This seems distinctly in opposition to what I believe makes Obsidian a great program, providing an excellent editing environment and extensibility for markdown. The more it ventures into these types of features, the more they're going to lose to applications that designed for this from day dot, like Notion and Anytype.
You can think of Bases as an editor and visualization layer for the YAML frontmatter in your Markdown files.
Frontmatter is not part of the original Markdown spec, but it became a standard way to add metadata to Markdown files long before Obsidian came along. I believe it started in 2008 with the introduction of Jekyll:
Frontmatter is supported by almost all SSGs and many apps like Obsidian add autocomplete and other QoL features around it.
Bases to me is exactly what you describe. A feature that provides an excellent editing environment and extensibility for Markdown files.
For example, my blog is a set of Markdown files compiled with Jekyll, that I edit in Obsidian. Now I can add a base in Obsidian that helps me see the state of different blog posts/pages, quickly sort/filter them, and edit their metadata. It helps me spend more of my time editing Markdown files, but at a higher level.
You've basically just added a custom language on top of Markdown, what is your plan for importing this into another editor in the future? How will it know to interpret it as a database?
By that rationale isn't Obsidian itself a language on top of Markdown?
Being able to view your Markdown files as a graph or show a list of backlinks is possible because Obsidian has some JavaScript to do that. Previously one could write other views with plugins, but bases make it easier for non-technical folks to create views.
The views are described in human-readable YAML, so recreating them in another tool is possible. That's effectively what many people are doing if they're converting views from Dataview to Bases. There are already tools that automate this: https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox
The output of views can also be converted to plain Markdown tables or CSV.
If you boil it down, bases are a visualization layer that is in service of creating and editing Markdown files — and that's what Obsidian has been since the start.
If you're not interested in this feature set you can disable Bases in core plugins :)
That's the thing. There's nothing really "custom" here. The files themselves are all still standard markdown with yaml frontmatter. The only difference is that there's now a nice, performant interface for getting an overview for all those files - something that you could fairly trivially make with a script, if you really needed to recreate it. And the file specifying what your views were is, itself, plaintext. There's no lock-in here, and the spec is open and well-documented.
To be very pedantic, "Markdown standard" is basically a blog post written over 20 years ago and never updated.
Everything more "advanced" like tables, to-do lists and multi-line code blocks aren't a part of the "standard" as it was written, but were added on top by different implementations (like CommonMark) which are now commonly-mistaken for the original Markdown.
My point being that this isn't something unique to Obsidian, pretty much everyone does it slightly differently while still calling it "Markdown".
> It’s a markdown editor, but they can’t modify the markdown standard,
They have several modifications of Markdown, everyone has. But not everything makes sense to implement in a flavour of Markdown. YAML is for structured data significant better than a freeform-format, especially when you're in the phase of building the foundation of a new feature-family.
The complain is valid, Markdown is for documents, free form, free flow, structured data are a very different use case, and while YAML is better for the job, it's still a different language with different smell.
But Obsidian is a tool for managing knowledge, always has been; it's not just a plain Markdown-editor. All those features which are going beyond simple flavoured text, have always been part of it's Core-Mission, just not materialized yet.
Valuable features such as this make working with markdown files much better. It's overall a huge plus for working with Obsidian. It does not change the content of the markdown files themselves, so there's no lock-in or other potentials long-term problems. It allows me to move further away from Notion, which is a great thing, and I hope to see them be able to fully replace Notion Databases in the future.
The “base” name appears to be misleading. I assumed this feature would add a structured data format to Obsidian, but it does not. This is exclusively a query engine for your existing markdown files.
An obsidian base is primarily defined as a code block in an existing markdown file. That code block defines a series of queries (filters, really) that produce a result set of markdown file names.
So… more a way to work with a large collection of markdown files than a relational database.
I'm with you. I think this should be a downloadable plugin, not a standard plugin.
