Frezik

Those games didn’t have the splash that Doom did for this sort of thing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010105180900/http://www.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/devweek_c.shtm

Mainstream application programmers switched to C in the early 80’s. Game developers were slower to switch, because their small teams and focus on performance kept assembly language viable till the following decade. When id Software released DOOM, they surprised much of the industry by having no reliance on assembly code–despite excellent game performance, and by successfully cross-developing the game (in NeXTstep and DOS), then successfully porting it to an astounding variety of platforms.

Because it’s true. Here’s an article from Tim Sweeney from 2001:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010105180900/http://www.gamespy.com/legacy/articles/devweek_c.shtm

Mainstream application programmers switched to C in the early 80’s. Game developers were slower to switch, because their small teams and focus on performance kept assembly language viable till the following decade. When id Software released DOOM, they surprised much of the industry by having no reliance on assembly code–despite excellent game performance, and by successfully cross-developing the game (in NeXTstep and DOS), then successfully porting it to an astounding variety of platforms.

Rollercoaster Tycoon was the last of an era, not a sudden burst of genius.

Before Doom (1993), almost all games were assembly. Doom was a shock to the industry. You could now write a high performance, multiplatform, sophisticated game in a compiled language ©. When I say multiplatform, I don’t just mean how it was ported to everything later. It was developed on NextStations first. DOS was the first port. So it proved all of the above immediately on release.

We take for granted that C is performant now, but that wasn’t obvious until optimizing compilers got good and someone tried.

Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999) is the last notable title that used ASM. It’s impressive in many ways, but it wasn’t as much of a standout as it seems now. Six years earlier to its release, that was just how games were done.

It’s notable that the only port of Rollercoaster Tycoon was the original Xbox, which was also x86. Nobody wants to rewrite it for anything else.

Dynamic DNS is the usual way. Your ISP assigns the IP, so they’re the only ones who can make it static.

You might be able to do it with some VPN shenanigans, but generally dynamic DNS is what you want. It’s basically a script that runs on your server that will periodically update the IP on the DNS entries.

A lack of a standing army has implications. It’s a huge drain on an economy that filters resources into tanks and guns rather than schools and healthcare. It also has ripple effects in places that aren’t strictly military.

The US massively overproduces food. The reason is that farms were heavily subsidized during WW2 in order to feed an army where every soldier would potentially need a 3000kcal diet after matching all day, every day. Those farms dropped that money into automation, and that meant they still had the capability to produce that much after the war.

Dropping farm subsidies would have meant plunging that industry back into depression. So the subsidies kept going. You could nationalize the farms, but that doesn’t happen for obvious reasons. Nobody has come up with another idea for getting out of that trap.

Contrary to what MAGA thinks, free school lunches aren’t there to support “moochers”. During the draft for WW1, 1 out of 9 draftees were rejected for reasons related to malnutrition during childhood. Those programs exist to make sure America can draw up an army. MAGA doesn’t remember that lesson and undermine their own objectives in the process.

You need to subsidize heavy industry, too. Car companies become tank companies in times of war. Therefore, you better make sure your car companies survive in “peace” time. Hence all the government financing of those companies. Chrysler (or the company owning it) has been stumbling from one financial boondoggle to the next for my whole life because of this.

Even worse, you want the tank factories to stay tank factories. Which means Congress needs to order new tanks even when they’re not needed otherwise, or else those factories close. Same goes for ships and planes.

None of which used to happen until industrialized warfare forced the issue. If Originalists want things how it was in the first few decades after the Revolution, then the military should have had its funding and staffing at anemic levels for about a decade now. Except that genuinely would be a problem in case of another big war.

A solution to this is to take our ball and go home. As long as Canada and Mexico are friendly, we face no threat on our own continent. An oversea invasion is impossible (I can go over the details of why, but it comes down to logistics). The scaffolding of an army and a navy focused on shore defense would be fine. Keep a few nukes if we really have to.

MAGA would never go for that, either. They’re isolationist in some ways, but still want a giant military for some reason.

The US didn’t have a large standing military or budget for it. This matters.

Oddly enough, this also coincides with the time when the US military was more explicitly about offence rather than defense. After the Revolution, people mistrusted the federal government having a large standing army. The army was raised up in time of war, and everyone went home when it was over.

Post-WW2 was the first time the US kept a large army in “peace”. Been that way ever since.

16M devices on one network would almost certainly have major scalability problems all its own. SMB chattiness alone . . . shudder.

In fact, it’s so standard that there’s a bunch of shitty code out there that thinks 127.0.0.1 is the only loopback address.

I’m thinking of a networked Chinese laser cutter that we put on our 10.0.0.0/16 network in the makerspace. It seems to think that 10.0.1.1 and 10.0.2.1 are on different networks. Wouldn’t be surprised if it does a similar mistake with loopback addresses.

IPv4 centralization creates far more privacy issues than everyone having a static IP. The solutions are still things like VPNs and onion routing.

Since they’re fundamentally predicting the next token, and there isn’t a lot of training data out there that would actually do this, I wouldn’t expect that LLMs are going to start putting in lookalike characters. They only lookalike to humans.

That said, you could probably poison their training datasets this way.

Simple answer is that Unicode is a design by committee attempting to make every single human written language work. It’s more complicated than it needs to be, but we also don’t want to redo all the work it would take to replace it with something more sane. Especially KJC languages. Trying to get those three to agree on anything is for people who deal with frustration better than me.

There is something there, but mostly I think existing net admins try to map their existing IPv4 knowledge onto IPv6. That doesn’t work very well. It needs to be treated as its own thing.

Right, not the only reason, but it’s a sticking point.

You shouldn’t need to connect to your smart thermostat by using the company’s servers as an intermediary. That makes the whole thing slower, less reliable, and a point for the company to sell your personal data (that last one being the ultimate reason why it’s done this way).

That’s nothing that can’t be done with a good set of firewalls on IPv6.

I know it’s a joke, but the idea that NAT has any business existing makes me angry. It’s a hack that causes real headaches for network admins and protocol design. The effects are mostly hidden from end users because those two groups have twisted things in knots to make sure end users don’t notice too much. The Internet is more centralized and controlled because of it.

No, it is not a security feature. That’s a laughable claim that shows you shouldn’t be allowed near a firewall.

Fortunately, Google reports that IPv6 adoption is close to cracking 50%.

I’ve got that. It doesn’t help with GDPR popups, notification requests, app pushes, etc.

This is a very common hypocrisy among first gen US immigrants. I’m a good Irish, not like those dirty ones coming over now; we should keep them out.

See also: Ayn Rand

What 2003 forum thread did this comment crawl out of?

At least with Rust, there is a specific, defensible goal for why it does that.

Java is just over designed. All of java.io reads like somebody’s Object Orientated Programming 101 final project, and they’d get a B- for it. Lots of things where you can see how they’re abstracting things, but there’s no thought at all in bringing it together in a tidy way.