Why do you think C is the one true language? It’s a tool.

There’s a single very simple answer to “what tool should I use?”. Use the best tool for the job

The job is the objective - what are you trying to accomplish? What are your priorities? What compromise is best between time, cost, and quality? What are your abilities? What’s in your toolbox right now, and what could you obtain within the time frame?

For you, the best tool might always be C. I don’t know how you’ve specialized or what you do, but C is powerful. Maybe you have an orderly thought process code meticulously, maybe you struggle to learn new languages. Maybe there’s just no better option for the jobs you take on

For me, C is rarely the answer. Not never, but outside of school I can count on one hand how many times I’ve chosen it. I code intuitively and feel how the code fits together, I can pick up languages on the spot and switch even more easily. But I’m not meticulous, it’s against my nature. I make mistakes frequently - but I learn by doing, and I don’t need to understand to start doing

All that said, why do we keep making languages and frameworks? Because as programmers, we build the tools. We can also share them without losing them. The perfect tool for one job won’t be the same for any other job, but a pretty good tool for many jobs is a valuable tool

The trade-off with our tools is between power, versatility, and cost (generally being time). We all want powerful and versatile tools - but our time is limited, and so we can’t afford the cost

Ultimately, I think you’ve correctly spotted a recurring problem but misidentified the cause. The cause isn’t the tools, it’s the fact that the cost is someone else’s time. And the fact we have no way to translate money into their time

A corporation can fund a team to continuously develop a tool they rely on. An individual can’t - we could chip in a few bucks here and there, but we use a lot of tools. We don’t know good tools from bad ones until we use them, we don’t know what tools are used to build the ones we need either.

So everyone and their mom wants to build a service to fund work on their tools. I hate services, I don’t want to give them my data or my money - I want tools that will work on my devices, not because I don’t want to deny them pay for their work, but because I pick up, drop, and modify tools all the time

That’s the real problem - if I could donate x dollars a month to support the tools I use, I would. If I could choose for us all to pay more taxes to support the tools we all use, I would take that deal. Hell, I’d go through the effort to generalize my personal tools

Instead, the only real profit to be had in OSS comes from companies, because they can afford to fund them directly, or services, which individuals tend to hate but companies barely notice. The tools aren’t the problem - the economics are the problem

Holy shit… When I got my wisdom teeth out, I literally broke down in tears after being awake for 20 minutes without Percocet

Friend, it’s ok to take opiates sometimes…

Kratom could be an option. You make it into tea, the first cup is a weak stimulant, the second (on an empty stomach) will start to work as a weak opiate. The third or fourth might give you stronger relief. The red strains are supposedly better for pain relief

You can’t OD on it, it’s commonly available in head shops or online. The addiction potential is very low, you’ll make yourself nauseous before getting what you’d get out of normal opiates. It’s most closely related to the coffee plant - the toxicity concerns are all about contamination, the plant itself is pretty innocuous

I can give brewing instructions if anyone wants to go down that path, I drink it for anxiety but others say it helps with pain management

Fuck the webcam, what about the mic?

Conflicts of interest. Sometimes illegal, but not nearly as much as they should be (almost always)

Like congress members being allowed to trade stock, which can then be affected by their vote

Or one of the specifically carved out exceptions to the medical kickbacks laws is for the people who negotiate drug prices for pharmacies

It’s structural - you can be open or locked down, and it’s hard to decentralize if you’re not open

You can make it easier or harder to work with that data, but ultimately it’s obsfucation - you could make it hard to parse and obscure details, but ultimately if you want decentralized federation you can’t hide too much

Wait… Y’all regularly leave your shoes in a normal place?

In our current economic system? Absolutely, declining population is a huge problem.

As far as physics? The world doesn’t care about imaginary human numbers. Production continues to soar through the roof

We made all of this up. At any point, we could say “hey, this is a dumb game that’s making people suffer, let’s figure out something else”

Imagine if phone manufacturers asked the public like this…

Hundreds. Thousands. Probably not more than a few hundred million

If we could sync memories, I could do everything at once. I could do anything each day. I could learn everything, I could do everything. My sense of self is flexible enough to see my clones as me… In fact I’ve had existential breakdowns over only having the one body. We’d be a single person from day one, hell my morality is based on “if the world was made up of only copies of me, would it be a better place”.

