In terms of memory usage it’s a waste. But in terms of performance you’re absolutely correct. It’s generally far more efficient to check is a word is 0 than to check if a single bit is zero.

My experience is that the programmers from the first row very much still exist. My theory is that the number of programmers from the first row stayed the about same or even increased slightly. There are so many more so called “programmers” overall now, however, that in relation the first row programmers are much rarer now. And to be fair, you don’t need a programmer capable of programming entire games in assembly to center a div.

Linux now has many mature distros that just work and don’t require much configuration if any - which is the motivation for Nixos, probably

General advice regarding open source: even if you tried something out years ago and didn’t like it, it may be well worth giving it another shot. Open source projects often need some time to mature and take their time to improve, but only get better over time.

No, it was an AMD creation. Intel created their Itanium 64 bit architecture but it failed and died out completely

Yes, absolutely. When you look at the innovations happening to Windows recently like Copilot integration and Recall I’m glad that Linux is “boring”

Something similar already happened when bicycle manufacturer VanMoof went under. I believe there was a workaround if you extracted your bike’s crypto keys before the servers went down but otherwise you were practically screwed.

The difference is, that you could just continue using XP until Win7 was released or continue using Win7 until Win10 was released. Win10 will reach end of life next year and then the only supported Windows will be Windows 11. Vista or Win8 were never as forced as Win11 is now.

Minecraft was just the example they used in the post but I agree. Minecraft is no indie game studio anymore atleast since Microsoft took over. But at least the free update policy hasn’t changed since the takeover

The Factorio Devs made this Blogpost some time ago about how to go forward with development. It basically boiled down to developing a big (paid) expansion pack. I would be totally fine with Stardew Valley doing the same. However, going for free updates was discarded for Factorio because they have a “smaller but more dedicated audience [compared to Terraria and Minecraft]”. I don’t think that applies to Stardew Valley so free updates might be the way to go.