Fair enough, but I enjoyed the talk as is. I tried to give sources in defense of UncleMeat but I can only overcome my own bias so much.
I'm not interested in getting suckered into believing some randall carlson gobbledygook, the type I might leap to assume UncleMeat would find quite problematic.
I just think UncleMeat initially came in, said something along the lines "this is bad, don't do this, ask people who know better" and it has been made clear they had the capacity to contribute more that what read to me as nothing more than the logical fallacy that is an appeal to authority. They have clarified their position enough to where I can no longer be left with such impression.
The use of the phrase "a lot" by me in this context isn't really helping. I should have at least said "for a powerpoint."
Unfortunately as far as I can tell, we don't have a circuit of public intellectuals, who happen to be historians, giving well thought through talks to lay people. We have ted talks on a good day, and those are often filled with dumb things said by smart people who should know better.
You and I haven't even touched with a ten foot pole the other side of the coin of that "Western History" implies. I won't attempt to in this thread either.
The same wikipedia article says that Petrarch noted for initiating the Italian Renaissance by way of rediscovering letters of Cicero who happens to have died in 43bc. He is then credited with founding Renaissance Humanism in the context of the above.
The above claims seem some plausible given the summary texts that mention Petrarch given by the page on Humanism given by the Library of Congress
One recontextualization of the concept of the dark ages of the type implied by UncleMeat (my interpretation what was implied, not UncleMeats) is given by this publication by The University of Michigan.
This is all very interesting, but I'd like to point out absolutely none of it seems to automatically leave the dilettante historian like myself from coming away with the impression that knowledge, scientific or otherwise, has not been lost in a meaningful way and thus throughout history did not necessitate some obsessed persons to resuscitate it.
I think UncleMeat's wife probably knows a hell of a lot more than I do about history, and contextualizing whatever horseshittery that has been propagated about the notion of the dark ages. The problem is rather than provide a link to a book or an article in refutation to Jonathan Blow or myself, UncleMeat has sort of just rattled off some history and said their wife is a history professor. Hardly what I think UncleMeat would have been satisfied as enough scholarly rigor for Jonathan Blow his talk with remotely the same framing. The retort along the lines of "but this is just a lil ole internet forum" goes out the window, when the call for rigor was made on said forum by said person.
I would suggest UncleMeat just advocate that people like Jonathan Blow take the history out entirely, and argue why this contemporary technology isn't good enough relative to our resources and skills.
I honestly don't see how you can't see how the text in you provided response to Jonathans talk, which he obviously put a lot of time and research in, no matter how misguided and poorly executed in your or your wife's estimation, wouldn't be massively hypocritical.
No worries if you didn't catch that I was the same person.
Your catch proves that issue is not remotely settled, and to my mind, indicates that more rigorous counsel with historians will only add depth to debate, rather than resolve it.
I think you've just committed a sort of armchair dilettante history off the top of the dome with lack of reference to a scholarly source of History you accused Jonathan of doing.
meheleventyone has demonstrated how easily even just referencing the article I myself posted could undermine my argument.
"The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records).[3]"
Not having records being categorized metaphorically as darkness, and more records as "Enlightenment" is pretty high regard for a word used the same way in the contemporary context as something an accountant or dentist keeps in a filing cabinet.
Yes you grokked my point quite well. I wrote a long rant about how I've never had access to Amiga hardware, but I think I owe your pithiness some pithiness in return.
I think Godot has only recently become mature enough to be remotely comparable with unity etc.
From the Godot download page:
"Godot is currently not code-signed for macOS. See the last section of this page for instructions on allowing Godot to run anyway. Alternatively, you can install Godot from Steam to work around this." So what does that leave, Windows and Linux on x86-64?
Isn't this the kind unjustified hoops that Jonathan is criticizing, that people criticize Apple for not making it viable for a clearly legitimate OSS project to have to deal with? It definitely isn't something that would make me confident recommending a middle school game programming class to depend on working one semester to the next.
Fair enough. I think you've called me out reasonably there.
I still don't think you've addressed my core point, and it's quite probable I wasn't clear enough to make that possible.
My white pixel example was referencing the talk, where I interpreted Jonathan saying almost verbatim about the barriers to just lighting up a single pixel on a modern computer. I made the assumption that everything he opines on publicly is in the context of him making games.
