The polite thing to do if you have a feature you think would make a FOSS project better is to submit a feature request first. If the maintainers decide they won’t support your feature quickly enough or at all, then fork it. GP did the right thing here
$450 for a dev kit is a steal compared to older console generations, which were thousands of dollars per device.
Also, I think it is completely fair for Nintendo to think: If you won’t spare even $450 for a dev kit, there’s no way we want your game.
By the way, consider what a Switch regularly costs: $299. You are paying Nintendo only $150 for the privilege of sending you a custom, low-run, modified device that is different in both software and hardware, combined with (likely) an account representative for business and technical questions. That’s kind of cheap.
No kid is going to learn how to program in Assembly and C++, when interfacing with a custom microkernel, custom graphics API, and all of the technical requirements Nintendo demands (i.e. you must have a launch screen, loading times cannot be longer than X, read speeds cannot peak higher than Y), while cross-compiling your game and all dependencies to ARM, and precompiling all shaders ahead of time, for the Tegra X1, into your game. That's what developing for the Switch literally entails. Develop your game first and then you might get there.
This is a game console, not a PC. Developing games, for better or worse, whether it should be this way or not, is an extreme privilege. Sony basically never allows individual developers to register in any capacity. Xbox does, but if you want to actually publish a game, you're going to be in for a hard time.
It has around a 1Ghz cpu, you have no idea if their little homebrew games will stress that or need all the assembly tuning.
Kids have programmed games for their calculators. This is like “throw it together to show off your friends,” it doesn’t need to meet Nintendo’s UI standards.
> This is like “throw it together to show off your friends,” it doesn’t need to meet Nintendo’s UI standards.
In that case, unless it goes on the eShop (thus meeting Nintendo's standards), every single one of her friends will also need a devkit to be able to run it; as retail units can't decrypt devkit-encrypted games, nor vice versa.
Might as well get a Steam Deck before convincing Nintendo to send over 10 devkits for children.
> Won't anyone think of the giant multinational corporations instead of the kids learning to program for once.
It's not a binary choice. Kids can learn to program in 1000 different ways. Getting social Brownie points for pointing out someone else isn't being incredibly generous is pretty poor behaviour, I think.
Kids can learn to program in 1000 different ways, but will they?
The biggest motivation is to show-off your creation and if all your friends play on the Switch and your game isn't there, it might as well not exist at all.
I learned programming on a Commodore 64, because I wanted to make my own games. Back at that time the playing field was fairly level as evidenced by the fact that a couple of the prominent game developers were almost kids themselves.
> My 12 year old and I made a little game in Godot and it turned out pretty playable.
> I think in her peer group the second most popular device after the iPhone is the Switch. It would be incredibly cool if we could get our game to run there.
I don’t think buying her friends Steam Decks is a very scalable solution for this sort of thing.
The Steam Deck is, fundamentally, a PC. PC software is written to run using "some" of a PC's resources, because PCs have a bunch of extra resource "headroom" for running userland software plus a bunch of other junk on them at the same time. You can run a game in debug mode, within an IDE, within Windows, on a Steam Deck. And maybe also OBS to stream yourself doing that!
The Switch — and all other game consoles ever made thusfar — are embedded systems: systems designed to run software in such a way that the software can make use of 99% or more of the system's hardware resources (because, per the unit economics of such systems, that's the only way to make the system's low per-unit BOM, translate to good perf for the software.)
Also, unlike with PCs, embedded systems can give a developer performance guarantees — a number of CPU cores, amount of RAM, etc. that will always be 100% dedicated to running your software, with even hardware interrupts being offloaded somewhere else. And the platform will be extremely uniform, with all retail units having (at least) those same numbers. (Though there may eventually be a revision of the hardware that bumps the guaranteed resources up for software that opts into that — see e.g. how the Gameboy Color runs Gameboy games, or the "New" 3DS, etc.) So, unlike with a PC, when writing embedded software, you can and should write it to use "all the resources" — to "wastefully" spend memory caching whatever you can, run background logic to pre-compute things, etc., so that your software can get the best realtime runtime perf. It's not like anything else is running. Take the Unix idea of a process being nice(1), and invert it.
