> Doesn’t Epic charge a 5% royalty for any games developed on Unreal Engine regardless of where or how the money is collected or what app store it’s installed from?
"Royalty". It's common to charge a royalty when allowing someone to distribute your copyrighted property.
> Why can’t Apple collect fees for any apps that are built on their software AND hardware?
Because that's not a royalty - you aren't distributing Apple's copyrighted property when you send someone an iPhone application.[1]
When you send someone your game built on Unreal Engine, you are sending them Epic's copyrighted property.[2]
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[1] If people could side-load iPhone apps, that is. I don't believe that they can.
[2] If you sell someone code to your game and tell them to to download Unreal Engine, then compile and/or link it against Unreal Engine themselves, then sure, Epic won't get a dime. But your customer might still have to pay for that, depending on whether Epic makes single-user no-sale licenses free (I believe they do).
No, that sounds like you're breaking backwards compatibility too often.
Assuming there is an update every week, you can expect all teams to update within two weeks, which means if everything goes well only two versions are active.
That's not how things play out in practice. Say you do backwards incompatible changes "infrequently", say every 4 months, or 3 times per year. In 5 years, that's 15 versions with backwards incompatible changes.
Everybody is time pressured at least sometimes, and you miss one update, and now you've got multiple backwards-incompatible updates and you need to do it carefully the next time around, meaning more time needed, meaning it needs to be scheduled and planned along with other feature work now.
And then you end up with something close to a normal distribution of versions across ~140 services: some have the very old versions (v1-v4), majority are on some middle, not ancient versions but still ~7 versions behind on average (v5-v10), and only some are on the latest few versions (v11-v15). "Patch" versions can become even crazier, and yes, there will be bugs in them making them inadvertently not backwards compatible either (as not everybody updated right away to detect it).
But really, I always point out to good, long lived APIs that make compromises in their API for the sake of backwards compatibility (eg. we still live with "Referer" instead of "Referrer" in HTTP, 35 years later; and it is OK!).
> GPS is a bad example, but there are things that pose a physical threat to others that we maybe shouldn't tinker with. Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering. If it's also push-to-start, that's probably not physically connected to the ignition either.
I'm not seeing an argument here.
Cars have posed a physical threat to humans ever since they were invented, and yet the owners could do whatever the hell they wanted as long as the car still behaved legally when tested[1].
Aftermarket brakes (note spelling!), aftermarket steering wheels, aftermarket accelerator pedals (which can stick!), aftermarket suspensions - all legal. Aftermarket air filters, fuel injectors and pumps, exhausts - all legal. Hell, even additions, like forced induction (super/turbo chargers), cold air intake systems, lights, transmission coolers, etc are perfectly fine.
You just have to pass the tests, that's all.
I want to know why it is suddenly so important to remove the owners right to repair.
After all, it's only been quite recent that replacement aftermarket ECUs for engine control were made illegal under certain circumstances[2], and that's only a a few special jurisdictions.
What you are proposing is the automakers wet dream come true - they can effectively disable the car by bricking it after X years, and will legally prevent you from getting it running again even if you had the technical knowhow to do so!
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[1] Like with emissions. Or brakes (note spelling!)
[2] Reprogramming the existing one is still legal, though, you just have to ensure you pass the emissions test.
Problem is I am not looking at TVs side by side. I'm watching a movie or a show, and the enjoyment I get at the correct viewing distance is unlikely to be significantly more on a 50" or smaller TV.
And if you want to go even cheaper, check out Hetzner their EX63 (go to custom) > 4x 7.68TB drives for like 140 Euro.
Not counting the fact that Netcup is raided (also Netcup is limited to 8TB on a VPS).
That is like 4.7 Euro /TB. That is like 4$/TB. 6 Euro / TB in a raid 5 setup.
I do not understand why they are not using this new pricing model on their older servers. There the best you can get is like 10 Euro /TB (for the single 15TB U.2).
This looks like it was written by an LLM. Not complaining, because my major use of LLMs is rubber-ducking, not code-generation, and I very often get responses like this when doing repeated iterations and deep-diving into a review/comparison.
The concepts are probably the authors, but the text we are seeing is probably the LLMs.
Regardless of the LLM overtones, this is still decent content.
You are correct. The final output was polished by ChatGPT, but I originally presented the basic ideas in a few paragraphs. The LLM added a sense of flow and persuasiveness which are somehow lacking in my rather dry and non-native English writing style.
Too many people, myself included, often skip LLM content.
After I am done rubberducking with the LLM I write my own code. I can you should do that too. Leave a few days after your session to let the discussion percolate in your mind, then write the post and only then check the discussion again to see if any details can be added.
In all fairness, I dont actually write blog posts like this, I just bang 'em out whenever I feel like, so not sure of it will work as well as I think it would.
Like everything else,work on the observability first.
Can you grab the current boot partition? Once you have it can you decode it? Do you have a reference boot partition? Can you extract the bootloader from the boot partition? Can you read those binary files? Maybe turn them into readable assembly?
Can you clip a multimeter onto a PC trace? Can you do the same with a scope? Can you decipher what the 'scope capture means? Maybe use a bus pirate instead?
> Those that say it's made me more productive or that I no longer have to do the boring bits and can focus on the interesting parts of coding.
I wonder about that bit, TBH.
If you're 10x more productive at generating lines of code because you're mostly just reviewing, just how carefully are you reviewing? If you're taking the time to spec out stuff in great detail, then iterate on the many different issues with the LLM code, then finally reviewing when it passes the tests ... how are you getting to 10x and not 2x?
TBH, for those people who really are able to create 10x as much code with the LLM, their employment is actually more precarious than those who aren't doing that - it means your problem domain is so shallow that an LLM can hold both it and the code in a single context window.
> I've used Claude in agent mode to port a very complex and spaghetti coded C application to nicely structured C++
You migrated code from one of the simplest programming languages to unarguably the most complex programm language in existence. I feel for you; I really do.
How did you ensure that it didn't introduce any of the myriad of footguns that C++ has that aren't present in C?
I mean, we're talking about a language here that has an entire book just for variable initialisation - choose the wrong one for your use-case and you're boned! Just on variable initialisation, how do you know it used the correct form in all of the places?
"Royalty". It's common to charge a royalty when allowing someone to distribute your copyrighted property.
> Why can’t Apple collect fees for any apps that are built on their software AND hardware?
Because that's not a royalty - you aren't distributing Apple's copyrighted property when you send someone an iPhone application.[1]
When you send someone your game built on Unreal Engine, you are sending them Epic's copyrighted property.[2]
-------------------------
[1] If people could side-load iPhone apps, that is. I don't believe that they can.
[2] If you sell someone code to your game and tell them to to download Unreal Engine, then compile and/or link it against Unreal Engine themselves, then sure, Epic won't get a dime. But your customer might still have to pay for that, depending on whether Epic makes single-user no-sale licenses free (I believe they do).
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