• 0 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle




  • There’s a lot of advantages that simply come with using a more popular distribution. For one, having a larger pool of package maintainers (and therefore more packages) is pretty important. Have you ever tried using NixOS as a daily driver? I did a few years ago. Very annoying having to create my own packages for so many different (and relatively common) things I wanted to use.



  • We’re talking about two different things here.

    Actually trying to end world hunger vs pushing a button and having it happen. The former is really hard and probably way beyond the means of any individual, no matter how wealthy. The fact that Elon promised to do it is only evidence of his extreme ego, not his ability nor his ethics (which his donation to himself calls into question).

    If he could push a button and end world poverty at a nominal cost of $xxx billion, I think he would do it. But to actually put in the work over a lifelong project which has a high potential to fail? I don’t for a second believe he’s capable of that. But who is?






  • I think we can state as a truth that they have less potential profit.

    That’s true but it’s not because people aren’t playing single player games. The reason single player games are less profitable is because the non-subscription, non-microtransaction single player market is extremely saturated with indie games. That makes it very hard to sell AAA single player games. The standards are extremely high and the opportunities for extra monetization are not there.

    I have been a single player gamer for most of my life, yet I haven’t bought a AAA single player game in decades. I have more indie single player games to play than I know what to do with, and frankly they appeal to me more than AAA titles. Expensive graphics and voice acting don’t have much draw for me these days. I am much more interested in roguelikes and retro games now. I think there are thousands of others like me out there, among all those who don’t go in for multiplayer games and haven’t purchased a console.






  • All the spatial persistence stuff was handled by the desktop database which was an invisible file that got stored on the disk. Hard drives and floppies each had their own so that if you shared a floppy with a friend the spatial properties of the floppy would travel with it. This also worked if you moved a hard drive from one system to another for the same reason.

    It also worked over AppleShare network file sharing. Where it didn’t work was if you had 2 different computers since there was no way to sync information between them. You essentially treated each computer as its own thing which is really more in keeping with the spirit of spatial design. After all, it would be really weird if 2 different drawers in different rooms in your house somehow always had identical contents which stayed in sync.


  • Q for all those with suggestions: do any of these attempt to replicate the Spatial Finder? No other system I’ve seen (contemporary to OS 9 or since then) seems to have got this element correct (or even attempted to do so).

    It’s such a key part of the OS 9 (and earlier) experience. Double click a folder and it opens where you expect it to, in the shape you left it, with the icons laid out as you left them. It’s a method of working that gives you great familiarity and confidence.

    If anyone’s worked in a kitchen or workshop for a long time and developed a deep memory for the layout and the location of every tool, material, and control, then they’ll know what I’m talking about. You can move around and work incredibly efficiently, relying greatly on muscle memory.

    Since the demise of OS 9, the only way to retain this level of operation has been to rely heavily on the keyboard. Since almost everything on the screen is transient and unreliably positioned (non-spatial), only the keyboard is persistent enough to allow us to work at the speed of thought and rely on muscle memory. It’s been so long now that I think people forget (or never knew) that the contents of the screen could also be persistent and spatial this way.