Glad you say you're coming around on the BEAM. It really is a fantastic virtual machine. Of course if you look at my comment history you'll see I'm a big fan of it and tend to push it, but that's only because it has actually made my job (and hobby) of engineering easier.
There's something elegant about how everything lives inside a process, and communication between those processes is crazy simple, you just `send(pid, value)` and boom you can not only talk across large codebases, but you can talk across _networked clusters of BEAM VMs_ with little setup.
At my current job, we're using it on embedded Linux for IoT devices, and it's really amazing to section off the code into processes that, if something like an i2c sensor or component glitches out, just let the process crash, and have it be restarted automatically by a Supervisor into a fresh well known state.
Definitely give it a look, it's nothing like the JVM ;)
I ended up grabbing an Ioniq fully electric 2019 and i absolutely love it. Got it for a decent used cost, interior wise it was like new, no huge touch screen, but a decent one for CarPlay and Android Auto, real knobs and buttons, and the online portion is entirely obsolete since it used 3G so it has no connection to the internet! It’s perfect for me
Can we just make art, using artistic choices, and visual design thought out by a designer who cares about what they're making? please?
We talk about things like "adding stylization" like it's just a new parameter or ingredient you plug into the big machine and a "good" looking game pops out.
I mean sure it's profitable and at this point that's all HN cares about these days, but _wow_ is it boring.
It's interesting to see software engineers realize that AI can be useful in the hands of competent engineers, but that LLMs tend to produce a mess in the hands of those with little software engineering knowledge. Then they're confused why generative AI asset creation doesn't look that good in the hands of people who have no art training.
I know someone creating a game, and she is using AI in asset creation. But she's also a highly skilled environment technical artist from the industry, and so the use of AI looks totally different than all these demos from non-artists: different types of narrow AI get injected into different little parts of the asset creation pipeline, and the result is a mix of traditional tools (Substance Designer + Painter, Blender, Maya) with AI support in moodboarding, geometry creation and some parts of texture creation. The result is a 2-5x speedup, but instead of looking like slop it looks like a stylistically distinctive, cohesive world with consistent art direction.
The common pattern is that people think AI will automate "other people," because they see its shortcomings in their own field. But because they don't understand the technical skill required in other fields, they assume AI will just "do it." Instead, it seems like AI can be a force multiplier for technically skilled people, but that it begins showing its weakness when asked to take over entire pipelines normally produced by technically skilled people, whether they be engineers or artists.
Having spent a lot of time talking to engineers working on AI tools, I find the idea that AI is intended to replace creativity comes entirely from internet comment sections and not from the engineers working on AI.
The engineers working on AI should speak up, then. To say that the barrel is rotten is an understatement; it's more like a bunch of rotten apples and you're trying to find the one good one.
That's why the conversation feels more like the NFT boom. MAYBE it had merit, but it didn't matter
I wanted to upgrade my NAS with some 12TB drives and two of them in the box from Amazon had been powered on (according to the SMART data) for over a year!
wild that I booted up my SGI O2 the other night just to remember the name of the tech used in the demos that ran inside Netscape! And then spent a whole while reading about VRML.
I wish we had something as easy to deploy interactive experiences on the web like that today.
I am primarily an Elixir engineer so Dart was the exact opposite of what I’m usually working in, that said it’s not hard to get up to speed on Dart conventions- and other team members were able to get up and contributing in a couple weeks
We shipped a project at work with Flutter recently, specifically using it on embedded Linux, basically a touch screen smart apartment tablet/thermostat combo.
Internally the “UI” team is tiny (basically me, a UI/Designer and one or two other part time engineers) and the productivity is astounding tbh
Okay so we ended up using that too, it was really well done and documented.
But in hindsight I think flutter-pi or the Toyota one might have been a better investment. The lead engineer in Sony behind the elinux project left for Nvidia. The Toyota one uses Wayland, you can't make it directly hook into DRM. So you'd need a minimal compositor to get it running.
Flutter Pi had other issues. It required systemd as a dependency just for the event loop which we ended up having to hack out. The Sony embedded project is still being updated and active. And the code quality is much better
Ooof I had a short chat with a maintainer with one of the competing projects and they really hated on the code quality for the sony embedder.
I just didn't like the lack of control you got with the sony embedder, you couldn't specify which display you wanted to show on when using DRM and it was real pain to get it working.
I didn't know about the systemd dependency, but we actually needed it though even though we used Sony because of our dependency on DBus.
Long long (2016 ish) ago I released an Unreal Engine 4 plugin that let people embed chromium embedded framework views into the engine via textures, so you could make fancy HUDs or whatever.
Epic Games was kind enough to give me a developer grant for open sourcing and making it, cool as hell for a college student at the time, helped pay my classes.
The number of angry game devs who basically wanted me to solve all their problems for them for free was astounding, additionally another dev grant receiver was jealous that I got money close to their grant for “just making a crappy plugin”
(paraphrasing but that was essentially what happened)
I don't know how different it is for other types of dev but, AFAICT, plugin development for game engines (Unity, Unreal, Godot?) is one of the absolute worst things. The issue is that millions of new developers are using them to build a game. They have no experience. If they run into any bug at all, while using your plugin, even if it's totally unrelated to your plugin, they'll ask for free support.
Say you made a plugin that serializes/deserializes to JSON. They making an FPS and the gun doesn't shoot in the correct direction. They'll ask why it's not working in your support area, even though it's got nothing to do with your plugin.
Incredible, my university class reg system had un-sanitized input for the class search field so if you knew the SQL you could find exactly how full a class was and dump the whole table of classes without needing to wait for your reg to open.
And pretty sure you could insert your student ID into the class that way too :)
There's something elegant about how everything lives inside a process, and communication between those processes is crazy simple, you just `send(pid, value)` and boom you can not only talk across large codebases, but you can talk across _networked clusters of BEAM VMs_ with little setup.
At my current job, we're using it on embedded Linux for IoT devices, and it's really amazing to section off the code into processes that, if something like an i2c sensor or component glitches out, just let the process crash, and have it be restarted automatically by a Supervisor into a fresh well known state.
Definitely give it a look, it's nothing like the JVM ;)