zubspace

In some industries, Microsoft subscriptions are a drop in the ocean. Switching out things like Entra ID, Office, and print/scanning solutions would cost so much more, and come bundled with enough risk that no sane project manager would take it on lightly.

As a C# software provider, making something Windows- and Linux-compatible is easier than ever. So giving up on Windows is effectively the wrong move, because you would miss out on the behemoth companies that are simply too large to transition easily.

I know the majority of HN readers are fed up with Windows. That is completely understandable. But not everything about it is bad.

Just last week I installed Windows 11 by downloading the ISO from Microsoft and creating a bootable USB stick with Rufus [1]. Rufus has options to make the Windows installer skip the Microsoft account login. Worked great!

There are reasons to install Windows. For one, I had to install it for my wife, and making her switch to another OS she isn’t used to would be quite a hassle. I also use it at work, and I need to run Visual Studio.

But I have the Pro version, and, AFAIK, there is a stark contrast between Pro and Home. Even though there is a push in Europe to make software Linux-compatible, there are still many, many companies and government institutions fully entrenched in the Microsoft world. Going Linux-only just for the sake of it sometimes does not make much sense business-wise.

[1] https://github.com/pbatard/rufus

Thanks for the recommendation, but "nmtui" is also the most Linux answer you could have given me :)

And it completely misses the point. Yes, there’s a lightweight tool for everything, but the appeal of KDE is that I don’t need to know. It mostly just works, is extendable and configurable.

But i also understand the appeal of staying minimal. The thing is, i want some kind of middleground: I want a simple tiling window manager. But i also want to easily install and configure stuff without falling back to the command line.

Maybe it's also brain damage of using too much Windows (with wsl). But there I have a different problem: It's easy to install and configure stuff, but it's everything else than minimal.

Interesting. But the only thing I would miss, is something like a settings menu. Or do you really expect me to fiddle around in config files to configure basic stuff like wifi? Or am I just stupid? Oh wait, I could use claude for that....

This will be pushed down from people, who will have no deep understanding of it. But it does check some boxes in an ISO certification.

Well, now you must to work with a confusing tool which slows you down. You are not allowed to use claude directly anymore, because someone heard that mythos is really bad for security. But hey, the tool integrates well with Jira!

You hate every second working with this thing. All the joy you had with explorative coding is forever gone, which was the sole reason you entered this field.

Deep inside you know that you can't change your job, because every other employer will cut its workforce as AI removes all manual labor of a software engineer and reduces risk to a minimum.

Oh, now we can finally move all those jobs to india without risk and shareholders will love it! How awesome is that! Wait, do we still need that guy in cubicle 42, who bitches and moans about AI every day? Nah...

The paper uses a minimal weight of 30g and surface area of 1cm² for a replicator. On page 13 it says that you need at least 40 of them to travel through intergalactic space, but also states that there is more mass floating around in interstellar space. The probes should create muliple staging areas.

I assume if such a replicating probe would really be possible, it should be straightforward to just send of a million of them and hope for the best.

In my opinion, a huge limiting factor is communication. How do you know if those probes reached their target?

There's also an ethical aspect to it. Should we really fill the universe with self replicating paperclips? Because once you start the process, when and how would you stop it?

I think cloudflare is down right now: https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/cloudflare.com.html

It's so sad that we're the ones who have to tell the agent how to improve by extending agent.md or whatever. I constantly have to tell it what I don't like or what can be improved or need to request clarifications or alternative solutions.

This is what's so annoying about it. It's like a child that does the same errors again and again.

But couldn't it adjust itself with the goal of reducing the error bit by bit? Wouldn't this lead to the ultimate agent who can read your mind? That would be awesome.

https://www.zubspace.com

The problem is the demand for dynamic content in AAA games. Large exterior and interior worlds with dynamic lights, day and night cycle, glass and translucent objects, mirrors, water, fog and smoke. Everything should be interactable and destructable. And everything should be easy to setup by artists.

I would say, the closest we can get are workarounds like radiance cascades. But everything else than raytracing is just an ugly workaround which falls apart in dynamic scenarios. And don't forget that baking times and storing those results, leading to massive game sizes, are a huge negative.

Funnily enough raytracing is also just an approximation to the real world, but at least artists and devs can expect it to work everywhere without hacks (in theory).

Maybe I'm missinformed, but doesn't starlink have to comply with rules made by local authorities? Afaik, when the internet goes down, like it happened in Thailand, Starlink can't be used too, because it always roots traffic to a ground station near the source.

If this would not happen, I would agree that Starlink is the future. But as it is right now, I don't see the point, unless you are living in or travelling to remote places.

I also thought about this a lot. Some things about slow thinking are great. I truly believe that it helped me thrive as a software developer.

But social interactions are awkward. I can't really come up with things to say easily and lots of times I can't respond in ways to keep the conversation going. Only after the fact I get lots of ideas of what I could have said. I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.

