Every military action will have an on-paper "justification". It's kind of irrelevant frankly. But to cut bullshit, it really isn't that complicated.

Venezuela is an extremely oil rich country. Countries in the middle-east region, including Iran are very oil rich.

And that's in large part why US (by this point firmly decaying petrostate propped by petrodollar) is constantly there "meddling" and ensuring all the oil is continuously bought using US dollars.

That is wholly sufficient to explain things.

Every other cartoonish-evil justification "Iran wants to build nukes to bomb US, etc" is largely bullshit (why, for example, Iran doesn't want to nuke.... say Germany or France? hmmm.....)

The reality is that chinese goverment is - overall - delivering results. People will accept things that bring good outcomes.

There's also upsides from the surveilence and the way things are done in China which makes it way more resilient from outside influence and disruptive bad actors.

Now I don't want the same things in my country, but it suits China to some extent.

Now I've come to realize the error in my ways, this is probably not going to happen. What will happen is instead is that the ones doing the "shuffling of shit" is just going to also be agents themselves. Prompted by a more senior slop-grammer specialized in orchestrating "shuffling of shit".

Lets say you had a device that could accurately quantify and measure how much pain/suffering and joy/pleasure you experience.

Lets say that number comes out to 70% pain&suffering and 30% joy.

Is life mostly good?

Lets say 70% of people say that the ratio sucks, and 30% of people says it is a good thing. After a couple of generations, the only people that exist are mainly the ones that think 70 units of pain vs 30 units of joy is "good life" and continue procreating producing offspring that are selected for the same qualitites.

Lets say environment changes, and life is 90 units of pain vs 10 units of joy. Given some time, the only people that exist think this life is a "good thing". They still feel pain mind you, but think the trade-off is worth it.

If you don't think the trade-off is worth it, you get selected out of the gene pool.

Now you can take this thought experiment to extremes, 9999 units of pain and 1 unit of joy, etc. This life would also end up being a "good thing", because natural selection optimizes for procreation and survival, and not for "quality of life", "joy/enjoyement", etc.

70% pain and 30% joy is derived 5 workdays and 2 days of rest, as a starting point.

I'm afraid there isn't any thinking involved in any of this, it's just hard survival instincts selected by natural selection. The people that think that having children now (for whatever reasons) isn't a good idea wont exist anymore, and only people that "think" it is a good idea and end up doing it. This isn't based on objective measurement of pain/pleasure (it's almost irrelevant).

That's still a high fertility rate for a country with stats like this: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/bangladesh.html

> 25.1% of children under five are stunted, 10.7% of children under five are wasted

And the country had even higher fertility rates when it had higher frequency of famines, and much higher rates of hunger and malnourishment.

The point i was making however, is that parents don't truly - at a deeper level - consider the quality of life they are subjecting their child to.

Natural selection doesn't maximize for quality of life (it doesn't care for it), it selects for procreation and survival.

The good part is spawning another entity which has to slog through mindless work and consumption cycle, (experience the misery of aging, wither and die) - just so you can feel good about yourself?

You acknowledge the stats about mental health and loneliness and how prevalent that is, and yet you will roll a dice on (other persons behalf) with glee - with high odds of subjecting your child to it.

Natural selection truly is a sight to behold, where peoples brains get disabled and they lose their ability to think when it comes to procreation, because those that do think get selected out of the gene pool.

It truly is beautiful.

Parents have never truly cared whether or not their children will have "good lives", certainly not in any - "i'll sit down and analyze carefully if my offspring will have a good time" type of way.

Child mortality rate used to be something like 50% in past.

People still have insane fertility rates in complete - objectively shitholes - like Bangladesh, etc.

That's simply not how the world works, that's not how natural selection works.

The problem is that you (and most people frankly) look at the "fertility problem" within their very limited 1-human lifespan. However, if you zoom out a bit, the fertility problem disappears, not only does it disappear completely - the problem will disappear regardless if circumstances get better or if they get way worse.

The mothers (and fathers) that don't have children because they think the "world as it is right now is a bad place", will simply get selected out.

Caring about whether your children will have "a good life" to a point of not having any is simply maladaptive from natural selection POV and it will sort it out very quickly. It's just a 1-gen outlier.

1. Less stress, better rest from better living conditions, that are quiet and have superb clean air and delegating stressful things to others

2. Waay better food

3. Comfortable stress-free vacations

4. Personal trainers, personal massages, spas, you name it

Etc, etc, etc.

