The Playdate community is very impressive and makes this device such a no-brainer purchase after all the questions about whether it would be worth it (while acknowledging it's still not for everyone)! As a mostly-lurker on the unofficial Playdate Discord it's delightful to see this get attention here
They send emails, maybe they could be more regular, but also definitely not "none."
* June 2022 - email that group 5 slipped from "Late Second Half [2022]" to "2022 (Later) ~ 2023 (Early)"
* October 2022 - email that group 5 slipped from "2022 (Later) ~ 2023 (Early)" to "2023 (Early)"
* March 2023 - email that group 5 slipped from "2023 (Early)" to "Summer/Fall 2023"
It's frustrating but they've also shipped roughly 40k units as a tiny company. I believe they are still supply-chain constrained. I would not expect a Playdate 2 soon (ever?)
This is hilarious- now when I google "90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience" the top result is the IMDb page for Gifted!!
The actual movie is Little Man Tate, yes? I've never seen it but that's what ChatGPT tells me. Zero Google results point there, but it is the #5 result for "related searches." I hate Google and even I am shocked how bad this is.
Not to sound dismissive, but I'm curious how that's working for you? Are you still in the industry? Seems the vast majority of jobs that pay well and expect obj-c experience are in the context of "single digit percentage of our codebase is still in that and we just don't touch it."
I think what I wrote was misleading. When I wrote that I never migrated to Swift, what I meant was that I never bothered learning it. It broke my heart to have to work on iOS and throw away my Objective-C knowledge and trade (the UI stuff of ) UIKit for SwiftUI, especially as all that remained a moving target for a long time.
I just went and got a new job. I'm doing web front-end work with React and TypeScript. I'm not crazy about that, believe me.
I don't even bother with iOS stuff right now as a hobby, because I can't really stomach it. I really think Apple went the wrong way.
On a side note, I can't stand "reactive" UI's (though that's what I work with now). You know, key-value coding and notifications on iOS can be used to make a reactive UI (of sorts), instead of updating the UI imperatively. But all the books I've ever read from iOS people who knew what they were talking about always warned strongly about overusing KVC or notifications: specifically, because it makes reasoning about how code works more difficult.
So, what the hell then is the idea of a reactive UI. It's taking the kind of architecture or pattern programmers have always been warned not to use, and then turning the entire UI into that!
I am really just down on the whole thing. I think it's a mistake.
Oh man, hard agree! I love being told that's all just a tooling problem. Okay, so when is that tooling coming then? I'm going along with the crowd but it is a struggle and I wish I could stay in UIKit land until I retire. Maybe things will come full-circle by then (or I'll just be telling SiriGPT what I want to show up on the screen)
Lol for almost all human history working all a day was the norm.
I don’t necessarily have to do that much work, but I want to get ahead. Most people I grew up with work 40-70hrs a week, often two to three jobs.
It’s natural for me to work that much. I don’t even blink at it. What else would you do? Play video games, watch tv, “party”? I can accomplish and build things and spend the rest of the time with family and friends. It’s a good life imo
> What else would you do? Play video games, watch tv, “party”?
Sorry, but this is such a sad statement to me. I mean, unless you absolutely love the field you work in, in which case that's amazing, go for it! But if you're like the rest of us, there's so much to see & do in life besides work! As an example, I'm reading, learning to cook, traveling, and trying to get fit. These provide their own satisfaction & meaning in ways that work doesn't.
On the contrary, I feel sort of sad that so many people seem to find their work unfulfilling. I work a job that’s more work than some alternatives could be. I could at any point quit and find easier work that paid better. But I chose to work here, right? I’m privileged enough to not be obligated to stay. I’ll assume most people here have similar flexibility.
I find the “cooking as alternative” suggestion interesting too. I can understand the desire work on a creation for yourself (a meal), but for me that’s balanced by the desire to create something amazing for the world. By the same token, I could take every Friday off and work on a side project, but fundamentally that’s not going to be as fun or productive as working on the main project I’ve chosen to work on: ie, my job.
Now raising a family I can totally see as a competing interest, if I were raising children I would be working less. But I’m not (yet).
I hear what you’re saying but since this is hacker news we’re mostly white collar and we’re not talking about all human history, we’re talking about 2023+.
I spend my entire weekend with my kids for one thing. Don’t you miss out on things? And yes I play video games or do literally anything other than work before bed. If you’re including side projects you actually want to build in your 60 hours, that’s totally different of course. And I also don’t mean to judge, as the people working those 2-3 jobs NEED to do it. Nobody wants to.
> I get to spend every morning 7am-noon with my kids.
I work from home, so I have no commute (saves a boatload of time) and get to eat every meal with the family (who ever is home). I also spend probably 4-7 hrs with my children every day (and all day Sunday’s). I’m pretty more involved, but sure I miss some stuff. I can’t do afternoon / evenings (unless it’s 5-7pm).
In terms of my work breakdown, I tend to do 60-70 hrs. But I code and manage our farm part time (kids will eventually assist with). That’s probably 50 hrs coding/designing, 10-20 hrs on the farm, depending. That obviously will shift a bit depending on weather. I also take 2-3 weeks off coding work to harvest; which are like 12 hr days for a week at a time.
Appreciate hearing your story! This is why I refuse to get chickens, let alone actually farm! I’m not disagreeing that this is a great amount of time with the kids, as many people see theirs way less than they would like. Still I can’t imagine losing half of my precious weekend, and in fact want another day of weekend like the people in this article. But not enough to take a pay cut because I’d rather take the money now and retire earlier. Cheers!
> for almost all human history working all a day was the norm.
References for that? Didn't they do studies showing that e.g. hunter-gather type tribes such as Kalahari bushmen had about the same amount of downtime as modern Westerners?
At any rate, the sort of work you're doing makes a huge difference as to how sustainable doing it 60 hours a week is.
(Quote from article linked below:
“Our hunter-gatherer ancestors almost certainly did not endure ‘nasty, brutish, and short‘ lives,” he writes of seminal studies of the Ju/’hoansi, a hunter-gatherer group living in southern Africa. “The Ju/’hoansi were revealed to be well fed, content, and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies, and by rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week had plenty of time and energy to devote to leisure.”)
As a manager, I always measured by consistency. I could care less about how much someone worked, frankly.
The engineers would commit and if they met their commitments they were usually good. Sometimes I’d have to nudge them one way or the other, but rarely did I see an issue.
I tended to try to inspire others - aka you can design your own projects, deadlines, etc. My job was to guide, provide cover / funds and ensure success is recognized. My teams were definitely intense at times, but always self-committed and everyone became invested. That’s how to help people grow the most and get the most out of them imo.
That said, most of our deliverables I always pushed publicly (parents, papers, open source, etc). This ensured good future job prospects.
I've been a paying subscriber since 2009 and I'm still happy with it. I agree this article is a dud and I could do without the Wired articles (thankfully they're easy to identify and skip even if you miss the by-line -- just look for the first paragraph that's all setup and zero content). But they still seem like a fine outlet for high-level science & tech news.
Agreed. Unfortunately there don’t appear to be any viable replacements. Ultimately I just read less in general now which sucks. I hate what the internet has become.
Ars in 2008 was the place where people found out you could run arbitrary floating point computations on a GPU. I've never heard anyone talking about it but without those forums deep learning would still be this thing that looks interesting but is really hard to train at scale and no one bothers with.
Also a cross platform mobile dev, couldn't agree more. Feels like I'm in a different OS when I have Android Studio full screen. There are some things I like about it but if I could stick 100% to iOS strictly from a devex point of view I would.
