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pcblues

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markosborne@pcblues.com

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No way! I played the original (too much) while doing computer science at uni in the early 1990s. My friends were either playing the Dune RTS or mmorpgs, depending on their leaning. A lot of the limited available computing power went into playtime in those days :)

Sounds like they tweaked an AI to get a minimal subset of accurate outcomes and started waving their hands for anything more complicated, realistic and ultimately generally useful. The larger problem-space is still an NP-complete problem. I guess if the data-centres become infinitely large, this problem can be worked around.

/s /jk

StarFighter 16-Inch 3 months ago

Sensible thought. I very much hope there is a glut of one-three year old ram and GPUs on the market in about one year when the AI market "cools" and the ear-marked components return to the market.

The banks that lent the AI industry the money are already trying to sell their debt.

Marked me down? That was a joke about how quotes are misattributed on the internet. (I am the following person) But if you are good at your job because you see faults before humour and it happens as a personal trait, then good on you. Found another fault.

I had a colour-blindness test when I worked at an abattoir.

My job was to find odd things on a one third section of a side of beef as it went past and cut it off. 1500 or so per day.

The test showed numbers created with blobs of close colours.

The last test didn't have a number in it.

Cheeky buggers.

For a while, I programmed while walking on a mini-laptop. Nice walking paths where I lived. I was on a hobby project and wanted to spend any minute on it. It wasn't pretty. I kept trying to design a contraption I could wear on my shoulders that worked like a laptop desk.

I also attached a laptop to a treadmill at home, but the static electricity from the rubber mat kept zapping the laptop.

The best result was a laptop on an exercise bike. But the bike couldn't have a high resistance or I would lose concentration.

As a software developer, when I used to smoke, I would go outside for 5-10 minutes and talk shit with other regulars who had nothing to do with my work. It was a break that would fix my fading focus (probably for more than one reason :)

I could only keep peak thinking/designing/developing for about an hour or so. That's peak matrix level with edge cases identified and documented on the way.

I could do OK for a lot longer, but the same quality wasn't there.

The non-smokers would resent us for it, but most of them would go for a half to one hour coffee instead.

I going to try this. Thanks!

I did TDD properly the first time in my Masters Degree (ongoing). It was an eye-opener. Write your program in two different ways to make sure you know the requirements by making their outputs match. That's not me being snarky. It actually works well. Just make sure you can type quickly.

In the 25 odd years I developed software, I learnt all the rules the hard way.

Relax. You will make all the mistakes because the laws don't make sense until you trip over them :)

Comment your code? Yep. Helped me ten years later working on the same codebase.

You can't read a book about best practises and then apply them as if wisdom is something you can be told :)

It is like telling kids, "If you do this you will hurt yourself" YMMV but it won't :)

I always enjoy these summaries. I took my bachelor of computer science in the early 1990s. It covered a language in most of these categories.

We didn't learn APL (Who is teaching the use of those custom keyboards to 100s of young students for one semester?)

The processing power of systems at the time made it clear which language classes were practically useful and usable for the time and which were not.

Prolog ran like a dog for even simple sets of logic.

We had the best internet access and pretty powerful desktop systems for the time.

I'm still curious why we didn't learn smalltalk. Could have been the difficulty of submitting and marking a system in a particular state rather than a file of code :)

This is silly reporting with a couple of interesting stories. Forget about the technical ways of doing it. Doing it at all changes the game experience.

Pausing a game has a massive impact on the game experience. It lets you break the fourth wall experientially. Not wrong, but it changes the dynamic of the game.

Same as saving at any time does. As losing your loot or your life permanently does. Not wrong, but a hard choice that appeals to some players and not to others.

I used to pause pacman on my Atari 800 so I could run to church and sing in the choir or be an altar boy. Then I ran home and unpaused to continue. Sometimes in summer the computer over-heated and I lost everything while I was at church.

Lessons learnt? None, I think :)

The idea that travel to work is necessary, most work is in the middle of a city, and people need affordable places to live that are far from the city led to both the road and rail catastrophes we have in nearly every modernish city. A better question is "Why can't the employer be close to home?" or "Why can't the employer pay for my commute?"

Before AI and the swell of papers for money(tenure), not necessarily in that order, science mattered. As a result, the science mattered more in the past. RIP Rabin.

Decompilation and you are back to the level of security you started with. OpenSSH is open for a good reason. Please acknowledge your error. Are you AI?