voppe

I can't overstate how good Elixir + LiveView is, especially for prototyping. I have been experimenting with it ever since it first came out, mostly games, and I have to say that building even simple multiplayer games is a lot of fun.

An example:

https://dev.voppe.it/chess

(FYI there is no actual game here, just pick emojis, place them in the arena and watch them fight to the death via a poorly designed combat system. Yes, those placing emojis other than you are other players.)

This was a prototype that I built to see if real-time multiplayer games were feasible. Apparently LiveView manages high tickrates decently enough to be a valid solution for (quasi) real-time games. This game for example runs at a whopping 8 ticks/s! It can handle more, as I've tried developing with faster tickrates, I think as high as 24 t/s, but I want to avoid server strain. With enough HTML/CSS/SVG wizardry you can get away with quite a lot. But the most amazing thing was the fact that there was no need to fiddle around with state syncing. Everything just works! I have nothing but praise for it.

Try LiveView if you have the chance!

I understand what you're saying, but with Facebook it's different, because it's tied to your real identity, which changes the context a lot compared to other services.

In my case, because of that, getting a Facebook account is hard, if not impossible, because those "real identity" checks are obscure: I attempted twice to sign up for work-related reasons, and I failed both times despite providing IDs and pestering support. I have literally NO idea why I cannot have a FB account.

However, even if I could, I hate Facebook so goddamn much that if this was my only option I would rather not use VR altogether. And I love my Oculus Rift, especially for game development.

I am royally pissed off, and I will gladly go forward with a class action lawsuit.

I tried both and it's much better than Mastodon IMO due to how much more lightweight, faster and easier to deploy it is. Maybe it has less features, but they're fully worth the sacrifice.

Well damn, that is much more understandable and super interesting. Thank you!

It seems to be some sort of in-page browser tab? Let's see what that brings. (besides interactive advertising, obviously)

My first thought was "I absolutely love this" and sure enough it's the first comment that pops up.

I remember a 24/7 livestream that ran on Youtube some time ago that only played drive-throughs of Tokyo videos while cheesy 80s japanese city-pop played in the background. It was pretty fun, but of course it was shut down, probably because of copyright. I miss it, but this is a valid replacement. Thank you!

Of course it is you!

Astounding work as always. Thanks!

there's no reason you'd ever want to revoke control of a domain

Careful with those words. Experience taught me that if there isn't a reason to ever want to do that, reality will eventually provide you with one.

Sorry, I don't have a solid reference, I'm mostly watching snippets of random youtube videos and trying stuff out on my own and putting the pieces together as I don't have the patience to sit through a course.

Also, I'm working with blueprints as the C++ side lacks any kind of docs or tutorials. Initially I was repelled by them, but after getting used to them, they're not as bad as they seem at first glance.

I agree with the first statement. I'd go as far as saying that Unity is the JavaScript of game development.

Sure, when you start out you get out results FAST, but then you run into limitations, weird behaviours and quirks that have to be worked around, and soon everything becomes a mess.

Mind you, I'm a hobbyist in this field so maybe you could chalk it out to inexperience, but I shiver to think to what professional developers have to deal with if the small prototypes I cranked out got so convoluted.

I'm trying out UE4 lately and although it can be daunting at times (and with horrible documentation), it feels much more comfortable to use in the long term.

The only takeaway I get from this article is...

Why is Nix?

And from skimming along the comments, both on HN and on Disqus, there's a lot of confused people trying to understand/describe the difference between Nix and Docker, because although the article described how Nix works in a very technical way, it didn't explain what it can be actually used for.

I understand the feeling, but from my experience it fades away pretty quickly once you get the feeling of the language.

These days I'm working again with Rust to add a new feature to a project after not touching it for months, and that feeling of "oh dear god this is awful" that I felt when I was starting out with the language was back again. However, once everything clicked in, with the compiler telling me exactly what was wrong with the code, and the project compiling which meant that I could be damn sure that the code I wrote would work with little to no risk of breaking in unexpected ways... that sure did spark joy.

Just my experience.

I've been using UE4 for VR development as a hobby for the last year or so. I have to say that I was against Blueprints and had quite to fight with myself to give them a chance, but once you get used to it it's not that bad. IMO still worse than pure code and sometimes much slower to write (complex arithmetic operations are painful), but at least it's not C++. Also, sometimes a visual representation of what your code is doing helps you simplify your code architecture when it gets too convoluted.

This just keeps getting better and better. Thank you for your effort.

I'm a big fan, Elixir + Phoenix is excellent enough, and LiveView is what really sealed the deal for me as the perfect web development stack. It's simple, it's fast, it works. Sure, it has a few rough spots that have to be worked around when you start to push its limits, but as this blog post showed it's perfect to quickly have a working web application by completely skipping having to write client-side code. I developed a couple of prototypes and single-use applications in hours that with any other stack would have taken me days. Hell, I'd argue that in some cases it took me less time to complete my app with LiveView than it would have taken me to setup Webpack with Frontend Framework.

I don't believe it to be a silver bullet for sure, and it has to prove its worth at scale, but it gives excellent results with little effort, and honestly the reduced tedium is worth it on its own.

Also, protip: try LiveView with Tailwind CSS.

This is absolutely great.

The RPi was already exceptional for its price point, and this version seems to address the few problems it had (lack of Gigabit, USB speed and RAM capacity) and add onto it even more features. It almost seems too good to be true.

Can't wait!

Raw performance means nothing, it's just yet another metric that can be traded off in favor of other aspects that make up a good application. In VSCode's case, it was traded off in favor of ease of development, which spurred an extremely active and ever growing ecosystem of extensions. Was it worth it? The download counter says yes, because despite it being "slow" compared to other editors, the tradeoff is not even noticeable by most of its users.

This all boils down to the art of "it's good enough". Take game development for an example. You could write an engine from scratch using Vulkan APIs and all that jazz and run at 144fps@4k on a toaster. Or, you know, you could trade off the performance and settle for just using Unity and optimizing wherever possible. It's not as fast, but as long as the user is not frustrated by it, who cares? You just saved a lot of development time. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.

Same thing applies here. The VSCode team did a damn good job of keeping performance just about over the "good enough" threshold of most of its users, <flamebait>unlike other Electron based applications</flamebait>. Of course, that threshold varies based on the user and his machine, but outright dismissing VSCode based solely on the assumption that editors cannot be written in html+js is simply short-sighted.

Apples and oranges. 3D TVs and cinemas serve no new purpose. There is objectively little to no difference between watching a movie in 3D or in 2D, it is literally a gimmick to attract customers.

VR, on the other hand, is completely unprecedented. It unlocks a way to interact with virtual environments that simply was not possible before. It has practical uses that we haven't had time to discover yet. Dismissing it as a gimmick and comparing it to 3D movies is shortsighted, in my opinion. One might argue that the technology is not there yet, but that would be comparable to PDAs preceding smartphones.