I kind of wish they would slow down development and just polish what is already there. They are on this treadmill where they feel the need to keep adding new features, new maintenance burdens, bloating the product in every dimension.
In a few years somebody fresh will come along with a product that's a lightweight alternative. It sucks, but that seems to be the lifecycle of this kind of thing. For now, I've turned off automatic updates on Obsidian which isn't ideal either. :(
It is. You can disable it from core plugins. Obsidian has done more than anyone else for the PKM community without lock in, it’s quite disheartening to see so many complaints.
I'm disheartened too because they have done so much and I'm happy to pay my annual fee, but it seems obvious that they are headed in a direction that isn't for me.
What are you concerned about specifically? What bits of Obsidian should they work on polishing instead?
(not trying to be hostile, just curious as another Obsidian user who is excited by this feature because the current meta search functionality is really poor IMO and this is very much needed polish from my perspective)
I think the core note taking is pretty solid, what do you think they should be doing instead? I do think search can be improved, as well as keyboard centric flows and native pdf annotations. But aside from polishing, is there much missing from the app core features?
I would argue the majority of one's time spent developing is verifying that the thing being built actually works as intended. AI has diminishing returns for the same reason your fancy text editor setup has diminishing returns, it's 10% of the job at best.
In terms of treatment, I'm under the impression that "normal" is the minimum bar of commercial productivity and psychiatry/psychology is primarily used to curtail social deviancy to maintain this.
The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.
I agree, though possibly for different reasons. Those support systems may or may not be weaker than they were in generations past, but they are certainly more likely to say "I can't help you, go get professional help" than in the past.
In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression, the "help" out there is criminal. It is not a disease we have a cure for, in fact it's not clear to me it's even a disease in most sufferers, but a healthy and rational response to societal decay. I do not believe some disorders will ever be satisfactorily explained by individual-centric medicine, in the same way history will never be satisfactorily explained by great man theory.
One thing that makes me nervous about a culture that is so quick to forward people to therapists, is that therapy is not some ironclad medical practice, like you might imagine heart surgery to be.
Therapy, and psychology in general, is one of the weakest areas of science, still based mostly on mysticism, large personalities, and weak statistical correlations. And that is assuming you even can get a "good" therapist, and not some schmuck who just happened to nab the degree.
I would go so far as to say that 90%+ of problems that are served in therapy sessions are better served by the regular participants in an intimate social network, friends and family, than some "expert" who is incentivized, knowingly or not, to send you into the pharmaceutical pipeline or, as this article describes, hand you a bunch of random labels you can forever use to psychologically handicap yourself with.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and humans abhor problems without definitive solutions. I don't think there has ever been a moment in human history where a civilization, when confronted with a great societal ill, has sincerely admitted that they have no idea how to solve it. Before science, natural disasters were the punishment inflicted by displeased gods on humanity, and through piousness or sacrifice they could be averted, or through divination predicted. Incurable diseases, especially psychiatric, were explained karmically or by folk wisdom.
But while we might have science today, we still have disasters and diseases. Instead of shamans and religious leaders, now politicians and activists promise easy solutions that are within arm's grasp, "if only the people currently in charge weren't so corrupt and incompetent." But change is incremental at best, and where it concerns depression specifically, it appears only to be getting worse.
I know where you're coming from, but despair is never the logical response. Whatever the situation is, it's better to do something about it, even if it's just to rage and call for help, rather than to quietly despair.
Regardless of how bad things are, we still have hope, both as individuals and as a civilization.
My partner is disabled and her transplanted kidney is failing. She will, in the next year or two, need dialysis and then a kidney transplant. Her Medicaid will be cut. The hospital she goes to will be closed. Both as a result of a bill that just passed. The average kidney transplant out of pocket costs $250,000, and because her first transplant happened before she met me, my insurance will deny her coverage because it's a pre-existing condition. We are in the process of trying to move to a different location, get her a job while she's going through kidney failure (not easy since nobody wants to hire a sick person, and definitely not at a workload that would give them benefits), and I'm in the process of trying to move us out of the country (I'm a dual citizen, she is not, so that's holding things up).
