i won't speak for gabe, but i (hispanic) had two distinct (and memorable) instances at mit where a classmate told me, to my face, that the only reason i was at mit was because i was hispanic. one passed it off as common knowledge in a group conversation, the other said it to me, unprompted, while we were talking to each other. they were assholes, to be sure, but it's not some hypothetical scenario.
that site is not really suitable for mass consumption, iirc it used to even have a caveat that said it really only existed to make certain leaf nodes sharable. it's basically a personal zettelkasten, but this update was also sent to his patreons as well, where the writing just ended up being whatever your email client made of it.
an earlier newsletter shows this distressing graph of teen suicides and, shocker, boys are doing terribly, a suicide rate at least three times more than girls, but the author seems to find the 34% delta less distressing. the data is unsettling, but the author doesn't remotely confront the question about why 2017 is a post-2010 maxima for both boys and girls. (which would probably change the boys delta to at least 60 percent and possibly undermine the premise that social media exclusively harms young women)
i believe the slideshow issue is actually a limitation of the apple tv's apis having changed around the time that the aerial screensaver came out and not getting updated to support the old screensaver functionality
great, now you have a native client but now your customers will expect that it works offline, so now you're building a sync system for your app.
additionally, if your app has any design/layout issues, now you need to hire for people that can do visual layout using tcl/tk.
If your app consumes rich text, you're in for a real treat as you are now on the hook for figuring out how to manage that as well (in addition to serialization, you also need it to likely be emitted into some web friendly format anyway. if your app consumes some feed (say new-user facing features or whatever), you need to find some meta-format that your app can use to layout that content (or i mean, i guess you can use a webview, but then...)
if your customers are enterprise-ey, you are now dealing with some overzealous IT dept that is skeptical of your application running with user permissions.
if you're trying to push a fix/update to your users, you now need to build infra around deploying new apps as well as customer support determining if users are somehow running old versions when they report a bug.
the web is a total "mo money, mo problems" situation, but i think people dismiss how many problems the web solves for your developers on a day to day basis: easy to push updates, simple to whitelist your app's domain on some restricted network, easy add dynamic content/layout to portions of your app with stored content, (less sync resolution issues because your app probably requires network to operate) etc. Native apps have their own issues, they're great, don't get me wrong, but people demand a lot from basic apps of any stripe these days, and as those requirements increase, so does the amount of complexity that developers need to manage at all stages of the pipeline.
Oh sure yes, 90% of the things people want are really just a few HTML forms and a back end.
My point was that desktop development isn't any harder than web development. Most of what you've mentioned involve adding features and the same features would be just as dificult to implement in a web app.
>but people demand a lot from basic apps of any stripe these days, and as those requirements increase, so does the amount of complexity that developers need to manage at all stages of the pipeline.
I think most of these demands are misunderstood.
RE: "syncing": Most people just want to work with their data offline. Traditionally this was done by interacting with the filesystem rather than a thick client manipuliting the state on a server (like many modern web apps are.) There's no need for "syncing" or complex protocols.
> I can't tell if the author has done a real analysis course before, but if they haven't that's the one they should choose next... I don't see the utility of re-doing calculus or linear algebra if the author is already strong in both.
having (somehow) completed many of these requirements for my 18c degree, i would say that analysis is not necessary if your interest is actually applied math. There's a great line in rudin's preface that says that his approach is ~"pedagogically sound at the expense of being logically incorrect," and recommending analysis for somebody that's not looking to mainline a pure math degree to me feels "pedagogically unsound (but logically correct)"[0].
I took analysis and i appreciated it, but i really loved the applied classes in my degree: 18.310, 18.311, 18.781 (theory of numbers) along with algebra 18.701/702. If you haven't taken a higher-level algebra class, it will let you know if analysis is right for you because you'll brush up against the edges of it without (what i consider to be, at least) its hallmark punishing density.
There are other great electives in math at mit, shop around the 18.4* classes and dial in by interest, most of them only require a prereq of 18.02/18.03/18.06 and you can sort of figure the rest out along the way.
