Blizzard has had this for a number of years, at least for World Of Warcraft. You can start playing and it downloads the rest of the game in the background. I think the loading screens are a bit longer since my guess would be that the program checks to make sure the needed files are there for the zone and, if not, it downloads them as a priority.
That's all well and good but how am I supposed to track users, serve them 100 ads, waste their time/resources, and ruin their experience all at the same time?? These desktop applications sound terrible, think of the marketing loss! /s
I wish these platforms that are used to distribute information had the option for important organizations to re-centralize their communication.
Instead of a Twitter account that could be hacked, why not let the SEC post to a feed hosted by themselves that Twitter can poll against and post to Twitter for them? Then you get the benefits of centralization for dissemination of information but decentralization for security? Then these important accounts can invest as much as they want in their own security?
It seems like the only benefit that Twitter actually gives vs the SEC just posting on their site is that centralization.
> The norm is to battle software rot and add features ad infinitum.
Software engineering is so expansive, it is ideas built on ideas built on ideas. I learned Node.js in my free time because of the derision that is rampant for FE engineers. Node.js is built on C++, which compiles down to machine code which runs on a CPU that has it's own firmware. My Node.js application sits in a docker container on a Linux server written in C that somehow knows how to accept network requests and respond with data to a user's browser, using protocols and methods that were conceived of before I was born. The application got on the server because of my gitlab pipeline that first built my application and bundled it with Webpack, then ran unit tests with Jest, then ran e2e tests with selenium, then runs a bash script to git clone my code to build a docker image. This all to change a response header from a 200 to a 203 to align with best practices.
At any given day I am working on 30 levels of abstraction, trying to deal with elitists who were around when the internet was in its' "glory days" telling me now that the stuff I am working on means nothing when compared to the pristine web we had in 1987 when a gif of a dancing baby blew people's minds. Now the internet is layers upon layers of protocols and languages and code and tracking that if I take time to look back on and learn, the industry will have moved past me to Next or Nuxt or Nyxt or Naxt or whatever bullshit flavor of the month library I am required to master and have 3 years of experience in (it came out a month ago).
There is no extra space for regular people like me, we can't build things any more; at least not things of note, things that get used. And while building something that never gets used is great for your portfolio, it feels like making a painting and immediately sticking it in a safe. What is the value if no one even sees it?
> When fewer than 5,000 programmers existed, they built Lisp (1960) and APL (1966) and sketchpad (1963). With over 5 million programmers today, the best we can do is Rust and React.
Being a standout of 5000 people is extremely hard, being a standout in 5 million is a statistical anomaly even with specialization. And people do it in the same sense that people win the lottery: someone has to but your chance may as well be zero[1].