This means two things:
1. when a game is running on a retail device — if you've developed it following best practices — then there's no extra room for anything else to be running. Your software, by design, hogs everything. The OS shrinks down to just running on one e-core of one accessory CPU (and on older consoles, gets terminated altogether, with the user software instead being expected to keep the hardware going using an exokernel library provided as part of the SDK.) There's no room to run an IDE or debugger. So retail devices fundamentally can't be used to develop games in such a way that they "mirror production" — to have the room to develop your game on such a device, you'd have to somehow build your game to use half the RAM and CPU it usually uses — but only sometimes. Which is likely impossible, for most software architectures; but even if it were possible, you'd no longer be mirroring production.
2. even with a devkit — essentially these days just the same hardware but with double the RAM to fit a debug build of the game (both for the debug symbols, and so that it doesn't need to take two hours to LTO the executable each time you rebuild like it does for building retail) — you still need a host PC, because you want development to mirror production at least somewhat closely, and that means that you can't be spending half the CPU budget on a userland debugger + telemetry. Instead, devkit hardware has a hardware debugger + telemetry, that feed one side of a USB-serial connection to a host PC, where the other side is a special IDE that knows how to talk to such a setup.
None of this is unique to game consoles, mind you. You do the same thing to develop for an Arduino, or a wireless router, or a smart watch, or your car's infotainment system. "Tethered hardware devkits that externalize the development environment so the embedded software can expand to fill the device" are just how embedded systems engineering works.
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And yes, embedded-systems hardware ecosystems also often involve "QA" or "tester" units, that are basically retail units that either allow you to run [the ecosystem's specific, often proprietary] media containing unsigned code; or at least, allow you to install a specific signing key and then run media containing code signed by that key.
So you could, in theory, do your development by building for QA units.
(That is, you could, if you thought that printf debugging with two-hour iterations is the be-all and end-all of development cadence.)
Homebrew embedded-systems tinkering communities tend to ignore such systems, though, mostly due to the requirement of burning the media. Even when the media isn't proprietary, it's still often something like a surface-mount eMMC flash chip, where the embedded-systems vendor expects you to be able to program that and put it on your QA board (and will, of course, point you to their hardware support partner who will sell you a programmer for it.) While there are many hardware hackers among Homebrew people doing fun reverse-engineering attacks, there are few true Electronics Engineers in the homebrew scene who have these sorts of Shenzhen-parts-store-looking industrial test-equipment labs in their basements. The average homebrewer doesn't even own an oscilloscope. :)
It's just easier to either work with true dev kits (where all you need is to "convince" the thing that you're authorized to feed it software over the serial tether); and/or to reverse-engineer and exploit your way into a retail unit, such that you can then feed it software through some channel that is attainable for the average dev (usually, these days, that means getting the system to launch software from an SD card that was supposed to just be there to store state data.)
> You are paying Nintendo only $150 for the privilege of sending you a custom, low-run, modified device that is different in both software and hardware, combined with (likely) an account representative for business and technical questions.
It's well known game consoles aren't the place to run custom code. If you can figure it out, power to you, but it's simply not a supported use case of the product.
Make the game available on the Switch store for like $5. 450/5 ~= 100, so after 100 purchases you've made back the money.
Sure, you'd have to spend extra time to polish stuff, and that would probably not be super easy, but afterwards you have a fully published game the daughter and all her friends could install.
This might not be feasible. If you are making a game for yourself and your kid, you might not be using assets (art, sound, etc.) that you could distribute/sell in your game.
I made a game for my daughters 3rd birthday, recorded some Blipi and Coco Melon songs off youtube that I put in the game. I would not have the right to sell the game without securing rights to the songs (unless I want a lawsuit on my hands).
