Dmitry Suzdalev
3.1K posts

Dmitry Suzdalev
@dimsuz
Programmer. Interests: performant software, UIs, graphics, math. Android Dev.
Калининград, Россия Beigetreten Temmuz 2014
182 Folgt290 Follower

@cmuratori @Jonathan_Blow A set of GPS coordinates for location from which the next set of coordinates will be tweeted.
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@Jonathan_Blow OK but if you really wanted people to care, you should have just tweeted a set of GPS coordinates.
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@valigo I saw an interview with @starfreakclone where he demoed the "Fred" editor, got very excited about it! But until it's ready — Emacs it is...
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Dmitry Suzdalev retweetet

My biggest gripe is that exceptions are fired deep inside low level code. You should not have error handling there. You should handle errors up front, before you put broken data in your data structure. You have lost track of who put the wrong data in the system if you find it later, and you can't give proper error messages and can't usually recover cleanly. And you spend a lot of CPU cycles in low level processing code checking for errors. Complexity covers the whole code base. That's a bad design. And it has hidden gotos all over the place. Super hard to reason about code bases like that.
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@GermanStrands Call me when they'll add at least 18 arenas and increase their song count by 91 so it will be actually playable at least.
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@Nekrolm Похоже, не зря я решил не продлевать подписку в январе.
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@valigo Also I don't even use Ctrl+R that much because typing any part of the previous command and pressing <Up> will often bring up from history exactly the command I needed.
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@valigo One thing that I love about fish is that it remembers and auto-suggests previous commands based on the directory which they were executed in, this is amazing and works out of the box too, no config.
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@valigo Instead, computer asks me to confirm I'm human several times a day.
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I cannot believe I have to clarify this - I am not affiliated with Thekla or Jon, apart from being in the beta of the language, this is not a sponsored video!
Valentin Ignatev@valigo
The world is not ready for Jai. This is just a little glimpse of what you can do with it.
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@matteocollina You should rewrite nodejs in Zig to maximize the drama
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@SoPraInformar @TheGingerBill @oxcrowx So the API design is actually more of a way of configuring IDE then? Doesn't feel right.
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@TheGingerBill @oxcrowx Pretty much, yes. Less options to choose from IDE completion
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Dmitry Suzdalev retweetet
Dmitry Suzdalev retweetet

To be a little less vague, I suspect that we're likely (not certain, but likely) to be entering into a period of unprecedented software degradation, and we're going to be seeing an increasing frequency of outages like this across many high profile products.
But IMO the cause is actually not just the-one-thing-that-everyone-is-always-talking-about, it's a number of things that have all been bubbling away at just below critical levels for a long time. Some of the things off the top of my head:
- Poorly designed / optimised software has been getting a free ride on hardware improvements pretty much since the invention of the computer. That chapter is now coming to an end, and will only be worsened by the enormous industry-wide pivot to producing & innovating on AI specific hardware, rather than general purpose CPUs etc.
- The ZIRP era created a temporary suspension of reality in our industry, and now that it's ended we need to deal with the hangover. Companies that spent years making no profit, paying extravagant compensation to employees / shareholders and giving away server time for free are now pivoting into extraction mode, which is putting further pressure on their low quality software. QA is being laid off, hardware budgets are being reduced, timelines for shipping features are becoming more aggressive, etc.
- The enormous amount of free money incentivised too many new people to join the industry too quickly. This has led to an abundance of poor quality education programs (bootcamps, uncertified colleges etc) and an influx of people into the industry who frankly aren't interested in programming. If you compared the average person in the industry now to 20 years ago, I suspect the difference in motivations would be stark. I'm not saying it's these people's fault necessarily, it's simply an inevitable result of the absurd compensation / performance expectations ratio that our industry has enjoyed for the last 15+ years. Working for a tech company has also become socially prestigious, which further adds to the problem.
- Because computer programming was once an incredibly niche area of interest, many of our fundamental systems are built on trust. We're now starting to see that if systems like open source, public supply chain, discussion spaces, education etc become flooded with bad actors, we have no real mechanisms to deal with them.
- Our hiring / recruitment pipeline has totally misaligned incentives. Even before the AI resume / AI HR-filtering arms race disaster that we're experiencing now, the widespread adoption of the leetcode style interviews IMO selected for a very narrow personality type, and filtered candidates that would have made great contributions to the industry long term.
- The pivot from purchasing long term stable releases of software, to paying a subscription for constantly updating software has done huge damage to software quality as a whole. Companies have lost their incentive to get their software "right" because they can just "fix it later", and for the consumer - you can't just go back to the version of github that still works because the new one has problems.
This was all happening well before AI entered the picture. I won't belabor the point because there has been endless discussion about it. But to me personally, there are two additional and deeply worrying problems with AI code generation.
- It's undeniable at this point that it negatively affects the people who use it. It stops juniors from getting better, and it burns seniors out and makes them hate their jobs. Like it or not, humans are still the core of this industry, and I don't see this ending well.
- It's completely unfit for purpose in the most important, high-stakes situations. One of the reasons that we excuse all the small errors it makes, is because it's low effort to type "do it again and fix this bug". That kind of thing doesn't fly when you only get one attempt because a mistake results in data loss or an outage. The damage is done.
All the above has led to a silent exodus of many of our most experienced and impactful people. There are so many amazing programmers who made enough through stock options / compensation that they didn't need to work anymore, and were only doing it because they enjoyed it. Many of these people have just quit the industry and switched to doing hobby projects in the last 5 years. These are the types of people who have the experience and foresight to prevent the types of outages that we're seeing at github today.
It's very easy to assume that the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is entirely to blame here. But I think it's a reckoning that has been on the horizon for a very long time.
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Dmitry Suzdalev retweetet

Mark Rosewater said something like this at his GDC 2016 talk: "Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them."
Jonathan Blow@Jonathan_Blow
Video games are like this as well. If someone has a bad experience, they don’t necessarily have an accurate view of *why* it was bad, and you usually should not listen to recommendations of how to fix it. But the fact that there was a problem is important to take seriously and work on.
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@GenTev35601 @ac1dgreen Как людей так натренировали, что они теперь считают это качеством, все фильмы в кинотеатрах тоже, фу.
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Я, прямого говоря, в ахуе насколько хорошо получилось
Average Estus Enjoyer@kagyriwe
@ac1dgreen Ну прям хорошо получилось
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@BenjDicken It’s difficult to make a decision if they are not visualised as balls
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@its_bvisness @valigo I would have The Witness in the same position! (or in Favorite Game) Also, love Subnautica.
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Dmitry Suzdalev retweetet

After 3 years, 47 releases, Ark VCS has finally reached 1.0! 🎉
youtu.be/XSnIw4siQ6U
It's a big release, with features that I've never seen to any version control system out of the box, like built-in changelist build status.
If you're tired of #perforce and #git, get it from ark-vcs.com!
#gamedev #indiegamedev #softwaredevelopment

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