I'm a tad older, so I stopped caring about it and just accepted my slow thinking. But I'm sure that I also missed out on a lot of opportunities regarding friendships or work. I still think, that others perceive me as awkward or just not fun and it's hard to just ignore that.

Funnily my wife is completely opposite to me and we have the greatest time.

It's a shitty system, if one side just needs to succeed one time while the other side needs to succeed over and over again.

What really should be done is to disallow proposals, which are kinda the same. Once a mass surveillance proposal like this is defeated, it shouldn't be allowed to be constantly rebranded and reintroduced. We need a firewall in our legislative process that automatically rejects any future attempts at scanning private communications.

Same here! Restarted my router and pi hole twice. Now i feel stupid.

I know this behavior all to well. I definitely think that this can be used to your advantage: You learn alot in the struggle and get a deep understanding of the problem.

But you really need to step back once in a while and contemplate, if the thing you're doing is really worthwhile.

One of the most precious resources is time. I didn't appreciate this insight a lot while I was young. But as I grew older I needed to be more careful how you I was spending it. In this regard like I like the saying "youth is wasted on the young". But this also enables you to be more focused in your approach. Fail fast is a lot better than spending years on a problem with bo end in sight

Wouldn't it just solve a whole lot of problems if we could just add optional type declarations to json? It seems so simple and obvious that I'm kinda dumbfounded that this is not a thing yet. Most of the time you would not need it, but it would prevent the parser from making a wrong guess in all those edge cases.

Probably there are types not every parser/language can accept, but at least it could throw a meaningful error instead of guessing or even truncating the value.

It's an interesting discussion. There's always a divide when you slowly migrate from one thing to another.

What makes this interesting is that the difference between C code an Rust code is not something you can just ignore. You will lose developers who simply don't want or can spend the time to get into the intricacies of a new language. And you will temporarily have a codebase where 2 worlds collide.

I wonder how in retrospect they will think about the decisions they made today.

Do colors have any significance in those flame graphs? It's unfortunate that a post about them does not mention anything about colors. If you look at at the examples, there are bars, which have the same length, but the colors look random to me.

G'mic is a great tool. I use the QT-Plugin for Krita.

The only problem I have is that I don't use it very much and if I do, I'm just overwhelmed by all the effects and parameters. I'm sure there's great value there... But, if you don't know exactly what you're looking for? Well, be prepared to click around for ages finding something cool. I have no idea how to improve that, but I find it annoying.

It would be also great for the effects to not be destructive. Like using it with filter layers. But unfortunately this seems not to be possible.

Yeah, and if you do that long enough, eventually there will be generation of consumers which think that it is totally normal.

I remember a time, when I set specific firewall rules for each application. A time where I would never allow to share my location. A time where I would never link my google account to other services. But as I grew older I stopped caring because I have other stuff to do.

The problem is, that those companies have time on their side. They can do whatever they want, back out, constantly rebrand stuff and confuse their users until we eventually give up. And at some point a large part of the population stops caring, because it's a fight, which is very hard to win. I hate it, but I have not the strength, time and will to push back.

I avoided wordpress like a plague. Used stuff like django, flask, grav and who knows what. But recently I had to make a website with lots of unknowns which needed to be authored by dummy users and I just said ** it and went with wordpress.

What I struggled with are: 1) Interesting site design, 2) custom functionality through plugins, 3) making it easy to add pages and blog posts with a nice editor.

I'm glad open source solutions exist, but I swear, they always have drawbacks. Either they are code heavy, plugins are out of date, maintenance takes a lot of time or there is no way to easily design a page.

So for Wordpress I bought Oxygen, for which you can still buy a lifetime license for, and oh my god, even I can make a nice, responsive website without touching code. It's such a game changer.

I think lots of people avoid wordpress because of security. But that is not primarily a wordpress fault. Linux & PHP complicates it a lot. And I'm sure those other open source projects have severe bugs, too, but nobody knows or talks about them.

What could bring down wordpress, imho, are expensive license fees for plugins. Who wants to spend 50 to 100 bucks per year and per page for a builder plugin? Everyone wants one, but no one wants to pay yearly. And it seems that all plugin makers are starting to go that way.

You're right about parts, which are mostly state machines. The have a defined input and output. Tests are straightforward to implement and adjust.

But recording and replaying matches? Taking screenshots and comparing the output? Just think about it: If you have recorded a match and change the hitpoints of a single creature, the test could possibly fail. And then? Re-record the match?

The same applies to screenshots: What happens if models, sprites or colors change?

In my experience, tests like this are annoying, because:

1) They take a long time to create and adjust/recreate.

2) They fail for minor reasons.

3) It takes time to understand, what such tests even measure, if someone else made them.

4) You need a large, self made framework to support such tests.

5) It takes a long time to run them, because they are time dependent.

6) They hinder you to make large changes.

