That is the problem, how you get corruption to go the way you want?

Lots of politicians see Paulo Maluf, and think they can imitate him, that they will be beloved by the public and steal money somehow and line their own pockets, except those are too self-serving or too incompetent to pull that off properly, so they steal in ways that go against the public.

So for example in one city where I lived, one mayor stole the money from the kids lunch, resulting in hungry kids. Another mayor stole ludicrous amounts of money from garbage collection services, the result is that the city ended with debts in the billions while being a tiny city (it has 100k people, yet has debts bigger than cities with millions of people).

Paulo Maluf meanwhile built lots of useful infrastructure that is still in use. (also hilariously he used to brag a lot using the phrase "Maluf that did it!", one time some comedic journalists went to a bridge opening, and asked him who did the bridge, he replied: "Maluf didn't do this bridge. But he did the two roads the bridge are connecting, so there is no bridge without Maluf!")

But bafflingly to me, almost zero of my coworkers seemed to be aware of it. They would just get the seemly weird orders from above and would execute them, without figuring out the end goal, and this does result into some bad software engineering (because people don't know the end goal they don't know what they can optimize, so they just don't).

So, when I was working, I found the decisions regarding the infotainment mind boggling, to me they made zero sense, until I found some random documents deep in the BMW intranet, where I found the logic of it all: The focus was actually increasing the car range, so for example instead of having one infotainment dedicated hardware, one for the doors, one for the brakes, etc... now the cars have the least amount of computers as possible, located in the locations that result in the least wires as possible, with the goal of saving weight. Because of this, the software layer now had to deal with extra virtualizations, software that originally was to run on a specific microcontroller and do a specific task, and communicated with other parts by wire, now shares a generalized CPU with many other software, and communicate by virtual machines sending messages to each other.

Marvelous stuff from the point of mechanical engineering, indeed results in lighter car and less parts. But the end result for the user? It is mind bogglingly bad, several VMs running on top of each other, everything is slow, the Infotainment instead of being just Infotainment now do several other things.

I had written some of the surprising non-Infotainment stuff the Infotainment do, but that probably would cross into violating NDAs territory, so better not. Just let's say the Infotainment has to meet some non-entertainment related EU regulations.

For example in my neighborhood most cars are parallel parked, people are living in centuries old houses converted into high density condos, there are no garages.

So what is more practical, charging your car overnight without an electric plug or going to the gas station for a few minutes?

In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.

  Location: Porto, Portugal
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: Lua, C, C++, GameDev, Python, know some embedded and some cloud stuff.
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesigner
  Email: mauricio.gomes@coderofworlds.com

I also did DevRel in the past and recently interviewed some DevRel positions, made me realize I am also suitable for that and willing to work with that.

I have a lot of experience with iOS and Android, but been some time since I worked with these.

Google Support would call me all the time, and then first thing they would do is ask me to open the interface and repeat some code or another.

Usually it is effects involving transparency, some games for example literally rendered some things only on some frames and not the others, to achieve 50% transparency, others tried alternating scanlines, or the most crazy one: Sonic that made a transparent waterfall by relying on the fact that cables common at that time blurred pixels horizontally, thus it renders one column that is water and one column that is not, and hope they will be blurred into one single column that is 50% transparent water on top of the background.

Screenshot of the waterfall effect: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1cGAP1i_4xQ/maxresdefault.jpg

Can't be shown with a screenshot: Axelay. I never seen that game running on a real CRT to compare, but on emulators that game look horrible, with distortions and flickering things everywhere, I was told this was not the intention at all, instead they relied heavily on CRT hardware to create pseudo-3D and transparency.

One day she said there is a simple way to prove it. Certain stringed instruments have the string move on their own to the correct note if you put them near a source of similar sound. If you put these instruments in front of a speaker playing from an analog source and have the strings move, then play the exact same music but from a digital source on the same speaker, the strings stop moving, even if to most humans it sounds exactly the same.

Sadly I never had the gear to test this, I am not a professional musician and was learning from that person as a hobby (she is a teacher for professional musicians).

Then I went and played lots of recent games in lower resolution, but could turn on lots of expensive effects even with such underpowered card, because I could do low-res with anti-alias disabled and no scaling and have decent results.

But true pleasure was playing for example Crypt of Necrodancer on that screen, the game felt so easy. I eventually stopped playing after that screen died, I could never nail the timing anymore on modern screens, the response time is not the same.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45100497

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# Comments: 5

Now there is also head support, while drivers back then had to just use their muscles to hold their head in place.

The list goes on... but it still is an athletic sport. When Nico Rosberg decided to win the championship, he had to heavily change his routine to so way more fitness training than he was used to. After he won the championship and immediately retired, he hinted that one of the reasons for retirement is that he didn't want to continue with the heavy body training.

I immediately started to think: but old behavior was so simple and obvious, what is there to change? The I right clicked to check. Immediately was hit with the wtf changes. Why? Why MS?

Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.

MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.

Company was founded by "visionary" CEO that is an sculptor and doesn't understand tech.

Most crucial employee is young guy hired right out of college.

Company now has 50+ developers, but the critical software is still made by that guy several years later.

Critical guy still get recent graduate salary, notices he is actually the most important person in the company, and asks for a raise.

Company denies his raise. He quits. Company hire a bunch of developers from cheap third world countries to replace him...

Company learns: 1. All software guy made a bit before he asked for a raise was on his personal, not company github. 2. The software is in other programming languages, not the one the company uses normally. 3. Everything the guy wrote since he joined the company, is extremely difficult to maintain, guy is a genius and all his code is correct, clean and well made, but his thought patterns and how they end in the code are just too different, and all people that worked with him before also were geniuses and didn't care the code was "crazy".

Note: the "other geniuses" mentioned above, also quit when other companies made them great offer and the stingy employer refused them a raise too.

There is a quite long history of USA doing coups, sabotage, and so on, against its own "friends".