Oh I can explain this: You were born with a destiny that doesn’t make sense anymore because the gods had to make some changes to the timeline. Sounds simple enough but some people have actually been given theirs or someone else’s prophecy so now they have to make it happen… Somehow.

To resolve this situation they often have to come up with clever solutions to make sure the prophecy still happens in a way that the (new) timeline can handle. Such as “experiencing plague” and “getting caught rolling with a naked woman in public”.

massive financial losses due to piracy,

No. That’s not “losses”. It’s just potentially lost sales. In reality though we call that, “wishful thinking”. So to Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs I say:

Well, good/useful AI integration. An AI that makes games infinitely replayable by changing the story, levels, and characters so they’re 100% unique every time? That could be awesome. Oh man I bet that sort of thing would be amazing if done right in a roguelike game!

AI that tries to figure out how to sell you more loot boxes? No thanks!

When Dad doesn’t joke about it.

For Microsoft, the key threat is that the Steam Deck isn’t even a Windows OS device by default, let alone having Microsoft’s Xbox services and Game Pass on it. Valve has used the platform, very successfully, to evolve Steam from being simply a digital store that runs (usually) on Windows, into being a very capable gaming OS in its own right.

That, perhaps more than anything else happening in the industry in recent years, is a threat to Microsoft’s plans for the Xbox platform and gaming more broadly – and if the success of the Steam Deck is a key component of that threat, then creating an Xbox device to compete directly in that space seems like the logical response.

And there’s the real reason why Microsoft cares. The success of the Steam Deck is a threat to Windows because it runs Linux. Also, the more games that run on the Steam Deck means the more games run on Linux.

Microsoft normally solves problems like this by abusing their monopoly and crushing their competition. In this case though, Microsoft is the underdog since Steam is the one with a much larger gaming monopoly. They’re going to have to spend billions and billions if they want to stand a chance against the Steam Deck.

The other enormous problem they face is that Windows is very, very far behind when it comes to technology compared to Linux. Devices made for Linux vastly outperform the best hardware that runs Windows. Even if that hardware was made to run Windows!

Windows is decades behind Linux from a technological development standpoint. For example, Windows is still running the same filesystem from over 30 years ago!

What this means is that for any given portable hardware Linux is going to vastly outperform Windows in basically every benchmark from battery life to frame rate. That doesn’t even include the fact that in Windows you’re forced to install many background apps (and kernel level rootkit anti-cheat) that takes up memory and slows everything down just to get basic security and play games.

without type safety your code is no longer predictable or maintainable

This sounds like someone who’s never worked on a large Python project with multiple developers. I’ve been doing this for almost two decades and we never encounter bugs because of mismatched types.

For reference, the most common bugs we encounter are related to exception handling. Either the code captured the exception and didn’t do the right thing (whatever that is) in specific situations or it didn’t capture the exception in the right place so it bubbles up waaaaay too high up the chain and we end up with super annoying troubleshooting where it’s difficult to reproduce or difficult to track down.

Also, testing is completely orthogonal to types.

It’d be ineffective and in fact, decrease the likelihood of obtaining that default assumption of innocence that cuteness provides. It’d be like tying a pink ribbon to the tail of a tiger. The ribbon itself would be cute but the tiger would still be viewed as a dangerous predator.

Might help with getting out of manual labor though 🤔 🤣

Yeah that’s annoying but it’s a short-term problem. Python just recently cleaned up some long-standing issues that broke backwards compatibility in packaging (for certain things). Most public modules that broke made trivial changes to fix the problems (once they learned about them) and life went on.

However, for some fucking reason a whole bunch of dependencies related to AI are dragging their feet and taking forever to fix their shit. Insisting that everyone “just use Python 3.10” and it drives me nuts too.

This problem started to become a real thing almost two years ago (so they had plenty of warning and time to fix things) and yet here we are with still a handful of core dependencies that won’t install for things like Stable Diffusion, Flux, and various LLM stuff because they’re dragging their feet.

I blame corporate culture: Enterprises hate upgrading their shit and they’re as slow as glaciers sometimes. There’s probably tooling at Nvidia, for example, that needs a ton of work for Torch to work with new versions of Python and since all their documentation already was written for running on Python 3.10 (and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS) they’ve created a lot of work for themselves.

Any day now they’ll finally finish fixing all these little dependencies and then we’ll have another two years of ease before the problem rises again with Python 3.14 and it’s massive GIL-free improvements that require big changes in code to actually take advantage of them.

Why? The most annoying thing that I remember about it was popular modules that hadn’t been ported yet. In essence, a temporary problem; growing pains.

The Unicode/string/bytes changes were welcome (to me). But that might just be because I had actually encountered situations where I had to deal with seemingly endless complexity and ambiguity related to Unicode stuff and encodings. Python 3 made everything much more logical 🤷

Haha: “A space breaks everything.” Fuck YES! Are you kidding me‽ It’s one of the best features!

Why? Because it’s so easy to see. In other languages you’ve got semicolons which are surprisingly difficult to notice when they’re missing. Depending on the situation (or if you’re just new to programming) you could spend a great deal of time troubleshooting your code only to find out that you’re missing a semicolon. It’s frustrating and it makes you feel stupid which is never a good thing for people who are new programming.

Types are in a different category altogether with seemingly infinite reasons why you’d want a feature-rich, low-level type system and also why you’d want to avoid that.

IMHO, the point of Python is to be a simple language that’s quick to write yet also very powerful and speedy when you need it to be (by taking advantage of modules written in C or better, Rust). If it had a complex type system I think it would significantly lower the value of the language. Just like how when I see an entire code repo using Pydantic and type hints everywhere it makes the code unnecessarily complex (just use type hints where it matters 🙄).

I’m not saying using type hints on everything is a terrible thing… I just think it makes the code harder to read which, IMHO defeats the point of using Python and adds a TON of complexity to the language.

The promise of type hints is that they’ll enable the interpreter to significantly speed up certain things and reduce memory utilization by orders of magnitude at some point in the future. When that happens I’ll definitely be reevaluating the situation but right now there doesn’t seem to be much point.

For reference, I’ve been coding in Python for about 18 years now and I’ve only ever encountered a bug (in production) that would’ve been prevented by type hints once. It was a long time ago, before I knew better and didn’t write unit tests.

These days when I’m working on code that requires type hints (by policy; not actual necessity) it feels like doing situps. Like, do I really need to add a string type hint to a function called, parse_log()? LOL!

In the US we teach kids that trash men are suckers and idiots that didn’t work hard enough in school! Also, that trash is an externality: Someone else’s problem.

“We pay taxes for people to clean that up! Why should I spend my valuable time doing someone else’s job‽”

It’s an awful culture.

They get paid more than most people would think but it’s still not enough based on the hazards of the job. They get exposed to all sorts of nasty things that can ruin their long term health and they have increased likelihood that they’ll get a life-altering injury at work.

Your wish has been granted! You will now keenly remember old photographs 👍

To get what I want by just being cute. Like little kids or cute girls. Or to be automatically excluded from manual labor/heavy lifting for the same reason.

If you’re a healthy boy, the moment you become a teenager is the moment you’re just expected to be performing manual labor or other hot, sweaty activities. At least in the US 🤷

For those that don’t know, this is one popular way of laundering money.

The other is real estate (which is how Trump made his comeback from early business failures).

Sounds sooooo second class to me. I only deal with first class languages so I can enjoy my curry with a satisfying closure 🎩 👌

Software patents shouldn’t exist!

Working analog clock minute hands after the first minute.

Anyone care to guess how long before that island is completely submerged due to rising seas?

Doesn’t exactly seem like a long-term base.