7) It's cheaper to make some low wage game testers play your game. Or better, make the game early access and let 1000s of players test your game for free, while even making money out of them

Reminds me of an article about the testing infrastructure of League and Legends [1] back in 2016. 5500 tests per build in 1 to 2 hours.

Games are extremely hard to test. For me it falls into the same category like GUI testing frameworks which imho are extremely annoying and brittle. Except that games are comparable to a user interface consisting of many buttons which you can short and long press and drag around while at the same time other bots are pressing the same buttons, sharing the same state influenced by a physics engine.

How do you test such a ball of mud which also constantly changes by devs trying to follow the fun? Yes you can unittest individual, reusable parts. But integration tests, which require large, time sensitive modules, all strapped together and running at the same time? It's mindboggling hard.

Moreover if you're in a conceptual phase of development and prototyping and idea, tests make no sense. The requirements change all the time and complex tests hold you back. But the funny thing is, that game development stays in that phase most of the time. And when the game is done, you start a new one with a completely different set of requirements.

There are exceptions, like League of Legends. The game left the conceptual phase many years ago and its rules are set in stone. And a game which runs successfully for that long is super rare.

[1] https://technology.riotgames.com/news/automated-testing-leag...

Yes, and let me explain why.

Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income.

While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maximize profits at all times.

It happened or happens in B2B, car sales, music, film, in games, and drawing apps... Everywhere you see, really. And it's so convenient if there is already a scapegoat like Adobe, which transitioned to subscriptions for the same reason.

And yes, I hate it. Even though it's easier to swallow 10 bucks a month, eventually you will spend more. They know it and we know it. All we can do as customers is to not support those companies, but this only goes so far. And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?

Step 1: Announce the acquisition. Everyone will talk about the company and the fear of subscriptions.

Step 2: Tell everyone, that the current pricing model will stay and no subscriptions will be offered. Everyone will cheer and recommend the products.

Step 3: Wait until the dust settles and switch to subscriptions. The community will say "told you that this will happen" and life goes on.

Smartphones alone are not to blame for the problem. There are several aspects that, taken together, pose huge challenges for schools, parents and children.

Parents have less time for their children. This is understandable when both parents in many families work. The workload on parents rise as our social nets go thinner because its easier than ever to move your home. We are building roads everywhere in our neighborhoods and are converting grassland into apartments. Parents are themselves dependent on digital consumption. Many activities (learning, homework, class chat, music), as well as play (Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, ...) are migrating to the digital world. And the teaching profession is no longer as respected as it once was, and they are also overwhelmed by the situation, as they are not familiar with the use of media themselves and expectations are high.

A problem like this is difficult to solve, especially as nobody really knows what is right.

A ban on digital media up to middle school must come from the government. But for that to happen, the level of suffering has to be high enough. At school, the path must lead back to normal PC/desktop lessons, away from consumer-oriented devices. And we need to give children space. Allow them to gather in our streets and squares to play again. And we as parents need to set an example and not be addicted to smartphones ourselves.

Yes, and extending existing contracts based on new requirements.

But also contract validation, like check if something missing or finding loopholes. If they are sneaky, they could sell that information to lawyers, who can definitely make use of it.

I'm not inherently pro-AI, but there are indeed valid and interesting use cases for such models, if the data can be anonymized correctly. And I'm not sure if it makes sense to single out DocuSign, because there are probably many companies which train their models on similar data.

Simple example: You want to control torque with a PID to reach a target angular velocity. What if the player suddenly negates the target angular velocity (by going from left arrow key press to right arrow key press for example).

How do you handle the I and D term then?

What if the player can also use a gamepad and go from left to right gradually?

The fundamental problem is that the error accumulates while you try to reach the target. But then the target suddenly changes. Do you just drop the previous error? Do you create an upper bound on the error? Or something else? This is the question no PID post ever answers.

I don't say, that this is impossible, but just that PID's in this context are harder to use than they first appear.

Well, you kind of prove my point, because you made me jump from a 5 minute lecture about PIDs to a study about control systems.

Yes, probably there are all kinds of systems to control and autotune a PID. But that's the problem. In gamedev, PID's get constantly recommended for so many things, but when you play around with them you soon realize, that they are quite hard to get right. So then there's two ways: you dive into control systems or you just lerp the value and call it a day.

The site explains the three parts of PID's very well.

On one hand I like PID controllers. It's a reusable concept which you can apply to a loot of stuff. On the other hand, in my experience it can be very tricky and cumbersome to tweak them.

In the given example, a PID makes perfect sense. There's a single, static target location you need to approach. Adjust velocity with a PID and you're done.

But what if the target location is not static? Imagine that the character needs to move to your mouse pointer? Do PID's still hold up? How do you handle the I and D term then?

It gets even trickier if you move to 3D. You maybe say, hmm, let's use a rigidbody this time instead of a kinematic body for the player character and use PID's to adjust forces to steer velocity and rotation.

But I never found a good way to do that, because in those other cases the error depends on the goal you need to reach, and if the goal constantly changes, I and D are kinda useless...