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I still use Flash

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Re: I still use Flash

#231

Post by zackmorris »

imperfect_blue wrote: post #215
zackmorris wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them. I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to the…

Because for everyone to make what they want to make is, as of current year, a pie in the sky fantasy until scarcity is solved, and perhaps not even then. There are 8 billion humans, the world doesn't need another hundred thousand programming languages or web frameworks or game development platform or even indie games or fiction or music or film, produced every year when the whim strikes someone's fancy. Even if we co…

You make a good point. I've latched onto some goals (like making games) because I forget that they're a stepping stone to something bigger.

The bigger thing would have been the web framework, or the programming language. But even those aren't quite big enough.

If I'm being honest, the biggest stuff is curing disease, eliminating wealth inequality.. biblical stuff. Truly I want to be an inventor and work to solve the very hardest problems.

So it feels undignified to be fixing someone's computer when I could be helping researchers to like, cure death and stuff.

But you're right, that act of helping someone is the very essence of our humanity and shouldn't be written off as something inconsequential just because it's not glorious. There is glory to be found though, a different kind of glory in that covenant.

And I totally agree about AGI.

Edit: as far as scarcity goes, I think that economics correctly attempts to allocate resources between people with unlimited wants and needs. It just never got as far as the endgame we're in now, where the primary scarce resource is time. That's an artificial scarcity, so we might have a chance to turn things around if we optimize for that instead of material wealth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity

Re: I still use Flash

#232

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

leetrout wrote: post #204
zackmorris wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I feel about HyperCard. Some apps were so ahead of their time that when they were axed, nothing comparable replaced them. I believe that this is due to a tragedy of the commons in the software industry. We're all so creative, with so many dreams, but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent. Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to the…

"but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent" THIS. I am so sick of the competition in most tech jobs / companies to climb the stupid ladder. Everyone just wants more more more and our society reinforces that. I _REALLY_ miss working on teams that didn't have that amount of competition causing mild dysfunction.

Do you feel compelled to participate in that competition? If not, why does it bother you?

Re: I still use Flash

#233

Post by TeMPOraL »

thelastgallon wrote: post #225
chucksmash wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then when someone wins the internet lottery, they succumb to their ego and do a bunch of stuff in business to hoard even more wealth, rather than working to reform the system which keeps so many others down. It doesn't even have to come down to greed though. If some meme stock speculation 1000x'd, my family could live off the gains in perpetuity and I could spend all my time working in a soup kitchen, doing good. B…

Is this effective altruism?

It's altruism if GP stops the recursion at some point and actually uses the money to help people and do good.

It's effective altruism if they use the money in a smart way, that reasonably maximizes the good it does for others, instead of doing something stupid or just extremely suboptimal.

Re: I still use Flash

#234

Post by falcolas »

imperfect_blue wrote: post #229
falcolas wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal opinion: I think scarcity is mostly a solved problem, in that most of us are working on projects that only exist to make someone else more money, not to fulfill any actual needs of those 8 billion humans. There are exceptions of course. But most of us could stop working tomorrow, and aside from the lack of income, the scarcity of resources available to us would not change. The real problems that causes hunge…

I cannot understand why you would think so, even in a first world nation. Who would grow your food? Who would make the tools and fertilizer that enable the farmers to grow your food? The robotics and software that enables those tools and fertilizer to be produce? Who would organize, transport, package, preserve and process the produce so that you can access it? Apply the same questions to healthcare, education, trans…

> Who would grow your food?

>> There are exceptions of course.

There are about 2M farmers and ranchers in the US. 22M health care professionals. 4M teachers. 2M truckers, 135k rail workers, 40k miners, etc.

Even at our highest employment levels, under half of those in the US are employed. They're just not counted as unemployed because they're either children, in school, retired, or simply not seeking employment.

Yes, I do believe that most jobs are superfluous - that many more people could not have to work without a material impact to the availability of goods.

Re: I still use Flash

#235

Post by tomcam »

AndrewSwift wrote: post #201
hutzlibu wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"FWIW it never went away¹ and targets standards-based runtimes these days. " I just tried Adobe Animate recently and nothing worked out of the box or like flash used to. I basically had to tinker, until even basic animations somewhat worked. And I even have quite some experience with EaselJS, the target framework, but that didn't helped much. The power of flash was the ease of use - that is gone.

You might like Svija — you can easily animate SVGs using Illustrator. It's not as powerful yet as Flash, but that's our goal. Disclaimer, I made it ;-)

Gorgeous home page. What does Svija do?

