251–260 of 316 posts
Regarding chocolate quality discussions: when Hersey started up, they couldn't get any European chocolatiers to share their process, so they had to invent one. They used lipolysis, which creates butyric acid, the chemical that gives vomit its distinctive smell and aftertaste. You can definitely taste it if you pay attention, like "yep, that's it, it's that vomit aftertaste." https://www.google.com/search?q=hershey+vo…
Writing GUI apps for Apple products. Too many variables to mention, but I wrote my first Apple application in 1986. It took several weeks, and wasn't much to look at. These days, I can spin out a full-fat, shippable app, in a couple of hours. I do that all the time, for my test harnesses.
I wrote plenty of GUI applications for IBM PCs in the '80s. It wasn't difficult with Turbo Pascal.
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Oh man, this brings back nightmares of upgrading jQuery, and third party components that were copy/pasted into the codebase and modified/customized. Large frontend codebases are indeed miles ahead of where they used to be.
The step backwards is that before, you couldn’t upgrade jQuery because the CDN script tag was on thirteen different partials, and you weren’t sure which were still in use, and now you can’t upgrade React because it depends on v4.3.2 of chalk-babel-duster-pack-plugin and that’s insecure but it has a breaking change in v5 you don’t know how to fix, so you’re just waiting for a total rewrite of the app to pull out CRA a…
I've only been using desktop Linux for 15 years, but it is vastly easier to use it as a daily driver than it used to be. It still has its problems--just yesterday I sunk an hour into an elusive bug. But when I was doing that, I remembered that such things used to be nearly constant and aren't any longer.
As an i3 user, basically going without a DE, I recently tried to breathe new life into an old core 2 duo laptop that was in very good shape and basically just used to browse the web and play spider solitaire. It was on Windows 7, and I don't think upgrading to 10 would have been worth it with that CPU and 2gb of RAM. I picked Debian, and put the different DEs through its paces. I started with those that should have b…
I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read
I'd also say that even with letsencrypt it is harder to setup a web server than 10 years ago when you didn't need https at all.
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Jevon’s Paradox
That's a super interesting take in that the normal assumption that "there's more games" is a supply-side statement. But Jevon's would apply a step before that. The "demand" is really the people wanting to write games. When they do that, they then create "supply" in the video game market. Per the parent comment however, Jevon's doesn't address the mean "quality" of games decreasing. Similar things happened to publishe…
It's the same for all art, as you say, starting from the figurative ones - the world has probably produced more professional painters in the last 150 years than in the whole history of the world, but among modern and contemporary works, almost nothing can really hold a candle to Michelangelo. Because there used to be one Sistine Chapel in the world, and now we're drowning in imagery every minute of our lives.
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That argument is usually made by the kind of people who consider developer experience the most important part of software development. I'm on the opposite end of this spectrum: I couldn't care less about developer experience, user experience is the king. Your users won't see your "write less code" crap and all your other "elegant" overengineered solutions that use 5 libraries for something that should be a trivial 10…
Be careful about the baby/birtwater situation. I can deliver a website a lot faster if I get to write it in typescript than if I have to write it in C++, even if the latter might execute faster.
I also use Java for my backend because not having to manage memory manually is worth of the small performance tradeoff.
I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read
* Running any website with user-contributed content. Spam is just everywhere nowadays, and you cannot publish a simple hiscore list for your game anymore without some kind of anti-spam measures, otherwise the spammers find it astonishingly fast and flood it with spam, even if it doesn't allow any clickable links * Thinking about it some more, everything related to security. Back in the days, the whole Internet wasn't…
Nowadays to draw a triangle you have to write, compile and attach two shaders written in it's own separate language that interface with the main code
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Is there a law for "when a thing becomes easier and/or cheaper to do, more of that thing is created, and the mean quality of that thing goes down"? Of course, there are positive effects as well — desktop publishing was responsible for countless design crimes, but it also unlocked some real innovation during print's last stand.
Jevon’s Paradox