It's not just Valve taking the initiative. It's mostly because Windows has become increasingly hostile and just plain horrible over the years. They'll be writing textbooks on how badly Microsoft screwed up their operating system.

I'm a Mac user, but I recently played around with a beefy laptop at work to see how games ran on it, and I was shocked at how bad and user-hostile Windows 11 is. I had previously used Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7, but 11 is just so janky. It's feestoned with Co-pilot/AI jank, and seems to be filled with ads and spyware.

If I didn't know better, I'd assume Windows was a free, ad-supported product. If I ever pick up a dedicated PC for gaming, it's going to be a Steam Machine and/or Steam Deck. Microsoft is basically lighting Xbox and Windows on fire to chase AI clanker slop.

In defence of Windows . . .

(I've been a cross platform numerical developer in GIS and geophysics for decades)

serious windows power users, current and former windows developers and engineers, swear by Chris Titus Tech's Windows Utility.

It's an open powershell suite collaboration by hundreds maintained by an opinionated coordinater that allows easy installation of common tools, easy setting of update behaviours, easy tweaking of telemetry and AI addons, and easy creation of custom ISO installs and images for VM application (dedicated stripped down windows OS for games or a Qubes shard)

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

It's got a lot of help hover tooltip's to assist in choices and avoiding suprises, you can always look to the scripts that are run if you're suspicious.

" Windows isn't that bad if you clean it out with a stiff enough broom "

That said, I'm setting my grandkids up with Bazzite decks and forcing them to work in CLI's for a lot of things to get them used to seeing things under the hood.

Bazzite is nice but its not very CLI centric I think because of the immutability. Its a great OS, but I found Cachy a lot better if you want to work from CLI in normal ways

> Ruby, which appeared just 2 years later, departs a lot more, arguably without good reasons either?

I doubt we ever would have heard about Ruby without it's syntax decisions. From my understanding it's entire raison d'être was readability.

It's essentially Perl for people who don't like punctuation marks.

More like if Smalltalk and Perl had a prettier baby.

Pretty sure he's talking about Lua's authors.

> that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time

Why? might be I'm just missing something, but I don't understand why this needs to be a goal of theirs?

As a solo grumpy senior, I've been pumping out features over the past 6 months and am now expanding into new markets.

I've also eliminated some third party SaaS integrations by creating slimmer and better integrated services directly into my platform. Which is an example of using AI to bring some features in-house, not primarily to save money (generally not worth the effort if that's the goal), but because it's simply better integrated and less frustrating than dealing with crappy third-party APIs.

We may end up using AI to create simplified bespoke subset languages that fit our preferences. Like a DSL of sorts but with better performance characteristics than a traditional DSL and a small enough surface area.

> all the conflict with the creator

Just so no one misunderstands this. The creator (Evan) didn't get into, or start, any drama himself that I ever noticed. I'd argue he's a very chill and nice dude.

I've been on the edges of the community for probably a decade now (lurker), and all of the drama came from other people who simply didn't like the BDFL and slow releases strategy.

I recently used Gleam + Lustre for a small app that I normally would have built with Elm + PostgREST. It went very well, and I'm now planning to use it for a larger rewrite (of a rails app).

Anecdotically I recently got into Ruby, via Sinatra, and enjoy the experience.

What are you lacking in ruby and rails, besides the types?

Ruby is lovely. I just prefer static (inferred) types, functional, compiled, and performant languages with managed side effects these days. Bit more upfront effort, but saves a ton of time and stress in the long run.

I've considered playing around with it. Every now and then I tell myself I'm gonna learn front end dev, but as soon as I start looking at it (FE in general not Lustre specifically) I get depressed and give up lol

I far prefer it to javascript or typescript. I recommend using a coding agent to help you learn it (claude code, gemini cli, codex) if you're interested. Pick a smallish project, prompt your way through it, examining to structure and code as you go, asking the agent to explain anything you don't understand.

Probably the most underrated aspect of this new AI age is having a tutor with encyclopedic knowledge available at all times.

* To be clear, I'm not saying to "Vibe Code" it. Take the time to really understand the code, ask questions, and eventually suggest improvements.

I'm confident I can learn it, but the whole ecosystem drives me nuts. It's always a bunch of shit spread across a ton of small file, at least three different "languages" between JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, frameworks or other languages compiled to JavaScript on top of that. Plus the behavior of web browser and trying to wrangle that nonsense.

No disrespect to FE devs. Pretty much all software development is one type of mess or another. But backend and terminals are the kind of mess that make sense to me.

Also, agree that LLMs are actually great for learning if you use them carefully.

> No disrespect to FE devs. Pretty much all software development is one type of mess or another. But backend and terminals are the kind of mess that make sense to me.

This is part of the appeal of Lustre and Elm to me. Not the main thing, but being able to avoid JS land churn (and nulls) is quite nice.

This Lustre? https://www.lustre.org/

Seems to be a filesystem, how would it replace a database?

This one is likely what they were referring to: https://github.com/lustre-labs/lustre

No, this one https://hexdocs.pm/lustre/index.html

I found the gemini cli extremely lacking and even frustrating. Why google would choose node…

Codex is decent and seemed to be improving (being written in rust helps). Claude code is still the king, but my god they have server and throttling issues.

Mixed bag wherever you go. As model progress slows / flatlines (already has?) I’m sure we’ll see a lot more focus and polish on the interfaces.

Codex is king

> Technically, yes. The CCP, though, wants to incentivize Chinese firms to use domestically-manufactured chips.

This couldn’t be playing out better for Xi. Trump is China’s best president.

I used to think Trump was clueless and being outplayed, but now I realize he’s just looting and couldn’t care less about protectionism or the American worker.

Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego.

> Every single action from this administration can be explained by greed and ego. I highly agree with you - and that’s coming from someone who can’t stand the Democrats[1]. Things like announcing all of a sudden that he opposes a merger when everybody knows Kushner is involved with a rival bid… it’s too obvious how much corruption is his very operating system. [1] (I didn’t vote for either candidate for President, but I’m not in a swing state so I’m not sorry)

The lesson from Mamdani is that the only way forwards for actual policy based and anticorruption politics is within the Democrat primaries. These are even run by the state in many states, I believe.

Eradicate the Republican party as an organization, split the Democrats into "normal right" and "maybe a bit left" factions, and see if you can get preference voting in there as well while asking for a pony.