How would you distribute that over the Switch in the first place to the daughter and/or friends if you don't have the licenses to the assets you're using?
we have a pipeline that ingest very concise cuelang files.
then it generates json files for each application for a tool that will create xml definitions which then are applied to a xls which the architects own, to spit out a yaml that we use to apply our helm charts. the charts deploy a k8s client which then interact with the main cluster via json using the api.
took a while, but we are using the best tool for each job.
Dhall's lack of any form of type inference makes it very verbose and difficult to refactor in my opinion. (I'm the author of dhall-kubernetes and never ended up using it in production; funnily enough). Dhall is also extremely slow. We had kubernetes manifests that took _minutes_ to type-check. Cue is basically instant. This matters a lot to me.
I find cue very ergonomic. Also it treating both types and values as values is very neat. You write your types and your values in the same syntax and everything unifies neatly. but I sometimes miss its lack of functions.
Cue also being to ingest protobuf definitions and openapi schemas makes it very quick and easy to integrate with your project. Have a new Kubernetes CRD you want to have type-checked in cue? No problem just run `cue get go k8s.io/api/myapi/v1alpha1` and off you go you have all your type definitions imported from Go to Cue!
Especially for k8s this makes for very fast development and iteration cycle.
I've wanted to take a look at https://nickel-lang.org/ which is a "what if cue had functions" language. but to be honest Cue kind of serves my needs.
Speaking of Nickel, they've got a great document detailing the reasons for their design (for example why they chose not embed in a general-purpose language like Pulumi) and how Nickel compares to other config languages like Dhall and CUE: https://github.com/tweag/nickel/blob/master/RATIONALE.md
> Dhall is also extremely slow. We had kubernetes manifests that took _minutes_ to type-check. Cue is basically instant.
Everyone wants type-safety, but no one wants to wait for the type-checker :)
Maybe in this case dhall with type checks equivalent to dhall would be slower, but I notice in many places people say "strong type-checking is valuable" while still expecting similar compile times as languages with weaker type systems.
People always undervalue the beauty of a short feedback loop until it's taken away from them.
And even then, they won't exactly pin point the problem, rather express their general frustration, without realizing that the dynamic system they used had indeed some great properties and were not popular for no reason.
I'm conflicted honestly. I find with dynamic languages it's easier to just spin your wheels and move quickly in the hole you are in.
With typed languages its easy to feel you are making less progress because the feedback loop can be longer, but generally the pieces you build are more likely to work correctly.
For me Haskell and ghci repl gives good properties from both areas, especially with something like Rapid for keeping state over repl reloads.
- You lose locality of behavior, which is very useful in configuration.
Also, nickel doesn't support injecting data into the nickel file, so external program can't set variables, query a database and pass the result to the conf file, etc.
Cue was designed very much with k8s in mind and developed tutorials and integrations for it early on. Dhall was designed pre-k8s. Dhall had to introduce a defaults feature: before that it was completely unusable for k8s. Dhall has functions, which are natural to programmers- particularly from an FP background, Dhall would be trivial to start using. Whereas it takes some getting used to cue's unifications- but there is enough documentation and integration for getting going with k8s to make up for it. Dhall has unique features for stably importing configurations from remote locations.
That's not a lot, in a country of millions. We do much more in France, every year. And it's been showing diminishing returns, as the government realized it could just not listen, and nothing bad would happen.
In fact, it's a drop in the sea, compared to the rising casual xenophobia I can notice with my German acquaintances, friends, and even family. Medias, general discussions, and overall atmosphere is not going in the direction of peace.
The fact that they welcomed many African refugees in the last few years increased the tensions, and the Russian crisis made economy a big focus. As a result, there is a general feeling of unfairness which politics use to push a divisive narrative.
Prices have gone up, which in most countries is visible, but quality has gone down, and in Germany, this is a sin. Everything is touched by this: transport, food, service...
And when people are unhappy, you can sell them an enemy.
I've never seen such a big protest. The transit system in Hamburg was completely overloaded. People standing around Alster lake, you couldn't even get close to the actual point where the protest was scheduled to happen. Those protests possibly may be ineffectual and what not - they certainly weren't small.
