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bobsgame

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bob@bobsgame.com

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I tried to ride one of the bikes from one Google building to another once and a black security SUV pulled up and started yelling at me. They aren't very good bikes anyway- they are fixies which are kind of useless for rides longer than a block.

I believe everyone physically able to should try running 13.1 mph on a treadmill just to get an understanding of just how fast these athletes run for two hours. It is incredible.

I believe the Gates Foundation has already put an enormous amount of thinking and research into determining the most effective use of a large amount of funds to improve the overall state of the world. My opinion is that you would probably rationally be better off investing that money or building a corporation to try and turn it into billions and then donate that to Gates.

I'm not convinced it will continue rising. I think it will be eventually replaced by a currency that solves all of its problems.

Xanadu 9 years ago

I think Xanadu is great and it will be one of those things that proves itself in the future. Perhaps whatever replaces the web someday will resemble it.

I bet that someday we will move to a distributed web hosted on something like the blockchain, with redundancy and revision history, and that will begin to resemble Xanadu. It reminds me of sort of a "Star Trek" vision of how things should be, but not how things actually are in this disorganized world.

I think that it's sort of like the Dynabook or early AI or VR, in that it's the correct vision of the ideal result of a technology, but was way too ahead of its time and the technology just wasn't ready.

Papers I like 9 years ago

Ryg is amazing and I love his writings. His series on graphics is fantastic.

50 pages of fixes and features! Unreal is an amazing beacon of technology that continues to push the limits and makes me proud to work with computers. Thank you Epic!

Game development is hard and making anything substantial will require spending thousands of hours in either engine, so it's more about the purpose of the engine rather than ease of use, since you will eventually have to learn all the ins and outs of either one.

Unreal is a "AAA" engine originally meant for large teams. It has much better level design tools and collaboration features, but all programming must be done in C++ which is fragile and can break the whole engine. Lighter scripting can be done with Blueprints which is good for designers making levels interactive. Unreal is a good choice if you are aiming to make a serious production with a team making large detailed levels.

The Unity Asset Store has many more plugins and it's easier to put together a sandbox type game with lots of features, since its managed code design makes it easier to drop in scripts other people have made. There are level design tool plugins available that mimic what Unreal does, but they aren't as polished and collaboration is harder.

His main point as I understood it seems to be that the problem is the direction of the organization demands that it continue to grow in that direction. More data means more power which demands more funding but also leads to less effectiveness at what they are actually supposed to be doing. It's really smart that he is confronting the problem by trying to create a legal framework that can steer the ship in a better direction. I really appreciate his work.

I don't think that I am trying to fight any politics, but rather just trying to understand the circumstances of the situation here.

I have had some experiences with women where things seemed to be going fine and then I was abruptly blocked or ignored, and it was very frustrating at the time because I had poor social skills and I didn't have a good understanding of what had happened or why. Now I understand that dating is often asymmetrical and one person just may have many more options than the other, or just decide they are not interested, and that's OK.

This seems like it could be a very extreme case which got way out of hand and the guy went off the deep end, but I think it is best to at least try to have some understanding of and maybe some empathy for both sides.

I think the same thing can happen to women who are pursuing men, and it can also become extreme, like the woman who broke into David Letterman's house. Should you just call her a creep and throw her in prison, or should you feel empathy for her mental illness and try to treat it? It seems to me like the best solution is to determine and treat the actual cause of the behavior.

Clearly at that point he had taken it way too far. I'm not making excuses for that and I think he is definitely in the wrong. I'm just commenting on what I believe causes these kind of situations in the first place.

I think that males have sort of an instinctual way of thinking which is often reinforced in the media that persistence and commitment are "romantic" which women secretly desire, and that they often "play hard to get," etc. There are certainly many cases where this is true but probably much more commonly not. I can see how this combined with wishful thinking, general emotional confusion, lack of information, self esteem issues, etc can lead to these sort of situations.

I definitely don't think the woman owes him an answer or anything else of course, but I do think that women have a different perspective than men in general where they often have many more suitors and don't really understand the male experience that well. From the perspective of a man who has few prospects who takes every interaction as being meaningful, being abruptly blocked by someone with no explanation seems very rude and personal, but to the woman doing the blocking it might simply be the most convenient and reasonable way to deal with being approached quite often. It wasn't until I became platonic friends with women that I realized just how much more popular they are on dating sites, etc.

I had the idea a long time ago to make a dd-wrt image which would automatically crack the vulnerable routers within distance, detect the model, and install a compatible version of itself in order to spread virally and create a mesh network. I'm not going to pursue it because it probably breaks a lot of laws, but I'm still curious if it would have been possible. Does anyone know if this is actually feasible? Maybe the radios can't handle that sort of thing?