The nice thing about Gator Game was that movement felt so good and fluid. It really is just a game about jumping and climing and bouncing around like a hyper kid.

Given the game doesn’t have ‘combat’ they really really needed to get traversal right because that’s the main draw, and they succeeded in that.

I got lost a few times too, but I think they did a good job of providing mitigation for that with specific large landmarks you can see at least one of from anywhere, like the big tree, the mountain, the windmill.

I understand what the devs were trying to do by not having a map. When a map is there, especially an always-on minimap, I basically spend my whole time with my eyes glued to that tiny corner of the screen rather than actually looking at the world. So I can respect the decision to try and do without any map.

What else are you going to do, though?

If you have some particular and complicated task then sure you’d probably write a program for it in a specific high-level language. But that isn’t what the shell is for.

If you’ve already got a bunch of apps and utilities and want to orchestrate them together to do a task, that’s a good shell use case.

Or if you have a system that needs setup and install tasks doing on it to prepare for running your actual workload, that’s also a task which the shell is ideally suited to.

Shell scripting always has a place, and I can’t see it being made obsolete any time soon.

What the fuck are people doing

People were upset about this because it seemed deceptive.

The first two words on the yelp page for their now-closed restaurant are “House made”

“Most of my stuff from here is made from scratch” said the owner.

So people who have that expectation in mind are clearly going to be upset when they find it was pre-made all along.

It’s about honesty and expectation.

If I go to some nationwide chain restaurant then I obviously expect all their breaded chicken is coming out the freezer in bags - and that’s fine because it’s not deceptive.

If I go to a small restaurant which strongly implies in their wording and branding that the food is all made from scratch, then it’s deceptive when it isn’t.

It’s quite easy to understand, even though it’s bullshit.

When the sales department has a good month and makes loads of sales, the business too has a good month. The activity of those individuals directly correlates to revenue on a month by month basis, so management are naturally going to be incentivised to give the sales team perks and bonuses as motivation.

In a given month the IT/dev department doesn’t “generate” any money at all, they only cost. We know they generate value in other ways of course, because the product the sales team sell is surely built and operated by the dev team, but because the relationship is indirect management don’t care to reward you.

Reward sales with nice perks -> Revenue goes up

Reward devs with nice perks -> Revenue doesn’t change

So of course management doesn’t see the benefit in giving more money to tech, because it doesn’t seem like you get anything back.

Of course, the reality is that investment in tech will make the product and the business better and more profitable, but it takes months or years to see the impact of changes, and management has a short attention span.

I wish the best for you, and hope you find yourself a better boss soon.

Can you imagine the absolute misery of working for someone like this.

A person who thinks developers are all useless, and has total contempt for any skills that aren’t “business” stuff.

A person who thinks tech is easy and you can “just” do this and “just” do that and everything will be done, always telling you “this is so easy I could do it myself” while any contribution they make only makes things worse, and if there’s any kind of hold-up it’s because you’re either “lazy” or “incompetent”

No thanks.

The line has to go up.

More engagement = more views = more ads = more money for the shareholders

Doesn’t matter how that engagement is generated, whether it’s human content or AI trash.

Late stage capitalism is hell.

Not quite the same, but we do have “andfinally” for quirky and silly news.

https://feddit.uk/c/andfinally

Named after the tendency on TV to put lighthearted news pieces like these at the end, to give people something to smile about after all the depressing stuff.

It’s AIs ans automated systems all the way down at this point. No humans in the loop, just machines talking to machines.

That’s such garbage!

From tiny companies of five people, to huge companies of five hundred thousand, I have never worked in an office where you couldn’t get a brew.

But then, I am British. Take the tea away and it’s riots (or at the least some quiet complaining)

Haha yeah. People are so accustomed to short TLDs that ‘smith.technology’ just intuitively feels kinda wrong, and it still feels that way to me, even as a tech person who knows it is perfectly valid.

You’re thinking like “smith dot technology dot what?”

Another reason is brand identity.

Using ‘.tech’ or ‘.flights’ or .sports’ for your site feels too “on the nose” and gives vibes of like browsing some directory where things are categorised and sorted. Even worse it implies there are other sites under the same category, and those other sites may be competitors, and this dilutes strength of brand.

lt also suggests strongly what the business does, and while that might seem desirable at first it actually isn’t from a corporate perspective because it means the company becomes tied to their business area and can’t expand and grow out of it into other things.

I think this is a major part of why descriptive TLDs continue to be less preferred over ‘meaningless’ two letter TLDs, because companies want the focus to be on the main part of the domain, not the TLD.

I agree with all of that, pretty much.

If Asus or whoever else dropped a “steam deck killer” I’m pretty sure Valve wouldn’t even blink.

Valve didn’t make the deck because they wanted to make money on hardware. I expect very much they made it specifically because they wanted to encourage the move of steam gaming from the PC to the couch, and they needed some hardware to prove their point with - like with the Steam Link where they tried this before, and that time failed.

If it later ends up being other companies in the long run who make the hardware then no worries, the mission was already accomplished.

This is a tricky one, honestly, because the steam deck straddles the line between PC and console.

If you were a Sony fan, you’d be rightfully upset if Sony released a new PlayStstion every year, and made new games only for the new hardware. It’s just not long enough to feel the hardware has ran its lifespan, and you feel cheated.

Conversely in PCs, the expectation is that the hardware slowly improves constantly, and new hardware doesn’t stop you playing all the latest games on your old hardware; the only limiting factor is how far your old hardware can be pushed before the performance is too poor. And that is YOUR choice as a user, not an artificial choice imposed on you.

I’d expect that any Steam Deck 2 is going to be more like the PC model - it won’t create exclusives or stop people playing the new games on their old deck, it will simply be better and faster.

So on that basis I wouldn’t personally have a problem if Valve put out a deck every year.

All that said however, I think waiting several years is the smart business move. People have longer to enjoy their hardware while still feeling like they have the “latest model” - it’s psychologically better from the consumer perspective.

There may also be an argument that longer release cycles makes things less complicated for devs (less devices to test on) and also keeps the hardware going for longer, because devs will be incentivised to optimise performance for the current deck (which they might not be as much after a new one comes along)

Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.

The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.

Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.

Thanks. I’ve been keeping my eye on colour ereaders, and the tech has improved so rapidly in the last couple of years I do wonder if I just hang on for another year then the colour reproduction could be even better.

Can’t wait forever of course, that defeats the whole purpose, but it might pay to wait just a little.

I’ve had two kindles so far, but my next e-reader won’t be from Amazon.

I’m trying to move my tech life away from closed ecosystems as much as possible, So I’ll probably go for a kobo or boox.

For me the dream would be a really large colour ereader around 10 inches, where you can view even the densest manga or comics comfortably without zooming or scrolling. I think that’s what I’m holding out for.