Both Hamburg and Munich protests needed to be canceled in the middle of the thing because the huge crowds were considered dangerous (I think rightly so).
But I am not sure why grand poster is downvoted so much. This is a significant and important sign of the liberal and democratic side.. still the frustration is huge and fear and anger is constantly rising.. humans are bad and egoist. Extremism as everywhere is not avoided with good people showing their good faith, unfortunately, the only thing that keeps it low is happy people without economic stress.. in that sense the world is bound for trouble in many places, as we already see it. Democratic protests are good, but in the end it is democracy and current politics that fail here, not the misguided humans, and the other side which shows up won't improve it much..
I was thinking compared to a Russian invasion, the Israeli-Palestine conflict. For the first time, it feels like people are reacting to the implications and not just the results.
But yeah, that's definitely the catalyst. What an awful bunch of people.
"A lot" means 2, they weren't neo-Nazis, the CDU also had people there and the meeting was so secret that journalists turned up to it on the day it was happening.
Indeed, that wouldn’t be a lot: the framing in the article is grossly misleading. The actual number of protesters this weekend was hundreds of thousands, and plausibly >1M (not “tens of thousands”), according to unanimous reporting in various German media and official sources (see e.g. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/demos-gegen-rechts-bilanz-1...).
And when people are unhappy, you can sell them an enemy.
In the US, the enemy being sold to the public is China. It's China this. China that. China is stealing your future. China is stealing our technology. Both parties are happy to throw China under the bus to win some votes and hide their deficiencies.
It's ironic coz in the 90s they were condescendingly told they were shooting themselves in the foot by not having a "free market" and centrally planning. Now they're too successful and it's a threat.
There’s not just one enemy being sold to the public. We are a nation of consumers and we have varied taste. Other enemies include Democrats, elites, Russia, the trans agenda, Republicans, billionaires, immigrants, fascists, and antifa.
In a democracy, the people have a right to control immigration. Uncontrolled immigration has been very anti democratic and has angered people literally all over the world (you can find many examples). I’m tired of people thinking that just because they have some reflective empathy doesn’t make their policy choices better or morally superior. There are real negatives when it comes to it that many in the left pretend don’t exist
But that party is planning to remigrate people with the wrong blood. The plan is to take away their German passports, move them into northern African country and create laws to make their life's as hard as possible in a decade long project to remove the unassimilated with German passports.
Yeah, that's the theory, but in practice, pretty much across all EU countries, for about 35+ years there was no party which you could vote for which both had a chance of being able to form a government and had an anti-immigration policy.
For all intents and purposes immigration policy was not (and remains not) somthing that was under democratic influence. That's why so many conspiracy theories have sprung up around the subject.
In France, constraining immigration is equaled to racism for many people. If you include it in your program, you will be compared to the far right, and a lot of voters will ignore you without checking anything you have to say.
> That's not a lot, in a country of millions. We do much more in France, every year. And it's been showing diminishing returns, as the government realized it could just not listen, and nothing bad would happen.
You guys have a protest culture I'm pretty envious of. Meanwhile, here in Germany you can and will get arrested for wearing a bicycle helmet...
French research is doing fine, and infrastructures are in a much better shape than in the US. Things keep being built, I can't spend a minute outside without seeing some giant machine running. We are incredibly productive given a 35 hours work week, so getting things done is also right there.
Our problem is rather turning innovation into a business. Getting money for it. Taking risks.
Instead, innovations and innovators emigrate to the US. Yann LeCun went to do AI in the US, he didn't stay in France.
In animal crossing, the player doesn't feel the characters cold, hunger, head aches, sleep deprivation or flue.
The player doesn't really experience the dreadful responsibility for a kid not to die, the requirement to fill forms, queue with irritated people, be stuck in traffic or the sub every day, etc.
And above that, the interactions are in this context. Nobody tries to hit on your girlfriend who you built your life with, no divorce can take half of your house, no firing send you back to your country because your visa depend on it. You don't have an asshole boss, an entitled customer, an asshole clerk or a depressed librarian.
