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balaam

Re:Do You Love Me? [video] on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @02:31PM (#25573768)
I don't really want robot weapons but I would love to see a firing range demonstration with one, just to see what's possible when you get super-human aiming.

I don't see a future for humanoid bots in war. Missiles and drones seems to render anything else redundant. Policing in a few more generations seems possible, at least at a technical level.

Re:Unreal Engine 4.26 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @01:21PM (#25292427)
In most cases the server code is home rolled, especially for realtime networked games. Handling multiplayer at scale is hard to solve in house, especially for popular titles and that's usually handled by third parties such as Multiplay (https://multiplay.com/about/)
Re:Does C++ still deserve a bad rap? on Saturday October 17, 2020 @03:58AM (#24808260)
C++ fills a niche and probably if you use it all on your own you don't even see the problems. But if you use it at scale with multiple developers you can see it's layers of leaky abstraction laid down since the 80s that can never really be cleaned because too much is built on this foundation.

This slightly over 100 page book on move semantics https://leanpub.com/cppmove shows some of the iceberg like complexities dotted all over the place. Some developers probably never use and have never even heard of move semantics.

I've been programming in C++ pretty much my entire career. Personal projects or small projects I'd use Ruby or Python first. I'd only ever use C++ (or a very specific subset of it) if I want to make something extremely performant.

C++ will eventually peak and die off but the timeframe is probably measured in decades and I'm sure there'll places where it holds on even then, like Fortran today. I certainly would't recommend it to a programmer starting out today, instead C or Rust would be better places to get an idea of system level programming.

Re:On Using Twitter on Friday August 07, 2020 @07:05AM (#24080608)
This is the best way to use twitter.

You get a clear stream of useful, relevant content. Unfortunately this also gets framed as a "filter bubble".

I want a filter bubble.

The problem in practice is that twitter actively fights you doing this. It tries to pour raw sewage into your nice clean stream and you can't stop it. You see what other people have liked, or what's popular or lots of other things I don't want to see.

At this point in time the biggest value of twitter is it's userbase, it's critical mass, people are on twitter, they're not on mastodon.

Re:How to disable the built-in Windows 10 ads on Sunday May 10, 2020 @09:13AM (#23132331)
For me, Windows 10 is where I felt like I was no longer in control of my own computer.

Microsoft doesn't do discrete OS updates anymore but I definitely feel like it might time to give Linux another go next time I upgrade my hardware. There's less and less software the holds me to MS. This is due to so many programs going to the web - Google Docs suite, dictionaries etc and partially due to better Linux support for software I use such as Unity or games via Wine. What's held me back until now has been poor graphics driver support.

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite email newsletters? on Thursday December 05, 2019 @02:06AM (#21710523)
Orbital Operations by Warren Ellis http://www.warrenellis.com/orbital-operations-a-new-newslett...

Various musings from author Warren Ellis - comic books, script writing, weird fiction are probably the mainstays but it can include all sorts.

Re:You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook on Saturday November 16, 2019 @03:50PM (#21554868)
I agree with this. A basic income program could have an unexpected dividend of a new innovation boom.
Re:Why I Write Games in C (yes, C) on Saturday September 21, 2019 @02:13PM (#21036935)
> You need very good practices to make C++ compile fast.

I would reframe this as the design of C++ makes it hard to write code that compiles fast.

That makes mse think that are probably a lot of easy wins in the funnel of getting people successfully through the course.
Re:Try Micromastery on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:37PM (#20679092)
I think you sometimes need a new word or term to better capture an idea. I quite like the idea of mircomastery. We'll have to wait and see if it's one that survives though.
Re:Building the New Twitter.com on Thursday July 18, 2019 @12:41PM (#20471568)
I don't see why edit couldn't save the previous tweet and make it accessible from the edited one. That way you can link to the original if someone said something they're now trying to obscure. The replies could also be linked to the tweet they were replying to.
Re:VAIO announces tiny laptop with tons of ports on Sunday July 14, 2019 @04:21AM (#20432367)
I've only ever had horrible experiences with Vaio and it would take a lot for me to consider trying one again.

(The screen broke with a month, then I spent 3 months in a horrible support hell before finally getting refunded which wasn't even the outcome I wanted - I just wanted it fixed. Contrast with the macbook I bought it, it worked for several months, the hard drive died, I took it to a mac store and it was fixed within the week. The ecosystem around the computer matters.)

Re:In defence of the wolf on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @01:17PM (#20225163)
Humans do this to a different degree than other animals but other animals also shape the environment; beavers can redirect rivers, some bird purposefully spread wildfires and so on.
Re:Developers don’t want to show gameplay at E3 anymore on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @03:21AM (#20221447)
> the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay."

The average developer has almost no input into what is and isn't shown at E3. They can present some source material but E3 decisioss like these are made by a marketing company or the publisher.