As Cory Doctorow says: code is a liability, not an asset

The title of the post is “ban religion”, and the first line is that religion “should have no place in society”

True. I’m just reading between the lines here, because of the phrase “until there is verifiable proof”. If it applies to god, then it applies to privacy of conscious experience, in which case… well, we have done pretty horrific things in the past because there was no verifiable proof of someone’s conscious experience, like performing surgery on infants without anesthesia.

• That’s unethical, but even it it wasn’t…
• There’s no way to satsifactorily define religion in the way I think you’re going for, but even if you could…
• People would worship their gods anyway, but even if they didn’t…
• They would worship something else instead (see the ongoing AI cult for live evidence!), but even if they didn’t…
• It wouldn’t suddenly make everyone empathetic, non-tribal, morally consistent, rational physicalists, but even if it did…
• Physicalism is for edgy teenagers who haven’t taken the p-zombie question seriously (source: was edgy teenage physicalist)

I was once a fool like you :)

Mike McShaffry’s book “Game Coding Complete” is a good guide to the practical side of using a game engine IRL to get things done.

It’ll give you a good idea of how things should be shaped in order to be useful, and some things you can “skip ahead” to. Off-the-shelf engines have to be extremely general in order to be flexible enough to be useful to many customers, so game devs have to put in the effort to make them more specific. You’ll have to start off by being specific, if you have any chance of actually finishing something.

Eberly’s book “3D Game Engine Architecture” deals with the nuts and bolts, the rigorous academic engineering stuff. It’s pretty solid, but it’s aimed at making a general-purpose engine, which is beyond the scope of a one-person project.

Backing up though… You don’t have any language or library opinions? You might need 5-10 years of experience doing general programming (or game dev) before you can sustainably tackle this, or else you’re likely to paint yourself into a corner.

Edit: Probably the biggest PITA with game engine dev is testing. If you’re not already an expert in setting up test harnesses at multiple levels of detail, you’re gonna find it impossible to keep moving after a few months.

Good luck!

Also the specialized shampoo is 15.99, the 17-in-1 everything-soap is 1.19.

But the specialized shampoo is pink, so that you know that’s the one you’re supposed to buy.

It’s classic MLM dynamics

• The money makes itself! It’s impossible to not make money with this system!
• You get to be the boss!
• If you’re not making money, you must be doing it wrong — my (paid) training course can help
• Heaps of unsold product rotting in garage/warehouse
• Religious-coded language
• Requires infinite growth to stay profitable for all current players
• FOMO, “getting in on the ground floor”
• Mid-levels taking huge financial risks to onboard more down-levels

It’s weird that “legacy code” is a pejorative.

If your code has lasted long enough to be considered “old”, but is still so useful that it can’t just be deleted without a dedicated replacement effort… it’s doing something right.

Security guard is one. Had a friend in college that basically got paid 8hrs/night to do 2hrs of actual work and 6hrs of building his portfolio. It can definitely work well for some folks.

Turns out we were better off piping data to /dev/null

Mostly agree.

But I think their advice falls prey to the “only a Sith deals in absolutes” problem, when they start contrasting “concrete advice” vs “generic advice”. They are offering “generic advice” with this post, aren’t they?

They hedge against that hypocrisy by offering some special carve-outs where generic advice is still “allowable”, but Idk. I think this post could’ve stuck to the 60% of the topic that was a slam-dunk instead of trying to take on the entire topic of design principles.

After all, I think you could argue that when experienced designers appear to contradict design principles, it’s because they understand the underlying logic of the principles and are recontextualizing them for this specific problem. That argument prioritizes concreteness but also doesn’t paint design principles as unimportant.

As Picasso or someone once said: first you must learn the rules, and then you must break them.

Make computers do stuff for what purpose?

I joke to my family that I just name things for a living. When you take away all the incidental stuff like files and pointers and ports, that’s really all it is. “This sequence of events with these properties is called <this>, and when you ask our system what to do about it, it does this other sequence of events with these properties which we call <this other name>.”

It’s kinda like those ancient stone tablets that are the first example of writing, and they’re just like “Ramses owes Jeremiah 5 chickens” or whatever. It’s just how we manage abstract concepts moving around our civilization. Yeah there’s math involved, but every endpoint is a human being in one way or another.

Yeah…

Human mistakes tend to 1) look like mistakes, and 2) are surrounded by lots of hints that the author had trouble with that section of code.

AI mistakes tend to 1) look like regular code, and 2) look just as confident and effort-ful as the rest of the code.

Tech bosses have well and truly lost it.

Consider that:

• Code is primarily to communicate from human-to-human, and only incidentally for computers to execute
• A codebase that is 30+ years old has an absolute shitload of learnings incorporated into it, much of it very subtle
• Languages are, in fact, different. So some things cannot be directly translated with exactly the same semantics, so devs will need to fully understand the intent and resolve ambiguities
• A million lines per month is a lot of text for someone to successfully interpret and translate without losing any subtleties

Why?

The language itself is… fine. It has some bad decisions baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And it has a pretty mature security model, which is a big help for embedded devices.

And given that so many embedded devices these days are talking to cloud services — that are probably running JS, but are at least communicating via JSON — being able to share some cross-platform code or tooling can help things go quicker and/or safer.

Edit: This is probably not a route for teams that are chronically tight on memory and choose to solve that by spending hundreds of dev-hours on optimizing code rather than adding BOM cost. But for teams that could stand to increase BOM cost as long as the savings on dev-hours make up for it… it could be an option.

shocked pikachu face

You mean all of those ballroom donations from tech billionaires and foreign agents might not get spent on the White House???

Why would you expect that?

Molly White’s coverage:

…maintained that they were merely developing privacy-preserving software, and that they were not responsible for criminal use of the software. Prosecutors have argued that the developers actively intended the software to be used for criminal purposes, pointing to marketing aimed at “Dark/Grey Market participants” and those engaged in “Illicit activity”.

Judge Cote cited a letter to the court in which Rodriguez continued to say that he was merely motivated by a desire to protect financial privacy and not “a desire to facilitate criminal activity” as evidence that Rodriguez “has not come to terms with what he did. … The letter indicated to me that you were very much still operating in a world with moral blinders on.”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-96/#samourai-wallet

Doing the O last cuz the dementia got im for just a second.

“Fuck the C_ps… What was it? Caps? Cups?”

Ethel: “COPS”

“WHERE?!”

Eh, it’s fine. It has some bad choices baked into it, but what language doesn’t? And JS in 2025 is miles better than JS in 2005.

I wouldn’t choose it for every project, but it’s a reasonable choice in many cases.