I have recently been thinking about fleshing out a story about a completely incompetent agile-type scrumlord, an unlikeable opportunist who is, tragically, unable to better himself in the institutionally broken system that is IT right now.
Oh and also he's sad about WFH because he has a poorly controlled fetish about smelling the air under people's desks.
I meant something along the line of non-fiction. Actual IT book. In your example I'd name it Agile in the real world, with a perfect legit cover, and as you go through the chapters, it starts descending into a complete circus and the joke that it can be.
I did some backend and devops stuff for a while and it can be insane.
On the one hand, I went to college for many years and spent so much time getting certifications to build my resume.
Then when I finally became a sysadmin in a mid/large company, for me to update a linux server I had to ask permission from the cloud group to do so, which took 8 weeks and required 3 rounds of project planning, time estimation, writing dozens of emails and ultimately an escalation over the cloud teams head to the division CIO to ultimately coerce them to provision a new linux server rather than give me appropriate sudo permissions on one I was already "supposed" to manage.
Ultimately I ended up getting the job done.
And then, other than a couple of intense temporary redeployments as a sharepoint frontend developer, which sucked, 90% of my job was to promptly respond to emails, attend 2-5 30 minute to 1 hour meetings a week where I was asked and said very little, and other than that about 20 minutes of work a day.
Playing with my home lab was more intellectually challenging and tech related than my actual tech job, and I probably spent more actual time doing that than actual time doing actual work in my real job.
Related, has anyone noticed with the new Sequoia, Apple Notes, which I use extensively, if you start searching or clicking as soon as the window open, you get a frozen application that won't recover - it must be killed? Is that being reported and if not where to?
I don't really care for the suggestion that 2 + 2 = 4, I'd rather the app be responsive on open.
I haven’t experienced it myself but you should file issues by going to the feedback page on the Apple site or going to applefeedback:// in a browser. The latter is better because it a shortcut to the embedded feedback app which collects diagnostic data.
My regular spotlight started doing that, if I do command space the box shows up and then spotlight hangs and then crashes, 2 month old MBa with sequoia update.
Nuke your spotlight index. You can add your entire "Macintosh HD" to the Spotlight Privacy settings to exclude it from indexing, and then just remove it, and it'll force it to rebuild.
I only get this when I paste and it's usually only edge or chromium apps (slack). I can't replicate it on demand to bug report, but it's very annoying when it happens.
But after that, for reasons that Sega does not make explicit, they will be "delisted and unavailable."
I really don't understand this move. The hard work is putting the games on Steam and making sure they work. Assets, testing, integration. Why take them away?
Anyway I'll never use Steam to buy a game anymore anyway, because you're only really buying a license to rent a game.
> Anyway I'll never use Steam to buy a game anymore anyway, because you're only really buying a license to rent a game.
I wonder if you misinterpreted the article? The games are not being taken away from people who purchased them. They will simply no longer be offered for sale.
I know the DRM exists, but to the extent that you trust the word of Steam and Gabe Newell, they have said they will release a patch undoing all Steam DRM if Steam ever goes out of business.
It's easy for them to have that intention, but then the realities of operating from bankruptcy court or receivership or being assimilated by Microsoft or Sony could be much different.
I choose to only buy stuff for like $8 and under where I can expect to get my money's worth of gameplay in a short time frame and so not have to worry about any long term sunsetting. That's a reasonable middle ground between fully trusting the platform or fully abhorring it.
If the developer offers the game on itch.io, buy it from there.
If the developer offers the game on GOG, buy it from there.
Otherwise, check if there's currently a crack for the steamworks version of the game. If so, buy it on Steam. Don't actually download or use the crack; just check it exists before buying.
The recent indie release, Kitsune Tails, was available on Steam and Itch, but the creator actually made clear on social media that Steam reviews were really important and that they were only counted properly if the game was bought on Steam and not added there via a key. They were really pushing to hit Overwhelmingly Positive shortly after release, I don't know if that was the only reason, though.
Also in your advice where you recommend verifying a crack exists before buying on Steam, isn't it similar to see if a GOG (drm-free) version exists that you could fetch at no cost later if needed, and then buy on Steam?
If the game developer wants to follow a particular marketing plan, e.g. they've discovered they get more sales when there's a lot of positive Steam reviews, then of course you can help with that. If retweets, or Reddit posts, or Facebook likes or lets-play Twitch streams, or whatever else sells copies, and you're in a position to do that...
However, when buying on Steam, you need to watch out for your own interests too. Will you still be able to play this game in 20 years? Checking there is a crack is your insurance policy.
If you can buy it DRM-free on itch.io or GOG, do that instead. Steam store pages will list if there is any _third-party_ DRM, but won't list if the developer is using Steamworks DRM, so generally you have to assume it is (unless the developer assures otherwise, or it's on https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g... )
I can't recall any cases where a game delisted from Steam was removed from the libraries of people who already bought them.
Meanwhile, Oxenfree was removed from itch.io, including making it unavailable for download even for those who have purchased the game. This is unprecedented as far as I know.
