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If you visit Rome and see a Bernini in person you will understand.

I’ll understand what? We have a plethora of established artists of incontestable value. If I need to check one out in particular to understand expression, excitement, inspiration, then all others have failed. You name exactly one. Why not Rodin? Or Henry Moore?

I bet nobody here saw the art from the submission in person but look at how many opinions around.

Every time I hear armchair critique of someone else’s “boring uninspired art” and “expressionless faces”, or “art connoisseurs” giving snippets of wisdom, I know they’re fuller of hot air than a desert on a hot summer day.


The examples you name are also fine. Just stuff that makes you feel something.

Spot on. Interesting methods always seem to be popular with engineering folks. But results are soulless.

All commercial art is soulless. Music, movies, professional painting and sculpting.

One thing I'm hoping for if AI destroys much of the value of soulless art, is human actual art reverting to the motivation of the desire people have to share things with those they love.


Sometimes it can be handy for testing some code locally. Especially in some highly automated CICD setups it can be a pain to just try out if the code works, yes it is ironic.

With the direction MtG is currently heading, I kind of want to break out and just play some in-Universe sets that are community made on an FOSS client. How nice would it be to just play the game in its original spirit.

You might be interested in Premodern: https://premodernmagic.com/. You can play it on regular old MTGO.

FOSS Magic clients are in a legal gray area at best. My mental model is that Wizards de facto tolerate clients like XMage and Forge because their UX is awful, but if you made something that's actually as user-friendly as MTGO/Arena, they'd sue you and you would lose.


GCCG has been around for a while and the clients at times had to download card images and metadata from the public Wizards site

My understanding of the argument for "why these clients are legal" is basically that they're just implementing the rules engine, rules aren't copyrightable, card text is rules, and they aren't directly distributing the unambiguously-copyrightable stuff like the art or the trademarks like the mana symbols. It's possible that would win in court, but so far my understanding is that everybody who's actually been faced with the decision of "WoTC sent me a cease-and-desist, should I fight it based on that legal theory or just comply?" has spoken to lawyers and decided to comply. WoTC has just gotten less aggressive with their cease-and-desists over the past decade or so.

The cards _could_ be copyrightable, would probably be essentially a coin flip if you took it to court.

No individual card text (limited to just the mechanics) is copyrightable but the setlist of cards might be. It would come down to how much creativity went into curating the list of cards that is released. It gets especially murky because new cards are always being released and old cards are being retired, so they obviously put a lot of creative energy into that process. You'd have to avoid pre-made decks as well.

Unless you have funding from an eccentric MTG-loving billionaire, I see why you'd comply with the cease-and-desist.


Yep, plus you've got to worry about the card names (unless you're giving every single card a new name like Wizards did with "Through the Omenpaths") and whether a judge thinks that "no we don't distribute the images, we just have a big button to download them all from a third party!" is a meaningful distinction or a fig-leaf.

That's correct as far as I know too. GCCG never even really implemented the actual rules, they were just a basic tabletop system.

Hasbro had the legal president too, as they were involved in the Scrabble lawsuit, which I think is mostly where the concept of not being able to use patent law for game rules, but did set the trend on aggressive trademark interpretation.

I expect the genie is mostly out of the bottle at this point. I'm fairly confident that people can do X and Y actual illegal things on the Internet, we can have our card game, but I hope it can happen with a site or decentralized system easier than doing on Tor.


Sounds like you want Cockatrice: https://cockatrice.github.io/

The rules aren't embedded into the client; it's "just" a virtual tabletop where you enforce the rules the same way you would playing with a friend in person. Cards have to be imported but it's fairly automatic (basically just clicking a few buttons after startup), so you could either only import the sets you want or just not use the ones you don't want (which is also how it tends to work when playing informally in person; it's not like you usually have a judge to enforce that you or your friends are playing by whatever rules you agree to).


I still play 4th edition against some friends. We have had the decks well over a couple of decades after we bought them! That and Catan.

Best to do this stuff in person I find.


As always with Zig posts, here come the haters. I really wonder why you even care about it. Can't we all be happy that Andrew and his team are doing their damnest to create something they believe in? Myself I am deeply inspired by their engineering spirit. In other posts I see people "worry" that Zig might not become mainstream. Why do people worry about these things? Just use the language if it helps you solve your problems. You don't need to treat it like an identity.

To make this go away, I think you’d have to change/mitigate the economic incentives (real and perceived) that influence programming practitioners.

People see the languages/libraries they use as their sellable articles. And why wouldn’t they? Every job application begins with a vetting of which “tools” you can operate. A language, as a tool, necessarily seeks to grow its applicability, as securing the ROI of if its users.

And even when not tied to direct monetary incentives, it can still be tied to one’s ability to participate and influence the direction of various open source efforts.

Mix in barely informed decision makers, seeking to treat those engineers as interchangeable assets, and the admirable position being promoted above falls down the priority chain.


This isn't a Zig-specific problem; the same thing has happened in waves for now decades on this site (see: Lisp, Ruby, Rust, etc).

