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Cake day: 2024年2月10日

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  • What are your future plans when it comes to smartphones?

    Same as my current plans: I pick a smartphone that runs a privacy-friendly OS, and only use privacy-friendly apps.

    Right now, that’s a de-googled Android phone running LineageOS, with F-Droid as the only app store. In future, it might be something else, like a non-Android Linux phone. My current model is 6+ years old, still gets OS updates, and still works great, so I imagine the open-source options will have improved by the time I need to replace it.

    I care about things like data exfiltration, battery life, cost, and hardware longevity (important for minimising e-waste). I don’t care about AI unless it happens to impact one of those things, but since there’s nothing inherent to AI that does, the issue of whether a phone has AI capabilities is irrelevant.

    By not using these AI features, you pay a lot for features you won’t be using.

    Only if you’re an early adopter. Like all new tech, further research and production volume will make it relatively cheap.






  • Naughty Dog did some solid storytelling in TLoU. It would be great if they could figure out how to apply that well to a game that isn’t on rails.

    “I think some of the best storytelling in The Last of Us – yes, a lot of it is in the cinematics – but a lot of it is in the gameplay, and moving around a space, and understanding a history of a space by just looking at it and examining it.

    I do appreciate this in game worlds, although this alone is not a substitute for storytelling, and not enough to make an open world fun. The world has to be interesting and diverse, full of unique things, characters, places, and situations to discover, so players will want to spend their time exploring it. Evidence of the world’s history is great for adding background depth, but I’ll be bored quickly if that’s all there is.

    Here’s hoping Naughty Dog makes something brilliant in this genre that they aren’t known for (have they ever done an open world?) rather than repeating the mistake other studios have made by churning out another open world of monotony.


  • Unfortunately, I don’t think D is good enough to prove your point. From your follow-up comment:

    A language that for all intents and purposes is irrelevant despite being exactly what everyone wanted,

    As someone who uses D, I can attest that it is not what everyone wanted; at least not yet. Despite all the great things in the language, the ergonomics around actually using it are mediocre at best: Several of its appealing features quickly turn it into a noisy language, error messages are often so obtuse as to be useless (especially with templates and contracts in play), and Phobos (the standard library) is practically made of paper cuts. Also, the only notable async support is a fragile mess, and garbage collection is too deeply embedded into both the stdlib and the ecosystem.

    (To be fair, D could be vastly improved with better defaults and standard library. That might happen in time, as Walter and the other maintainers have shown interest, but it’s just wishful thinking for now.)

    Also, D is an entirely different language from C++, and as such, would require code rewrites in order to bring safety to existing projects. It’s not really comparable to a C++ extension.









  • Given how long and widely C++ has been a dominant language, I don’t think anyone can reasonably expect to get rid of all the unsafe code, regardless of approach. There is a lot of it.

    However, changing the proposition from “get good at Rust and rewrite these projects from scratch” to “adopt some incremental changes using the existing tooling and skills you already have” would lower the barrier to entry considerably. I think this more practical approach would be likely to reach far more projects.