Is this whole stack overflow thread just a bunch of masochistic programmers, or is it needly complex to achieve consensus on how to plot a pixel in a browser canvas? I'll take responsibility for begging the question in jest.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4899799/whats-the-best-w...
If one wants to start the game they are going to make in the same engine the are going to finish making it in, for most people, unity is going to be worth the gigabyte download. If you just want to teach kids html/css, the server stack in python, and how to change the color of one pixel in the browser is lesson one day one on a raspberry pi, fantastic. If one wants to write a mario clone and ship it in electron, bravo.
You're right, but most speakerphones still aren't even properly full duplex, much less utopian zoom software for apex cyber virtual orchestras.
The amount of times I'm tripping up on my own words because the last thing I said is blaring out a friends/family mobile speakerphone and then back into the mic is disappointing on all levels, to say the least.
And how is that meaningfully different or better than using unity to ship an executable?
I thought your whole point was that everyone already has a stable browser, and shipping games as some bare metal or in some half bare metal form is really the developers imposition if the game could have just as well run in a browser.
I don't make the argument that they were more reliable now or then than today's PC, they almost weren't and aren't. The problem is how we got more reliable pcs today is in the context of people who had access to both. Some generation in the future won't have access to living human beings for the day the first electronic computer came into existence as we ourselves have access to now.
Notice I said "even if left untouched." Perhaps that was too charitable, as these retropcs, without memory protection, would often crash if metaphorically "touched." It would happen often with productivity apps, much less so with games. As time has gone on with pcs, this seems to have flipped, a fair trade for the time being.
I think I know what you meant, but in America Anglo-American would either imply White non Hispanics (as opposed to White Hispanics or White descendants of French first speaking people who were white) or it would mean virtually anyone born in America or elsewhere whose first language was English and is now an American citizen. In any event, virtually all 2nd generation American undergrads would fit the latter definition, and the former definition would not imply a racist scholarship by your definition, but a prejudice against non anglophone white people and non anglophone non whites alike. Given that Harvard and its scholarships almost certainly assume near native proficiency in English, I'm not sure if you argued my point or yours more effectively to be honest.
In the example of your Amiga, your hard drive failed, but it probably would still boot right into any game from any floppy that didn't require workbench to have been booted from floppy or HD. The game could very well have been written in workbench booted from workbench/assembler from floppy.
The same game, replicated in Unity, requires a several gigabyte download just for the developer to light up a white pixel on a black background in Unity.
Is the juice of Unity worth the squeeze? It depends on the game I think. Using Unity to get a Super Meat Boy clone on a Nintendo switch starts to ride the line of absurdity (i.e. using a massively complex and capable game engine to make a knock off of a beefed up version of a flash game that was paying homage to games written in 6502 assembly and booted instantly and never crashed).
I'm not a musician, but I interpreted it like this:
Lets say the delay is 15 seconds, you hear the composite, including your part delayed, and you "think, cool, I played the right thing at the right time, I'll keep going with my same assumptions" or you hear "my part was way off, but the rest sounded decent enough, better do something different."
The part where everyone is just playing terribly isn't a concern or doesn't manifest because you've got a bunch of intermediate or better musicians playing.
Jonathan does a better job than I did explaining the premise of how retrocomputing isn't just a means to nostalgia, but a means to make sure and verifying we've improved personal computer hardware/software since the initial boom. Emulators don't give us the insight into the whole stack or understanding on the true reliability of these old systems.
As Jonathan says, if our laptops today aren't capable of 99.999 percent uptime, then none of the software runnning on it can be either.
In the days of the Amiga or the Archimedes, it was quite possible to boot entire app or os/app combo and just leave the computer on indefinitely, without it crashing itself even if untouched.
I'm not interested in getting suckered into believing some randall carlson gobbledygook, the type I might leap to assume UncleMeat would find quite problematic.
I just think UncleMeat initially came in, said something along the lines "this is bad, don't do this, ask people who know better" and it has been made clear they had the capacity to contribute more that what read to me as nothing more than the logical fallacy that is an appeal to authority. They have clarified their position enough to where I can no longer be left with such impression.