8 ms·

Its just fun. "Okay wth, today we're going to make the entire base solar powered" When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that

by Taek 2y ago

Its just fun. "Okay wth, today we're going to make the entire base solar powered" When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. But in Factorio? Nobody is using it so sure, make it bizzare. Change the rules, let yourself go. Don't test the design just send it. Bored? Too challenging? Don't bother finishing the design do something else.

dartos 2y ago
> When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. This makes me sad. You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.
- serf 2y ago
  >This makes me sad. I gotta say, I think I agree. Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck. It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema. tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun. (p.s. I love factorio now too)
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Bring back counterculture hackers
    - tux3 2y ago
      What do you mean, back! There's more than ever! We're overflowing with talented peeps hacking on cool things, writing nice blogs publishing zines, and so forth and on! The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places. Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        Haha, any recommendations?
        helpfulclippy 2y ago
        See if your area has any local makerspaces/hackerspaces or regional conferences like BSides.
        dartos 2y ago
        Next to none in south Florida outside of Miami :(
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        I won't sell any area near me unfortunately.
  - gessha 2y ago
    The hacker culture is still there but hacker social media (unless carefully curated) is flooded with optimized content to the point where the cool stuff is hard to find and you only see the grifter techs.
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      Nah, they're still there, you merely have to know where to look. Most hackers I know eschew social media appearances.
      - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
        Plenty of hackers with substantial social media presences but they live in pockets that don't cross over into mainline social media too much.
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Social media popularity is pretty much an anti-signal nowadays. The more popular the closer to the average.
      - wickedsight 2y ago
        You don't even have to look per se. The YouTube aglo provides me a lot of interesting content that isn't especially high quality or production value. I do take an effort to ignore click bait as much as possible and click "don't recommend channel" for things like MKBHD and LTT, because those crowd out original content if you let them.
      - patrickk 2y ago
        There’s loads of hacker spirit still alive in the homelab and home automation space just to give one example. Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying. Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.
  - shagie 2y ago
    Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a “science cruise” timed for the launch, and the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators, and, according to Gosper, “an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks.” Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat. Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.” The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing. Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking. The world. As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses. Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition ---- Factorio is hacking again. It's kludging it together to make it work. When you read things like https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics or the JK latch and the SR latch ( https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/92tdgm/jk_latch_switch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/92tdgm/jk_latch_s... and https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#Latches https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#... ) and get into r/technicalfactorio/ it is reminiscent of HACKMEM ( https://archive.org/details/HAKMEM https://archive.org/details/HAKMEM ) written by Beeler, Gosper, and Schroeppel.
  - dpkirchner 2y ago
    > It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority. There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
    - musha68k 2y ago
      the permaculture of: patches in emails; binaries on usenet; releases / of sources on maybe less savoury personal web sites otoh lack of basically centralized source control / git / hub / lab etc would also be missed dearly depending on context: corporate polish can be fine; especially if software "is infra"; let truly (?) fun inconsequential software be messy and / or fun if sparks joy apropos permaculture: i enjoyed TIS-100 but never got interested by factorio (maybe its art?) but anyways i'd personally find it more interesting to see more declarative / triggered simulation / play out in ever interesting ways so maybe biologic systems over industry in space? maybe there exist such games already? they do in my mind at least; i should look into current simulation frameworks maybe and read up on ecology
      - dartos 2y ago
        TIS-100 was more of a puzzle game than a sandbox factory building game like factorio. TIS has a much tighter game loop with hard success metrics for each challenge. I wouldn’t really compare the two.
        musha68k 2y ago
        TIS-100 was one example of the general context of "programming in games" or "games as programming" which I've actually played and enjoyed. I get that Factorio has a different game loop and broader sandbox than TIS-100, so I can see where you're coming from. Factorio, on the outset however, hasn't quite gripped me. Again, it might be this particular one's art and overall setup, but TBH I also think that outside of constrained puzzling as you say, I'm much more inclined to work on all those little side projects desperately waiting for attention... In some ways, this reminds me of Guitar Hero and its set of games. As great as those are for getting into music, once you're already into it, it can feel like time that could have been better spent on deliberate practice or at least some good old jamming for fun. I do love games, as long as they don't take up too much time and have an ending. In an earlier life I've already burned plenty of midnight oil on similarly "open ended" play (4X and other strategy or construction games are the worst traps for me). I'd rather finish BG3 at some point - at least that one has a definitive end to the player's story and is a bit more of a change of scenery from what I do for a living (building and optimizing systems). Then again... maybe I'll finally try Satisfactory which I own through Humble Choice IIRC; or maybe I should avoid doing that at all costs for the reasons above... ;) TL;DR IT'S A TRAP
  - 7952 2y ago
    I think that culture still exists outside of official IT teams. It is just contained in python scripts, R coding, excel, PowerApps, shadow IT etc.
- slowmovintarget 2y ago
  Nods in Emacs.
- miki123211 2y ago
  Used? Certainly. Well loved? Oh boy do I disagree. I think it's an extremely powerful tool, and it's worth knowing how to wield it well, but that power comes at the expense of user friendliness, especially for junior devs who don't have an intuition of git internals and how commands map to them.
- lucb1e 2y ago