At what point in that is despair not a logical emotion, even when we're doing something about it? What is illogical about being so overwhelmed with circumstances that it makes you question whether waking up tomorrow is a net positive or negative? Please explain.
Despair seems eminently logical in your situation; I felt it, when I put myself in your shoes, reading your comment. That is not to say it need take precedence, or supremacy, to that most human of emotions: hope. I have hope, that you and your partner will prevail, and live a life agreeable to both your terms. I’m sure many who read your story will too. Please, lean on hope, not despair.
> Regardless of how bad things are, we still have hope, both as individuals and as a civilization.
No we don't. Evidence: falling birthrates is the society collectively deciding that live ain't worth it. Personally, I think this is the real reason why we don't see aliens - any advanced civilisation will eventually reach a point where it realizes that life ain't worth it.
If my finger is broken and someone says "Cheer up! Your neighbor lost his leg and is in an incredible amount of pain", I may feel sympathy for my neighbor but, crucially, my finger still hurts just as much.
Right, it won't change the fact that the finger injury is sending pain signals to your brain. But it just might change what you do in reaction to that signal.
Some of you guys need to cowboy up and quit whining about trivial problems. A broken finger is a minor injury (nothing even remotely like a lost leg), and usually easily managed with basic medical treatment. Get it splinted, pop an ibuprofen, and move on. It seems like a lot of HN users have led such soft, sheltered lives that they fall apart when faced with the slightest adversity.
Why is that a reason to cheer up? When I think about it, I’m miserable most of the time—and knowing that life was even worse for most people throughout history only makes me feel sadder.
Turn that around and ask yourself why that's a reason to be miserable. Your sadness is a choice. Be miserable if you want to but that won't improve the circumstances for yourself or anyone else.
Not sarcastic. Only people who are ignorant about history believe that things are really bad today. If you live in an industrialized country that isn't in the middle of a shooting war then things are objectively pretty awesome compared to the average conditions that humans have endured.
Only ignorant people think individuals can find comfort in averages.
Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
> Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.
Whoa now. That may be true within a strict scope of the "arithmetic mean" definition of "average", however, the idea of average as a 'concept' is much older. As an easy example, early references to agrarian yields (crop farming and how much food they produce) talk about average size of crop harvests, etc. Early tablets from Mesopotamia talk about average yield size, and those are dated 700ish BC.
Cheer up, the lake of shit you’re caged in is at its lowest level on record.
Slightly more seriously, things will be on an upward trajectory until they aren’t. There are some decent reasons to think we might be nearing the peak.
That's a meaningless claim, devoid of any evidence. At most points in human history there were decent reasons to think we were near the peak. And yet with some occasional temporary valleys, average human living conditions continued to improve.
At most points in human history, the global economy was not so tightly integrated, and major powers didn't have the ability to devastate the globe in an afternoon.
There is a significant meaning to my claim, which is that it's unconvincing to make exactly the sort of "it has always worked out before" argument that you're making here.
I don’t see these as opposing ends of a spectrum. I think they’re largely independent variables.
Anecdotally, the people I know who have become most immersed in therapy speak are also the most socially connected. The therapy speak and associated language have become tools for establishing themselves within their social support system, communicating cries for help, and even trying to use therapy terms to shield themselves from accountability for their actions by transforming it into a therapy session.
It was also possible to buy afford a house and a small family on a job that doesn't require much training or special skills. It's easier to deal with (often meaning "ignore") undiagnosed mental issues with your own roof over your head.
> is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely.
I disagree! There was never a good support system at all. We used to just man up and live with it. Now that stress is reaching it's new heights. We can't cope with it.
