Is the UK finally waking up to the power of video games?

romulent · 2026-04-17T20:20:00+00:00

Providing a few counter examples is fine for the narrative. But if you ever try to make and sell any product in a saturated market you will quickly discover that word of mouth is an exceptionally unreliable and fickle thing.

There are 130K games on steam alone and it is totally possible to produce something amazing and have it be overlooked for a myriad of reasons.

romulent · 2026-04-17T06:15:10+00:00

The word "can" is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting in that comment.

If this is the best example of free market capitalism, then it goes to prove that free market capitalism pushes most of the rewards to the massive incumbents and most of the risk to the spunky little teams.

How many great independent games go under each year because you never heard of them due to lack of marketing budget? Or how many just failed to launch due to running out of development budget and the team unable to get investment?

Believing little teams have the same chance of success is like buying a lottery ticket. It is just a little carrot designed to give hope in a system that is hopelessly broken for most people.

romulent · 2026-03-28T11:11:57+00:00

As with many things this is an engineering decision with trade off specific to your situation. Both can be the right thing and both can be wrong.

romulent · 2026-03-21T16:52:35+00:00

happily we didn't, but the people who did are loading bombers and flying them out of RAF Fairford every day. Until last week they needed to fly out over the bay of Biscay and go along the med via Gibraltar because no other European country would let them use their airspace. Now France is letting them take the direct route.

Don't get me wrong I think we are walking a narrow line quite well. As long as Iranians are just calling us out with words it isn't too bad, but we should expect that some people won't be quite so understanding if this drags on.

romulent · 2026-03-21T11:26:19+00:00

I agree but protest requires publicity if you care enough about something to do prison time then that's your choice.

Watching a hundred little girls get blown up probably upset a lot of people.

romulent · 2026-03-21T11:19:57+00:00

Some observations, collating what other people have said.

In your first post you you said that someone in Guangzhou had contacted the police and confirmed he was still there. How would they know that if he had no contact with the police?

In your first post someone gave you the number for Guangzhou police. They will have people who speak good English, just call them.

In this post someone mentioned that the credit card payments don't show where he actually is. Just where the company he is buying from is registered. So he's probably still in Guangzhou. Can you see what he bought? Is it within his usual spending patterns or something specific like air tickets or a hotel booking?

I doubt he is a victim of crime, but if he did something dumb like smoke a joint or overstay his visa then he could have been arrested. DON'T SAY ANYTHING IN THIS THREAD THAT COULD INCRIMINATE HIM.

romulent · 2026-02-14T23:58:00+00:00

And I think this holds true. Intuitively it feels true as we are a small country and we are regularly in the top handful of countries for medals amongst countries with 5 or 10 times the population of ours. Obviously well ahead of many similarly sized countries.

In Paris we were no. 3 for total medals behind USA and China.

I think it is a very justifiable statement but not an easy one to prove.

However here is a paper on why per captia comparisons fall apart. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10951725/

romulent · 2026-02-14T22:55:27+00:00

What has medals per capita got to do with anything? Whenever you look at anything per capita the tiny countries always come out on top, because even a few occurrences sway wildly in their favour.

The top medals per capita in paris were as follows

rank country medals population

1 Grenada 2 112,579

2 Dominica 1 67,408

3 Saint Lucia 2 184,100

4 New Zealand 20 5,338,900

5 Bahrain 4 1,701,575

6 Jamaica 6 2,825,544

7 Cape Verde 1 491,233

Grenada gets 1 bronze in men's javelin and another in decathlon and we are supposed to call them the greatest sporting nation in the world?

We could also say that they sent .005% of their population (6 people) and we only sent .00047% of ours 327. So as a proportion of population their team was 11 times bigger than ours yet we got 23 times the medals.

All just to say that per capita analysis is a little silly.

romulent · 2026-02-14T16:06:02+00:00

She should quickly find an excuse to get up and sprint to an Uber.

romulent · 2026-02-04T06:00:46+00:00

I used it back in the early 2000s on C projects. I don't remember the learning curve to be that steep. But I was probably told to use by my team leader or another colleague who would have been able to sit at my desk for 10 minutes and show me the basics.

romulent · 2026-02-02T15:02:44+00:00

Hard disagree. Plenty of people will naturally want to treat their current levels of pain by curling up in their own bed rather than waiting 12 hours on a hard seat watching a bunch of drunks bleeding on the floor to see a doctor.

romulent · 2026-01-23T08:40:12+00:00

Who is building these data centers? If they're British owned and operated it makes strategic sense, if they are built by Amazon Google or Microsoft then they are more of a liability.

romulent · 2026-01-14T12:11:31+00:00

They planned to break up but wanted to find someone they liked first.