Something to be aware of is that for a while 18.310 didn't have a dedicated instructor, so it really was all over the place. 18.311 was also somewhat hastily structured the semester i took it, but it is actually pretty good material.
You may find that after you've done all these classes that you are actually interested in pure math and at that point i would suggest looking at 18.100b (analysis), 18.700 (linear algebra), 18.100c(real analysis), 18.901(topology) and the rest of the "hard math classes," but i really do think that you'll find that the rationale for those classes doesn't click if you haven't taken a few classes like 310 or 701 first.
just my two cents! good luck, have fun!
[0]: this is the actual quote, it's in the preface rudin's principles of mathematical analysis 3rd ed. which is the 'textbook' for 100b.
> i would say that analysis is not necessary if your interest is actually applied math
If you start reading research papers in applied math, there’s a ton of measure theory and functional analysis there.
More generally, both introductory real analysis and introductory complex analysis are assumed basic foundational background for pretty much any kind of research mathematics, applied or otherwise.
I’m also not sure I would recommend trying to self-study them though. Some expert guidance/feedback is pretty helpful for someone starting out.
i tried this and found it to be pretty satisfying. i played entirely on a macbook while traveling during my winter vacation. It worked surprisingly well even with mixed wifi, i would compare it to the experience you get from using PS4 Remote Play or Steam Link over ethernet.
The only time i found it lagging was similar to the times when both of the above lag: during particularly complex visual scenes (i.e. you're circle strafing around a target and the entire screen is constantly redrawing). I thought it was great for playing a game casually: i.e. story mode. Lots of people use that phrase as a put-down, but the system is well suited for a game like ACO where you are mostly being tactical, planning, exploring, and moving the story forward.
I think of a game like 2016 hitman: i hesitated to install 30G of it to my ps4, but if you told me i could drop into the demo/prelude in less than a minute, even at 720, it's a very appealing concept for somebody like me that plays video games the way other people watch netflix while they're eating dinner: basically whenever i have some downtime and want to dip into a story or mechanic i like for ~30 mins.
Note that even Steam Link over Ethernet is too laggy to play KB/M FPS at any serious level - the input lag makes FPS almost unplayable.
I can see the growth of services like these, especially with more gamers being unable to access dedicated hardware, but there will always be a niche for dedicated hardware. The only way I think they could solve that problem with streaming is using some sort of hybrid streaming approach where some of the UI is remote and some is local and they could do client side simulation somehow for input.
i perhaps have diminished standards, but i found steam link over ethernet to be totally serviceable for playing through most of hyper light drifter on a controller. the input lag was fairly minimal and the computer was already quite long in the tooth, but to your point, i wasn't getting 60fps, that's for sure (probably realistically it was a firm 30fps).
i don't doubt that consoles will remain useful, but i think that services like this will satisfy a pretty legit niche for a vast swath of games that aren't really dependent on low latency input (i.e. puzzle/turn based/rpg/simulators/board game conversions) and that are often 'discovered' by people finding letsplays on youtube.
for some variety of mmorpgs, i can imagine devs being excited about the reduced surface area for cheating/exploits. for somebody like me that uses a mac, i'm looking forward to playing a version of Civ that doesn't cause my laptop to sound like it's about ready to take flight. i don't think the idea is meant to replace consoles, though more, it seems like a way to grease the wheels of commerce and get people playing (and buying) games that they've been traditionally priced out of because of the not-insignificant startup cost of building and maintaining a gaming pc/console.
I guess my question is; how would something like this scale? With Netflix and Spotify, the media is the same every time you play it, and even stuff like the Black Mirror CYOA have a limited number of combinations, so it's very easy to cache.
Every game has an extremely high number of potential combinations and outcomes, so it's effectively uncacheable. Fan that out to Steam level popularity and diversity of games and it sounds a bit nuts.
The only way is adding more servers closer to the users, which means Stadia will only offer really low latencies to users living close to the data centers. So probably only people in large cities.
I don't really have a need to stream a full game, but your idea about the demos actually sounds great. I would like to play the demo instantly, evaluate if the gameplay/controls are good and if it does and I'm interested, I would purchase and download full game to my system.
