What would be a better solution? Do other package managers reliably restrict access to the host system beyond the scope of the project folder?
Many quirks come from abilities that were once deemed useful, such as compiling code in other languages after package install.
Sure, today, I can disable install scripts if I want but it doesn't change much when I eventually run code from the package anyway.
But even restricting access to the file system to the project's root folder would leave many doors open, with or without foreign languages: Node is designed as a general purpose JS runtime, including server-side and build-time usage.
The utility of node.js was initially to provide a JS API that, unlike the web platform, is not sandboxed. And npm is the default package manager.
This not only allows server-side usage, but also is essential to many early dev scenarios. Back in the days, it might have been SCSS builds using node-gyp (wouldn't recommend). Today it's things like Golang TypeScript or SSGs.
So, long story short: as many people before me already said, it's an ecosystem/cultural problem.
One thing against npm in this regard was/is its broken lock-file handling until I think version 12 or 16. That led to unintended transitive dependency version changes, breaking any reproducibility.
Same for compiling foreign languages.
These problems are solved today / not different from other package managers and -registries, as far as I know.
The culture of taking breaking changes and dependency bloat lightly has not changed as much, I think, although it's improved.
This most important point seems to be related to 3 reasons IMO:
- junior developers without experience in library development reaching large audiences
- specs, languages, runtime, and the package managers itself going through disruptions and evolutions
- rapidly releasing breaking majors, often caused by the above factors
The combination of these plus the role of the project lead/team who actually decides about the dependencies.
There are probably also many projects with unclear roles and many people who can push manifest changes, coupled with habitual access to CI/CD pipelines.
Maybe that's another indication of something wrong - the NPM ecosystem granularity being so high there is not enough humans alive to safely maintain all the packages ? And some rethinking might be needed even there.
...are we not on the same page here? I'm talking about inflation, if that's not clear. Inflation is a tax from people who don't hold assets to pay people who do.
Many OpenSource forums and software are like this. None of the help is there to help you use the system. It’s there for you to gain some deep knowledge that you don’t care about.
But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.
Almost all community help forums (for commercial and open source software) suffer from what I like to call "HaveYouTrieditis". You post a question, and without any root cause analysis or even a description of why it might work, people start posting "Have you tried X?" and "Have you tried Y?" and "You should try Z." These kinds of responses are almost always unhelpful.
I'm asking for help because I don't want to just try random things.
Do you really think that in a high stress situation you’re going to make the best decisions?
Do you really think health workers are all concerned about legalities first?
Not moving a patient unless you explicitly know how is probably right the vast majority of the time. Sometimes that’s wrong, but how are you going to get the entire public to understand what the right situation is?
It’s so easy looking at a single case in hindsight. May we all have the ability to make the right choices all the time.
It's not that health workers are always thinking about legality; it's that they're following policies either written by people thinking about legality or re-written by people in response to legality, i.e. they got sued and changed the policy in light of that.
> Do you really think health workers are all concerned about legalities first?
100%. Legal issues are a huge deal in healthcare. This is a snippet from a study [1] on the topic, just to get an idea of the scale (which I think most do not realize at all):
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Each year during the study period, 7.4% of all physicians had a malpractice claim, with 1.6% having a claim leading to a payment (i.e., 78% of all claims did not result in payments to claimants). The proportion of physicians facing a claim each year ranged from 19.1% in neurosurgery, 18.9% in thoracic–cardiovascular surgery, and 15.3% in general surgery to 5.2% in family medicine, 3.1% in pediatrics, and 2.6% in psychiatry. The mean indemnity payment was $274,887, and the median was $111,749. Mean payments ranged from $117,832 for dermatology to $520,923 for pediatrics. It was estimated that by the age of 65 years, 75% of physicians in low-risk specialties had faced a malpractice claim, as compared with 99% of physicians in high-risk specialties.
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I can give a very specific example of how legal issues play directly into behavior, and how it leads to antibiotic over-prescription. Antibiotics are obviously useless against viral infections but many, if not most, doctors will habitually describe them for viral infections anyhow. Why? Because a viral infection tends to leave your body more susceptible to bacterial infections. For instance a flu (viral) can very rarely lead to pneumonia (bacterial). And that person who then gets very sick from pneumonia can sue for malpractice. It's not malpractice because in the average case antibiotic prescription is not, at all, justified by the cost:benefit, but doctors do it anyhow to try to protect themselves from lawsuits.