I’d start with a dozen, then scale up as I get more jobs (I could handle 12x my food bill for a while, I mostly eat beans and rice already). I’d rotate between jobs and time the memory syncs to give myself work-life balance.

So my answer is basically “how many can I get?”

Bold of such a casual watcher to opine on her motivations.

If you had actually been paying attention, each clue represents one of the 12 arcana given context by the way it is revealed, each episode being a tarot reading that gives depth and context to her character.

A true fan would watch in order, and would discover each season clearly describes the fools journey with a reading for each step - at that point it just. It then repeats, revealing more of her backstory each season

I’ll give the broad strokes, since I’m sure that’s all a casual viewer like you is interested in.

Blue was born as the deity of a small tribe on the coast of modern day France. She loved her people and worked for them tirelessly, and they loved her as she lavished them with bountiful harvests and artistic inspiration. Her people were kind and righteous, creating beautiful sculptures and cloth that they traded generously. Then the sea people attacked.

It’s unclear who they were, but her people were slaughtered and enslaved, her power slipping away, for she had given back all her people gave her, not considering her own needs. Slowly they died out, and knowledge of her name slowly died out.

Fading and in desperation she bound herself to a place, a cave in modern day Paris. Her heart broken by loss, she changed in those dark centuries. Her presence still brought fortune and so her former people’s land was taken by others, but she no longer had love in her heart. She compelled them to bury their dead in the caverns under the city, where she feasted upon souls of the dead for generation after generation. But none knew her name, and so she barely was able to sustain her existence.

At the advent of WWII, knowledge of the occult reached a peak. The Nazi leadership heard of the abnormal luck of the city, and so made a deal with the French - they only wanted access to the city without revealing their goal.

The Nazis took the city, and drove the resistance down into the catacombs, giving them an excuse to seek her out.

They succeeded, and they found her. She was almost feral at this point, but after heavy losses they managed to imprison her in a relic, an urn containing scraps of bones of her people. On this urn, they engraved an inscription, a binding to a single person. That person would gain eternal youth and funnel power to her, but they misunderstood what she was - in effect, those bound to her died quickly.

The relic was captured at the end of the war, and ended up in Hollywood along with many other odds and ends. After several high profile deaths, they discovered that attention from children could sustain the needs of this unnamed being. By destroying their potential, a little at a time, the host would not age or be drained by the relic.

What no one expected was how well this would scale. The fallen deity known as “Blue” has swiftly recovered, and there’s many fan theories about what this means.

And just to spell it out for the slower among you, this is a clear metaphor for capitalism, the effects of the industrial revolution, and the how in an effort to make children subservient , we reduce the future prospects of everyone, including those at the top

I’m not attracted to masculine characters. You want me to care what a dude looks like? You’re barking up the wrong tree. And if I wanted to look at myself, I’d look in a mirror

My avatar is not me… If I’m going to watch a character for a couple dozen hours, it’s going to be someone I find attractive. Hell, if I’m going to spend more than 5 minutes on a character creation screen, it’s going to be a woman, because it’s hard to get invested in a male character for me

It’s already out… People have been letting it out for months to do all sorts of things

Luckily it turns out empathy and lewdness are practically built in to these models

Depends on how much money and power they’re entangled with, and who they threaten

For me it’s "oh? You really like this creator? Be careful not to binge their backlog all at once! I think you’ve had enough. Let me hide the rest of their content for you so you’re not tempted

Hey, how about this news show where the guys stand instead of sitting, and wear normal clothes? They still awkwardly read off a teleprompter and have a very shallow understanding of the topics, but come on, you should watch them again. I know their shrill, forced, voices make you cringe and exit the video as fast as you can, but let me put that up next on auto play for you again

Fair point, although I’d argue that this is probably a cheap and standard extra step

