soulbadguy (u/soulbadguy)

soulbadguy commented on Sony's Mark Cerny Has Worked on "Big Chunks of RDNA 5" with AMD overclock3d.net/news/gpu-... · Posted by u/ZenithExtreme

shmerl · 2 months ago

Because it won't tax developers with the need to learn yet another NIH. Same reason any standard exists and makes things easier for those who use it.

Honestly any idea that defends NIH like this belongs with dinosaurs. NIH is a stupid meme, not the opposite of it.

soulbadguy · 2 months ago

And most of the standard we have now starts with something similar to NIH. Vulkan itself is an offshoot of mantel from AMD. There are valid reason to have a custom api. Especially in domain like game console with hardware with long release cycle, tight performance requirement and legacy (ps4) code to support.

soulbadguy commented on Three Ubisoft chiefs found guilty of enabling culture of sexual harassment theguardian.com/games/202... · Posted by u/freddier

soulbadguy · 2 months ago

Yes... but no... From the article : > At a 2015 office Christmas party with a Back to the Future theme, François allegedly told a member of staff that he liked her 1950s dress. He then allegedly stepped towards her to kiss her on the mouth as his colleagues restrained her by the arms and back. She shouted and broke free.

Every team and sub culture will have an "energy" and different attitude etc... sure

But this is much more than racy poster on the walls... This behavior was never acceptable. I find it fascinating that we have to rediscover and relearn every generation why professional etiquette is so important. And what happens when. We blur the line between professional life and "familial" attitudes

soulbadguy commented on Jemalloc Postmortem jasone.github.io/2025/06/... · Posted by u/jasone

soulbadguy · 3 months ago

Maybe add a link to the post on the github repo. I feel like this is important context for people visiting the repo in the future

soulbadguy commented on Koto Programming Language koto.dev/... · Posted by u/virtualritz

raphinou · 5 months ago

Fsharp, which originally was ocaml on dotnet, can also be run as scripts. It is a really practical way to start a project. I blogged about it here: https://asfaload.com/blog/fsharp-fsx-starting-point/

soulbadguy · 5 months ago

Fsharp is such a nice languange. Such a shame that I never seem to get the light it deserves. Between the alternative light syntax, type providers and first class "scripting" mode supported it really was a great middle point between fully scripting language and fast prototyping and full blow projects

soulbadguy commented on Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories jackhopkins.github.io/fac... · Posted by u/noddybear

scottmsul · 6 months ago

Also I should add, being a Factorio veteran with 2-3k hours in this game, I think the goal of making the "largest possible factory" is too vague and not the right metric. When Factorio players make large megabases, they don't go for "size" per se, but rather science research per minute. The metric you should be telling the agents is SPM, not "largest" base!

soulbadguy · 6 months ago

ahhh another factorio addict :) Curious, how long was your first play through (assuming in v1.x lanching the first rocket)

soulbadguy commented on WASM Wayland Web (WWW) joeyh.name/blog/entry/WAS... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

zanderwohl · 6 months ago

This reads like a semi-incoherent essay from someone who doesn't really understand what complexity is and has a chip on their shoulder about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

soulbadguy · 6 months ago

Yeah and coming from someone with so much experience and industry knowledge as dannybee i find that perspective very puzzling.

Just painting the situation as well google have influence because they work the hardest is just bizare. Having been in some standard / comity meetings. Everyone in those room work very hard... but someone hard work is not enough

soulbadguy commented on WASM Wayland Web (WWW) joeyh.name/blog/entry/WAS... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

DannyBee · 6 months ago

The "weaponization of complexity" as you call it is simply "work is done by those who show up".

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc took the horribly dastardly approach of "participating" and then "doing the work".

The horror.

Microsoft gave up because it wasn't worth it when someone else was willing to do the work. It was not something that was adding value to them by them doing it themselves anymore.

It's hilarious to try to pain this as some evil dastardly thing where they badly tried to keep up and just failed because it's just so hard and costly vs something where it just wasn't worth them paying for because they didn't derive enough value from it.

Remind me which earnings call it was where they were saying "you know, we are going to issue rough q4 guidance because we think it's going to be really hard to implement these next 3 CSS features"

The cost of keeping up for them, even now, if they started again, would be a rounding error in any MS VP's overall equity refresh budget (IE the money they are giving out in stock per year to employees in their org). So please, let's not pretend it's too "hard" or "expensive" for them.

In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.

If you think you can do it better, or that it doesn't need to be this complex, or whatever, awesome. show up and do it, like everyone else did.

The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity".

Calling it that is just plain lazy. Almost all improvements and backwards compatibility shims make it harder for someone else to implement from scratch. That's because the primary goal is usually to help users.

I mean, why stop with the web with this argument?

How come the Go folks weaponized the Go language by adding generics? By making it harder for me to implement my own, they've weaponized it against me!

I can't believe nobody has stopped their dastardly deeds.

soulbadguy · 6 months ago

Money and resource are not the problem nor the reason microsoft gave up on their own browser engine. Same as why they gave up on mobile.

No reasonable amount of engineering resources would have made a dent in the problem. What OP is calling "weaponization of complexity" is just the asymmetry of effort required between new comers and entrenched players.

You would have to be naive to think that google would just open their arms and kumbaya with microsoft to do the "hard work"

We have seen this played out in any industry in history. Sometime hard work is not enough and it's easy to abuse dominant position to grid lock a market.

The rest of your post frankly sounds like someone who is drunk on the usual company cooliad.

> The end goal is to help user

No. The end goal is to make money. Sometime it requires helping user, other time a bunch of anti competitive ( forcing android oem to prevent meaningful forks)and anti consumer (like playing hard ball with ad blockers) BS.

>The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity

So much wrong with this. And is just a strawman. OP is not saying that it's not hard problem solving. The point is the solution achieved is self serving and sucks for the rest of us.

> In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.

Yeah no. History disagree with you

soulbadguy commented on Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year' cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-... · Posted by u/drchiu

ralfd · 7 months ago

I am lukewarm about unions, but if that shit would be the new work norm I would go hard left.

Wouldn’t be every coworker a competitor? How do you plan your life or start a family if you are every year 10% likely of being fired or backstabbed?

soulbadguy · 7 months ago

I am very much opposed to unions,I think in general , with time unions workers are just trading one oppressing power structure where they have not much control for another. However, i think with the way things go, it's inevitable that IT/Knowledge worker with start unionizing. The same things happens for starbucks the coffee : As the company grew, the margin improvement came at the expense of the employee working conditions until unions start forming

soulbadguy commented on Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year' cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-... · Posted by u/drchiu

lacker · 7 months ago

When I was an engineering manager there, engineering leadership described performance reviews as, in a large well run engineering organization, you'll probably be firing 5-10% of your employees every year for low performance. (Well, "non regrettable attrition", which includes people who quit when they get pipped.)

Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a quota and force managers to fire people who shouldn't want to be fired, but if you have 100 engineers in a department and only one of them gets fired in a year, probably the director is making a mistake.

So, I'm sure this won't be the only firing for the year at Meta. But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices.

soulbadguy · 7 months ago

Level and start/end year of tenure if you don't mind sharing. As meta grew in employee number things definitly worsen on that front

soulbadguy commented on Meta Is Planning to Cut 5% of Lowest Performers, Memo Shows bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

softwaredoug · 7 months ago

When you layoff the worse 5%, you drag the best 5% down too due to their lack of trust in the company. Nobody wants to go above and beyond when companies don’t seem to value employees.

soulbadguy · 7 months ago

Not really. Meta as the best retention policy for top performers. The amount of money the top 5% can make is simply too high to leave