I'm very curious as to how you come to the conclusion that 'stress' has increased. I don't suppose it's that the world is more stressful, WWII, cold war, a thousand famines throughout history, what makes us so stressed that we can't cope in some way that we used to be able to cope?
I have wondered - but have no evidence either way - if the stress we encounter nowadays differs to stress of the past. At some point very long ago most of us were stressing about things like food, water, surviving the night. Now most of us are stressing about things like work pressure, debt, global disasters. I wonder if the nature of the stressors have changed from immediate and acute to increasingly abstract and chronic? And potentially, if the quality of life profile is different in the two cases due to different coping mechanisms?
Very anecdotal which makes me think this: immediate physical stressors like exercise are uncomfortable but I get through them fine. Chronic stressors like climate change are totally ruining my quality of life.
At least they knew that this was temporal but heaven would be eternal. There was a point to things. When you stand for nothing you fall for everything. There's no story left in which we play.
chronically worrying about climate change is no different than chronically worrying about death. it's simple, stone age, existential fear.
ancient men and women coped with existential fear by either embracing that everything is a cycle, or inventing some semblance of immortality by raising children or believing in life after death.
I guess I have no stress about climate change because it seems very normal to me that society and biosystems occasionally collapse. The stress comes from thinking there's something that can be done to stop it, and feeling that you're unable to achieve it. Maybe that's me throwing my hands up and accepting death instead of trying to stave it off, I just want to throw out there that the stress is self imposed, not environmental.
I have this personal theory that some time after an external stress-related impulse (be that negative - ww2, cold war, becoming paralyzed, etc, or positive - inheriting money, winning the lottery, not having to work for the rest of your life, finding the love of your lufe, etc), the brain adjusts and one comes back to the baseline of their perceived normal stress level. And that’s why we see people who are always happy and seemingly stress free despite having nothing, and ones that always seem stressed to the max despite having everything
When you eliminate problems in people's lives, they do not suddenly feel that they have no problems. Instead they lower the bar for what they consider a problem. If the bar gets lowered too far, suddenly the previously minute things are problematic and there may be many of them.
Stress is caused by our internal perspective of our problems, not by some external unchanging measure of it.
Most of our suffering is in our imagination (Seneca) and our imaginative lives have never been as big as today. The world we think we live in has never been as big. The lives we think we could live have never been as many. The bad things that could happen to us are so much more plentyful and destructive than the bad things that do.
Also people used to smoke and drink a lot of alcohol. So it's possible that stress has objectively decreased, yet subjectively increased, as we are more aware of it.
But yeah it's an interesting question, and with the Internet as well. The 1980s world I grew up in as a kid (in Czechia) was more dangerous than the Internet-focused world of today; yet young people seem to be more stressed by the latter.
That depends on the time frame. Tobacco only spread beyond the Americas in the 16th century. And really poor people have never been able to afford much tobacco or alcohol; those are luxury products.
If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that they did and just simply passed it forward or didn't talk about it.
i don't know what the ratios are but a LOT of people fell through the cracks.
it's just that the birth rate was high enough to continue the population growth, and there were socially acceptable ways to ignore the inconvenient problems (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)
it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.
now the stigma is gone and we're finding EXPLICIT paths to treatment, tolerance, and embracement of mental health, neuroatypical brains, spectrums, etc. Is there overpathologizing? Maybe? Hard to know! The stigmas still aren't gone. Go read the comments on any video providing tips on how to parent children on the spectrum and see neurotypicals freaking out about how soft the current generation is.
the western world seems to have peaked in tolerance in the 2010s, and is now backsliding into authoritarianism and fascism. that's trying to recreate a lot of those original support systems (by destroying the new ones). It's a bold plan, let's see how it happens.
> it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.
I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.
Heck no. We have “it’s always the quiet ones who go first”, to remind us what it was like from that time.
Most people suffered, and made the ones around them suffer as well. On top of that, you are in no position to move to an “average” position on the behavior spectrum, because it’s fundamentally outside your biological operational parameters.