Presumably, itch unlike Steam doesn't have the leverage or lawyers on staff to enforce what's a blatant violation both the consumer rights and itch.io's own terms of service.
The reason I suggest itch.io is because they take ~10% cut, compared to Valve and CD Projekt's 30% cut. The developer gets more money.
But if itch.io, GOG or Steam shut down tomorrow... I would not expect to be able to download from them at all. You should install the games on your computer, storing them at your own cost. And if the game is DRM-free, you can still play the game!
Steam is of course very nice in serving re-installs to customers of no-longer-purchasable games. But you can expect that some day it will end. That's why the fight is to have no DRM... to ensure publishers can't "take away" a game already on your computer, or a book already on your e-reader. It's not to demand storefronts let you download your stuff from their servers indefinitely, which is nice but ruinously expensive for them.
Honestly I doubt that, and not because I distrust steam and gabe newell, in my books steam is one of the good guys, in an industry filled with nickle and dime rent seeking, steam provides a reliable, unobtrusive service. Personally I think their margin is grossly high. And I too hate how many of my games are locked up depending on the benevolence of a corporation. But steam has thus far proved to be a very useful service, mainly by not fucking up.
I just don't think it could happen because when your business is going down in flames, the last thing on your mind is giving away the keys to the kingdom. The normal death spiral is. The business is unable to make a profit anymore and will have to be closed down. however it still has a reputation. somebody will buy the business with the expectation they will be able to make the changes needed to make a profit. these changes are vile, trying to extract any money they can from the corpse. it then gets sold to the next sucker. who repeats the whole repugnant farce. It is almost never a clean death.
> I know the DRM exists, but to the extent that you trust the word of Steam and Gabe Newell, they have said they will release a patch undoing all Steam DRM if Steam ever goes out of business.
I do not believe this was said by Gabe. It was also made years ago before Steam was the size it has become. At the time, Steam might have only been losing Valve first party titles.
The license doesn't matter if you can have the DRM-free installer on your harddrive forever. They sold it to me (and called it a "purchase"), I downloaded it, who cares about the license, it's mine now.
But GOG offers offline executable installers, so from a practical perspective even if your license was revoked, they'd have no way of preventing you from playing the game (assuming that you had downloaded the installer, of course).
But is there a way to actually back up an installer (or the installed game) in a way that lets you run it on a different computer after, say, your Steam account has been closed for whatever reason?
On macOS an app bundle is usually self-contained, so if there is no DRM backups are simple enough; for Windows, it's usually not that easy, I believe.
For some games the executable just works outside of Steam, you can copy the whole directory from steamapps to elsewhere. I recall Starbound being like this during beta, good for last-minute local multiplayer at a LAN party.
Those games aside, I think goldberg steam emulator is used for ripping/cracking/sharing games. I don't wanna say too much as I don't know the process well, but I think sometimes you remove or replace a certain steam file and that's the main thing needed. This doesn't get you past extra layers of DRM like Denuvo, of course. I recommend not buying any such games. You can follow a Steam curator that checks games for Denuvo and then it will display if they have it (or used to and removed it, like Soulcalibur VI) on the store page if you're logged in.
Honestly as a polyglot, only a Go project can run without being touched for 5 years.
The rest of them get vulnerabilities discovered in the packages, which requires you to upgrade, which changes the feature set and takes re-work.
Also design ages, UX paradigms change over time, look at the "web 2.0" look today and the "web 1.0" of before. Skeuomorphic design aged as fast as Garage and Jungle music did in the 90s. This will be the same with flat design and neuomorphic design in 5-10 years, if there is even an UI then.
All in all, software does decay and we lose data every day. Try go through your oldest bookmarks, many sites will be gone. Or run software that used to run on windows 98 or DOS or amiga or classic mac, you need to jump through hoops, the UX will be terrible, that's aging.
Software doesn't need artificial aging, it erodes well all by itself. Even fast moving code in a startup changes so much from week to week, your merges can be difficult. That's like a river bed redefining itself during a rain storm.
As humans go through time, so does software as an extension.
> What distinguishes a Go project from any other programming language?
My experience with Go, as user and open source maintainer, is that many libraries just work even if untouched for several years.
There is a culture around building small libraries, with minimal usage of dependencies beyond the standard library. This leads to most CVEs existing in the standard library, which combined with Go's commitment to backward compatibility, makes improving your security posture simple by just upgrading the toolchain.
You are the product. The editor is free afaik, and is very good. It has a plugin system and many languages have been added. It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ. Sadly many bugs are stopping that for now.
They'll charge for integrations later, collaboration etc. I'm not sure exactly where the money is going to come from but I value a quality native IDE.
I hope they don't stuff crap down our mouth in the future and simply charge a one time fee per version. But that of course is unlikely to happen.
Every new version of IntelliJ I gasp that they F'd with something, and usually I'm right.
I assume they did the same as with Rider, and made the UI objectively worse, rather than solve a million other things that actually need improvement (performance!)?
10 years ago, Intellij, 1 IDE to rule them all they said. There are 14-15 at my last count. Complete cash job.