There have been studies demonstratively showing this as well, in that doctors who live in areas with less rampant malpractice lawsuits are less likely to prescribe antibiotics unless deemed necessary. Or if you have a friend/family in medicine you can simply ask them about this - it's not some fringe thing.
I get that in some societies there is a quick journey from something bad, to someone-to-blame. In litigious societies this means a quick trip to sue someone, anyone...
What's interesting to me is that in societies not prone to blame, or lawsuits, it can be much easier to have human interactions without being inhibited by legal fear.
Accepting that people make mistakes makes progress simpler. I recently had a medical issue which would have turned out simpler had he run a specific test earlier. I'm not the litigious sort (and I'm not in a society that is litigious) so I can now go back to him and we can discuss the mistake so he doesn't make it in the future.
I accept he's not perfect. I seek his development not his censure.
This is outside the US. No doubt inside the US fear of lawsuits would make this feedback untenable.
My vent: I have very mild cerebral palsy- it affects my left hand and left foot slightly. But properly conditioned, I’ve run half marathons and ended up in the middle of the pack and I’ve been a gym rat and in above average shape all of my adult life.
That being said, anytime I’m looking on the web doing research, the first thing you find are lawyers looking to sue doctors. I absolutely hate that’s the first thing parents think about to blame doctors. Some times things just happen.
> Do you really think that in a high stress situation you’re going to make the best decisions?
I mean that statement could be used to excuse any mistake in any project/system ever made, and is mostly a cop out. Yes, the system is definitely designed to minimize legal risk for the health-workers/hospitals. A system is only as good as what it's' design objectives are, and if "save a life at all cost" was the objective the system might as well look entirely different.
If you trained when you were younger, you’ll know this is complete BS. My performance as I age is on a steady downward slope. Recovery is noticeably worse, diet is becoming more important to maintaining a stable weight.
Don’t leave getting fit to your thirties or later. Start now.
Technically you're probably right, but I think this feeling affects people who trained to be competitive at something when they were very young, then stopped and stagnated, and then tried to pick it back up after their divorce or letting themselves get a beer gut or something. The feeling of not being the same as they were in high school or whatever.
I was reasonably athletic, but never tried to "train" or got even close to what peak might have meant, and then continued skateboarding and doing other athletic things throughout my twenties, always being in pretty good shape. Now in my thirties, I'm in my best shape and continuing, it doesn't really matter what my peak hypothetically could have been or where I was at earlier, past is the past, let the good memories stick around, let the bad ones disappear, be present and keep pushing into the future.
Maybe I consider it a blessing that I never tried that hard in my early years, because now I'm not concerned about any ceiling. I let the enjoyment and ambition guide me, not the numbers, who cares.
I've had a concept 2 rowing machine for almost 20 years, so I (automatically) have a detailed record of every workout for two decades. N=1, but for me at least, I have clear evidence that the same level of effort does not produce the same result as you get older. onsistent effort does produce results at any age (that I've reached at least).
I play games like Gloomhaven and TI4. Not sure how this product would simplify anything. Far too small for any of the more complex board games. I guess I could scroll around but then what does physical piece detection give me? Then it’s $500USD. My game group and myself got Gloomhaven from Epic for free and played through the campaign together. BGA subscription is cheap. So many games have online implementations that are free. And I can buy a lot of boardgames for $500.
I really think in-person Gloomhaven is a great use case, if it's handled well.
Scene 0: Enter player count / difficulty / etc.
Scene 1: Map. Press UI to pick a location / scenario
Scene 2: Loads hex map and enemies, manages all NPC activity for you
Players still use physical cards, and importantly, physical stands for their characters. Would be worth discussing if the screen handles modifier cards... for physical cards the names might be on screen, then the players select their actions (top or bottom) and define movement or action targets. Some animation and NPC health / reactions are handled by software.
So there's a reduction in set up (hex maps, NPCs) and a reduction in managing NPC actions (which is why the PC versions are so appealing in the first place.) But instead of all players focusing on their own screen, they are still getting some face time and tactile board game play.
it does open up some possibility for mechanics that exploit the fact that the play area ("board") is almost infinitely mutable.
But honestly concepts like this, mixing of physical and digital, have been tried to very little success in the gaming space for years. Out best success is wii-motion controls and rockband-era .. elaborate controllers. But there have been card games that utilized cameras to read the cards, skylanders, etc.
Actually this is closest to some of the things that original run of microsoft surface tables could do. I played some backgammon on one with physical dice and disks. It was .. fine, but it was just backgammon, they were just showing off the object tracking features. The only thing you could do with the board was some fancy animated board themes.