Molds and turn around time are definitely expensive… But much cheaper if you wait until the next version that probably will have different mount points for the newer internals

I’m not saying this isn’t worth praising, I’m just saying this is exactly what integrity and giving your employees autonomy looks like. You come back for version 2, and you take your lessons learned, you explore the improvements that you thought up during the last version

It’s just basic craftsmanship, but that has unfortunately been smothered in most places these days. You have to be big enough for this to be an R&D effort you can afford to fail, but small enough no one has bought you up to wring you for value

Crazy more expensive for raw profits - per unit, it’s basically negligible.

You could say this if s consumer focused effort to achieve market share or sell more games, but I choose to believe this if just what happens

Personally, I think this is just what happens when you have an employee run tech company. They lose out on like 0.05% profits, but more then make up for it through game sales and reputation

I mean realistically, this is probably a few cents a unit. Across hen million units, that’s real money. But quality pays over time. They lose out on quarterly profits, but they don’t worry about that bs - they’re not publicly traded, and they’ll make way more on a 5 year timespan

Nier automata had that moment for me. At first I was pissed, just getting another playthrough with slightly different mechanics… But that quickly wore off when i realized how much more depth that second pass was adding to the story.

Then, with the full context at the climax of the first half, I cried… Where the red fern grows and that are the only two pieces of media that hit me that deep.

Then, when things are getting all jrpg-ending crazy and i thought I would get nothing but a bit more lore and maybe another death scene, they did it again, but different. The climax floored me, as again things I had long accepted as just slightly mysterious, but mostly explained, backdrop (it’s set post extinction after all) clicked into place again and I just sat there in awe. There was a mystery you had to work to understand, and multiple big twists leading to the finale…

It was already a good, complete story. I thought we were done. But then the final piece clicks into place, and everything I already knew intimately (I messed up one ending before I looked up the ones I was missing, but otherwise 100%d it).

Now the world had another layer of implication, which peeled away another, and another. I just sat in shock as the story changed over and over, as I thought through the story I’d played through again and again. The hints are everywhere from the beginning, but it’s all cycles within cycles, growing bigger and faster with every new layer of recontextualizaion

It gave you the time to reel from the impact let it sink in… You sit there, your mind blank, in awe of how the game gently planted one tiny bomb at a time throughout the experience, and despite dropping bombs the whole time, they managed to remain unexploded. Then the final one hits just right, and the next explodes. Around and around it goes, blasting away what you thought was the dirt the experience sat on. It reveals this beautiful mural, only for the explosions to destroy it to reveal another, and another… Usually following the thread of the story, but occasionally cutting across the familiar timeline.

So you’re in awe at how a game could make you feel all this, just in shock

Then the last cutscene gently draws your eyes back into focus. A slow and melancholy scene plays, and it’s like viscerally grasping the size of the sun, only to turn around and see the Milky Way… All of this was just one bead in an endless chain. And before you can taint that emotionally deep but intellectually worthless moment by thinking too hard on it, it starts the credits.

It’s an extremely difficult but very simple asteroid , and you finally die, but respawn right away. There’s no counter, no punishment, no reward, but you start to see how long you can survive… It doesn’t require much thought or strategy, it just keeping you just occupied enough that you can’t let your mind wander. Then another ship appears and it changes nothing, but one after another appears, and suddenly the tides are being beat back by the sheer number of other ships firing alongside you. It crescendos and fades gently.

And then, in this raw and disoriented state, the game gives you a question. Sacrifice your save, and you can join the wave of fellow players who helped make that tiny desert mint of a feeling of connectedness when others finish off the experience.

It’s a meaningless sacrifice - that last minigame wasn’t really that special, and the game can’t be lost. At that moment, my game save was so emotionally important to me, and plenty others had already made that little sacrifice - mine would do nothing. I might pick the game back up - I still had one more ending, and I’d have to do it all again to get the final two achievements anyways. I’d come back and finish again, and I’d take the other path, completing the journey. Not now - I just combed through every inch of the world, trying to squeeze every last collectible dry to extend the end a little more. But this was my first completion, this one should be the trophy.

