You mean Godwin’s Law. I think Crenshaw’s Law is the one about Nazis.

Edit: aaaand someone didn’t get the joke.

I only found out about E.V.O. way later, probably around 2005 when a friend made a web game that combined its evolution theme with gameplay similar to Legend of the Green Dragon. I still wonder why E.V.O. wasn’t more popular. It’s an amazing game, I still occasionally play it on my Analogue Pocket.

I would say Age of Empires 2 which was where I first used the name that I still have on here, over 25 years later. Its amazing editor also resonated with my urge to create my own games without requiring programming knowledge that I just didn’t have at 11 years old. I went on to create custom content for Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, eventually studied computer science and joined some indie gamedev communities where I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still meet in person once or twice a year. I never became a full time game developer but I worked on some stuff part time in the mid 2000s and still do it as a hobby.

My question was specifically about “the general non-technical population”. Do you expect my mom to even remotely understand what different servers are and why talking to me is securely encrypted but talking to her friends group isn’t? The point about secure software is that it needs to be secure by default or else, entry level users will manage to accidentally send their stuff in plain text and not even notice.

For nerds like us, I agree that Matrix is probably a good choice. For someone who needed to be told that “the internet” isn’t the blue “e” on their desktop… not so much. I’d rather send carrier pigeons than explain Matrix to my family.

What would you recommend as an alternative for the general non-technical population?

Interesting take and totally understandable though that’s not quite what happens in the plot:

• The battle for the Citadel at the end of ME1 wasn’t the entire known universe banding together by far. What we see is a couple of ships that happened to be nearby because at that point, most of the universe still doesn’t believe the reapers even exist.
• After the battle, the reapers don’t show up at the Citadel but at the edge of the galaxy. They are still months to years away from eradicating the Alliance. Yes, they have a whole lot of firepower but taking down thousands of planets full of enemies who now know what’s coming takes a lot longer than an attack on a single space station where nobody was prepared for an attack.
• At the beginning of ME2, Shepard doesn’t just wake up at the hospital after the battle you saw in ME1. During a later battle/patrol (?), the Normandy gets ambushed and completely destroyed. Shepard dies and their corpse drifts through space. Cerberus (who were only briefly mentioned in a side quest in ME1) manage to retieve the body and use an experimental technology to bring them back to life (it’s implied that they basically built a Shepard-shaped cyborg who has access to at least some of ME1 Shepard’s memories). The goal is to have a well-respected figurehead who can assemble a squad to take down some critical Reaper infrastructure.

Off, both for myself and for guests. If your feet get cold, slippers will be provided.

I’m not super strict about it. If I’m on my way out and notice I forgot something on my desk that I still need to grab, I’m okay with keeping my shoes on for that. But other than that, definitely shoes off.

I know your question is worded for movies and shows but I have one example from the world of video games that still makes me sad. Final Fantasy died shortly after X, maybe X-2. XII if you really want to stretch things. After that, they were too focused on “modernizing” gameplay. I just want something with a colorful world, quirky characters and turn-based combat that’s more about finding the right strategy for a boss than reflexes.

I guess XIV is nice in its own way but as an MMORPG I see it more as a spin-off than as a part of the main series. The VII remakes tickle some nostalgia neurons but would have been better without their real-time combat. XIII, XV and XVI were just meh. If you really want to make me happy, make a faithful remake of VIII with modern graphics, rebalanced but otherwise faithful gameplay and a few more scenes in the last act that answer a few questions that the community has been trying to answer for 25 years.

I really liked the Acolyte. Not necessarily for its acting but it leaned into the idea that dark side and light side are not so different and the Jedi can cause a lot of suffering by sticking their noses where they don’t belong. Also, there are force users that don’t fit neatly into those two categories and just want to do their own thing.

Sadly, we won’t see a second season, because some “fans” on the internet got mad that women, people of color and - very shocking - queer people exist in the Star Wars universe.

I don’t know, am I? I tried to keep it civil, until you argued - multiple times - that everyone who thinks that your software of choice is cumbersome is just too dumb to learn it and got downvoted almost every time. Then you gave me a snippy reply when I politely asked what your professional relationship with that software is.

By the way: software engineer, 22 years hobby, 16 years professional.

Maybe we should just accept that everyone has different needs and experiences and not judge others for not liking the things we like? Does that sound fair?

But aren’t you so great at reading that you get everything the first time and never forget?

Yes, I know I‘m mean right now but you ran into that.

Unemployed, never had to use a piece of software to make money.

May I ask what you do professionally?

Are you intentionally misreading my posts or is this just a superiority complex? It’s not about how long something takes to learn or how often I have to look it up. It’s about how long it takes to do on a daily basis.

And to clarify, I’m not talking about “Why is this function in a different menu than what I’m used to” but “Why does GPlates require me to export my continent coordinates into a text file, copy a line in that file by hand, give that copy a new ID, make sure I made no syntax errors, re-import the text file and then edit the shape of both copies just to split a continent in two halves?” I know how to do that, it’s not too hard to learn. But if there was a knife tool or at least working copy and paste, I could reduce that task from minutes to seconds.

The best manual in the world doesn’t help me if the things I need every two minutes in my workflow take three times as many steps as in the software that I’m used to. Sure I can learn how to do it but it’s still annoying - knowing that there’s a better way to do it - and over the course of a month of using the tool, my productivity loss is probably enough to just pay for a proprietary tool.

OpenSCAD has pretty nice UX (though massively outdated UI look & feel) but of course describing your part in code is a very different use case from most other CAD tools.

Software for a medical device. Everything needs to be done exactly right and documented in three different places or else the regulatory agencies from at least three countries get really angry at you and worst case pull your device from circulation. Less cowardice and more cover your ass. Still annoying though.

You would think so, right? But that doesn’t have a requirement ID so apparently it can’t be referenced in the incident report.

I mean, technically, there are pretty good frontends for gdb, for example in VS Code and CLion but I guess if you use them, you’re a corporate shill or something because they are backed by companies and contain code that isn’t licensed under (A)GPLv3.