We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new bragging rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all speedrunners. But why, some say, zero A presses? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 55 years ago, fly to the Moon? Why does Mohun Bagal play the Delhi Capitals? We choose to do zero A presses. We choose to do zero A presses… We choose to do zero A presses in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

for a large project, you can probably look at the history of issues, if there are lots of issues that are 5 years old, it’s almost certainly legit

All 9k stars, 10k PRs, 400 forks & professional web site are fake?

Technically, it is entirely possible to find a real existing project, make a carbon copy of the website (there are automated tools to accomplish this), then have a massive amount of bots give 9K stars and make a lot of PRs, issues and forks (bonus points if these are also copies of actual existing issues/PRs) and generate a fake commit history (this should be entirely possible with git), a bunch of releases could be quickly generated too. Though you would probably be able to notice pretty quickly that timestamps don’t match since I don’t think github features like issues can have fake timestamps (unlike git)

though I don’t think this has ever actually been done, there are services that claim to sell not only stars but issues, pull requests and forks too. Though assuming the service is not just a scam in itself, any cursory look at the contents of the issues etc would probably give away that they are AI generated

looks like work on the android client started in 2011 (or at least, that’s when it seemingly started using version control)

the app was released in 2014

so it has likely inherited decisions from ~14 years ago, I’d guess there is a several year gap where having a native desktop app was not even a concern

Also the smartphone landscape was totally different back then, QT’s android support back then was in alpha (or totally nonexistent if the signal project is a bit older than the github repository makes it seem), and the average smartphone had extremely weak processing power and a tiny screen resolution by today’s standards. Making the same gui function on both desktop and mobile was probably a pretty ridiculous proposition.

what’s wrong with them? are you sure it’s just not set to use 100% of all cores, and then the OS does some shuffling?

the “will linearly speedup anything [to the amount of parallel computation available]” claim is so stupid that I think it’s more likely they meant “only has a linear slowdown compared to a basic manual parallel implementation of the same algorithm”

yeah rust along other new languages takes package management (and some other “hard learned lessons”) seriously, which gives it an advantage over most older languages (and it’s ahead other newer languages in that there is a serious amount of adoption for rust… a package manager that has no packages to manage is not very useful)

You can, of course. And if you’re good enough at it, and focus on keeping it simple, you can keep the complexity down to a minimum, at least with most straightforward programs.

Buut you can say the same about other complicated languages like c++. And things like writing quick “shell script” type things are going to be pretty simple in almost every decent language. Even if the result is slightly more verbose it won’t really matter.

eh, I’d say rust’s problem is more that it’s marketed as a general-purpose language, when in reality it is rare for software to need a language that is both very highly performant and memory safe, and rust makes heavy sacrifices in terms of complexity to achieve that. Most popular languages are garbage collected which can cause performance problems, but makes code much simpler to read and write.

A game that requires you to click a lot cannot possibly be a progress quest ripoff

While I agree 100% with your main point,

"it’s a graph of commits” makes no sense to a layperson

You’re probably putting your standards too low. Every coder should know what a graph is, the basic concept at least. If you can understand fizzbuzz you can understand graphs too.

the word “diff” makes no sense

diff is short for difference. And that basically explains it

do it right and it could even look very good and immersive. But at least with the skills, technology and budget of a 1966 TV show, and especially with certain wack ship designs it’s far easier to just have everything oriented the same way

Never underestimate the rationalist’s ability to write a 5000 word, extremely fanciful short story to make a point that could be compressed into 2 sentences, in a failed attempt to dismiss a strawman

and of course the story includes a cameo from the writer’s opponents who are naive fools and proceed to doom the universe with their hubris (of disagreeing with the author)