I always leave my project in a state where it doesn’t compile or run (not commits, obvs) so I’m forced back into understanding exactly what I was doing when I left off to fix the error.

How do I remember what the command even is? Like how would I discover the grep tool without using the Internet?

Online

Ok but what if my Wi-Fi isn’t working

I started using Python ~15 years ago. I didn’t go to school for CS.

Compared to using literally anything else at the time as a beginner, pip was the best thing out there that I could finally understand for getting third party code to work with my stuff, without copy paste… on Windows.

When I tried Linux, package managers and make were pretty cool for doing C/C++ work.

Despite all that, us “regular” engineers were consigned to Windows.

We either had to use VBA or a runtime that didn’t need to be installed.

I’m invested because higher adoption of my preferred platform causes prices of said platform to drop, making the platform economically attractive to develop for.

Fewer users causes less effort to go into the platform by larger corporations due to lower revenue streams, diminishing updates and feature count over time.

Eventually, users leave due to pain points not being addressed. Shrinking user bases causes independent developer talent to focus on other platforms since the economics no longer work in the marginal case.

The shrinking independent developer contributions to the ecosystem make the required effort to develop for it that much higher, since the tools and apps that would have been built weren’t.

Higher development costs slow down feature pacing, due to the increased effort needed to substitute the efforts of missing ecosystem developers.

Lack of feature cadence drives users to other platforms, shrinking the user base, bringing us back to step 1.

A 172 is the plane you train to get a beginner license in. 90-120mph max.

From other discussions I’ve seen, the guy stepping down was frustrated by having C code rejected that made lifetime guarantees more explicit. No rust involved. The patch was in service of rust bindings, but there was 0 rust code being reviewed by maintainers.

As a mechanical engineer who spent multiple thousands of hours using SolidWorks, trying to use FreeCAD felt like flying a Cessna 172 after getting used to a Citation jet.

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/

Enjoy a new rabbit hole to dive down

AutoCAD is amazing once you get all your shortcuts and settings set up just the way you like it.

100% this. I used to work at a company that sold software that mechanical engineers used all day, every day in a certain field. Our app looked like the last pic but with better alignment.

People who are competent want all the things on their screen all at once all the time. They also want keyboard shortcuts.

My parents are approaching 60. I told them that the signal text message app would work a lot like iMessage if we both used it. And it did. It was great. For the other people that used signal, the experience was generally better. For other people that didn’t, SMS was fine because that’s how I was going to talk to them anyway.

The thing is, My parents are not going to go to more than one app to communicate with other people. Since it no longer sends and receives text messages, it doesn’t work with 99% of the other people in their lives.

They own and run a pretty large business. There’s no way that they’re staying on more than one messaging platform. You can talk all day about what they “should” do, but at the end of the day just getting them to switch to another app was a huge lift for me. Not only did they switch back to regular SMS, I burned a lot of credibility with them on tech related stuff through no fault of my own.

Repeat this story for the 90 or so people I had converted. There was no critical mass, so adoption evaporated overnight because my social graph is not enough to provide any sort of critical mass and adoption.

I quit using signal after they stopped supporting text messaging on Android. I had my whole family using it and that just evaporated overnight 😭

I have listened to a ton of game developer talks over the years. Some of the old indie devs that have given talks basically all welcomed steam because it meant that they didn’t have to deal with all of the stuff that steam does themselves. Before people started buying games through steam, doing an acceptable level of DRM, distribution, payments, refunds, etc. was all hand-rolled, for each company.

You can still do that yourself. Why do people stick with steam with the supposedly onerous 30% cut? It’s because steam provides a valuable service. Now the people that build games don’t have to deal as much with the things that aren’t building games.

In my opinion, a platform like Steam was bound to emerge at some point. Let’s thank our fucking stars that the company that “won” is not beholden to any shareholder and is run by a gamer that understands what people who love video games needed.

If you think that the 30% cut is too high, there’s nothing stopping you from building all the infrastructure yourself. And there are plenty of companies that have done so, like Epic and, until recently, Sony.

But I would say unless you are a team building AAA games and making millions and millions a year, where the savings you can realize outweigh the cost of rolling your own infrastructure, steam is kind of a good deal.

I use it all the time. I’m an engineer though so it doesn’t really counteract what you’re saying.

I built a computer and didn’t have high speed Internet about 18 years ago. Couldn’t get Windows activated so a friend gave me a (Debian?) CD so I could get something going. Been keeping old machines alive with it ever since.

Two days ago lol

I watched Jon Gjenset’s stream where he implemented the beginnings of a BitTorrent client in Rust and of the four hours about 25% of it was spent wrestling with quirks in serde and reqwest.

It was pretty discouraging watching a pro have to fight the ecosystem so hard.

Last year I made a vow to put at least one hour into every game in my steam library (except ones I’ve played before or didn’t work).

I had about 120 games to get through. It took me most of the year. I ended up playing some “hidden” gems I’ll never forget ( Torment: Tides of Numeneria was a notable great).

Did I play Skyrim too? Of course. But I also got addicted to Risk of Rain. Were there some stinkers? Absolutely. But for every Dev-Guy (bad) there’s a DiveKick (good). For every Serious Sam 2, a Warhammer 40k: Space Marine.

Some of my most played games right now are Into The Breach, Slay The Spire, and Vampire Survivors - none of them are complicated. They all respect your time.

I think what it is is the immersion. You know you’ll be interrupted before you’re “done” so you can’t let yourself mentally wander off into the world.

So, play a game that respects that limitation.