russtrotter

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

That's certainly the pragmatic call, but while admittedly I'd never heard of Braid or his other games before he started showing up my YT feed, his takes on programming culture are very opinionated and compelling. He could have focused on making games and lobbing criticisms like so many of us do, but he chose to act. I'd say that's worth something.

russtrotter

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Sometime in '85, my mom is an administrative assistant at the local University. She's an absolute wiz on her office's newly modernized setup with these "PC" things running Wordperfect all creating beautiful documents on nascent HP laser printers. She'd let me show up after hours to hunt'n'peck the final draft of my high school term papers on the setup. I knew so little about computers then, but i firmly believe the magic of this simple process and things like "reveal codes" planted the seeds for finding deeper insights into speedy software on slow hardware and how file formats work. She was so sad when it inevitably went to windows :-) Rest in peace Bruce, thank you for .. you.

russtrotter

2 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I always feel like NASA has mastered the basic "under promise, over deliver" philosophy that keeps the lights on and the next missions funded. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at who they get to tap dance in front of the congressional committee or how they schmooze the decadal people to rise above the rest.

russtrotter

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

i'm thinking two themes here: the X in xcurl and the famous MS-ism "embrace, extend, extinguish"

russtrotter

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I started uni in 1990 and went from a kid in his basement banging away on a PC clone with Turbo Pascal 5.x to a place with this thing called "usenet" on a "VAX" running "BSD" off of tapes and the map of the "Internet" could just about fit on a whiteboard. I sponged off the sysadmins all I could learning about renoe, tahoe and all things in between. I had no cognizance at the time that the death of this amazing world was getting thought off just when i thought it was the greatest stuff in the universe. I read the demon book cover to cover when I had no idea what most of it meant. BSD, whether alive or "dead" will always hold a special place in my mind. It's only with the long road since those days that I can appreciate the tone of this article. Thanks OP for posting it here.

russtrotter

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Agreed with this general notion however, I'd argue that unlike a standards body, a big driver for JSON's ascent to defacto standard were the legions of javascript developers working at every layer of a tech stack using it as a low-friction means to an end.

russtrotter

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Absolutely agreed. I've watched lots of his long-form videos on all those topics and initially I was always scratching my head as to why he'd want to reinvent all these wheels from the molecules up, but as I watched more, I realized that he's a journey guy, not necessarily a destination guy. To his credit, he's attracted a similarly-minded following of contributors along the way.

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