I did the first version of the matchmaking for the network play in Delta Force but didn't make it into the credits because I quit before it shipped. My psycho coworker built a custom web browser(!) that integrated directly with my from-scratch matchmaking server. At least they let me work in C for that project; most everything else I had to do for them was assembler because that was not a "sissy" programming language. That server code was by-far the coolest thing I wrote for many years afterward.

Unfortunately, my server code couldn't handle more than like 32 concurrents because the Windows NT 3.0 kernel would BSOD with more. My (extremely grumpy) manager and the Sega Saturn coder called me a few days after I had quit to ask how the code worked. I suspect I left data in the socket buffers too long (was trying to batch up my message broadcasting work at regular intervals) and the kernel panicked over that.

I recall learning later the TCP/IP stack was homegrown in NT by Microsoft at that time and they licensed a good one for later versions, so I can't be blamed, it wasn't me! :D

The reason facing east-west (or was it north-south, now I'm unsure) made such a difference in framerate was the color and height maps were ray marched in straight lines up from the bottom of the screen to the horizon. This meant you were zipping through the color map in straight lines, wrapping around to the other side if the ray went far enough.

When those straight lines lined up with the color and height map (north-south), life was good (and when a ray marched up a sheer canyon wall, life was VERY good.) But, when those straight lines went perpendicular (east-west) to the color and height map, you were blowing through the L2 cache constantly and going to main memory very often. I imagine on modern hardware these cache misses wouldn't amount to much measurable time, but on a 386dx with 8megs of RAM, the impact was very clear.

Novalogic was the only programming job I ever had where I got my own office with a door. ;) When I was with them, they had a policy of one game developer per game which I never saw again. Maximum cowboy coder energy, good times.

I watched a bit of the gitbutler video and I liked the ideas, multiple/stacked branches. It felt like a genuine/natural extension of git concepts.

Sortof like Typescript vs JavaScript, I worry that the payoff of adopting something like Gitbutler would require navigating a lot of janky integrations with the rest of my tooling and training of the team.

I myself have always resisted mastering the git command line because JetBrains' git tooling is so nice, and abstracts just the right bits that I haven't had the need. I'm not opposed to switching to command line, but that 3-way git merge tool that JetBrains has is so good and I'd hate to lose it.

Honestly, I predict the world and its networks and developers are going to start cloistering and close themselves off as the AI training panopticon is getting nasty.

It would be great for Gitbutler to abstract true decentralized version control by offering decentralized/self-hosted feature parity with GitHub and remove vendors like them from the picture. I'd pay recurring seat licenses for something turnkey that I could run privately and securely.

Many of our maps' routes would be laid out in a predominately east or west-facing track to max out our staying within cache lines as we marched our rays up the screen.

So, we needed as much main memory bandwidth as we could get. I remember experimenting with cache line warming to try to keep the memory controllers saturated with work with measurable success. But it would have been difficult in Voxel Space to predict which lines to warm (and when), so nothing came of it.

Tailslayer would have given us an edge by just splitting up the scene with multiprocessing and with a lot more RAM usage and without any other code. Alas, hardware like that was like 15 years in the future. Le sigh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel_Space

I convinced them that if they wanted to treat uncovered lines of code as tech debt, they needed to add an epic stories to their backlog to write tests. And their artificially setting some high target coverage threshold will produce garbage because developers will write do-nothing tests in order to get their work done and not trip the alarms. I argued that failing the builds on code coverage would be unfair because the tech debt created by past developers would unfairly hinder random current-day devs getting their work done.

Instead, I recommended they pick their current coverage percentage (it was < 10% at the time) and set the threshold to that simply to prevent backsliding as new code was added. Then, as their backlogged, legit tests were implemented, ratchet up the coverage threshold to the new high water mark. This meant all new code would get tests written for them.

And, instead of failing builds, I recommended email blasts to the whole team to indicate there was some recent backsliding in the testing regime and the codebase had grown without accompanying tests. It was not a huge shame event, but good a motivator to the team to keep up the quality. SonarQube was great for long-term tracking of coverage stats.

Finally, I argued the coverage tool needed to have very liberal "ignore" rules that were agreed to by all members of the team (including managers). Anything that did not represent testable logic written by the team: generated code, configurations, tests themselves, should not count against their code coverage percentages.

I'm saying you could make the same argument about useful tests themselves. What is testing that the tests are correct?

Uncle Bob would say the production code is testing the tests but only in the limited, one-time, acceptance case where the programmer who watches the test fail, implements code, and then watches it pass (in the ideal test-driven development scenario.)

But what we do all boils down to acceptance. A human user or stakeholder continues to accept the code as correct equals a job well done.

Of course, this is itself a flawed check because humans are flawed and miss things and they don't know what they want anyhow. The Agile Manifesto and Extreme Programming was all about organizing to make course corrections as cheap as possible to accommodate fickle humanity.

> Like, what are we even doing here?

What ARE we doing? A slapdash job on the whole. And, AI is just making slapdash more acceptable and accepted because it is so clever and the boards of directors are busy running this next latest craze into the dirt. "Baffle 'em with bullsh*t" works in every sector of life and lets people get away with all manner of sins.

I think what we SHOULD be doing is plying our craft. We should be using AI as a thinking tool, and not treat it like a replacement for ourselves and our thinking.