If you have the wealth, but don't use it, you won't benefit from it. No shot!

It's very easy to use it as a generic bitmap display, there's nothing awkward about packing 8pixels into 1 byte, and you can set the addressing mode (horizontal/vertial) to whatever you want, etc.

There's quite a few ways to do this, you can do a DMA transfer per horizontal/vertical screen line (not enough memory for a fullscreen buffer, but usually enough memory for 2 fullscreen lines), with an interrupt which fills in the next line to be transfered, etc.

> displays are rarely more than 8 bit

Backing memory in these color TFT SPI displays is often 18bits per pixel, often transfered as RGB565 (2bytes) per pixel.

For SSD1306 its 1bit per pixel, and even the weakest MCUs usually have enough memory for a second buffer.

All this is completely ass-backwards thinking though. The crucial question is - does the end-user/customer want to see smooth lines or prefers "hacker-man" TUI aesthetics.

I'd say you generally speaking users want normal smooth lines graph instead of hackerman aesthetics.

So preferring implementation simplicity (TUI) might be another case where substandard programmers prioritize their convenience over the end-user needs/preferences.

So in order to draw a line, you will - objectively - have to copy/move more bytes if you approximate line with character symbols.

This isn't a big deal, but crazy efficient it is not.

All the efficiency when drawing on those screens mostly relies on how well you chain together DMA transfers to portions of the screen you want stuff to be drawn to, so that SPI transfers aren't blocking the CPU (that's assuming you don't have memory for a second full-screen buffer).

I have some old borderline senile relatives writting apps (asking LLMs to write for it them) for their own personal use. Stuff they surely haven't done on their own (or had the energy to do). Their extent of programming background - shitty VBScript macros for excel.

It also helps people to pick up programming and helps with the initial push of getting started. Getting over the initial hump, getting something on the screen so to speak.

Most things people want from their computers are simple shit that LLMs usually manage quite well.

Good question whether or not this (outsourcing their thinking) actually just accelerates their senility or not.

As someone who likes to solve hard or interesting technical problems, I've long before LLMs often been disappointed that most of the time what people want from programmers is simple stupid shit (ie. stuff i dont find interesting to work on).

I love how you one hand acknowledge your severe lack of ability and achievement. And yet at the same breath you confidently put forward to know better - than JBlow no less - what the game-dev-industry or world at large needs. Or that you'd even have the ability to gauge evidence for it(or lack of it).

What evidence would even qualify as proof that game-development-industry (or world at large) requires a new programming language?

What is the exact threshold of "suck" that you have to cross before you go "yup, we need something different"? Does such threshold even exist?

And how do you measure it?

> There are a lot of musicians and actors more influential than JBlow, does that mean I won't be a fool if I listen to their opinions on anything more important than what to eat for breakfast?

Is John Blow making bold opinionated statements about fine-dining or something? No? Then what are you even talking about?

Why are you constantly making shit up to discredit the guy?

This is NOT rational behavior, its some sort of ego defense: "like how dare he say bad things about C++, who does he think he is (just some one hit wonder game-designer, just got lucky!)? He has no idea what he's talking about!"

Except, he making statements about a language that he has used extensively for more than 25years at this point. And used it to ship large, intricate, largely succesfull hit-games all with their own engines where he has done bulk of the programming work.

That is to say, you can HARDLY find anyone more competent and suited to comment on deficiencies and shortcomings of C++, and how to improve them and fix them.

Now, just because he makes astute observations about various defects in C++ doesn't make him special, after all C++ is extremely badly designed mess, and it is very easy to do so, and thousands of people have done so.

What makes him special - is that he - has mostly delivered on this (stretching himself thin in the process), whilst also making a large game at the same time. This is very rare and exceptional.

> metaprogramming with #run is cool, I'm also fed up with cmake. But surely we don't need to throw away all of our C++ tooling for that? Nah, we probably need something more incremental.

Who is this council of "we" you're refering to? A council of average Joeys that haven't shipped anything of note and is more concerned with whats "cool"?

You have roughly zero idea what the actual painpoints of making and shipping large games are. His latest game does full rebuilds in 2 seconds, so he can iterate and make changes quickly.

There are no "incremental improvements" that can be done to C++ to suddenly make builds not take MULTIPLE MINUTES.

