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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • How about the feature where you get a notification that someone said something in a group chat but if you click on the notification it opens the private chat with that person instead?

    Or the one where you enable recording a meeting and only after the meeting does it tell you that it couldn’t actually save anything to OneDrive so there’s no recording? That’s some advanced UX engineering right there.

    Or the one where it hides less used “applications” and decides that the only ones it should hide are the chat and the calendar. Not everyone can come up with that.

    Or how it shows a banner telling you to update even if your client is company-managed and especially if you’re using their web client.

    FLOSS can’t hope to compete at that level.







  • Mind you, even relatively simple fridges can technically have firmware because these days the cheapest way to implement something like a defrost timer is with a microcontroller. Of course that firmware is so simple that it doesn’t need updates and definitely doesn’t need to be connected to the internet.

    Other than that I don’t really see what a smart fridge can do that you can’t cover by sticking a cheap tablet on the fridge door. Sure, maybe a smart fridge can order butter from Amazon when it thinks that yours runs out but you can do the same with your phone and “buy it again” in seconds. Assuming that you even want to buy your groceries from an e-retailer.

    It’s definitely a pointless price inflation device that makes the fridge less reliable to boot.



  • Yes. That’s how art works.

    Most musicians, including many bands that fill stadiums and go on world tours, pay the bills with regular full-time jobs and do all of their band stuff in their spare time. It’s similar for artists, authors, etc.

    A really good game takes years of hard work. It can take surprisingly little money; a small team driven by passion can be very efficient. But it does take effort. And sure, not everyone can be Tynan Sylvester or ConcernedApe or Pixel or Team Cherry; most tiny indie games aren’t genre-shaping mega hits.

    But they don’t have to. There’s plenty of small games out there that are just good and that’s good enough. The idea of even just a hundred people playing one’s game and being entertained is enticing enough for thousands of developers to sink hours and hours of their spare time into.

    Will there be a bazillion lame asset flips in the future? Yes, just like there have always been lame derivative bands, shitty overhyped artists, terrible indie movies, and drivel-slinging hack authors.

    Just like there have always been shitty AA and AAA games, for that matter. 90% of everything is crap. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of gems hiding in between all the chaff.

    (And while I’m at it: While making a game does requires a lot of knowledge, that knowledge can be acquired along the way. The original Cave Story was a one-man project and Pixel certainly didn’t start out as a professional programmer/artist/composer/screenplay author. Learning how to do all that is part of the fun for some people.)



  • Jesus_666@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•Singularity 2045
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    20 days ago

    True, of course, but we did make huge leaps in fusion power in the last years. We’re currently at a stage where several teams are currently constructing reactors intended to demonstrate break-even (so more energy comes out than is put in), with ones viable as power plants already being designed. The one I mentioned plans to run their demo reactor in 2027; the 2031 one is supposed to be the commercially viable one.

    That’s a hell of a lot better than the “we will have some kind of viable reactor at some point within the next three decades” we’ve been hearing for the last 50 years. It could be several simultaneous high-profile scams, of course, but their plans are plausible.

    Mind you, this won’t take us to a future of unlimited cheap power and micro fusion reactors in every pocket. Deuterium and tritium don’t grow on trees and fusion reactors have a fairly substantial minimum size. Also, renewable power sources are a much cheaper and easier way of generating power. Fusion’s strength is that it’s a “generate a lot of heat and drive a turbine” type of power source so it can be used as a cogeneration plant (providing both power and district heating) or to provide heat for industrial processes, which renewables aren’t great for.


  • Jesus_666@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•Singularity 2045
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    20 days ago

    Mind you, a commercial fusion reactor company is currently aiming for net energy production in 2031 using a stellarator. Their series A funding round raised 130 million Euros so investors seem inclined to believe them. Technologically it also checks out; both stellarators and tokamaks have taken major steps forward in recent years.

    The eternal 30 year timeframe has shrunk an awful lot over the last decade.


  • Not if you’ve been taught that everything is a zero-sum game, which apparently many people believe, especially in the States. If you believe that one person gaining something necessarily means that someone else loses something to an equal or greater degree, caring about other people inherently means having to compromise on your own happiness.

    Of course it becomes a lot easier if you believe that it’s possible to win together and that giving a little can make a huge difference in someone’s day.


  • Try working on a codebase that’s all event-driven hexagonal CQRS with hand-crafted SQL for persistence. Add additional buzzwordy methodologies to taste.

    Adding a single property to your product means you now have to update an aggregate class, several DTOs, and several event classes and handlers before you can even think about touching the UI.

    And that’s in your main solution. There’s also at least one facade service you’ll need to make compatible and you also need to update the event simulator used for testing. The latter night involve having to touch every single line in a 2000 lines long SQL script.

    Having to go though three separate 600-2000 LOC PRs for one PBI isn’t that exotic.


  • Jesus_666@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.world•Art teachers
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    28 days ago

    I had one like that for several years. His approach to interpretation was that there was his interpretation and “D, factually incorrect”. And that was for homework or tests; having a differing opinion on a work during class was seen as a personal affront.

    Notably, out textbook literally started with an essay written by a major author from our country that stressed how interpretation is inherently subjective and how it doesn’t make sense to ask for the one correct interpretation of a text. Of course the teacher never acknowledged that essay in any way.


  • There’s also a lot of stuff that’s not meant to be taken literally. The text is full of similes and metaphors that are a lot less clear today than they were at time of writing. For example, many numbers in there are just used to convey a vague serve sense of size. Sometimes concrete numbers just mean “many”, which was well-understood back then.

    On top of that we have later edits for various reasons and assorted other sources of imprecision. The Bible makes a lot more sense as a book that’s not meant to be taken literally in it’s entirety. Of course figuring out what’s really meant isn’t very easy all this time later.

    Plus what you pointed out. That’s also in there, probably especially by means of edits.