• 3 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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    Disgusting. I don’t demand or expect them to rewrite their website, but those people are nowhere near even “neutral” status, as long as they behave this way.

    Certainly not allies or friends I would support.








  • I don’t understand why the R4L are even trying to get it into THE kernel at this point. Especially after the open hostility, but also after basically offering to be “downstream” of whatever C people do.

    The difference to forking and gradually transitioning things to Rust seem technically minimally negative and socially enormously positive to me.

    And when and if people want to use the linux kernel with Rust, made by the R4L people, they would then be able to do that? Idk.

    I have no stakes in either side, so I don’t really care.



  • I’m working on an RTS too, there isn’t too much to show yet.

    The “inspiration” is supreme commander and other RTS being low on the complexity and planning aspects.

    The approach I have seen in the industry is that people take AoE2 and starcraft as a baseline and then switch out or improve different elements. E.g. starcraft 2 massively improved unit movement and pathing. I think total biscuit tried to make a mod where resource gathering was “automated” and easier and more recently “battle aces” focuses more heavily on the skirmish aspect. Many opinions I have also heard boil down to “if you remove micro, you remove the game”. And that’s not wrong, I can certainly see the point and the skill differentiation between someone who can and someone who can’t micro their units.

    But what I want to see is all of things that people already do “in their mind”, like picking a build order, certain defined “points” in their own “gameplan” that they decide “X units A Y units B is when I should attack”, or “transition points” and steps, and to make all of that explicit.

    MTG “deckbuilding” works the same way, players anticipate certain problems and situations and then they build their decks with specific setups in mind and situations that they want to reach, and if they reach those states, victory gets very very close.

    Taking all of that into account, surely there are just “strategies” that work better than others and finding those is more interesting or at least equally interesting as micro to me, but basically no games give you any tools or help to actually do it. You basically have to take out pen and paper to write down what worked in your last game, what didn’t.

    What would a game look like that gave you ALL the planning tools and performance metrics?

    To me, that’s where the modern “big scale” RTS fail, or rather, why they don’t interest me.


    And also, once things are “perfectly” planned and prepared, there are always ways to introduce e.g. random failure into plan steps to keep players solving “micro” problems, they would just happen in a different place.



  • Why the heck would 2 projects share the same library?

    Coming from the olden days, with good package management, infrequent updates and the idea that you wanted to indeed save that x number of bytes on the disk and in memory, only installing one was the way to go.

    Python also wasn’t exactly a high brow academic effort to brain storm the next big thing, it was built to be a simple tool and that included just fetching some library from your system was good enough. It only ended up being popular because it is very easy to get your feet wet and do something quick.


  • The difficulty with python tooling is that you have to learn which tools you can and should completely ignore.

    Unless you are a 100x engineer managing 500 projects with conflicting versions, build systems, docker, websites, and AAAH…

    • you don’t really need venvs
    • you should not use more than on package manager (I recommend pip) and you should cling to it with all your might and never switch. Mixing e.g. conda, on linux system installers like apt, is the problem. Just using one is fine.
    • You don’t “need” need any other tools. They are bonuses that you should use and learn how to use, exactly when you need them and not before. (type hinting checker, linting, testing, etc…)

    Why is it like this?

    Isolation for reliability, because it costs the businesses real $$$ when stuff goes down.

    venvs exists to prevent the case that “project 1” and “project 2” use the same library “foobar”. Except, “project 1” is old, the maintainer is held up and can’t update as fast and “project 2” is a cutting edge start up that always uses the newest tech.

    When python imports a library it would use “the libary” that is installed. If project 2 uses foobar version 15.9 which changed functionality, and project 1 uses foobar uses version 1.0, you get a bug, always, in either project 1 or project 2. Venvs solve this by providing project specific sets of libraries and interpreters.

    In practice for many if not most users, this is meaningless, because if you’re making e.g. a plot with matplotlib, that won’t change. But people have “best practices” so they just do stuff even if they don’t need it.

    It is a tradeoff between being fine with breakage and fixing it when it occurs and not being fine with breakage. The two approaches won’t mix.

    very specific (often outdated) version of python,

    They are giving you the version that they know worked. Often you can just remove the specific version pinning and it will work fine, because again, it doesn’t actually change that much. But still, the project that’s online was the working state.




  • I don’t think this is a problem.

    Channels to get visibility exist.

    People can mostly choose what kind of news they want to subscribe to and where. They will seek these things out or they will mute them, respectively.

    If people want to join the community, finding the discord server is not an actual issue in practice. You can very much still put a link into the game or the demo.

    I’m certainly not subscribing to a channel on a 3rd party program to get spammed with marketing every 2 weeks.


  • How is it vague?

    It’s vague in all the legal ways:

    • First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can’t work for games that have a technical server requirement, … world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that’s usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what “could be” single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn’t done.

    • It’s not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It’s not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.

    • It’s not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn’t immediately ready to keep working.

    And a few more.

    That being said, I think Thor’s stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that’s not happening.



  • When you lament the loss of ready and experienced volunteers, what we lack are people who’ve learned at the side of truly talented people

    What I’m actually lamenting isn’t the lack of experienced volunteers.

    I’m lamenting the fact that the groups in need lack the awareness that nobody is teaching the stuff they need and that they should do it themselves.

    E.g. https://kernelnewbies.org/ I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned them. Their idea of “outreach” is to open the door and wait for people to fall in. They have no teaching material, they have no recommendations. I’m recognizing that there is something happening that is in my interest and I personally would put in the time to learn whatever is necessary to get to the level that is required to seriously touch that code. I just literally don’t know where to start and have no point to connect. There is a https://kernelnewbies.org/KernelMentors mentors program. Not only is their only point of contact a mailing list, if you follow the link, you will find that the mailing list doesn’t actually exist.


  • I’m not applying but I have a comment / suggestion:

    A pattern I’m seeing here, in activism and open source is that you basically want the full package right now. While I understand that that is what you need, people like that don’t grow on trees.

    It would be good if there was a “trainee” position for people to gain the kind of experience you are asking for. And guidance, by you to make sure they learn the right lessons. Possibly including a private-ish best practices handbook or whatever. I know that that means additional work in the short term.

    Thanks for reading, all the best wishes!

    (Compare to linux’ kernel team asking for kernel devs and the policy of “pick any topic you’d like to work on”. Do I expect a fully course on everything, bringing me from “high school knowledge” to “kernel dev professional”? No, of course not. But a few book recommendations would be great. In that case. Not sure if you can learn moderation from a book.)