Once you realize that all this stuff is written by either young Gen Z copywriters or AI, everything begins to make more sense.

Yeah, this is a free-to-play arena game by Zynga. No thanks.

C

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {

printf(“Hello, world”);

return 0;

}

C++

#include <iostream>

int main() {

std::cout << “Hello, world” << std::endl;

return 0;

}

This article was fascinating.

I was just talking to a couple of software engineer friends the other day about how engineering research like this doesn’t really happen anymore outside of the massive companies, and even within those it’s greatly reduced.

Now it’s all about applied engineering (app development using established technologies and techniques), with research limited to incremental gains with new technologies, augmented by published research. But it wasn’t always like this; there was a gradual erosion. Just prior to this latest era, a company could at least plausibly start a project to use published research with no public implementation and build an implementation. Our careers started in the 2000s and we remember a better time…

Two of us work in a large company currently and were recently closely involved with some of the most “speculative” research at the company, and it was almost entirely incremental. The third person is a literal research engineer at an engineering research firm who says real research described in articles like these is dead.

I can’t imagine having two years to produce something so ex nihilo these days, and the fact that they were able to achieve so much in such a short amount of time is truly incredible, and a testament to the quality of the engineers.

According to people who are way more interested in this than I am, there was a bunch of licensed software in 5 and 6.

tl;dr for article and comments:

Microsoft mangled arrays and code comments with ASCII extended characters into UTF-8 encoding, which makes building many of these files impossible without a lot of extra work. This was mistakenly attributed to Git.

The timestamps for each file are also not preserved, which is debatably a valid criticism of Git (original file timestamps can technically be preserved on an archive like this, but it requires a large amount of work to line up those times and the correct commit times programmatically).

Several Microsoft employees involved in this project appeared in the comments and offered to work directly with the author to correct the character encoding issues. One Microsoft employee indicated that historical timestamps could likely not be included due to Microsoft corporate policy around personally identifiable information.

12:30 made me tense up with momentary anxiety

It was Compaq. Incidentally, that story was the basis for the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.

There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone…

Not following the logic here. Why does Microsoft’s choice in 32-bit OS kill Apple?

Most Kickstarter rewards ship in a year or less. Why did shipping take an entire extra year for him?

My old homepage from nearly 10 years ago was a page that looked like it was straight out of the late '90s but was entirely valid HTML5 and CSS 3. That included an applet-like rippling water reflection effect beneath a photo of my city at the time, MIDI audio, JavaScript emulating the blink tag, and right-click “image save protection.”

It was a total blast to make and people loved it, but being in the tech industry it kind of gave the wrong impression to hiring managers, so I swapped it for a much more boring page.

Oh man, you want the real answer?

The people who run these kinds of companies ascended to their roles through a mixture of amorality, naked ambition, willingness to do whatever it takes to ingratiate themselves to those above them, credit stealing, blame shifting, and sabotage of rivals. As a rule, they are uncreative, unintelligent, and cowardly, but they have arrogance in spades. If you think you’ve met an exception to the rule, you’re either wrong or they just haven’t been pushed out yet. Natural sociopaths are common, but so are those who have intentionally become sociopathic in the pursuit of power. It’s a trait that’s selected for.

They will replace successful leaders with their own cronies and yes people because they would rather suffocate a successful thing they don’t control completely than tolerate success from someone that’s threatening to their ego.

For all of their performative hand wringing about layoffs, they don’t actually care and will say terrible things in private.

Long story short, they’re all Carter Burke from Aliens, but the more power one accumulates, the more of an asshole they become.

Source: from millionaires to billionaires, I’ve had to deal with these human-shaped bags of shit up close and personal my entire career.

The Making Of book sounds really interesting. Maybe covers similar ground as Playing at the World, but I’m interested to find out.

If you click the link…

As someone who’s also invested a considerable amount of my finite life into thoroughly understanding the inner workings of archaic technologies, the level of passion on display here is really motivating me to wrap up one of those projects and release it into the wild (for absolutely no one to use).

Elected worker representatives should have rotating seats on the board of directors for any company, pass it on.

For anyone confused: this isn’t D&D 6th Edition. (It’s a homebrew system.)

This is cool! I did run into a bug, though: the filter list is too tall for mobile and you can’t scroll it.

It’s also missing quite a few retro game shops in the Portland, OR area. However, it seems like arcades are pretty well covered; it’s just missing a couple in Tigard.

Right now Yelp is still more useful for finding shops in my area, but I really like the idea behind this and I’ll keep it in mind.

This looks cool, but I was surprised there was no signage anywhere.

I really like the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, but it looks like they closed during Covid and haven’t yet reopened…

Isn’t educational use the whole point of Raspberry Pi? It seems like that has way more opportunity for it with a modern architecture, ready-made robotics kits, and other maker-type applications that could get kids excited about electronics and programming.