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Old man yells at cloud

jonandnic.com

131–140 of 239 posts

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#131
post #82
post #39

I tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened; - Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked. - Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed. - Try to…

> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. Agree that is a factor, but a small one. > It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart. Respectfully disagree here. Systems have…

> 1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice.

What boot camp is purporting to graduate "senior" developers after 6 months?

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#132
post #39

I tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened; - Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked. - Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed. - Try to…

Honestly, I haven't seen anything like that level of issue recently and I strongly suspect the issue here is Civ Six itself. The last multiplayer game I played was Halo infinite. It went great. Did exactly what it's supposed to. ETA: I am on Windows... At a cursory glance it looks like changing the download region fixes an issue you encounter in MacOS after updating the operating system. Apple being an also-ran platf…

I play Halo Infinite and the game play is great. The game crashes on a daily basis though so I don't agree with "Did exactly what it's supposed to"

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#133
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire post is pretty much the definition of having rose tinted glasses when remembering the past. There was a lot of annoying shit back then too, you just choose to not retain those memories.

Am I misreading your post? I think that’s my whole point right?

Someone is agreeing with you... on the internet.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#134
post #32

If you showed someone from 30 years ago a modern video game, a Tesla, or even TikTok, it would absolutely blow their mind. So the author comes up with some nitpicks and declares "technology has gotten objectively worse". I guess the title checks out.

The point is that this isn’t evenly distributed. A Tesla would be super impressive — but they’d also rightly point out that the giant dashboard TV distracts the driver, and moving the touchscreen controls randomly in patches is unsafe.

That doesn’t mean we should give up on Teslas but it does suggest that we question whether every new aspect is as good as it seemed in the demo or whether the optimal balance is somewhere else.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#135
I'm generally of the opinion that games are a lesser evil than TV so I'm slightly happier when the kids turn on the Xbox instead of open the flix. However, if there is a gap of a few days, the downloads start ... And we cant play without the updates. A simple solution could be let people play the version they already have while the update is in progress. But no, the services have to be on the internet and their economics perhaps doesn't consider it worthy enough to support the last week's version.

When I was growing up .. to program, my friend and I connected the zxspectrum to a TV and switched it on to instantly get a BASIC prompt. Now I don't know what to do to get kids to experience the joy of programming (yeah I know about scratch yadayada). Making 2d games doesn't cut it for them since they're seen visual Nirvana before they got to create it. Strangely there seem to be some corners still fresh - like this surprise I got https://sriku.org/blog/2019/07/16/prolog-is-magic/ .

Minecraft is the other sane and creative place that I let the kids hang out on. Relatively infrequent updates (thank you from the bottom of heart) and open ended creative play that could be seen as a programming/learning activity if I squint the right way.

As Raph Koster put it - "fun is another word for learning".

Another factor I wonder about is whether the economic system incentivizes this degradation. By shareholders insisting that their companies keep increasing their profits - even giving it an inviolable religious name like "fiduciary responsibility" - people at the helm could easily be forced to not "do the right thing" for the people. A few like Jobs may have been strong enough at one point ... But they are very few and most have no stomach or vision to challenge / fight that force.

(Excuse typos due to mobile)

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think that games that couldn't be patched were, at the very least, just as good and very likely a lot better than modern games. At the very least, the fact that the game couldn't be patched meant that companies invested in QA and testing. In those days, "going gold" or shipping the master ROM was a big deal , and so companies went out of their way to ensure that their product didn't have any huge showstopper bu…

Survivorship bias. Games that couldn't be patched were better if they worked on your architecture. Otherwise you were just left out in the cold or you bought an entirely new PC to play them. Consoles were better because (after the Crash) the vendors guarded them jealously and put the developers through an absolute hell of quality control to confirm they shipped a working product on the cartridge. Of course, the conse…

You're proving my point. You're saying that the quality controls imposed upon developers by the console manufacturers resulted in fewer, but higher quality games.

I'm saying that's a good thing.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I misreading your post? I think that’s my whole point right?

Someone is agreeing with you... on the internet.

Oh lol - I read it as a critique of my post (which confused me) not an agreement about the parent article

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#139
post #3

The first example is because the game had a patch, I'm pretty sure that you can skip that on Switch, but even if you can't, games that couldn't be patched were objectively worse than ones that can. The second example is social media and has been discussed to death. No arguments there. The third example, Tesla's UI, could be said to be worse than manual buttons, but the technology in a Tesla is not objectively worse o…

Its not a Switch in the article. There's also this bad trend where publishers literally leave pieces of the game off the disc/cartridge and force you to download the rest. Not a patch, the actual game.

That "trend" isn't shipping incomplete builds, but rather that the engineering work to minimize delta update sizes simply isn't a priority for games with infrequent patches, and YouTubers can't tell the difference.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#140
post #6
post #4

Man vehicles are a big one. All of the infotainment crap, the 200 control computers, electronic wastegate turbos, etc. etc. are going to age so poorly. There is a reason why cars with mininal BS are fetching such a premium on the used market.

peak toyota/lexus was around 2006. After that all downhill.

We have a 2006 Subaru Outback. I’ve rented newer cars and got late 2010s loaners a couple of times and it was quite jarring to realize that I’d actively avoid the later models due to the touchscreen UI - even if you ignore the safety issues, it was amazing how crappy the implementations were - laggy, low-precision screens; UI lag like an intercontinental Remote Desktop session; my iTunes collection broke three separate systems over USB because apparently nobody has 10k tracks; etc. It’s like being charged a couple grand for an 5 year old Android tablet which was barely mid-range when it was released.
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