• 0 posts
  • 21 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • Seems like a pretty fun language with an unfortunate amount of 90s baggage.

    However, I firmly believe that trying to de-parenthesise lisp is a distraction. The main reason being that s-expressions make the beloved code=data concept very obvious.

    A suitable editor makes it really easy to ignore the parens (until they’re useful, e.g. for navigation). When reading, the structure of the code is inferred from indentation and line breaks. Just like C.

  • If you’re able to easily migrate issues etc to a new instance, then you don’t need to worry about a particular service providers getting shitty. At which point your main concern is temporary outages.

    Perhaps this is more of a concern for some projects (e.g. anything that angers Nintendo’s lawyers). But for most, I imagine that the added complexity of distributed p2p hosting would outweigh the upsides.

    Not saying it’s a bad idea, in fact I like it a lot, but I can see why it’s not a high priority for most OSS devs

  • Just to lob a controversial thought in there: There may be some challenges the game industry faces that aren’t solely “capitalism bad”. The most compelling one I’ve heard is that, as games as a medium they have to increasingly compete with a growing back catalogue of classics.

    Between that and the rise of indie games, it gets increasingly risky to invest in large projects.

    (To try and preempt some comments: I am not saying that investors are “right” to pull out of the games industry. I just want people to consider whether the problem, and hence the solution, is more complicated than they first thought)

  • I think it means client-server basically. You can host a server in “the cloud” then access a frontend to it via your browser.

    Might also mean it has features relevant to debugging/deploying cloud services.

    Cloud is often a BS marketing word, but I’m sure there’s ways to make it justifiable in this case. (Not that any of us has to like these features. I for once can’t stand the idea of having my editor run inside a browser…)

  • Be aware there are basically two different things called Owncloud. There’s still the original php version, which is similar to nextcloud but worse (not open source, smaller plugin ecosystem I think)

    On the other hand is owncloud “infinite scale” (or ocis). This is the thing entirely written in go. But as others have pointed out, it’s little more than a file server at this point.

    IMO the self-hosting community is really missing a self-contained “all the DAVs” server (files, calendar, contacts). Baikal etc seem like a great start, but it would be great to have somewhere to get those parts pre-assembled. Until then, nextcloud works for me.

  • The big downside is that, for backwards compatibility, the default must still be unsafe code. Ideally this could be toggled with a compiler flag, rather than having to wrap most code in “safe” blocks (like rust, but backwards).

    One potential upside that people don’t seem to be discussing is that the safe subset could also be the place to finally start cutting down the bloat of C++. We could encourage most developers to write exclusively in the safe subset, and aim to make that the “much smaller and cleaner language” trying to get out of C++.

  • Isn’t production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?

    Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.

    I agree with your main point though, it’s kinda creepy when you realise just how much we are expected to allow other people’s code to run on our machines.

  • There’s a common thread between a lot of the missteps listed here and Embeacer group’s recent troubles. The idea that you could fund 230 Spiderman 2’s for the same price as buying 1 Activision-Blizzard-King really drove the point home to me.

    The problem (in my obviously uneducated opinion) is that when you spend so much money in acquisition, especially of established companies, you’re neither funding nor rewarding innovation. You spend $70B on ABK and some randos in suits get a huge payout that they invest in oil or crypto or whatever. Spend $70B on talent and early career devs and you could unleash a tidal wave of creativity and experimentation.