Given the contemporary examples, they weren’t wrong to think so. Everyone was trying to make a console in the 16/32-bit era.

• PC Engine/Turbografx
• Phillips CD-i (only sorta a console)
• Atari Jaguar
• Neo Geo
• Amiga CD

Some of these are better than others–I’m fond of the PC Engine–but none can be called successful. Neo Geo is somewhat of an exception because it was used as arcade hardware. Some others here are the butt of jokes. There’s also a bunch of Japanese consoles around this time that go nowhere, and are little more than fodder for retro gaming YouTube channels.

Sony took a big gamble and won.

When I was a kid, Dave Berry had a column where he made fun of the US Strategic Helium Reserve. This taught me an important lesson: when people make fun of what seems like government waste, 75% of the time it turns out to be really important. Not always, but you should look into it more.

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Next, you’ll be telling me synthetic motor oil isn’t synthetic.

What if it’s very hard light?

PHP extension might be telling. Consider that phpBB had an extention system that didn’t have any kind of hooks. All extensions were installed by modifying the code in place. They did not use any of the diff formats already out there; in a gross case of Not Invented Here, they made their own. Took them a while to make their own patch tool to automatically apply their custom diff, and it was buggy as hell.

So that shop might have just been following the lead of one of the most successful PHP apps.

Someone will be along to say “PHP is good now, actually”, but I don’t care. The community was shit back then, and I don’t see why anyone should care beyond legacy software at this point.

Fantasy evolved out of folk tales in the public domain. It was owned by nobody, and everyone could add to the story. It’d be accepted if people thought the story was good enough. Later, new stories were under copyright, but their heritage was clearly public.

SF grew up when a strong copyright regime was already in place. It was owned by either a single person or a corporation, and only they had the legal right to declare what was canon or not.

And I feel like half of that 20 years was based on FOMO. “I better get the next Assassin’s Creed or I’ll miss out”, and then it’s all the same crap but they still sold a million of them. People do eventually wise up to FOMO.

. . . our goal is not to push any specific agenda

This is the part they’re actually getting at. Not that the fundamental game design is for everyone (which, yes, is what they try and fail at), but rather they’re responding to people who think they’re failing because they put a woman as the protagonist in some game or another.

Languages don’t die. They have long tails.

That’s a very narrow view of programming.

Guys, I think Marx might have been onto something with the theory of alienation.

I’m not sure it is. Like, yes, it does exist in the Left/Right, Auth/Lib political compass, but that’s just a model. The stance has some inherent contradictions.

And so does Right/Lib, for that matter. “Fiscally conservative/socially liberal” is a nonsense position, and those taking it tend to just be conservative in practice.

BufferedReader cannot accept file name because it makes arbitrary reader… well buffered. It’s not BufferedFileReader, even that would accept something like Path or File, not string, because File can be remote file, should Reader now know all possible local and remote protocols and path formats? What else it must do?

You’re just describing the problem. Yes, I see where they’re going with this. It’s still a usability nightmare. I can’t think of another language that makes you jump through hoops like this on IO, and they get along fine without it.

Eh, I’d still go for it. I find the Rust compiler tends to amplify my impostor syndrome–it tells you all the ways you are objectively being stupid. I know that’s not really selling it, but it’s doing that stuff for a reason. I’m especially hopeful that it becomes the standard way to do things with microcontrollers; that’s about the only place I write C/C++ at all.

There was a Wisconsin retail chain, Shopko, that fell to this, too. They bought the company, then took out loans against all the properties. Those loans were paid out as bonuses to the board, but the company had to pay the bill.

Then they minimally staffed the stores. One person handling registers, one or two behind the customer service counter, and one or two people on the floor to handle stocking and helping customers. If you needed help, you could easily be waiting around 15 minutes for anyone to come. This for a store that, while not as big as a Super Walmart, is around the size of a regular Walmart.

During the inevitable bankruptcy, it was revealed that the money taken at the register for state sales taxes was pocketed by the company rather than paid to the state.

All under the guise of “brick and mortar can’t compete with Amazon”. Competition was not the problem. Shopko was murdered by its own board of directors.

Years ago, I had a friend who worked at Best Buy and was fired (he’s a nice guy, but lazy, so I’m not surprised). He then went to work to work at Circuit City. He found out that most everyone who worked there was also fired from Best Buy.

To me, this explains a lot.

Progressive at first, but then sorta forgot about it.

At the start, women were given rights that suffragists in the UK or USA could only dream of. Then it stopped. By the 1960s, women in the USSR found that they were still expected to do all the same old household chores while also holding a job outside the home. Meanwhile, western feminism had developed a strong second wave, and later a third (arguably more since, but that gets complicated). Those waves dealt with increasingly abstract issues in the patriarchy, including the problem of household chores.

This simply didn’t happen in the USSR. Developing one would have required greater freedom of speech than anyone had in that country.

It’s slightly less close to the metal as C. Array bounds checks are always going to cost you something, for example. However, if you look at the speed of numeric computation in C, Rust, and Go, they’re all in the same order of magnitude performance compared to things like Python or JavaScript (not including things like PyPi, which is C with extra steps).

Baroque? Because he does actually say that.