81–90 of 219 posts
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You realize that the US is still designing the most advanced processors and technology. Now if you argued that the US has forgotten how to manufacture anything, I would agree with you.
No. Taiwan and Korea are on par for design.
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> He’s released two games which barely qualify as games. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but it's worth pointing out that Braid is not only widely considered one of the best games ever made[0], its success was also instrumental in the explosion of indie games in the late 00s/10s. The Witness didn't quite reach the same heights, but it got an 87 on Metacritic and was a financial success. Even if it's only two games…
I like Braid. I do. But, it’s more of a puzzle than a game. Once you figure out the answer, you’re done. Like Myst. Games have some element of skill involved and Blow’s products lack that. And that’s not to knock the products. I like puzzles. And not everything has to be a game. Will Wright has said that he does not make games, he makes toys. Digital toys. I also think people judge his work on his reputation more tha…
This criteria is very specific to you. Outer Wilds is also widely considered one of the greatest games of all time, and also one of the least replayable once you've beaten it. Myst too, since you mentioned it.
Besides, Braid is as much a platformer as it is a puzzler... is Super Mario Bros not a game since the levels don't change once you beat them?
I teach the systems class at Montana State, where we go from transistors up to a real computing system, and I have students that don't understand what a file system really is when they start my class I agree that blow is wrong on some details, but I really think we need to be thinking hard around a NAND-to-Tetris style education that starts in high school for our technical students. I use "outdated" models like Littl…
> If we forget low level stuff, civilization will fall apart since we won't be able to keep vital software running.
There's barely anything to remember. Most of low level stuff did 180 in last 3 decades. RAM is slow now, compute is fast. Drives can be almost as fast as RAM. Sometimes it's better to do more than less to make code branchless. It's best if you can split your task into thousands of micro-threads and run on GPU.
Blow often makes fantastic points about development, and often completely misses the mark. He’s accomplished great things and has ideas worth listening to - but also plenty of nonsense that’s presented indistinguishably. I felt quite strongly that the collapse of civilisation talk was one of those pieces of nonsense, and I’ve largely ignored it (despite listening to it twice). I’m grateful to OP for providing a more…
Muratori's main talking point seems to be that modern software is slow. I think he is 100% correct on this. It's absolutely insane how long it takes jira to show me a ticket or slack to switch chat rooms and that vscode can't keep with up with normal typing speed.
I miss assembler and maximizing code efficiency to juggle 2k of ram.
Plenty of hand written assembler in core programs like ffmpeg. Sure most people glue together tedious JavaScript frameworks but there’s still people doing real work.
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I personally do not like how his solution boils down to "just learn more" which may be true at an individual level, but not as the general solution to awful software. You will never be able to force developers worldwide to start writing everything in C/Assembly, or even to care beyond "it performs fine on my machine". Individuals can have fun micro-optimizing their application, but overall, we have the app we have be…
The real problem is that we have a broken, anti-performance culture. We have allowed "premature optimizaiton is the root of all evil" to morph into "optimization is the root of all evil. That single quote has done untold damage to the software industry. We don't need to pass laws to force all programmers worldwide to do anything. Fixing our culture will be enough. In my view, that's what Casey is trying to do.
"Clean code" is indeed often a bad idea, but you are overestimating the impact. Even software written by people caring very much about performance consume way more than it theoretically should.
Plus, if this was that simple, people would have already rewritten all the bad software.
Your message is exactly the reason why I do not like Casey, he is brainwashing everyone into thinking this is a culture problem. Meanwhile nobody tries to solve it technically.
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The concept of files and file systems is useful to regular computer users, even when they have no interest in knowing how things work under the hood. The issue is with mobile OSs, and that software companies like their apps to be a walled garden for your data as much as possible, and therefore resist exposing your data as files living in a normal shared file system. Even if you already work with files, they have you…
In the name of low effort, tangential, golden era HN comments: the decision to hide file format extensions on windows (and maybe other OSs) sucks soooo much. The point about mobile devices breaking the desktop metaphor and file system norms is really interesting. Higher quality discussion question: Files, buffers,file systems, file explorers, and window managers seem like useful abstractions to me for the human compu…
Because that's anti-thetical to control. The biggest sin in a technology business is allowing your customers to stop using your product with no negative consequences for them.
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> They think that React is itself what browsers render My kingdom for native JSX in the browser. That would be awesome . Something similar to how we have WebGL and Canvas, but for pure JavaScript UI without the extra step of DOM reconciliation. There’s a small (and growing) cohort of people working on rendering React Native directly on canvas or webgl (I think). Supposedly gives you super smooth UX, but I haven’t kno…
> rendering React Native directly on canvas or webgl I just threw up in my mouth a little. I can’t wait to: - not be able to double click to highlight text a word at a time, because the developers of the “super smooth UX” didn’t know that’s what typical text does. - or triple click to highlight a paragraph at a time - or have the standard menu available when I highlight text (which I often use to look up words, etc)…
Maybe then the circle(jerk) will be complete.
Ugh.
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What do you disagree with Casey Muratori on specifically? I have seen some of his content and he seems pretty humble but opinionated on things he knows about. I also think he did a great job with handmade hero.
I personally do not like how his solution boils down to "just learn more" which may be true at an individual level, but not as the general solution to awful software. You will never be able to force developers worldwide to start writing everything in C/Assembly, or even to care beyond "it performs fine on my machine". Individuals can have fun micro-optimizing their application, but overall, we have the app we have be…
>compromises we find somewhat acceptable
His entire point is that most developers aren’t actually aware of the compromises they are making. Which is why he calls it “performance aware programming” and not performance first programming.