  > You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. Hear, hear. I would tell you all about the tools my household runs on but it is as you say. Still gives me a lot of satisfaction to make stuff that makes life better, and for someone more adventurous than me it might also be something you can use to try out new technologies or build something for on your CV. The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it and better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way!
  - 0points 2y ago
    It fascinates me how someone like you manage to build all these tooling to run your house, but still struggle with > need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it ^ remote access and > better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way ^ unreliable tech
    - medstrom 2y ago
      What would you do?
      - sanotehu 2y ago
        Syncthing to sync the grocery list to your phone whenever it is on the home WiFi. Any changes will be updated when you next get back home. I use this with obsidian and it's a game changer, removing need for the cloud
        lucb1e 2y ago
        > Any changes will be updated when you next get back home [...] removing need for the cloud More than one person can be in the grocery store. Syncing a file does not work because you overwrite each other's changes; this is what we started with but this is why I made (what I call) multiplayer groceries in the first place And note that I also don't need a "cloud"; it's hosted on my own system rather than someone else's
- scott_w 2y ago
  > You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. Some people, like myself, enjoy writing code but need a purpose to write code. If I don’t have a reason, or problem to solve, I can’t just sit down and start coding.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Try graphics programming. Endless fun to be had trying to recreate shaders and having cool ideas for different vfx.
    - scott_w 2y ago
      Honestly, that fits into the same boat for me. I like fixing problems for people and I’m not particularly creative in the classical sense. So messing with visual effects for the sake of it doesn’t really do it for me. Weirdly, if someone needed it for something, I’d probably pull a 60 hour shift to figure it all out ;-P
      - dartos 2y ago
        Just kind of sounds like recreational programming isn’t your thing. That’s okay too :)
  - Hugsun 2y ago
    Consider yourself lucky. I enjoy programming in itself greatly, but I don't find myself motivated by producing anything useful.
    - LaGrange 2y ago
      I mean, what is “useful” in the sense of “paying the bills” is quite different from “useful” in the sense of social utility - and what you _perceive_ as social utility is a whole other thing on top of that, that’s only _hopefully_ somewhat aligned with the actual thing. Working on something that feels like it’s only useful as a way to extract money is incredibly unrewarding in my experience, to the point of increasing my feeling of burnout.
- nicbou 2y ago
  An app can be like a home cooked meal https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
- z3phyr 2y ago
  Well loved? It runs on network effect mostly. hg is well loved but not well used.
- earnesti 2y ago
  I do not find git weird and bizarre at all. First time I hear such nonsense. Why do you feel that way?
  - thoroughburro 2y ago
    It’s amazing you haven’t heard negative criticism of Git, before! It’s widespread. https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git
    - echoangle 2y ago
      For all the peasants that don’t have a kagi subscription (like myself): https://www.google.com/search?q=criticism+of+git https://www.google.com/search?q=criticism+of+git
    - freediver 2y ago
      Or this (used share search feature in Kagi, which works for everyone) https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git&r=us&sh=-Tk-oKViOB1JgydQoFngNQ https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git&r=us&sh=-Tk-oKViO...
  - dartos 2y ago
    > I do not find git weird and bizarre at all. You probably haven’t used it enough, honestly. Rebasing, reflogs, pickaxes, 3 way merges, merge directions, the fact that merge directions are reversed during rebases, are all weird things that are pretty specific to git. At least as far as how they’re presented > First time I hear such nonsense You don’t seem to listen very closely. Linus himself recognized git’s perceived weirdness in a talk he gave about it years ago.
- rkangel 2y ago
  > Git is weird and bizarre The core of Git is incredibly simple and elegant (content addressable database). It's an amazing approach to how to represent the data that needs representing. The UI is the challenging bit, and that's because Linus just slapped something on to demonstrate it, expecting that a proper UI would be built over the plumbing he'd created.
  - dartos 2y ago
    > The UI is the challenging bit, and that's because Linus just slapped something on to demonstrate it Which makes it weird and bizarre. Especially in the context of this whole discussion. Not really sure what you’re trying to say.
- Taek 2y ago
  > You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. In Factorio, the things you make don't need to have *any* appeal. It's just fun. If you have more fun making random wonky software, that's great for you and I'm happy for you. But I personally find Factorio to be more fun than software when I'm trying to enjoy my days off. (at least, some of the time. Sometimes I have fun making software too but only if I have that 'itch'. With Factorio, it's fun even if I don't have an itch)
satvikpendem 2y ago
I don't understand, I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose, and it can still be impactful, depending on the user. It feels way more impactful than anything I can make in Factorio or similar.
- dasil003 2y ago
  Not everything is about impact.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Perhaps not, but my fun can in part be traced to impact.
    - averageRoyalty 2y ago
      Are the FPS games you play also about impact? You seem to have set yourself a different bar for 'fun' for this title (or genre?) alone.
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        Of course not. I think you misunderstand, if a game is too similar to real life, I am unsure why I should play it, whereas if it is fairly different, such as an FPS, it becomes much more fun for me. My question is primarily on the former, of why people seem to play a game that basically is like work but has no benefit for them. If it's fun for them, then that's fine, but my question more, why is it fun for them in the first place? That's really what I want to figure out.
        johannes1234321 2y ago
        It's fun to solve problems. How do I optimize this sub-factory? - That's the same fun as "how do I optimize this function" but instead of a green light from my test runner one gets a colorful display of a working factory with a visible result. The fact that I reduced memory usage of that function by 10% I don't see in that way. And probably both both are equal in benefit to humanity's progress (zero)
wiseowise 2y ago
> When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. Sue you do. And you’re not obliged to keep it in some workable form just because they use it, they can use something else.
rendall 2y ago
>When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. More counter-examples: LaTeX, vim, Regex, Blender, SAP, most Unix CLIs...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by Taek 2y ago