I’m ashamed of that moment when I said no. The trophy was as meaningless to me as the sacrifice would have been to future players… But I now understand that little symbolic sacrifice wasn’t about them, it was about me.

The final act of the game came years later, when the details had faded. I had tried to pick it up a few times, but there’s another genius part of the game - the intro ship sequence is terrible. It’s very long, and slow, and there’s no checkpoints. If I hadn’t just paid for the game, and was just shown that this was just a minigame, I would’ve refunded it immediately. It doesn’t respect your time, it doesn’t offer story, it’s not really challenging, but although it’s very easy, you do have to focus and play it - the instant death is very easy to avoid, but even letting yourself get hit to see what happens means a couple of minutes of nothing. You realize it’s the perfect mirror of the ending, your squad is stripped away until you’re incredibly strong but alone, the enemies few but will kill you if you don’t try. It’s 100x worse after completing the game once - you already know what happens, you know you have to do it at least once more to reach the end again, and there’s no anticipation of a new world - you still could draw it out from memory because while it’s small. It feels big initially because of how you run around in circles as it changes around you, but going back…I finally finished the into, looked around, and closed the game.

A tried again with the same result, but a couple years ago I finally felt sure it was time! I forced myself through the intro, blazed through the story, repeated the into again. I found I’d collected most of the weapons and was gearing up effortlessly… And as I ran it through again, I saw the cracks. The textures had aged, they looked terrible now. Invisible walls are everywhere. The combat system is tight, but easy once learned. It’s not hard. The main obstacle is slow moving balls with obvious patterns. The weapons each have different patterns to learn, but I knew them still. I could blaze through it with any combination of gear… But I had a goal, and I wasn’t going to just give it up again. I’d never again play what for years I’d written essays about how it was possibly the most well crafted game ever made. Nothing else has ever made me feel so much

And finally, I got to the moment that made me cry, and I felt nothing. The game sucked. I played through half the next section on autopilot, getting to the part I remembered less clearly… And I put the controller down. Again I felt shame at not sacrificing my save. I came to terms with the fact that doing it now would mean nothing.

And this is the final cycle. Every time someone asks about the best game ever, I say it’s Nier: Automata. Because none of it is on accident. It was meant to taste like dirt in your mouth when you came back to make that sacrifice like you promised yourself.

:::Spoiler:::The pacing of the reveal of 4a’s assignment, to kill 2b when she learns too much, doesn’t hit again. When you learn this specific 4a had killed her before, and when he tries to sacrifice himself to save her, or at least so he won’t have to kill her again, or when she ends up dying to save him… These moments can only be had once, even if the details fade.:::

.I don’t recommend this game anymore - it’s a masterpiece of pacing and tying up your emotions in knots only to pull it loose at the right moment - the pacing doesn’t work anymore, all media is faster now. It cant be remastered or revamped, the story itself isn’t that good

It’s a trancedent experience, or it’s trash - balanced on the knifes edge purposely. It can only be experienced once, by an active game who has never played more modern games, or it doesn’t hit at all.

It changed be as a person, and I think of it often. I will sacrifice so much more now, because it made me understand - when everyone comes together and achieves something impossible, it’s not all the same if the result doesn’t change. Your sacrifice doesn’t really matter much to the result if they have enough, but the you that made that symbolic sacrifice is so much greater than the one who held back.

I definitely have. It’s usually when people explain capitalism the way it’s sold to us (like enlightened self interest or misquoted excerpts from the wealth of nations), or with economics bs strapped to the top of it. It’s always “well it’s not like I want people to starve…”

But then when you remind them “hey, there’s more than enough food, and the whole economic system is made up by humans” they treat you like a child for not understanding why their starting point is the only valid one

I think chaotic good should be you tie it with a loop. It’s firmly tied closed, but you just have to pull at the end and it comes open

Well put.

It really is just as simple as “don’t do mental gymnastics”, there’s only a paradox here if you make one