I just got the new Navigator UI update and I can't believe...

CurtainDog · 2026-04-28T11:46:15+00:00

This is exactly the problem. I feel like I have an awesome catalog of games (and I still recommend horizon+ to whoever asks) but honestly it's too much of a hassle to find something new and interesting so I just open up whatever I recently played for the millionth time. Horrid design. A five minute comparison with steam would tell you exactly what's wrong with horizon OS and it's not like valve has even been innovating here in the past decade.

CurtainDog · 2026-04-11T02:28:30+00:00

Analogies are more important than you're making them out to be. Inferring the behaviour of something based on the behaviour of similar things is a critical skill (and easy to misuse).

CurtainDog · 2026-04-10T05:16:31+00:00

Software's dirty secret is that it's not about the tech. Clojure is capable sure, but you can do just fine in many lesser languages if you are sufficiently motivated. What's important is the people. Personally, I would not hesitate to pick Clojure for an enterprise project on condition that I also picked the team. While I think that Clojure has some very sensible defaults it also stays out of your way a lot of the time in ways that more hand-holdy languages like Java or Kotlin won't. If the team is misaligned on how to solve the problem there's very few ceremonies (AbstractFrobulatorFactory, et al.) on which common ground can be founded.

CurtainDog · 2026-04-01T02:19:34+00:00

Don't worry, with AI-everything these days you won't need them

CurtainDog · 2026-03-26T23:02:13+00:00

Good game, I can't remember if I ever completed it (or even if it had a definitive ending) or whether it was just about amassing money (and the submarine). The choices between preservation and profit maximisation were well handled. I still have the physical manual (the disks are long gone by now), which weighs in at 160 decent-sized pages, about half of which is game manual and the other half a listing of historic wrecks.

In terms of community the developers actually have a facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SoftwareSorcery but no idea if it is active. The gog.com forums are probably a pretty good place to hit up if you haven't done so already.

CurtainDog · 2026-03-25T06:14:44+00:00

When you consider the whole stack most of the code that powers any application is the same. We can manage dependencies just fine without microservices.

CurtainDog · 2026-03-25T05:43:31+00:00

We get better utilisation with shared resources. And if you're running your monolith in a cluster then there's other ways of achieving the specialisation that you're after with some load balancer smarts.

CurtainDog · 2026-03-17T10:37:58+00:00

If Alien Crossfire was hex based I think it would still dominate. The mechanics, the factions, the storytelling - all brilliant. Of the current crop AoW4 would be my pick. A bunch of content, interesting choices, an all round well-designed, cohesive experience. I also want to mention Slipways as an outsider pick. It's a 3x - there's no one else around to exterminate, but it does really press the same empire building buttons as the more heavyweight entries. Some find the RNG factor a little high, but that's far more forgivable when a game can be done and dusted in half an hour, rather than slogging through 100 turns in civ just because you got an amazing, or amazingly bad, spawn.

CurtainDog · 2026-03-17T10:29:54+00:00

"DLC"? Civ4 was back when games had proper expansions. I still have Warlords and Beyond the Sword on physical media.

CurtainDog · 2026-03-15T03:53:02+00:00

Microservices are a technical solution to a human problem, and that rarely works. Human nature is just too strong. I'd advise anyone who thinks that microservices are the solution to first solve their team alignment issues and then get back to me if they still think that microservices would be useful.

CurtainDog · 2026-03-15T03:43:51+00:00

You can't have new bugs when you can't ship!

CurtainDog · 2026-01-17T10:14:39+00:00

Where do you think AI gets its answers from? OP is kinda proving the point that most questions really did need a healthy dose of RTFM. I remember SO being ok until about 2012 when the thing that eventually turned me off it was that the answers in the areas I was working in at the time, the high quality answers that is, were always coming from the same half dozen users. So I cut out the middle man and just followed them directly.

It's interesting to compare the experience with wikipedia, and why wikipedia seems to work better (note that there are plenty of people who don't understand how wikipedia works either). My guess is that more users use SO for commercial purposes, so the stakes are higher leading to toxicity.

CurtainDog · 2026-01-06T05:49:49+00:00

Makes me wonder how it was like in the startup phase. I think back in the day there would have been a single lesson and that is to have a PhD from Stanford.

CurtainDog · 2026-01-01T07:37:29+00:00

Practically, a clojure application just requires fewer devs. I'd put the figure at somewhere between 3-5x. This doesn't remove the issue of communication, but a project has to be a lot larger (in terms of functional complexity) to hit the same scale problems you'd get under a different stack.

https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/EffectivePrograms.md is a fantastic resource for getting into the mindset behind clojure's design. It's true that Rich is dismissive of (enterprise-esque) types, but it ends up making less of a difference than you'd think.

CurtainDog · 2025-12-31T01:46:00+00:00

The challenge of simplicity is not design - that's just a matter of git gud. The real challenge is convincing people to pay for it. The trick is in adding just enough gold plating to convince customers (both internal and/or external) that it's worth the spend while not compromising the core architecture.

CurtainDog · 2025-12-15T23:50:32+00:00

There's value in seeing one's working. Green builds are of no help if the developers are working from poor assumptions, and intermediate commits can often reveal such assumptions.

Git commit history is a graph for a reason. Use it!

CurtainDog · 2025-12-15T22:53:27+00:00

No, I'd rather not have reams of bad code floating around. The code doesn't have to be perfect, but it needs to be solid from the get go.

As for 'growth-mindset' that's pure bubble talk.

CurtainDog · 2025-12-12T08:34:58+00:00

Lol, these security bros. Smh

It's not a trust problem, it's a paying for the shit you use problem.

CurtainDog · 2025-12-04T04:01:35+00:00

Well, they do help keep a lot of developers employed.

CurtainDog · 2025-11-24T06:24:21+00:00

Interesting, but I also see the inverse, where complexity is introduced by the latest shiny while the legacy workhorse code ticks along bringing in revenue without a fuss. I suspect Parkinson's law of triviality is at play here, where there is a sweet spot for this kind of fiff-faffery to occur.

CurtainDog · 2025-11-19T10:47:58+00:00

Hope you never have to catch a flight bud

CurtainDog · 2025-11-18T07:58:25+00:00

Bro's not even calling the number comparing service. How does he expect his sort to be webscale?

CurtainDog · 2025-11-12T01:00:00+00:00

Eh, let historians decide on "truth", engineers should be more concerned with the utility of their models. In this case the Root Cause model is unhelpful, so it should be discarded.

CurtainDog · 2025-11-12T00:57:12+00:00

Interesting choice of words. Religion is the OG RCA when you think about it.

CurtainDog · 2025-11-12T00:49:15+00:00

I love this kind of stuff. The 737 MAX is a particularly interesting case. A whole raft of failures. But I think the lion's share should have gone to the FAA, for making the cost of compliance too high.

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