dartos 2y ago

> When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. This makes me sad. You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. Git is weird and bizarre (especially when initially released), but it’s used and well loved.

serf 2y ago
>This makes me sad. I gotta say, I think I agree. Maybe it's just rose-tinted-glasses, but I remember a time when software was split between "IBM-Corpo" culture, and zany SV/MIT/Caltech culture where people threw things at the wall and proceeded when stuff stuck. It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo, and everyone feels the need to be ever-productive and adhere to strict rules and schema. tl;dr : I remember when the fun Factorio game was qbasic.exe and no one blinked about it. We all had fun. (p.s. I love factorio now too)
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Bring back counterculture hackers
  - tux3 2y ago
    What do you mean, back! There's more than ever! We're overflowing with talented peeps hacking on cool things, writing nice blogs publishing zines, and so forth and on! The formerly-counterculture conventions got so cult and big they grew a counter-counterculture of smaller places. Outside the walls of the AI SaaS grind. There be life.
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      Haha, any recommendations?
      - helpfulclippy 2y ago
        See if your area has any local makerspaces/hackerspaces or regional conferences like BSides.
        dartos 2y ago
        Next to none in south Florida outside of Miami :(
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        I won't sell any area near me unfortunately.
- gessha 2y ago
  The hacker culture is still there but hacker social media (unless carefully curated) is flooded with optimized content to the point where the cool stuff is hard to find and you only see the grifter techs.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Nah, they're still there, you merely have to know where to look. Most hackers I know eschew social media appearances.
    - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
      Plenty of hackers with substantial social media presences but they live in pockets that don't cross over into mainline social media too much.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Social media popularity is pretty much an anti-signal nowadays. The more popular the closer to the average.
    - wickedsight 2y ago
      You don't even have to look per se. The YouTube aglo provides me a lot of interesting content that isn't especially high quality or production value. I do take an effort to ignore click bait as much as possible and click "don't recommend channel" for things like MKBHD and LTT, because those crowd out original content if you let them.
    - patrickk 2y ago
      There’s loads of hacker spirit still alive in the homelab and home automation space just to give one example. Having lots of fun tinkering with Proxmox, Wled, Shelly devices to manipulate electric rollers, and more. Couldn’t quite get Valetudo running on my robot vacuum (my model isn’t the easiest to hack) but the concept is so cool. Triggering automations With dirt cheap NFC tags or a cheap wireless numpad is so satisfying. Building an *arr stack is another area where there’s tons of amazing creativity online and the hacker spirit still lives on.
- shagie 2y ago
  Not long after his immersion in LIFE, Gosper himself got a glimpse of the limits of the tight circle the hackers had drawn. It happened in the man-made daylight of the 1972 Apollo 17 moon shot. He was a passenger on a special cruise to the Caribbean, a “science cruise” timed for the launch, and the boat was loaded with sci-fi writers, futurists, scientists of varying stripes, cultural commentators, and, according to Gosper, “an unbelievable quantity of just completely empty-headed cruise-niks.” Gosper was there as part of Marvin Minsky’s party. He got to engage in discussion with the likes of Norman Mailer, Katherine Anne Porter, Isaac Asimov, and Carl Sagan, who impressed Gosper with his Ping-Pong playing. For real competition, Gosper snuck in some forbidden matches with the Indonesian crewmen, who were by far the best players on the boat. Apollo 17 was to be the first manned space shot initiated at night, and the cruise boat was sitting three miles off Cape Kennedy for an advantageous view of the launch. Gosper had heard all the arguments against going to the trouble of seeing a liftoff—why not watch it on television, since you’ll be miles away from the actual launching pad? But when he saw the damn thing actually lift off, he appreciated the distance. The night had been set ablaze, and the energy peak got to his very insides. The shirt slapped on his chest, the change in his pocket jingled, and the PA system speakers broke from their brackets on the viewing stand and dangled by their power cords. The rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some flaming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare; the cruise-niks were stunned into trances by the power and glory of the sight. The Indonesian crewmen went berserk. Gosper later recalled them running around in a panic and throwing their Ping-Pong equipment overboard, “like some kind of sacrifice.” The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future—yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large—certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation—all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing. Gosper’s revelation led him to believe that the hackers could change things—just make the computers bigger, more powerful, without skimping on expense. But the problem went even deeper than