I don't really follow Racket, but I recall that few years ago one apparently fairly significant contributor within their community wrote a blog post about Racket having a Missing Stair problem involving another even more significant (possibly foundational) contributor.
I'm a complete outsider, cannot find that blog post any more, and also just not invested in the language at all, so I'm hesitant draw conclusions about the validity of any of the accusations that were thrown back and forth at the time, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's inevitable that the community will end up being split after an event like that.
if it's Felleisen, then i'm surprised. i've met him on a conference for a couple of days about a decade ago, and my memory is of a nononsense guy with whom our vision of programming resonated a lot.
i was coming from the CL side of the isle, i hadn't known his work prior to that.
Haha, right? I remember meeting up with some friends after school back in 1996 at the home of the one kid whose dad was a surgeon, and him showing off their Pentium Pro with a mindboggling 32 MiB of RAM! And then we tried playing SimIsle! Which actually managed to run on their computer! Very, very slowly! Unbelievable! :)
> Yeah, I'm sure the reason stated by the customer support is the real one, and not the lack of profitability from that tool among a shift of focus towards AI[0] as reported everywhere.
Yeah, although "finished" software is antithetical to this always have new features to push onto your customers subscription model, so it's not entirely unrelated.
Having said that I still find it strange. I can imagine it might not be able to ride on the AI bubble, and perhaps animators are especially vocal about not wanting AI in their tools. But even so, why would that make Adobe Animate unprofitable? They do have a subscription model, and customers, so people are paying for this product.
Compared to other digital art, the data for vector animation takes relatively little space to store. It also requires much less resources to render than other forms of video, and rasterized video output should compress really well compared to alternatives, especially with modern codecs that are not only optimized for regular film. So surely it shouldn't be that expensive to maintain for them compared to all their other projects.
> But even so, why would that make Adobe Animate unprofitable?
Sorry, I wasn't precise with my wording. What I meant to say was "less profitable than the perceived AI opportunities they could do with the same engineers".
Ah, ok. Even then switching Animate into "maintenance mode" should be doable on a shoestring budget methinks but whatever, the more Adobe hurts itself the better tbh.
A mere 69, but I wonder if I would do better in my native language. Also, once I discovered it accepts extinct animals I went all in on dinos and other extinct animals, that's like half of my score.
I too feel like Emscripten is doing way more than it should for the vast majority of actual use-cases for WASM on the web out there. It's too heavy to install, too much of a hassle to get running, produces way bigger output than it should if the main target is a website, and adds needless friction by being largely oblivious to how the web works from the C++ side of things. The shared memory architecture + batched calls also aligns with hunches I had about unlocking fast WASM for web dev. So this sounds extremely interesting!
Coi looks pretty nice! But honestly I think WebCC might actually be the thing I have been waiting for to unlock WASM on the web. Because if I understand correctly, it would let me write C++ code that compiles to tiny WASM modules that actually integrates with generic JS code very efficiently. Which would make it much easier to add to existing projects where there are some big bottlenecks in the JS code.
> I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative.
Because I actually have an arts degree and I know the equivalent of a con artist in a rich people arts gallery bullshitting their way into money when I see one.
And the "pushing and crossing boundaries" argument has been abused as a pathetic defense to hide behind shallowness in the art world for longer than anyone in this discussion board has been alive. It's not provocative when it's utterly predictable, and in this case the "art" is "take the most absurd parody of AI culture and play it straight". Gee whiz how "creative" and "provocative".
Speaking as a Dutch person who lives in Sweden and who has traveled a lot within the EU, I'm pretty confident that the sympathy for "loser" heroes is not limited to England, but broadly applies to most if not all of Europe.
The way this is expressed however varies a lot depending on the local culture, and the English sense of humor around it is particularly loved (at least in the Netherlands, I can't really speak for other countries).
