I also worry that the whole idea will die before it had a chance to truly blossom. It's really amazing as is and with higher resolution and better field of view it could be on another level altogether. I hope that Valve will keep the tocrch and I plan to get their VR glasses to support the industry.
My own view is that the bigger long-term opportunity is actually Windows, simply because more desktop software and more professional workflows still live there. macOS-first here is mostly an implementation / iteration choice, not the thesis.
That's mostly because Mac OS users make tools that solve their problems and Linux users go online to complain that no one has solved their problem but that if they did they'd want it to be free.
Listen; we're not in a "Windows vs MacOS vs Linux user" meme. We're trying to have intelligent discussion here, and surely generalizing a large amount of people simply because they use one OS is not intelligent discussion.
Wake up. Real life is not what you see in funny memes.
I agree with the sentiment but want to point out that the biggest drive behind UML was the enrichment of Rational Software and its founders. I doubt anyone ever succeeded in implementing anything useful with Rational Rose. But the Rational guys did have a phenomenal exit and that's probably the biggest success story of UML.
I'm being slightly facetious of course, I still use sequence diagrams and find them useful. The rest of its legacy though, not so much.
Which in turn were only invented because millennials would not be caught dead writing Java and JSP. We had all this shit figured out by the late nineties and 90% of what is accomplished on the web today was entirely possible and well integrated in Java app servers.
This whole business is a fashion industry.
I'm for one grateful for LLMs because for the first time in around 30 years there is actually genuine novelty to explore in software engineering. Ruby and nodejs weren't it.
Indeed, as someone confortably on Java/.NET ecosystem, I only put up with stuff like Next.js, because it has become a required skill in the headless SaaS products space.
Thanks to Vercel partnerships, many of those SaaS vendors only support Next.js as extension/integration technology on their SDKs.
MVC really changed web dev for the better, and Django/Rails trail-blazed it. It's one of the few paradigms I've seen in my career that was an unequivocal win for us.
We were already doing MVC in products like the one sold by Altitude Software in Portugal, in a Tcl based platform that was inspired on Vignette and AOLServer.
The authors of said product eventually went on to create OutSystems, one of the very few RAD products to do Delphi/VB like application servers with graphical tooling.
It was no need for Django/Rails trail-blaze anything other than not everyone has Silicon Valey visibilty to push their ideas.
I was looking for a similar produc/project the other day. Alas my need is a Linux native version. You may want to consider it as Mac seems to be overserved by the agent harness supply while Linux is the opposite
Than you for Tiled Words. It quickly became a morning ritual to complete the daily puzzle. I wish there were more mobile games that are not obnoxious. The idea and the execution are top notch.
My only concern is that there is a buzzing noise if the app is in the foreground and some audio is playing in the background. This is on pixel 9a
You're welcome, thanks for making it! The noise is intermittent and may simply be CPU/GPU overload and the resulting sound distortions. But it could be something else. It is quite reproducible on my phone.
For those who already read Rendezvous with Rama but need their alien aliens fix I can highly recommend "Shroud" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is a similar theme with modern writing and convincing aliens as is pretty much expected by now from Tchaikovsky.
I liked shroud a lot, but the ending felt very ungratifying. It's like Tchaikovsky wrote himself into a corner and didn't really know how to wrap it up nicely. I find this to be true of some of his other books as well.
I'll admit I'm quite anxious for Children of Strife. Children of Time is an all-time favorite, but each subsequent book in the series was a bit of a disappointment. Fingers crossed this one turns the tide
I kind of agree with you on that... and I kind of understand why.
The first book was an exploration of humanity in the stars. While there was contact, it had more the traditional science fiction footing that we're familiar with.
The second book was getting into the exploration of the mind and other minds. While the first book touched on the mind - with spiders being more relatable to how we think... the 2nd book presented us with something more alien in how the octopus thinks... and something even more alien.
The third book was downright confusing until the end and was more of a philosophy book about the mind. Can one mind be in two bodies? What entails thought? What is identity? ... and for that matter, what is reality?
The 2nd and 3rd books are good (and interesting) science fiction, but they go much deeper into exploring philosophy than many other science fiction books and use the scaffold of the universe to explore the mind rather than technological advancement. The upgrade of technology and how that changes things isn't the focus of the story - as one would expect in more traditional science fiction, but rather an exploration of a new mind. That change in the expectation from the first to the second (and third) book has some wish for more of that first book with the challenges of humans (as we can understand them).
Book 1 is a first contact story with survival. Book 2 is a psychological mystery about alien cognition (and a bit of horror to it too - "we're going on an adventure" gives me shivers). Book 3 is much more of a puzzle around unreliable narration and reality.
For me, I enjoyed the first book. I was confused by the 2nd book because of the change in the "it's not about the technology and survival anymore...". The 3rd book confused me on the first pass through it. The second time going through it and understanding where things were leading and being able to pick out the changes made more sense... even though I was expecting a book about the mind rather than science (the first pass through I thought it was more about the crow's minds).
For me, not so much a decrease in quality but more of an evolution as the landscape of sentient beings expands. The paired covids in the last book, were a great addition.
Don’t normally buy a hard cover or kindle (I like the paperback) but I may do that for book 4 “Children of Strife”
Agreed, the first one is a masterpiece and every sequel feels like a step down. It's a real pity because we do need more good SF writers, there are already too few of them.
Yes, The Architects books were pretty great but they had very classic soap opera kind of vibe than hardcore science fiction. I did enjoy them nonetheless.
Tchaikovsky has written some of the best books I have ever read like Children of Time and Children of Ruin and also some of the worst books I have ever read like Cage of Souls.
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