Stone age when? 40,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago? Göbekli Tepe is from a mere 11,000 years ago. I mean cranes for ziggurats, sure. Cranes for megaliths I dunno about. Maybe you just got a lot of beefy men to push the giant rock into an upright position, maybe brute force was the point. Giving them simple machines is a slippery slope (which is itself a more plausible paleolithic/neolithic technology) to a kind of paleo-punk where you retrofit them with Flintstones cars and apartment buildings and production line belts, all made from hide and rope and mammoth grease.
It probably makes sense with a silent linear keyswitch for users who are used to the obvious acoustic feedback of a typewriter.
Since cheap modern MCUs have programmable ADCs, you can wiggle an output pin and experiment with different sounds. I've tried something a bit more "tinkle" like than a flat "beep" and it has its charms, but it could go a whole new place like different tones for special keys (simulating the clunk of a shift or space bar) or even keys that you could subtly differentiate by sound to tell if you're off alignment.
The article is talking about symbols that were lost. The sentence should be interpreted as "these [symbols], for Insert (now gone) and Delete (still with us)". The photo is of a symbol for 'insert', an 'a' with a caret above it.
Holy conspiracy theorists. I surely was not expecting this amount of paranoia from a sound place like HN. Either way, drama is always welcome, for it is ultimately unavoidable, in one form or another.
I just don't like moral distortions. Is YC in control of Flock or responsible for their choices? Who are "them", what are we ignorant about and why is it Marxism?
But what are you saying? YC are to blame for the unsavory future directions of the companies they fund. Counterargument, no they're not, what are you banging on about.
Is this really true? Or are we counting like the games kids made in a computer lab somewhere.
Or there's this 87% number, but it's based on "no longer a legal way to buy it," not that it's not archived/preserved: https://gamehistory.org/87percent/
> Or are we counting like the games kids made in a computer lab somewhere.
We don't have to count amateur projects but the commercial releases in the US is not the entirety of the gaming history. There are other countries with their own rich gaming histories and other platforms (e.g. browser, mobile) that don't get the same attention as American releases for PC or popular consoles.
I cannot play a single game from my childhood, they were early flash games "for girls" and they were not in English. Nobody archived those.
Yeah, I wanted to say that too. You can't (always) separate enjoying the craft from enjoying the praise. People too often talk about the value of an art object divorced from its provenance, as if you could measure its goodness with a meter, instead of the value of the audience relating to the personality expressed in it, which means it's a communication, and the communication isn't all one-way. When you're crafting something you're initiating that communication. Of course you want praise, or distressed complaints or anyway some reaction.
I agree with all of that, but I think there's a bit of "ball-hiding" going on in most of these conversations. It isn't only that programmers crave(d) praise or social recognition (though maybe that's it for some), but they're also having to come to terms with the fact that their "art-form" suddenly has much, much less economic value. They were able, for a long time, to (and I say this absolutely non-pejoratively - in fact, just the opposite) have their cake and eat it too, by being virtually guaranteed to make a living (in practice, in the demographic most represented on this board, a very good one) doing a thing they love to do. It's gauche, in Anglo-Saxon countries, to talk openly about one's own financial circumstances, so that mostly doesn't get raised in these threads, but I can hear it in the background of most of them, like "whaddya mean no one's gonna pay me to solve interesting problems with code any more? Now I've gotta do that, if I'm ever going to do that at all, in my spare time, for free?"
And I so, so, so sympathize with that. I devoted 25 years of my life to the performing arts, from which - as a very unattached young man - I was able scrape an exceedingly frugal living. That, in the arts, is a success story - the vast majority make no living from doing it at all, in fact probably the reverse. Coders arguably have it worse: it's hard to see anyone making any money from "writing code", ever again. It's not surprising to me that they're confused and hurt right now: they have, quickly, sadly, and unexpectedly been pushed into the economic corner other artists always have occupied.
Hmm, game design is a little different to other forms of software, and DF in particular since it's a niche interest that happened gained a following and became profitable. Would a temple-os be exhibited in MoMA?
Oh, you're not going to bait me into that one! "What is Art?" is the central 20th century aesthetic question, which no one ever answered to anyone else's satisfaction. Nowadays artists and critics have mostly stopped addressing it, because it's just exhausting, and everyone gets on with whatever it is they do. (But, yes: every profession can be Art is one of the answers some people propose! You can make your own mind up about that.)
What I observe, however, is that the people on this board who most mourn the end of hand-coding talk about code much like artists talk about art. It also, if it is to continue, looks like it will be an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti. However you care to define the practice itself, economically speaking, that's an art market.
Probably, those folks are in an even worse position than that. Though I've written some software I'm proud of, I wouldn't describe myself as a particularly competent developer, and while I can appreciate clean code, and love 'the story of Mel', and all that, would I pay extra for an artisanal, organic, free-range, hand-coded app or whatever? No, I frankly wouldn't - and I'm to the right of probably 98% of the general population on the appreciates-software-aesthetics curve. The fine arts world depends on the money it generates from its own rightmost 2%, but are there enough wealthy patrons for whom hand-crafted software will be a prestige marker? That's difficult to imagine.
but it's you throwing around the term. e.g. "economically speaking, that's an art market" - in what sense? How do you define an "art market"? It all seems very tautological.
> aesthetics-driven pursuit
aesthetics can usually biased by utility, to the extent of being a proxy for it. You can find the aerodynamics of a aeroplane or hummingbird wing beautiful, but there is still functionality driving it.
aesthetics is not the opposite of instrumental value; perhaps affective value, or sentimentality is?
> would I pay extra for an artisanal, organic, free-range, hand-coded app
what is artisanal code? I think talking about ux design conflates things, consider only backend code.
A slightly silly synonym for "hand-written code" - ie, not made with the assistance of AI. That's what I've been talking about all along.
> How do you define an "art market"?
In the preceding sentence:
> an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti.
It's the cognoscenti who make the market, in case that sentence wasn't quite clear. I expanded that thought more thoroughly in the next paragraph, but I can see how the transition was a bit ambiguous.
> consider only backend code.
Sure, that's what I actually was thinking about. Where is the market for hand-written back-end code going to be? What will induce someone to pay more for it than for in-elegant but equally-functional AI code? Who's going to be able to make a living writing code by hand?
I'm not really a developer, but when I read good ones on this board lamenting the de-valuing of their craft, and the necessity to adapt to an AI-aided method of working, I hear echoes of the weavers forced from their looms and into the factories. Handweavers today are hobbyists or "textile artists", and the everyday fabrics we all wear are made by soul-less machines. That's where those developers believe they are headed, and I'm sympathetic to them, especially so because think they're more fucked than they even realise.
It's primarily marketing for some mystic self-help shtick. You ask a question about your life, like in tarot, and a facilitator gradual reveals ambiguous answers until you agree that you had a revelation, like in tarot, and cross their palm with silver. Totally not fortune-telling apparently.
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