> JBlow is an entertainer, first and foremost.

This is what you have got wrong, JBlow is an exceptional programmer first and foremost, who also happens to be a pretty good at thoughtful gamedesign, and pretty good at doing public speaking, among other things.

> a notable part of the success of Braid was thanks to a contract with Xbox Live Arcade

Notable part of success is that he made Braid interesting enough to win "innovation in game design" at IGF. Winning IGF ment he got contract with XLA (interested in making money and promoting platform) This is a deterministic process, there's no dice rolls or lottery draws involved here. If you're exceptional and you make exceptional things you succeed sooner or later, statistically speaking.

The whole thought process that if you spawned another much younger JBlow in 2026, he would be attempting to make another verbatim Braid, instead of something completely different - way more attuned to current market conditions is not very bright. He (the young JBlow clone) might not even choose to do games in these market conditions, he might chose to do exceptional, highly influential work in a completely different domain.

What however is highly likely is that he'd be highly, highly successful at whatever it is. Because highly exceptional hardworking people just succeed (unless they are born in Mumbai or Karachi)

I mean, if you're born as an average Joey, instead of being born exceptional, it is _luck_. After all, who would choose to be average when they can be exceptional and bright?

But it is important to acknowledge at which point luck materializes. And the lucky event wasn't XLA at 2008, the lucky event is beign born exceptional.

Most people would call being born rich a luxury. And not - being born exceptional and applying the said talent and hard work to ever more ambitious projects.

> Even John Carmack didn't really succeed in rockets.

He was very successful at engineering aspects of rocketry considering his very small and completely self funded budget. Just not comfortable burning 1mil of his personal funds / retirment money per year (that was still considerable money to burn out of personal stash in 2007/2008)

This is a very bad example you're using here.

Translation: Could Korean government win a power struggle against Chinese government

I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.

For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.

I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.

Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.

He made two hit games, Witness was released 7.5 years later.

> Within a week of release, Blow stated that sales of The Witness had nearly outpaced what Braid had done during its first year of release.

> The Witness is widely regarded as one of the best games of the 2010s. The game appeared on 'Best of the decade' features from IGN,[103] Polygon,[104] NME,[105] CNET,[106] and National Post.[107] Edge considered the game the 22nd-best game of all time in 2017

Calling him "one-hit wonder" simply has no basis in reality. He's at minimum a two-hit wonder.

> it was most likely not as groundbreaking as Braid, considering that he chose Braid instead of The Witness for a remaster.

Now you're making shit up on the spot to make an argument. Think for a second will you, how exactly would he remaster Witness? Braid Anniversary Edition was announced on 2020, at which point Witness would merely have been ~4 year old game.

Braid was also made for a 720p console, the Xbox360 Xbox Live Arcade service, so remake atleast makes some sense.

> The question I'm interested in is: why would anyone listen to what the man _says_ if his own preaching makes him lose money?

What exactly is he _preaching_? Not what you have cooked up in your mind, but actually _preaching_?

Why would anyone pay attention to the man who has made TWO hit games in a row, and a third one in his own programming language (that has inspired countless other programming languages like Zig and Odin), yes, why indeed people would listen to an exceptional guy who has repeatedly demonstrated competency and delivered results, whilst always putting it all on the line?

Can you make atleast one hit, not two, just one? Or anything of note?

No you can't, you can do nothing, that's why you don't have the "luxuries" and people don't listen to you, but pay attention to him. You might not like it, but it is what it is.

And you like to comfort yourself with the thought that you don't have some sort of unearned "luxuries", because otherwise you would do great things.

But the reality is that he's exceptional and you're not.

Paul Graham has this wonderful article on this topic: https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence. And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away, because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection" that you so sorely lack.

Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.

There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.

Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.

>I don't care about the man's personality or whatever qualities he has.

The only thing I'm addressing is the so called "luxuries" you alluded to, and the alleged "luxuries" he has is directly a result of his personality and his qualities.

The only reason you don't have those so called "luxuries" is because you're not even in the same ballpark as good. It really is as simple as that.

> By providing a result in a way that will be superior to the current status quo.

But he's done exactly that.

> I look at what he does, and so far, he spent 10 years making a game that you yourself admit won't be even that good.

I'm not saying that the game won't be good necessarily, I'm saying the game probably might not sell very well (atleast not to justify the amount of money spent from purely business perspective, etc)

There's a difference.