I speculate we'll discover there's very few unambiguously ethical uses of AI, much less for military applications. Them's the breaks.

Not everyone will understand the dilemma that UX designers have about surfacing their features without causing clutter and distraction, and I was trying to start a conversation about that.

Hey what's with the jerky tone? Are we competing for dominance now? Was Steve Jobs a bad guy and so I am by mentioning him? He had good taste, and people aren't one-dimensional cartoon characters, you git.

> hundreds of items

Pedantry. The ellipsis items covers some categorized feature drill downs that don't get top billing, the sub menus others.

> This isn't the only alternative

Captain Obvious does it again ladies and gentlemen!

Many managers have to show engagement with their feature to be successful and would love to shove it in your face with a shiny button. See the copilot button getting added to every Microsoft Office product even if it's not integrated at all - shameful!

> It isn't very discoverable, there is no search

Thank goodness I can save face here, 'discoverable' is a binary quality: something either is or isn't discoverable and a browsable menu IS.

Plenty of vendors put a search on their Help menu. (It usually sucks, to be fair.) Jetbrains has an auto-completing action search that exposes practically every action the IDE can effect by their titles.

Wow, search CAN help, amazing insight! Why aren't you advising diplomats and statesmen?

Of course the status.azure.com is all green right now in US East 2.

It's only interesting because of the latest update mention "rolling back the deployment", and my assumption was AI slopped a bug into production configurations or code.

If AI was to blame in this case, I just want to complain, because ADF is fubar right now.

At scale, that kind of bad engineering practice is going to get people killed and lead to lots of legal headaches and brand damage. FAFO.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47283742

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Part of the discoverability of menus is learning what actions are modal (titles have the ellipsis) and learning what hotkeys and key chords do what in the app. There's nothing faster than hotkeys. Ideally, users train themselves to use hotkeys to get work done and forego the menu except to discover additional features.

I have noticed that Mac Sequoia I'm running now has some memory as to which process last focused on each display and now is able to show a different menu per display, albeit grayed for displays where the user is not currently focused. It's a little janky, but kindof a graceful devolution of the original single menu vision.

> Apple experiments in GUI design for the Lisa project initially used multiple menu bars anchored to the bottom of windows, but this was quickly dropped in favor of the current arrangement, as it proved slower to use (in accordance with Fitts's law). The idea of separate menus in each window or document was later implemented in Windows and is the default approach in most Linux desktop environments.

I recall hearing a quote that said Jobs called the menu the ultimate discoverability tool in the designer's arsenal, but I couldn't find the quote.

I am thankful for the menu junk drawer in Firefox. Better to give me everything I can discover in a menu rather than make a zillion fugly buttons and cluttering up the chrome. Although, anything that isn't frequently used by users should at least go under a few submenus to echo OP's criticisms. If Copy Clean Link is the "right" thing to do for users, then make "Copy Raw Link" a sub-menu item.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menu_bar

There are glaring fallacies by omission in the article you hold up as proof, don't insult my intelligence.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1112950/

It never occurs to some people that systems they operate in and trust could be 1) total and 2) corrupted to some extent at every level.

Nothing I can ever say, no link nor reasoned oratory could ever change your mind because, as I said, I believe you are captured by the system. You are emotionally invested in it and you work for it for free.

To convince me, people have to work, I'm not cheap and I'm unforgiving after corruption is uncovered. Putdowns and shame have no power because power is everything, and I understand the games people play.

The money will drain away and chase the next incompatible bubble or grift like AGI. Climate alarmism will become too much work to grift off of and people on the sidelines will gradually stop worrying about it. It's a good thing.

Pollution is real - a legit problem and a worthy cause, but the anthropogenic global warming thing was always just wealth extraction by elites. They cranked up at least three generations scaring them half to death and making them crazy and depressed and now, oh ... it was nothing, we need more power for AI data centers, you can go sod off now. No one can claim otherwise: the models' predictions never panned out and the data was always cooked for $$$. The trash we sort into the blue bin goes to the same landfill as the grey bin.

Almost all the latest crazes are like that. How fast did we go from Covid-to-Ukraine-to-destroying Tesla dealerships? Just don't get cranked up, it is all intended to stun you. Live your life. Focus. The people doing this to you need you to be unproductive and vulnerable.

I said "almost all" because the wars are real. The isolation and despair brought on during Covid lockdowns was real, oxes were gored, people were emotionally stunted and scarred. Covid itself likely came out of a lab, and it seemed to be designed to kill the elders.

Regarding the real harms that happened to real people and myself, I keep them separate as lists in my mind, I try to remember to hold scoundrels accountable if I am ever personally given that honor, and I try not to go to bed angry and to forgive people.

"Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold."

To be fair, I also dislike abstract platitudes that are overly optimistic as I think you might be.

"Diversity is our strength"?? I mean, I guess diversity of _opinion_ is desirable to a point so we get all the ideas on the table. But not at the sacrifice of unity and shared goals. Unity is our strength. Discord and wasteful politicking are our undoing.

Also meta-platitude whinging like

> The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality.

Sometimes the winner deserves to win, AND that's a good thing even at scale. It kindof depends.

Beyond that, there is no consensus on any of these gobbledygook movements - all these comments up and down these threads make the implicit assumption that we all agree.