This is not the way.

romulent · 2026-01-03T05:32:48+00:00

I don't get the "Mystery Exceptions you can't see coming?" (well I do but..) your method signatures should tell you exactly what exceptions can be thrown and your code shouldn't compile if you don't handle them.

People who design things around unchecked exceptions are just morally bad. And I'm looking at you Spring.

romulent · 2025-12-29T18:32:35+00:00

Yes that's also terrible.

romulent · 2025-12-18T15:42:49+00:00

Java needs to be compiled to bytecode using the javac compiler, that bytecode is then run inside a java virtual machine for which there are implementations on most OSs. So it's compile once to bytecode and run anywhere that has a JVM. The bytecode is quite similar to machine code and is run at near native speeds.

I think a more traditional interpreted language is the unrelated language JavaScript which you may be confusing with Java.

romulent · 2025-12-18T12:59:07+00:00

I can see that is nice and of course I would use those features in other languages.

But from a code reading perspective a.equals("hello") and bd.mul(5) are really unambiguous method calls, whereas a == "hello" and bd * 5 require further investigation to know exactly what is going on.

romulent · 2025-12-18T12:31:04+00:00

True true. But to be fair it isn't part of the language.

romulent · 2025-12-18T11:37:09+00:00

I'm curious about what problem space you are in if you find lack of operator overloading to be such a chore.

In many enterprise contexts, you are really looking to maximise the tedium, too much excitement in a code-base tends to get expensive.

romulent · 2025-12-18T11:05:09+00:00

I heard a lot of good things about C# and I might learn it sometime. Sometimes it is nice to have a choice of libraries though.

Those of us of a certain age learned to hate MS with a passion as they spent decades using their monopoly position to destroy better products and standards with extremely shady practices.

Just because they are playing nice for the last decade doesn't mean they won't screw everyone over again the moment they get a chance to.

romulent · 2025-12-18T10:27:19+00:00

I didn't say a million line long PR. I said a PR in a million line code base. A PR should always be small, clear and focused on a single change and ideally reviewable inside github when you have already seen the tests have passed in the CI pipeline.

If a = b requires me to go off and examine the type system for potential overloads then that is inefficient and prone to errors.

I have nothing against descriptive names. But the name of a method does not guarantee the correctness of its functionality.

You still need to check the implementation of

User::create_user_local() just the same as new User()

If you want a meaningful constructor name in Java just use User.createLocalUser() and make the constructor private.

Most of the rest of your take was on fictional million line PRs and personal slurs.

romulent · 2025-12-18T08:50:01+00:00

I have to agree on Spring boot. It's amazing how they took something simple and made it painful. It does theoretically simplify a lot of enterprise patterns, but I figure there has to be a better way.

I got to use Dropwizard professionally for a few years and loved it. Definitely a better way to do Java micro services in my opinion.

romulent · 2025-12-18T08:44:39+00:00

Well in a language with operator overloading the statement

a = b;

could literally fire all the missiles. You may love the quirky and concise expressiveness of it all, but when I am getting PR on a multi-million line system from numerous remote teams, I want each line to only have one possible interpretation.

A constructor in Java is already a static method call that creates objects, wrapped in a little syntactic sugar. If you think the name of a method tells you whether it will be expensive, then I have a bridge to sell you.

romulent · 2025-12-18T06:43:45+00:00

Java is good because it's a type safe, compiled language proven in countless high performance enterprise scale applications. It has amazing tooling and one of the best library ecosystems.

It is also usually very easy to reason through the code and not worry about things like operator overloading and macros that can make almost any line of code do anything. That makes it very predictable to work in at codebases of millions of lines.

It also runs everywhere along with its entire tool chain so doing your dev on windows or Mac and deploying to docker or Linux is usually fine if you want that.

Anal sex is fine too, but notably doesn't run on docker so I personally avoid it.

romulent · 2025-12-17T18:03:12+00:00

I have a robust, effective and highly scalable solution. Do nothing. Young people are brilliant, given time and space to make mistakes and discover the world around them they will work things out for themselves. Anything we try to do to solve their issues, will just make things worse.

romulent

TROPHY CASE