Bugs I reported went unanswered for 3 years and then swept under the carpet, still not fixed. Obvious stuff too. Breaking and annoying stuff.
The best part was when they came out and claimed they had the best latency to screen rendering, long article explaining the technology etc. behind it. Mac just came out with retina screen, and their stuff is written in Java, did not handle any kind of graphics acceleration. It was a complete joke, just pressing 'aaaaaaaaaaa' on the keyboard would start lagging after 10 characters to seconds long to render. Insanely funny stuff. If you shrank the IDE to 1/4 of the screen it was much faster! yay.
I stopped paying a little while back and jumped on the community edition for debugging and other IDEs to write the code. I'm sick of their antics.
>It's really, really close to be my replacement to intelliJ
Isn't Zed just a text editor? The last time I checked it out it didn't have any debugging features which doesn't really make it a replacement for an IntelliJ IDE.
People who use Zed now at work, sorry but you still print variables to debug issues? In 2024?
Zed is investing in features to satisfy shareholders like AI and team collab but ignoring a basic functionality like interactive debugging is mind blowing.
Google got so big it swallowed the internet. It now has digested it and what is left is... this.
I used to love crafting websites and cared about SEO. What's the point now, no one is going to find your content. It won't even be on the third page. Google will answer questions by regurgitating whatever it swallowed on your websites and presume no one will click through, it won't even bother marking the authors.
Instead it appears to be prioritising whichever website is going to give it revenue first, e.g. the click farms.
The regular folks don't care, they google for stuff like "am I dying if I have a pimple?" (to which the answer is always yes, apparently). No one does actual meaningful research using Google anymore, if you do, good luck, get your gloves out <picture of dinosaur poop in Jurassic Park>.
The global internet as it stands is close to dead. Discoverability of "cool" things is down to social media, tricked by "influencers", who are tricked by marketing themselves.
We need a hard reset button, it needs to start from the ground up with site rings, and good content. Ah... that last part, "good content", is now stuffed with AI Samey McSamey sounding text. I really don't see a way out of here.
The funny part is we used to think that the internet was going to change the world. We thought all idiots needed was information. Access to information would fix the world! Instead, it only has given the village idiots a global voice: if you can think of some dumb crazy thing, you'll find dumb crazy people agreeing with you, so you must be right!
I've been on the internet since 1997 and I think it's the worst it's ever been.
I wonder how feasible that is without leveraging one of the two existing search engines in the backend. I always pitted a general search engine as a top 5 difficult tech project to go for.
> The funny part is we used to think that the internet was going to change the world. We thought all idiots needed was information. Access to information would fix the world!
I was 9 in '97 and wasn't really aware of the internet until maybe 3 or 4 years later. The internet seemed like a magical place, where reason and common sense existed (unlike the messy meat world). I bought into the same ideals that information was power and once everyone had access to information, we'd collectively get smarter and wiser. Less wars!
I remember being excited for Google Search and then Gmail. FINALLY, a company that gets it!
It seems that any public or VC-backed company is destined for enshittification.
I'm old school. I like to shutdown devices. Apparently that's going away on desktop computers too now.
It boggles my mind, really. Anyway, I also love the value for money of the mini. I have had quite a few mac mini and this won't stop me from buying the M4 pro...
I'll just stick some tiny rubber feet to the side of the mac mini and rest it 90 degrees on its side. Done. Thanks Apple.
I mean, you still can shut it off, but it’s really pretty unnecessary nowadays. Sleep mode has gotten very reliable and efficient. In deeper power states devices don’t draw much current at all, and still wake up transparently instantly.
People don’t shut their phone down very much, it’s similar with laptops and desktops nowadays.
I don't like devices that sip on power when I'm not home, or asleep. It makes no sense at all. It's not like fetching emails involves connecting to a landline, ring up a dialing device, get... The mac boots faster than my ass gets in the chair. Stuff loads instantly. I turn off the whole desk at the wall at bed time, so all the "mood lights" go off as well. Simple, safe.
I get the convenience of always on, it's just not my jam.
Shutting down and starting up again can draw more power than sleeping/other low power mode. e.g. airplane mode on a phone is probably better than turning the device off for the night. Old dumb phones used to sip power when switched off so the alarm would work.
No idea with desktops, but I wouldn't be surprised if suspend used less power than stop/start for overnight in some cases.
Microsoft appears to be deprecating sleep in favor of Modern Standby, in which the machine draws enough juice to download and install updates. You know, because Windows is a service, and your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to install the updates. Modern Standby is a low-power variant of S0, the normal "awake", "computer is on" state.
Because what a PC is is defined largely by the needs of Windows, many systems shipping today do not support the deeper power states (S1-S3) at all, just Modern Standby.
Idle state is probably what, a few watts? Maybe leaving it on 24/7/365 costs you like a few dollars at worst annually or something in even most overpriced energy markets.
I remember doing the math on leaving every single LED light bulb on all day in the house until bedtime, and the costs were so low I had to convince family that it's just poverty mentality and that we don't live in the incandescent age anymore.
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