Given it’s a Chinese company, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Especially them.

Exactly. I bet they escalate because they’re more instinctively drawn to a dramatic story than to pragmatic victory or desirable outcomes.

Western militaries, at least, have made it doctrine to always keep a human in the loop, so that’s good.

I’m still not really sure how it’s a coherent ideology. Techno-optimism is, but as far as I know most big tech people don’t actually adhere to it, or even think it makes sense any more than we do.

Anti-user features are a major thing. People are dumb enough with technology you can get away with openly screwing over your “customers”. The antifeature in this case is “it’s not actually the advertised game, it’s a cheap pay to win thing”.

Presumably, people download this thinking it’s cool, and then end up playing it anyway and whaling for the “developers”, who may literally be four people, one of which reskins existing games, while everyone else does sales and marketing.

Oh, good. I was asking because otherwise it’s the sort of thing that they’d try to shut down the first time it was misused.

If it’s magically free, is it also magically permanent?

An audio-based SSH client, maybe. It could be used for good or evil, but at this point any open SSH connection is regularly targeted anyway. It’d be really neat to be able to do whatever computer task over an old landline or one of the remaining payphones.

I thought that was what’s being implied.

So then I guess C is salamander. Also lays eggs and lives by a pool, but doesn’t do anything extra, and is a necessary step before most of the other modern languages.

COBOL is a coelacanth. To everyone’s surprise, they’re still out there. We thought they were an old, very extinct example of a non-terrestrial lobe-finned fish, but they actually hung on in some odd environments. They cause massive indigestion to anyone that has to consume them.

If Node is a mosquito, Javascript itself is another hymenopteran: the yellow jacket wasp. Just as hated, and with a tendency to injure handlers, but widely successful and defended as filling an actual useful role in nature. They build delicate, arguably pretty nests.

Roaches don’t spread nearly as much disease as 'squiters, and IIRC are actually important in some ecosystems.

What, could you have done better in 70-whatever?

I’ve definitely never been guilty of this. /s

Alright, I’ll never, ever write something this way now. Good to know.

Absolutely not. Demographic data shows it’s shit, income distribution data is best explained by a random walk process (neat graphic explainer here), and all the data on startups and investing show that there’s no free lunch; capitalism actually does ensure everything gives the same steady return on average.

Every rich person won some sort of lottery. Even the bona-fide engineers are never the only ones that could have invented whatever thing - as technical person myself.

Honestly this seems less evil than a lot of stuff Google itself does.

That’s a good point. Supporting all hardware in particular is a pretty big ask. Maybe you could cleverly fit memory management into a small amount of code, but a pile of arbitrary standards can’t really be meaningfully compressed.

In the video he states the OS he uses works on the original Pentium processor which came out in 1993. Four years after Reagan went out of office.

I was wondering. That didn’t look like an 80’s computer.

I take it all the important stuff stays in America, though. There’s a chance you couldn’t even tell I’m Canadian if you met me, but there’s still senior devs earning 60k up here.

In every country but the US, really. Someday, big tech companies will realise that a person in any other Western country can code just as well for half the price, but for now they won’t even consider it cause 'Murica.

It should be possible, right? It’s not like we’ve gotten worse at coding. All the bloat is a function of people not caring, and to some degree different requirements.

I should check if lemmy.sdf.org is back online. Retrocomputing would love this.

Mentioning @CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org, so I can find this easier.

Yeah. I feel like there’s a real lack of discussion about where the dividing line should be on the issue. How different from just imagining it is it, really? Nobody’s saying your dirty mind should be banned.

Now, if you actually send this shit to Taylor Swift, that 100% should be criminal.