bindings via https://github.com/veandco/go-sdl2). The prompt I've given myself is "Chip's Challenge meets Hotline Miami," but who knows how much of either of those elements will remain after I keep evolving the capabilities and general feel of the gameplay. For dev graphics I'm just cobbling together sprites from various pixel-arty asset packs I've purchased on itch.io, but in the future if I want to commercialize it I'll probably want to work with an artist to develop a unified look-and-feel for the game--I may even switch to 3D/2.5D depending on how the tone and my workflow evolve.

I've experimented with Unity, Godot, and GameMaker in the past, but for the time being I'd like to see what I can accomplish on my own in Go to keep my dev chops sharp especially since I've moved into an engineering management role at my job (which has nothing to do with game dev but is increasingly employing more Go source throughout). Something I've realized as I've been applying good code organization and reusability is that I'm essentially building an engine for anything top-down (hesitant to say "isometric" since I know that means something graphically specific)--RTS/TBS/tactics/RPG all seem doable with what I've built given a little bit of extra logic on top for each.

Heh, I just watched The Wild Robot with my nephews, and the film uses pretty much this same trick early on.

"Always code as if the guy^Wold lady who ends up maintaining^Wrunning your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live^Wwork."

The trick they use to handle the transition from Russian to English dialogue is so cool.