There are TONS of relations which were kept in place, because of society, keeping people who made each other worse, in permanent proximity.
Survivorship bias is real.
We’re the ones who inherited the world with more knowledge than past generations, it’s up to us to do better with it. This will include getting better at diagnosing.
1) the most talented people with cognitive differences made it out for sure. But not every person on the spectrum is "amazing with technology" in a useful way. But not all are, and the ones that weren't just didn't make it. Today they do.
2) those people still needed luck. Luck that they were able to come up in a society that didn't expect more from them than to perform a "function". Things like meeting a spouse were "easier" because there was a more rigorous social structure. Depending on which society this was in, potentially to the detriment of your grandmother who didn't have a lot of choices.
2b) and luck that the community around them accepted them. That wasn't JUST because he was a farmer, it's also because he hit the other markers of inclusion whether he wanted to or not.
People in that day and age were not cognitively free. Is cognitive freedom preferable? Well that's the question of our age. We weren't supposed to just kill god and stop. We were supposed to replace a new humanist secular philosophy to replace the theology to find purpose to humanity.
We didn't, society is now full of anxiety and malaise, and the right wing is rising promising to fix it by a RVTRN to the old ways regardless of who they harm.
You're downvoted but you're correct. Disordered people who did not offer some sort of economic gain in a market were simply institutionalized. Autistic people who were not high functioning were pretty much as good as dead. Same thing goes for depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. We had no systems in place for people who cannot work. Physical disabilities were more of the same. If you could work, it was okay-ish. You'll still get treated as a freak and discriminated against daily, but you weren't completely shut out of society. If you couldn't work, however...
Ah, I see. I think the ‘label’ (ugh – what a terribly awful way to describe a diagnosis) and the beatings are orthogonal, though.
In my parents’ time in a (then) Dutch colony, nobody was diagnosed with anything (that was only for crazies), but all the men knew how being hit with a belt felt (daughters were spared, from what I’ve been told). Self-medicating with alcohol and beating your kids if they ‘misbehaved’ was just the done thing, as far as I’ve been told.
This is to say that anyone who showed (what we would now identify as) neurodivergent behaviour probably would’ve been beaten, but this then wouldn’t have precluded them from going on to start a family and business (and maybe beat their own kids).
Actually, this is probably still how it works in many parts of the world. Even here in the Netherlands, beating your children was only outlawed as recently as 2007.
There is substantially more going on than "tolerance vs intolerance". We have a huge influx not just because of changing diagnosis standards, but also because the financial benefit for getting a diagnosis has also expanded.
The views of people you are trying to label as fascist are more accurately described as individualism vs welfare state.
I can second the assertion. It's absurd that people really believe folks are getting benefits from having a mental disorder. It's literally the "welfare queen" nonsense just directed at a new group.
You don't even get social benefits, no one excuses your behavior just because it has a label. You get told it's your fault for not managing your disorder properly. Have you seen how we treat people with visible, obvious, undeniable disabilities? Like shit.
Ayn Rand has a lot of friends here. She also described the neurodivergent as "subnormal" and thought that society should do nothing to help them or the handicapped. Additionally, she believed that "normal" children shouldn't have to ever interact with those who were mentally different as it would harm the "normal" children.
Depending on the specific services in an area: everything from subsidised legal access to medications, to access to accommodations in schools seen as favorable (private environments to take tests, or extended deadlines).
Some areas have specific assistance to parents of children with a diagnosis. Some have easier access to disability support services and payments.
Turns out that the poorer a nation is, the less reported autism they have. That could be because there is no benefit to the diagnosis or it could be because they have less healthcare in general and a real diagnosis can easily take 4-8 hours of clinical time.
Or it could be because poorer countries actually have lower rates of autism. I'm not claiming that's the case, just that we don't have any reliable data on it one way or the other.
By definition roughly half the population in any society must belong to a below average family and/or below average communities.