that. While the mastery of the hackers had indeed made computer programming a spiritual pursuit, a magical art, and while the culture of the lab was developed to the point of a technological Walden Pond, something was essentially lacking. The world. As much as the hackers tried to make their own world on the ninth floor, it could not be done. The movement of key people was inevitable. And the harsh realities of funding hit Tech Square in the seventies: ARPA, adhering to the strict new Mansfield Amendment passed by Congress, had to ask for specific justification for many computer projects. The unlimited funds for basic research were drying up; ARPA was pushing some pet projects like speech recognition (which would have directly increased the government’s ability to mass-monitor phone conversations abroad and at home). Minsky thought the policy was a “losing” one, and distanced the AI lab from it. But there was no longer enough money to hire anyone who showed exceptional talent for hacking. And slowly, as MIT itself became more ensconced in training students for conventional computer studies, the Institute’s attitude to computer studies shifted focus somewhat. The AI lab began to look for teachers as well as researchers, and the hackers were seldom interested in the bureaucratic hassles, social demands, and lack of hands-on machine time that came with teaching courses. Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition ---- Factorio is hacking again. It's kludging it together to make it work. When you read things like https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics https://wiki.factorio.com/Balancer_mechanics or the JK latch and the SR latch ( https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/92tdgm/jk_latch_switch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/92tdgm/jk_latch_s... and https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#Latches https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook#... ) and get into r/technicalfactorio/ it is reminiscent of HACKMEM ( https://archive.org/details/HAKMEM https://archive.org/details/HAKMEM ) written by Beeler, Gosper, and Schroeppel.
- dpkirchner 2y ago
  > It kind of saddens me that it feels like it's now only IBM-Corpo I think about this whenever I see a new open source library hosted on its own domain with a polished and slick promo material. I really don't mean to throw shade at designers for making nice designs, but it just feels weird and corporate-y to me that the polish is a priority. There are, of course, open source projects that serve as a hook for selling SaaS products, which is corporate by nature and thus doesn't trigger the same feeling in me.
  - musha68k 2y ago
    the permaculture of: patches in emails; binaries on usenet; releases / of sources on maybe less savoury personal web sites otoh lack of basically centralized source control / git / hub / lab etc would also be missed dearly depending on context: corporate polish can be fine; especially if software "is infra"; let truly (?) fun inconsequential software be messy and / or fun if sparks joy apropos permaculture: i enjoyed TIS-100 but never got interested by factorio (maybe its art?) but anyways i'd personally find it more interesting to see more declarative / triggered simulation / play out in ever interesting ways so maybe biologic systems over industry in space? maybe there exist such games already? they do in my mind at least; i should look into current simulation frameworks maybe and read up on ecology
    - dartos 2y ago
      TIS-100 was more of a puzzle game than a sandbox factory building game like factorio. TIS has a much tighter game loop with hard success metrics for each challenge. I wouldn’t really compare the two.
      - musha68k 2y ago
        TIS-100 was one example of the general context of "programming in games" or "games as programming" which I've actually played and enjoyed. I get that Factorio has a different game loop and broader sandbox than TIS-100, so I can see where you're coming from. Factorio, on the outset however, hasn't quite gripped me. Again, it might be this particular one's art and overall setup, but TBH I also think that outside of constrained puzzling as you say, I'm much more inclined to work on all those little side projects desperately waiting for attention... In some ways, this reminds me of Guitar Hero and its set of games. As great as those are for getting into music, once you're already into it, it can feel like time that could have been better spent on deliberate practice or at least some good old jamming for fun. I do love games, as long as they don't take up too much time and have an ending. In an earlier life I've already burned plenty of midnight oil on similarly "open ended" play (4X and other strategy or construction games are the worst traps for me). I'd rather finish BG3 at some point - at least that one has a definitive end to the player's story and is a bit more of a change of scenery from what I do for a living (building and optimizing systems). Then again... maybe I'll finally try Satisfactory which I own through Humble Choice IIRC; or maybe I should avoid doing that at all costs for the reasons above... ;) TL;DR IT'S A TRAP
- 7952 2y ago
  I think that culture still exists outside of official IT teams. It is just contained in python scripts, R coding, excel, PowerApps, shadow IT etc.
slowmovintarget 2y ago
Nods in Emacs.
miki123211 2y ago
Used? Certainly. Well loved? Oh boy do I disagree. I think it's an extremely powerful tool, and it's worth knowing how to wield it well, but that power comes at the expense of user friendliness, especially for junior devs who don't have an intuition of git internals and how commands map to them.