I suspect that these cultural differences have a strong connection to the flavor of Christianity that historically was more dominant in a particular European region. More specifically: how bleak their takes on predestination were[0]. That relates pretty directly to the question of "are we merely victims subject to winds of chance and external circumstance, or are we powerful agents fashioning our own stories, making our own luck?" after all.
Getting side-tracked for a bit, I've also seen this argument used to to explain why Donald Duck is more popular in most European countries than Mickey Mouse. That is actually a fun little rabbit hole to dive into too[1][2].
Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have had their own weekly Donald Duck magazine since 1948, 1951 and 1952 respectively, producing a lot of their own stories with their own established canon. Italy used to have a Donald Duck weekly from 1937 to 1940, but then it got merged into their weekly Mickey Mouse magazine. It still creates monthly Donald Duck pocket editions (which are translated and sold all over Europe).
Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse has weekly magazines in Italy (1931), France (1934), Germany (1951), Greece (1966), and was even very briefly published in inter-war Poland (1938 to 1939). I can only confirm that Italy produces most of its own comics.
Now I could argue that this confirms my claim, since Donald Duck appears more in the protestant side of Europe and Mickey in the catholic/orthodox side. Having grown up reading these comics I know better: in reality the magazines in different countries have been exchanging Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse stories (and others) for many decades already.
However, those stories definitely have a different flavor to them depending on which country they are from. One big example: in the Dutch comics Donald Duck is not just often the loser at the end of a story, but his misery is usually self-inflicted. Meanwhile, the Italians came up with a superhero alter-ego for Donald Duck that started out as a revenge fantasy against his horrible boss (Scrooge McDuck) but that quickly evolved into actual an actually superhero comic[3]. Make of that what you will.
PS: As a tangent on a tangent, if anyone from South America wants to comment on 1971's How to Read Donald Duck I'd be very interested, because I just discovered it on Wikipedia[4].
I suspect that one difference that gives the impression that the characters in Peanuts are "untouched by failure" is that for the most part they don't have real character arcs. Once their archetypes are established they stay the same. Combine that with being the longest running comic written by a single person of all time and it feels like nothing ever changes.
That's not a critique - being a comforting source of unchanging familiarity is part of the point of a newspaper comic. But it is very different to H2G. Arthur Dent might be a bumbling failure who is flung around by forces out of his own control, but his life still changes and he still changes. He still grows a little bit as a person.
It's really sad that Kishimoto so terrible at writing female characters. I'm not being a hater when I say this, he has even complained about this himself!
In terms of character concepts he's always really great - Naruto is one of the few series I read almost from the start, all the way to the finish. At the beginning of the series the concept for all male and female characters started out really interesting. But the female characters barely got any development compared to the male ones, and it got worse as the series went on. Partially because it ended up focusing more and more on Naruto and Sasuke, partially because the majority of the female character development was reduced to how they relate to the male characters.
I don't think it's intentional or that Kishi has any malice towards women or anything - if that was the case I doubt he would have been able to come up with interesting character concepts for women in the first place. But the fact that they're sidelined like that still sucks, especially since the potential is there.
I'm glad that Sakura got to be a bad-ass in a few of the side-stories after the main series ended at least.
I constantly get the impression that it's a yaoi manga dressed up as a shonen, and so from that perspective I can understand why women may not be the focus.
Naruto and Sasuke spend much of the entire series pining after each other, and when they do finally - uhm - "resolve their differences", the show tacks on two female counterparts to marry them off to like an afterthought.
I don't blame Kishimoto for this, I blame the shonen crowd more for shaping their expectations on what is clearly a yaoi story
OMG that's amazing. This is the first time I hear that take but I can actually see it, hahaha. They did have each other's first kiss after all, lmao.
Having said that, the whole issue with the women is that they're flat romantic characters most of the time (or, apparently, beards) instead of being allowed to pass the Bechdel test. I don't think being a yaoi manga really excuses that (although I can't say I've ever read any so I can't really comment on its genre conventions - surely there are female friends in the better written ones though?)
EDIT: it would need to predate the 6-bit teletype codes that preceded ASCII.
reply