Prosperity is easier when things are predictable, you have low risk and people are homogeneous. E.G: it's easier to live as a Swiss in your own country than as Tunisian refugee in china.
You don’t get dirty when you plant a tree in Animal Crossing and have to do a bunch of extra laundry. No grit under your nails that sticks around for a couple days and sometimes ends up in your food. You don’t pull a muscle and spend a whole week miserable. You don’t get blisters. You don’t want to go plant a tree but then you can’t for real-life days on end because the weather is bad. You don’t get mosquito bites, or worry about ticks maybe giving you a debilitating illness.
You don’t have to go find the shovels, mulch, scrap cardboard, whatever. Maybe craft a shovel, but that may take less time than walking to the garage. It’s a minute or less to reach the spot you want to plant it. You will not dig and hit a big rock and have to relocate, or have to worry about hitting utilities. The tree’s roots will not trash your sidewalk if you plant it in the wrong place. The tree will not fail to grow.
“Work” in video games is rarely anything at all like real life “work”, even before you layer on workplace bureaucracy and regulations and stuff. There’s no mess, no danger, (generally) no actual costs, and usually you can’t really screw it up, and if you do, there are no actual consequences. Stuff like travel times or how long it takes to do boring tasks are usually compressed.
Given that we still have today people crafting leather belt by hand and sell them for a premium, I assume there will always be a niche market for craftmanship-type software.
And only people that really love it will be able to work in that.
I'm not that hopeful. It does look like we will eventually get code of the quality of a good SWE. Usually that's not the case for craftsmanship-type items... shoes, knives, teapots, etc. I'm a sucker for this kind of objects but I can't see myself care about a handmade iOS app. Most people don't understand what coding entails anyway, whereas everyone has a rough idea that you need to hammer hot metal a lot to make a knife.
Software written by a human may feel more like hand woven cotton than hand made shoes.
It would be interesting to have an iOS app where you're in a discord with the developer and can make feature requests really directly, or say that a font or some UI thing needs changing and get that patched in a week.
Small game dev communities are close to this, but I can't think of other software that's really similar.
There's a discord for worldbuilding software that's like this, though, due to the main dev's health issues and the original architecture being relatively weak, such changes have been very delayed, buy it is picking up again now
This is how LegendKeeper’s Discord is. I interact with my users daily, reply to bug reports and feature requests, and overall shoot the breeze. Been a great way to stay close to the community, and been going on 5 years now. :D
While I agree that there is lots of innovation and talent in the EU, I think there is also an "innovation gap" with other developed economies. Here's a take from the Economist [0] but you can find similar articles from the Financial Times, Blomberg, and other similar outlets.
It is a hit piece here for example they compare a whole group to a subset:
“western Europeans were a quarter poorer than Americans in 1990, and remain a quarter poorer today. ”
And when they say they do less research Id argue the research is done in universities for the benefit of mankind instead of something corporations do. Latest example is Stable Diffusion developed by the CompVis group at LMU Munich.
But if you ask the common man he will say it is something by OpenAI.
There are really no good institutions left, only good people.
If it is easy, it is not innovation. You're not finding and improving a thing then. True innovation requires novelty and effort. Even smallest innovative projects require many many thoughts and redesigns until they become even an MVP.
The US tech giants were coasting and amassing compound wealth without by innovating but buying the innovative companies or disregarding a basic human right: privacy.
True innovation is and should be difficult and it shouldn't come at the cost of human rights that people has fought over for centuries, sometimes with their own blood.
That analogy doesn’t really work for interpersonal relationships. If everyone likes you, you’re not going to get fired from the CEO position for missing one ball. And if you miss a bunch of them, you’re probably no longer the best in the world.
That said (and I haven’t read the article yet), the quote the original commenter picked doesn’t say he got the job back due to interpersonal skills. “Influence and reputation” could just as well mean he’s known for being ruthless and vindictive with friends in high places.