Re: I still use Flash

#236

Post by bionade24 »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #131
CharlesW wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It blows my mind that no one has made a tool like that in so long. […] Why has the pinnacle of ease of use in game creation been achieved and never replicated since? FWIW it never went away¹ and targets standards-based runtimes these days. I'm sure there are many kids every month having the same kind of epiphanies with it! That being said, because Adobe Animate is marketed as a tool for professionals rather than ki…

I remember when Minecraft was released a bunch of kids had their first Java experience due to the modding scene. Funnily enough I didn't do that since by then I was a C enthusiast and had an irrational hatred towards Java (oh how the turntables..). I wonder if that's still possible now that Microsoft has changed the codebase IIRC?

There are 2 editions of Minecraft. One, is the original one, now called Java edition. They definately still work on it, because despite not running well on Java > 8 for a long time, it now does. But afaik, they're still stuck on LWJGL 2.

The newer one written in C++ was first called "pocket edition" and targeted mobile. It's now called "Bedrock edition" and is also the version that has RTX support.

It'll be hard to move the modding community over to the Bedrock edition. I personally don't have any knowledge how limited modding is in the latter one.

Re: I still use Flash

#237

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #232
leetrout wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent" THIS. I am so sick of the competition in most tech jobs / companies to climb the stupid ladder. Everyone just wants more more more and our society reinforces that. I _REALLY_ miss working on teams that didn't have that amount of competition causing mild dysfunction.

Do you feel compelled to participate in that competition? If not, why does it bother you?

Fail to compete and you'll be left behind in terms of compensation, performance review rankings, and career growth, the last of which also limits your future job choices. It also puts you nearer the top of the list for layoffs when corporate finances get tight.

Re: I still use Flash

#238

Post by lazyasciiart »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #232
leetrout wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but spend the majority of our lives working 40 hour weeks to outcompete each other and make rent" THIS. I am so sick of the competition in most tech jobs / companies to climb the stupid ladder. Everyone just wants more more more and our society reinforces that. I _REALLY_ miss working on teams that didn't have that amount of competition causing mild dysfunction.

Do you feel compelled to participate in that competition? If not, why does it bother you?

I don't, but it bothers me because the people who win it get to decide what I work on and they are too often fundamentally incompetent.

Re: I still use Flash

#239

Post by CharlesW »

romwell wrote: post #210
CharlesW wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a small but major difference with Flash vs Minecraft and Roblox. Flash let you create something from scratch (or close to it). […] It was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic, yes! Roblox does allow you to make a game from scratch — even though the primitives are generally less primitive and the constraints much different — but my point is just that if you're wondering where the spirit of dj_mc_merlin's experie…

>Roblox does allow you to make a game from scratch ...with the caveat that once Roblox (the company) folds, all the games will be gone. ...and that since Roblox changes the code all the time, you have no idea whether your game will look the same in a year. Or even run. So yes, while I understand what you mean by the spiritual successor.. Roblox takes everything that made Flash bad (i.e. dependence on a clunky binary…

> ...with the caveat that once Roblox (the company) folds, all the games will be gone.

True, and I guess Flash is a useful lesson in that sense, although no platforms I jammed with as a kid are around either. It makes me wonder if Godot apps written today will work on the web 20 years from now.

Re: I still use Flash

#240

Post by mike_hearn »

ho_schi wrote: post #130

Interesting read. And it doesn't end up with Electron, which is "Flash for the Desktop". Notarization Why I don't wonder? I come from Linux and the weird rules for App Bundles and Notarization on Mac are pain. And badly documented. And the tools suck! Which entitlements my app needs? How to change libraries paths? Compiling applications on Mac is easy (with Hombrew), shipping to ordinary users as App Bundles is compl…

If you want to create Mac apps from other platforms then check out Conveyor:

https://hydraulic.software/

It can build, sign and notarize Mac apps (and Windows apps, and Linux apps) with auto update and can do so from any platform. So you can ship to everyone from Linux if you want. It also does auto update, generates a download page that detects your OS and it includes control over low level OS-specific things like setting entitlements, custom deb dependencies, Windows manifest extensions etc.

Notarization as a process is actually OK in my view. Yes it sucks to have to pay, especially for hobbyist stuff. Still, process-wise it's pretty lightweight and it seriously beats having a virus scanner intercept and rummage through all your file IO all the time. Windows has a lot of problems with aggressive AV engines mucking up programs and macOS doesn't, because notarization is in effect an ahead of time virus scanner that moves the work off the end user laptop. Also these days the notarization protocol is open and documented.

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