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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Well, that explains a lot about the product quality. Their entire development workflow is a complete fucking mess.

    • Long-lived feature branches.
    • Creating merge commits to main just for the sole purpose of tagging them as releases while also maintaining separate release branches.
    • Force-pushing tags to incorporate post-release hotfixes instead of releasing minor patch updates.
    • Taking bugfixes from releases and merging them back into the development branch (have they not heard of cherry-pick?)
    • Always using merges even when a rebase would be easier to follow and keep the history more straightforward.


  • Literally create all the service problems by normalizing launcher DRM

    I hate DRM as much as the next person, but if Steam didn’t exist and digital downloads still became a thing, there would still be launcher DRM. Thanks to corporate greed, DRM is an inevitability in the industry.

    Games distributed on DVD were packed with DRM fuckery, needing to be inside the computer to launch and using kernel-level drivers to enforce it. Before DVDs, you had games on floppy disks. Those came with physical codewheels that the player had to use to decode a password before it would start the game.


  • even their precious HL’s engine was IIRC a rewrite or fork of the one for Quake

    IIRC, even the HL2 engine was just an improvement on the HL1 engine with a commercial physics engine bolted on top.

    Much like Google used to, Valve doesn’t really do anything new. They take existing ideas and remove the rough edges to provide a more polished experience than what is already available.

    To their credit, that’s exactly why they succeeded with most of their ventures. Gabe Newell understands consumers well enough to know that most people don’t care about anything other than user experience. Or, as he put it, “piracy is a service problem”.





  • Windows’ UX is shit.

    Windows 11 still has its settings splattered across multiple applications. The Settings application has all the shiny new gimmicks they added, yet still lacks any way to change some basic settings. If you need to reset a local user’s password, you’re stuck going back into the now-gutted Control Panel to do it. And if you want to change something that Microsoft feels the average user shouldn’t be allowed to know exists, you’re using the group policy editor to do it.

    Or, how about the way that there’s at least two applications installed by default that do the same or very similar things? Windows Media Player or Videos? Paint or Paint 3D? Cmd.exe or Windows Terminal?

    How about the design language inconsistency? The Run dialog was left looking like a Windows 7 dialog and didn’t get a dark mode until the mid 2020s. The Event Viewer and Windows Firewall UIs are still something right out of Windows XP, but with Vista-smeared paint applied on top.

    Or, if that’s not bad UX, then how about the ads in the start menu? Or how OneDrive tries to trick you into uploading your desktop to the cloud? Or, maybe all the telemetry services running in the background and slowing shit down?

    If you’re using a distro with a worse UX than that, then that’s on you. There’s plenty of options that provide a more cohesive UX than Windows









  • I didn’t want to make it sound too scary 😉

    Seriously, though, git really needs an option to treat --force as --force-with-lease. In the exceedingly rare occasion where I might want to completely overwrite a branch, it should be extra explicit by having to type something like --force-and-overwrite.