> You don't need to treat it like an identity.

This is an eternal problem in this industry and it is by far the most annoying thing about it.


Is it really a problem with the industry or is this the sort of thing where discussions go on forever on message boards where no one is in charge and people aren’t trying to work together to some actual goal, but where industry doesn’t suffer from the same problems?

The cool thing is, when you get even a whiff of this kind of tribal fan-boy bs from someone, you can just ignore it, move on, and continue learning, building, and discussing with positive productive people who share the same motivations. Life is too short to be bickering with haters in comment sections.

> As always with Zig posts, here come the haters. I really wonder why you even care about it.

It's another language stack that would need to be maintained within Linux distributions for years to come (security support, architecture support etc).

Upstream developers always seem to assume that there is no cost associated to introducing new software stacks. But in the end, someone has to maintain it. And they keep forgetting the purpose of software is to serve users, not developers.

And I'm not sure what's so revolutionary about Zig that couldn't have been solved by improving other languages.

For Zig in particular, the language isn't even stable enough that you can compile packages like Ghostty with any recent version of the Zig compiler. It has to be a very specific version of the compiler.


No. If you don't want to maintain it, don't package it, or for that matter programs written in it. Yes, there are valid reasons not to use zig from a stability perspective, but just ignore it if it isn't good enough for your standards.

Personally I'm glad that there are more people trying to break out of the C tar pit. Even if I'd never chose to use the language.


> And they keep forgetting the purpose of software is to serve users, not developers.

Developers are the users of these software stacks though? I don't really understand your point.


> And they keep forgetting the purpose of software is to serve users, not developers.

I don't have any horse in the game, but I do think Zig is interesting. This remark is funny to me because it's literally one of the tenets the Zig devs make decisions by!

https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Zen

> * Together we serve the users.


A mainstream language has predictable library-ecosystem support for most use-cases.

A language, and by definition it's libraries, does not have to solve most use cases.

A new software stack isn't free. Someone has to maintain it.

And if the new software stack just improves a fraction of the ecosystem, it isn't worth the effort.


It's not v1.0 and they don't claim to be.

So what is your point?


I was directly answering the GP poster's posed question. Let me rearrange that question for readability:

> Why do people "worry" about Zig potentially never becoming mainstream?

There are people who want to learn Zig because they're excited to gradually transition their way away from some other ecosystem, and into the Zig ecosystem, as the Zig ecosystem takes root and develops.

But they don't want to regret that decision. They don't want to end up in a place where they're writing blog posts about how much they love Zig, and are the maintainer of five popular Zig libraries, and yet still feel forced to use C++ for their next actual app project (where they're then mostly unable to make use of those Zig libraries!) just because Zig, not being sufficiently "mainstream", can't attract/force the corporate owners of big fat libraries (Vulkan, CUDA, LLVM, etc) to invest effort into integrating with it, and continuously maintaining those integrations for it (i.e. including a Zig build in their CI matrix, so that their upstream changes can't silently break that integration.)


I couldnt quite get the benefit of this. It's similar to UTC, but then in a format that doesn't make sense unless you convert it back to minutes? Why not use UTC, it is already in human understand format.


same here, this is just moving to switzerland as the base time.

https://www.swatch.com/en-ch/internet-time.html https://beats.wiki/0


In Dutch we call this a "dooddoener", a "death-do'er". Quite a good word.


I read this type of (sour) comment more and more on this forum. To me it reads very cynical and I wonder what the author is trying to say with this. Are you perhaps negatively impacted by automatic coding?


we are ALL negatively impacted by generative excrement

I have to use Windows at my day job

and my god, I'd prefer Windows 3.1


Do you want to enable Copilot ?

    | Yes |    | Remind me later |


Nope, not at all.

I read your comment as ignorant to AI's capabilities and their negative outcomes with relying on vibe coding.

The implication is that MS is forcing AI adoption on users at a point of absurd recklessness, and that they should not be trusted - especially not blindly trusted.

Perhaps the reason you're seeing comments similar to my original comment more frequently is because actual software engineers whom know the capabilities of AI and how much of a bad decision it is to assume it's as good as a competent engineer. Many engineers have had years of experience working with management, whom while have legit concerns about the capabilities of software as they are ultimately responsible for it and the financials, see them turning to vibe coding and relying on it. Non technical folks think software is kinda easy to do, and because LLMs can generate code that it just proves their assumptions.


Can you define “non-technical folks” for me? Because last I checked there are a LOT of “technical” people who aren’t software engineers, and a lot of “non-technical” people who don’t believe software is “kinda easy to do.”

It’s really frustrating to see comments like this with absolutely zero sourcing, but just stated as fact.

It’s giving “I saw ads on LinkedIn and it made me anxious about a world where I can’t make six figures being in control of what tools people have access to”


The current job market for managers does not look great since Elon let that sink in.


Maybe there should be a different way to calculate h-index. Where for an h-index of n, you also need n replications.


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