lucb1e 2y ago
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. Hear, hear. I would tell you all about the tools my household runs on but it is as you say. Still gives me a lot of satisfaction to make stuff that makes life better, and for someone more adventurous than me it might also be something you can use to try out new technologies or build something for on your CV. The only downside is that internet connectivity being down means, e.g., you need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it and better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way!
- 0points 2y ago
  It fascinates me how someone like you manage to build all these tooling to run your house, but still struggle with > need to remember to load the grocery list before leaving the house that has the server in it ^ remote access and > better hope your phone doesn't decide for you that the page needs to be unloaded on the way ^ unreliable tech
  - medstrom 2y ago
    What would you do?
    - sanotehu 2y ago
      Syncthing to sync the grocery list to your phone whenever it is on the home WiFi. Any changes will be updated when you next get back home. I use this with obsidian and it's a game changer, removing need for the cloud
      - lucb1e 2y ago
        > Any changes will be updated when you next get back home [...] removing need for the cloud More than one person can be in the grocery store. Syncing a file does not work because you overwrite each other's changes; this is what we started with but this is why I made (what I call) multiplayer groceries in the first place And note that I also don't need a "cloud"; it's hosted on my own system rather than someone else's
scott_w 2y ago
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. Some people, like myself, enjoy writing code but need a purpose to write code. If I don’t have a reason, or problem to solve, I can’t just sit down and start coding.
- dartos 2y ago
  Try graphics programming. Endless fun to be had trying to recreate shaders and having cool ideas for different vfx.
  - scott_w 2y ago
    Honestly, that fits into the same boat for me. I like fixing problems for people and I’m not particularly creative in the classical sense. So messing with visual effects for the sake of it doesn’t really do it for me. Weirdly, if someone needed it for something, I’d probably pull a 60 hour shift to figure it all out ;-P
    - dartos 2y ago
      Just kind of sounds like recreational programming isn’t your thing. That’s okay too :)
- Hugsun 2y ago
  Consider yourself lucky. I enjoy programming in itself greatly, but I don't find myself motivated by producing anything useful.
  - LaGrange 2y ago
    I mean, what is “useful” in the sense of “paying the bills” is quite different from “useful” in the sense of social utility - and what you _perceive_ as social utility is a whole other thing on top of that, that’s only _hopefully_ somewhat aligned with the actual thing. Working on something that feels like it’s only useful as a way to extract money is incredibly unrewarding in my experience, to the point of increasing my feeling of burnout.
nicbou 2y ago
An app can be like a home cooked meal https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
z3phyr 2y ago
Well loved? It runs on network effect mostly. hg is well loved but not well used.
earnesti 2y ago
I do not find git weird and bizarre at all. First time I hear such nonsense. Why do you feel that way?
- thoroughburro 2y ago
  It’s amazing you haven’t heard negative criticism of Git, before! It’s widespread. https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git
  - echoangle 2y ago
    For all the peasants that don’t have a kagi subscription (like myself): https://www.google.com/search?q=criticism+of+git https://www.google.com/search?q=criticism+of+git
  - freediver 2y ago
    Or this (used share search feature in Kagi, which works for everyone) https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git&r=us&sh=-Tk-oKViOB1JgydQoFngNQ https://kagi.com/search?q=criticism+of+git&r=us&sh=-Tk-oKViO...
- dartos 2y ago
  > I do not find git weird and bizarre at all. You probably haven’t used it enough, honestly. Rebasing, reflogs, pickaxes, 3 way merges, merge directions, the fact that merge directions are reversed during rebases, are all weird things that are pretty specific to git. At least as far as how they’re presented > First time I hear such nonsense You don’t seem to listen very closely. Linus himself recognized git’s perceived weirdness in a talk he gave about it years ago.
rkangel 2y ago
> Git is weird and bizarre The core of Git is incredibly simple and elegant (content addressable database). It's an amazing approach to how to represent the data that needs representing. The UI is the challenging bit, and that's because Linus just slapped something on to demonstrate it, expecting that a proper UI would be built over the plumbing he'd created.
- dartos 2y ago
  > The UI is the challenging bit, and that's because Linus just slapped something on to demonstrate it Which makes it weird and bizarre. Especially in the context of this whole discussion. Not really sure what you’re trying to say.
Taek 2y ago
> You don’t need to make software for mass appeal. In Factorio, the things you make don't need to have *any* appeal. It's just fun. If you have more fun making random wonky software, that's great for you and I'm happy for you. But I personally find Factorio to be more fun than software when I'm trying to enjoy my days off. (at least, some of the time. Sometimes I have fun making software too but only if I have that 'itch'. With Factorio, it's fun even if I don't have an itch)