Anyways all of that stuff is largely abandoned. So I wish these guys luck.
Building diy multitouch tables has been possible for a long time now, given time, space and budget for that project.
I fully agree that it ultimately boils down to software: Can I implement my favorite board game for my multitouch interface? Yes. Can I bring that game to the table faster by just buying a physical copy? Yes.
I happen to have two 42" touch displays set aside for such a project - a unused backup unit destined for the living room for 200€, and damaged unit for dev work (for free). Since I bought them about 2 years ago, I also bought at least double that value of physical board games in retail, plus a Kickstarter board game. Go figure why.
However, I did play the digital version of Root on one of them, and enjoyed it very much. I should get Dune, too.
NB: I regularly see multitouch tables at trade shows. Nice eye catcher and useful to present some products or the multitude of services big companies offer.
mt tables are fine and dandy and exactly what friends have built. There are several solutions for augmenting consumer panels for multitouch. This product is a bit further than multitough though.
The problem is that I see few reasons for playing boardgames, with friends, on them. You loose a lot of 'delight' factor. Physical pieces are very important to most people. I think if you asked two chess players if they would rather sit in a park and play in the sun with a physical set or play with a touchscreen inside, they would probably select the first.
I have played many digital board games, especially during covid. It's harder for me to concentrate on the game, it's less delightful. However for solo experiences and some extremes (gloomhaven) I do prefer digital games. (I also learned root digitally so that I could hurry my understanding of each faction before I played it physically with players who had a few games under their belt, and I play a lot of solo dune imperium because i love that game more than my friends it seems)
Can this product's support for physical pieces crack the 'delight in physicality' problem. Maybe. Like I said, I had some experience with this on the surface table like 15 years ago.
I think, in my experience at least, that they only time I've wanted a digital table is for TTRPG play for very tactical tables it just keeps the game moving faster than drawing a battlemap to put minis on. There is a reason I first started seeing them during D&D 4th edition where the combat was so 'on grid'. I imagine as we try out 'Draw Steel' we may revisit that more heavily as it's combat system is very 4E aligned.
The product is a concept that I want to work more than it, historically, has.
If you missed physical objects, they did not do ftir with fiducal markers, I guess? There were some nice demos back when that was novel, like over a decade ago.
Some of the tables I saw at trade shows (e.g. E-World in Essen) this year also had them. On one you could place 3d printed power plants and various energy storage systems onto a map. To adjust their output, you could turn them like a knob. The company sold a management system for small grid operators, which then reacted to those demo inputs.
> The product is a concept that I want to work more than it, historically, has.
Sad but true. But then they don't exactly fit into the usual living room. However, as specialized board game tables are getting more popular every year, we might yet see a market for smart variants emerging long term. Not a huge chance IMHO, but larger than zero.
Maybe they need to work with the creators of Gloomhaven etc to design their next game specifically so it can be played on this tablet, to cut down on the need for bookkeeping.
The main problem with games like Gloomhaven and TI4 isn’t the book keeping. It’s getting the people around a table at the same time. Need 6 players for TI4 and the same group multiple times for a campaign. Hence why I’ve been playing the digital versions online with my group.
You’re right. But it’s only a problem if you can play in the first place. Of course solving book keeping effectively can lead to more possible times to play since you don’t need as long.
Online platforms like BGA solve both problems and are pretty cheap and constantly implement new games. And I can play with friends that have moved overseas! And if you have a regular group, you only need to pay one subscription. Could have an old fashioned LAN party for online boardgames for an order of magnitude less money.
China is also deploying a ton a renewables though. Its the worlds leading producer of renewables. It’s a mistake to think they won’t ween off carbon where they can. The US has a president that said “drill baby drill”.
The difference is, this is "normal" geometry, with fixed 64x64 textures (or similar) mapped with hard edges (nearest-neighbour filtering, no bilinear/trilinear/blur).
Voxels is quite different: the world is made of cubes of 1 size or various size cubes (any texturing method can apply here, or without, some even use gradient shaders on the cubes).
So you get that pixel art vibe, mapped into the 3D world with smooth movements. The 3D window isn't made of stairs.
In this case, this is done "properly". Because some developers just use normal geometry, normal texturing with bilinear filtering, and slap a post processing shader on the camera view, which makes the view "blocky" without the world actually being blocky - which is cheap, and typically looks cheap.
