markus_zhang

Stupid question on toilet: if prime numbers are 1s and other integers are 0s. What do we get from this “digital” landscape?

I need to drink/eat those too to feel like I'm an AWS ops guy!

This also helps downstream a lot.

OK I got it. But it’s not going to happen in my case!

Would love to see computer engineers or electrical engineers.

Maybe that's what people with strong ideas do. They execute and they kinda push each other around.

I think it helps a bit, but no longer makes a big difference. Guess that's because I'm "old" (40+).

But again, maybe it helps more than I thought, because I haven't done any A/B test on myself -- I'm kinda getting used to exercise now.

I half-agree with you. I agree with you because I kinda had that experience from time to time. I'd focus on a certain learning project for about 4-6 months, usually without much break, all done after-work. I disagree because I usually burn out myself so much after that 4-6 month period, that I usually don't do anything related for another 4-6 months.

This shows up in my github repo contribution chart, but more importantly I retain very little whatever I learned -- concepts maybe, not nothing else. That's why I so admire Carmack's machine-like consistency.

Maybe I don't really believe in the course as strong as he did. Maybe I'm more tuned to burn out early. Whichever the reason it is, you could imagine that I'd very much love to improve.

I kinda realize that the most important factor for personal success (whatever kind of success you want) is mental stability.

Like, John Carmack said that he NEVER burned out, never went into a dark corner (verbatim from his interview), and everyone agrees that he works like a machine. And I don't think he actually spent a lot of mental training to achieve that stability, because, he has been like that from a young age. This is THE best thing you can have in the world, if you want to achieve something, anything. If you don't have the mental toughness, you won't be able to make through that 10,000 hours (cliche, I know). I guess that's also why many self-help book talk about being consistent -- to be consistent, is to have mental stability. And I think there is a whole difference, between someone who trains his mental to stay stable for 6 months, then collapse, from someone who actually doesn't need to train and just be stable somehow.

This also leads me to realize that good sleep is one of the fundamentals of a stable mind. As a parent, I actually don't remember when was the last time I had a good sleep, and my definition of a night of good sleep is perhaps just trivial for someone else. At the same time, I consider myself lucky, because at least I don't suffer from serious mental issues. I still have a job and a house, and that's better than many out there.

This then leads me to despise the human body. It is a machine so delicate that you have to be very lucky to be super productive, whatever your definition of being productive is. It seems to ignore the input in short term (e.g. you can eat garbage food for a month and nothing really happens, or, you can sleep 4-6 hours every day for the last 6 years and still function normally), but once the long term shows up it is very hard to reverse. And there are so many theories focused on it that we have no idea which one is best for the individual. You might as well spend years doing A/B test on yourself and still have no idea what the hell is going on. Or you need to be super rich to have some medical team monitor you 7/24 to figure out what the hell is going on.

Which language is worst for AI? Just curious.

I’d go for Amazon as a no brainer. But you are probably one of the 10x programmers so maybe your interests differ.

You gave too little information for us to recommend effectively.

I wouldn't say she was always wrong. I get her methodology wasn't always right or appealing, but she did inspire a lot of girls, which is a good thing.

I think Scully in the X-Files also inspired a lot of girls to study STEM.

Thanks, yeah that's the laptop.

I thought that's an ZX-81 Spectrum but I watched it again and found out that it was not!

Edit: Watched again and it is an ATARI laptop because the brand showed up in a few frames. This is probably the one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio

A screenshot I just made: https://imgur.com/6I34YyN

Also I think we are pretty close to the year 2027 which was supposed to be the year that humans defeat Skynet.

Time flies.

My initiation was the first Alien movie on VCR. I watched it maybe in 1990 or 1991, but definitely before I reach 10 years old. It was also the first movie that I watched. The movie scared the shit out of me for months afterwards.

When looking back, all these movies (Alien, Terminator 2, and Jurassic park) were very well done. They never tried to achieve anything that was out of reach back then, and story-wise they were simply very entertaining. They didn't rely on, say, pornography (some movies clearly had too many naked men/women) to appease to their customers. The characters felt like real human-being who can hate and love strongly. They were done so well that it felt like nature. Movies nowadays couldn't do that anymore, somehow.

I saw claims for that in multiple sources. I think they initially wanted to do CG but it was too hard back then so the pilot did it anyway.

Thanks will check them out.

I don’t disagree with that, but back then polygons are in the hundreds/low thousand, and now they have mega textures, huge models, which are simply too expensive to create. Not to say IDTech is alone in this, but I think not many companies can handle those things.

And the engine is way more complicated nowadays — UE at least has a huge community and docs.

I’m just an old man who prefers a much, much slower pace for the rendering engine. I wouldn’t mind that they grew so slow that we just got IDTech 4.

I also worked in a public company that bought a lot of companies during the pandemic and had to sell or shut them down in the wake of 2024.

My cynical take is that a lot of VC/fund bros need their cash during the pandemic and they saw a high in the market so installed their friends to buy those assets. Scroll forward 5, 6 years, they now do the reverse to pump up stock prices of those parent companies and win big again.

It has nothing to do with the parent companies themselves. They are just a tool to pump and dump.

I was thinking, is that the space hopping map? Because I didn’t play much MP back in the day but that map was a blast.

Checked online and indeed that’s the one! I wonder what is the biggest online community nowadays that I can play MP with.

I don’t think they are interested or have the $$$. It probably worths like a billion?

IMO, people should stop chasing making AAA games or whatever nVidia pushed out. They should just build games instead of graphics demos that sometimes sold well.

They can stick to desktops 10 years ago, make smaller teams, and either build their own engine or use something that is not UE5.

Machine games and Arkane studio use IDtech.

However, is it easy to work with an undocumented IDtech engine? Even a previous generation, say Rage? I think it’s very hard.

Did they do any talks about optimization?

I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases.

The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.

That's really sad.

Maybe they will just pump up remakes in other engines, like UE.