I've been a fulltime Linux user for years but there are tons of excellent Windows-only apps.

Here are some that I miss: Directory Opus, ShareX, Wiztree, Everything, AltDrag, AutoHotkey, Paint.NET, irfanview, SumatraPDF. I'd add Keepass2 as well but fortunately KeepassXC is a thing.

Those are all feature-filled (in the bloat-free good way) and they've all been around for over a decade (from memory). Most are free and open source to boot.

I do not think that it's your competitors' pretty one-shotted UIs that are losing you your leads. FWIW your website:

  * Does not explain the benefits nor the feature-set of what your platform offers
  * Has a Docs page which seems to be a link to 6 sets of reference APIs (or similar) in disparate Github pages - that's worse than most open source products.
  * Uses cute animated characters which does not give off the "we are a serious enterprise and you can rely on us" vibe
  * Has a novel pricing scheme ("implements a techno-feudalist pricing model") that requires a 4 paragraph explanation and somehow tries to frame introducing additional uncertainty for potential buyers as a feature (it's a good thing that _my_ pricing tiers could be adjusted by other customers' votes!?)
  * Additionally prominently features cryptocurrency in the topnav, which is for many people a yellow or red flag (regardless of what seems to be your good intentions behind it)
 Doesn't have any demo apps I can click around in to smoke test the platform's functionality, let alone fiddle with the backend
  * Has almost zero information on basic business-y compliance-y things - no info on security, availability, SSO support, etc let alone more hardcore things like compliance standards your platform meets.

Source: working on a Noita-like so have spent a bit of time looking at prior art. Noita wiki.gg will explain a lot of it though (warning: many spoilers).

Meanwhile with Claude Code I've had to get claude to decompile the editor (extract JS from the bun executable) _twice_ to diagnose weird things like why some documented config flags were not taking effect.

Opus is great - but I'd rather use a different model than be forced back into Claude Code.

Technically it's (usually) deterministic for a given input, and you can follow various best practices to increase your odds of triggering the right optimizations.

But practically speaking "will I get the good & fast code for this formulation" is a crap shoot, and something like 99% (99.99%?) of programmers live with that. (you have guidelines and best practices you can follow, kinda like steering agents, but rarely get guarantees)

Maybe in the future the vast majority of programmers put up with a non-deterministic & variable amount of correctness in their programs, similar to how most of us put up with a (in practice) non-deterministic & variable amount of performance in our programs now?

Not sure whether you'd still be entitled to the source code under the previous license then.. can a copyright owner revoke a previously issued license to the code? Haven't heard of it, but wouldn't surprise me if it's legal.

Suspect it's because their "60 frames a second" layout logic is trying to render extremely long lines, maybe with some kind of wrapping being unnecessarily applied. Could obviously just trim the rendered output after the first, I dunno, 1000 characters in a line, but apparently nobody has had time to ask claude code to patch itself to do that.

For example, for the last 3 weeks using the sandbox on Linux will almost-always litter your repo root with a bunch of write-protected trash files[0] - there are 2 PRs open to fix it, but Anthropic employees have so far entirely ignored both the issue and the PRs.

Very frustrating, since models sometimes accidentally commit those files, so you have to add a bunch of junk to your gitignore. And with claude code being closed source and distributed as a bun standalone executable it's difficult to patch the bug yourself.

[0]: https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime/is...

That is, the main thing that makes it possible to tell LLM bots apart from humans is that lots of us have over the past 3 years become highly attuned to specific foibles and text patterns which signal LLM generated text - much like how I can tell my close friends' writing apart by their use of vocabulary, punctuation, typical conversation topics, and evidence (or lack) of knowledge in certain domains.

So yes, funding Godot is A Nice Thing To Do but it also conveniently puts a bit of pressure on Unity, their biggest competitor, without impacting their own business.

Also, if you believe Matthew Ball's take[0] then Epic is all-in on fostering as many gamedev-ish creators as it can so that it can loop them all into making content for its metaverse later. As you alluded to, in the long term funding a FOSS game engine which is focused on ease of use helps that too.

[0]: https://www.matthewball.co/all/epicgamesprimermaster

4 years ago I tackled exactly those courses (raytracer[0] first, then CPU rasterizer[1]) to learn the basics. And then, yes, I picked up a lib that's a thin wrapper around OpenGL (macroquad) and learned the basics of shaders.

So far this has been enough to build my prototype of a multiplayer Noita-like, with radiance-cascades-powered lighting. Still haven't learned Vulkan or WebGPU properly, though am now considering porting my game to the latter to get some modern niceties.

[0]: https://github.com/caspark/the-all-seeing-crab [1]: https://github.com/caspark/little-crab-tv

I have a lot of devlogs at https://www.slowrush.dev/news though at this point I am quite behind showing off the latest graphical improvements there.

Here is some more up-to-date gameplay footage: https://bsky.app/profile/slow-rush.bsky.social/post/3m523ft2...

The only major point of friction with syncthing is that you should designate one almost-always-on device as "introducer" for every single one of your devices, so that it will tell all your devices whenever it learns about a new device. Otherwise whenever you gain a device (or reinstall etc) then you have to go to N devices to add your new device there.

Oh, and you can't use syncthing to replicate things between two dirs on the same computer - which isn't a big deal for the keepass usecase and arguably is more of a rsync+cron task anyway but good to be aware of.

Here[0] is a good summary of dithering/noise to reduce color banding. Interestingly, for my game[1] I found that Valve's animated dithering technique (which uses variation over time in lieu of a fixed noise pattern) worked best, as the other techniques described there altered the perceived lightness of the resulting image.

[0]: https://blog.frost.kiwi/GLSL-noise-and-radial-gradient/

[1]: A multiplayer Noita-like (more at https://slowrush.dev), where the radiance-cascades-powered lighting tends to cause obvious banding patterns on really dark backgrounds.