And it seems pretty likely that those with below average capacities at handling, processing, reflecting, etc., on these issues would be concentrated there.
> It's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis
I claim the DSM-5 is why. We changed diagnostic criteria then we diagnosed. People who used to be "normal" were suddenly "undiagnosed until late in life." But the people themselves hadn't changed much, just the diagnostic criteria.
DSM-5 took a bunch of distinct disorders and rolled them into one new disorder called Autism Spectrum Disorder. The only problem it solved is to reduce the number of disorders with unknown pathologies.
My classically-autistic son who needs a lot of support apparently has the same disorder as a nerdy guy who comes across as a bit abrasive, doesn't understand the point of small talk, and would rather work on Linux kernel patches on a Saturday night than hit the town.
I agree with everything you said except for the last paragraph.
The people who, according to your theory, want to reverse the tolerance trend and slide towards fascism/authoritarianism didn't pop out today. They existed and lived in society in the 2010s too. So, from a logical standpoint, what changed?
Nothing changed - mostly it seems the American condition is a side effect of dedicated partisanship and asymmetric political behavior since the 1970s.
The media apparatus in America has split into a center and left, and then a right wing which has different norms and produces its own products.
That in turn has created a durable political coalition that self referentially calls itself when it needs to support its descriptions on reality.
It’s significantly more effective at producing narratives, and moving ideas from the fringes to the main stream news channels.
Since it has little traffic with the left and center media channels, it avoids counter claims and norms on journalistic standards.
So you can now primary Bipartisan politicians, and then the ideas that gain media attention are the ones that reinforces party talking points. Counter views simply do not get air time.
What we are seeing today, is the progression of those forces, as the narratives are never challenged.
The parent comment didn’t even pose a theory as to why. People can change beliefs over time. Weimar Germany had less Nazis in it than Nazi Germany, which would be equally confusing under your framing.
Material conditions degrading further with no end in sight, a massive influx of money towards right-wing populists appealing to a frustrated middle class, etc. Same story as always. How can a country slide into authoritarianism? It seems impossible until it happens, and by then we can hardly tell we're there.
I'm pretty sure current highly interconnected society elicts more spectrum behavior then back when 90% of the populace was just digging soil for grains.
It worked for the large majority. It now no longer works for that large majority, and practically also does not work well for the rest. We have in this sense regressed, thanks to the social liquidation of capitalism.
Your leaving out that people with mental and even physical issues often were outcasts for revealing them to their family, friends, and community in the past.
While I believe there is scant value in being a critic, a good point is nevertheless made: it should be made by practicing artists.
Elaborating on both points, as a practicing artist, paying attention to what you like is important as it shapes your tastes. Critique is useful only insofar as it allows one to create more of what perfectly embodies one's taste, whatever that may be. To be a public critic is to believe one's taste is superior. In my opinion, the only important taste is one's own to one, and should be cultivated by unabashedly following what you find intriguing.
If you're not a practicing artist, like what you like earnestly. Plenty will bemoan the state of the art crumbling, but there's a reason people still enjoy the greats of old to this day. What's good will persist.
I think this is a myopic view of critique. A good critic helps potential consumers gauge the likelihood they will or won't enjoy a given work, and offers insights that facilitate a deeper engagement with the material. Of course one's own taste is the final arbiter of enjoyment, and of course every critic's own taste is going to flavor their criticism, but that doesn't mean they must believe their own tastes are superior, or that non-critics should take their views as objective facts, or that the whole enterprise serves no purpose for anyone other than practicing artists.
For example, if I watch a movie and don't understand it I could shrug it off and forget about it and there would be nothing wrong with that. But I could also go read critiques of the film and maybe gain an understanding which makes my interaction with the film more enriching, even if it doesn't necessarily change my overall opinion.
I think it's true that critique can never be as valuable as the work it examines, but art only becomes part of culture when it is discussed by the culture. That is what critics are doing.
