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.
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?
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.
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.
I guess, writing debuggers is hard and if you need to support multiple environments or console debugging it's probably wise, as a programming language community, to simply make your users adopt print-statement- or gdb-debugging.
But as a long-time Visual Studio developer (C# and C++) I am constantly amazed how bad that status quo is for other languages. I'm probably spoiled by all its features:
* Conditional Breakpoints.
* Move instruction pointer.
* Jump between threads, freeze and thaw them.
* Showing variable Values when hovering over them.
* Inspecting (large) Lists and Dictionaries easily.
* Changing variable values or execute methods while breaking.
* Changing code and continue debugging.
* Historical debugging (moving backward)
I believe that someone who never experience debugging like this cannot possibly imagine how much you could improve debugging in other environments.
1) The basic physics of sand, water and gases is quite simple. I was impressed by the fact, that he implemented most of it in Q-Basic way back. Thinking about this a bit more, Q-Basic looks like the perfect environment to play around with such pixel simulations, albeit a bit slow I guess.
2) The hard part is mixing rigidbody simulation and pixel simulation. Also updating the world using multiple threads.
3) Procedural world generation uses something called Herringbone Wang Tiles [1]. It reduces visible seams and the algorithm itself does not look too complicated.
I agree, Dart offers alot regarding prototyping. Maybe I'm thinking too much, but I believe native os and mobile targets are simply too important in the gaming industry and therefore it's difficult to leverage the device capabilities if your primary target is the web & webgl.
I guess, what I miss most is cross compilation, which would be totally awesome. But Dart moves slowly and I'm very hesitant to invest in a platform where its fate relies on the adoption in browsers. (how long until the Dart VM runs in chrome, ff, ...?)
I'm so impressed watching Notch program in realtime. "Last Minute Christmas Chopping" was an eye opener for me. (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview...). I was totally baffled when he started to draw the ascii character map pixel by pixel in an 48h competition, but the result was usable and actually quite simple.
My takeaway is this: Doing something quick and dirty for a first draft and improve it later on often leads to better results in the long run than planing and over-engineering a solution beforehand, because you can start refining details much earlier or throw away bad approaches without investing too much time.
What I don't get is, why he seems to like Dart so much. Don't get me wrong: I love Dart as an language. The syntax looks very familiar to someone coming from c#, adds syntactic sugar and the editor, with line step debugger, is great. But in the end it's still javascript which makes it hard to create native and mobile builds. Wouldn't Haxe be more suitable?
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.