satvikpendem 2y ago

I don't understand, I can make whatever software I want, for whatever purpose, and it can still be impactful, depending on the user. It feels way more impactful than anything I can make in Factorio or similar.

dasil003 2y ago
Not everything is about impact.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Perhaps not, but my fun can in part be traced to impact.
  - averageRoyalty 2y ago
    Are the FPS games you play also about impact? You seem to have set yourself a different bar for 'fun' for this title (or genre?) alone.
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      Of course not. I think you misunderstand, if a game is too similar to real life, I am unsure why I should play it, whereas if it is fairly different, such as an FPS, it becomes much more fun for me. My question is primarily on the former, of why people seem to play a game that basically is like work but has no benefit for them. If it's fun for them, then that's fine, but my question more, why is it fun for them in the first place? That's really what I want to figure out.
      - johannes1234321 2y ago
        It's fun to solve problems. How do I optimize this sub-factory? - That's the same fun as "how do I optimize this function" but instead of a green light from my test runner one gets a colorful display of a working factory with a visible result. The fact that I reduced memory usage of that function by 10% I don't see in that way. And probably both both are equal in benefit to humanity's progress (zero)

wiseowise 2y ago

> When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. Sue you do. And you’re not obliged to keep it in some workable form just because they use it, they can use something else.

rendall 2y ago

>When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad. More counter-examples: LaTeX, vim, Regex, Blender, SAP, most Unix CLIs...

deleted 2y ago

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