That's a massive infrastructure change to pay out what would likely be peanuts to users, put a massive maintenance burden on the platform (payments are a nightmare system), and disproportionately benefit a law firm profiting off of the lawsuits and the good will of the brand. Seems like a shit deal to me.
I think this has less to do with Rust and commercial game engines being better and more of a fetish that game programmers seem to have for entity component systems. One does not have to look far to see similar projects repeated in C++ years prior.
ECS is basically the realization that relational databases are a pretty damn good model.
I’m suspicious though that you could probably get away with literally just using like an in-memory duckdb to store your game state and get most of the performance/modeling value while also getting a more powerful/robust query engine — especially for like turn-based games. I’m also not sure that bevy’s encoding of queries into the type system is all that sane — as opposed to something like query building with LINQ, but I think it’s how they get to resolve the system dependency graph for parallelization
> ECS is basically the realization that relational databases are a pretty damn good model.
A pretty darn good model for what though and to what extent? For processing millions of objects, sure. For gameplay logic, using ECS for everything? I don't know about that. What I was implying with my comment is that ergonomics are the most important trait of a good game engine.
I reach for an ECS as a last resort when the performance of a gameplay system demands it, not before. Even before that I will tweak my gameplay code to be less wasteful.
While Microsoft is certainly in the wrong for removing the copyright notice, I think the author has zero basis for complaint otherwise. If you're going to release software with one of the most permissable licenses, you need to accept that for all it entails. Consider what you're comfortable with and pick an appropriate license relative to your values.
I think it's weird they didn't mention anything about Peerd or their plans on how to use Spegel to the author. They could've atleast said "btw we plan to do xyz" instead of leaving the author fantasizing about a collab.
In a reply from an Microsoft employee who's familiar with the situation, some group in Azure wanted support for some Azure-specific APIs. The spegel dev decided that was too far out of their wheelhouse, so they didn't want to add support in spegel for that Azure-specific API. The Azure subteam went ahead and added that support into their fork of spegel.
Other changes removed the spegel project's LICENSE and added in Microsoft's LICENCE file and copyrights on all files.
If the author has ethical concerns with companies using their work there's a simple way to make that explicit and unambigious – the license. No one can read their mind otherwise.
If you consult with someone over their project, then proceed to fork it behind their back, that's just being a dick, even if it was perfectly legal. We should not accept that kind of behavior. And that's even ignoring that the consultation was unpaid and the project was actually even stolen.
Highlight the part of the essay where he is claiming MS didn't have a right to do what they did.
The point of the article was that MS showed interest in his work, asked him about his designs. Said nothing about internal plans to fork it or use it. Then he shows up to a talk and sees them discussing his work.
Reading between the lines, it is 100% clear they didn't feel like telling him they planned to fork his software, and they danced around it. They didn't reach out to him afterward and say "thanks, we are building a fork and your free time was really useful".
The essay isn't claiming a legal issue. It's pointing out a substantial, practical issue with OSS that didn't exist nearly as prominently in the pre-cloud era: megacorps forking software and cutting out the OG developers.
I mean, the title is “Getting Forked by Microsoft,” not “Microsoft Removed My Copyright Notice.” They don’t even outright state that the fork is missing the required attribution, you have to infer it.
Anyways, the real question should be: what is the most productive form for the project/technology? Separate efforts may not the answer, we're looking for.
Yes, he complains in the last few paragraphs that he feels like this form is a competitor. Says that users sometimes come to him asking for help with the Microsoft fork, etc. Those all very much fall into the domain of "what did you think MIT meant exactly", imo at least.
The people I've met who have made similar remarks about C have authored some of the most heinous pointer tomfoolery I've ever seen in my life. It's a remark indicative of a hubris that has remained unchecked or worse, in denial.
So you couldn't understand their code, and therefore everyone who says the same things is incompetent and in denial. That's one way to explain the experience you had.
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