rayalez

Tried asking Claude to do that, ended up with something pretty beautiful:

Everything is made of atoms & energy, life evolves, math describes reality, knowledge builds on itself, humans need each other & Earth to survive – test ideas, learn from mistakes, be kind, stay curious.

Thanks!

Yeah, no good comes from taking things personally, or getting offended at things, or arguing about who's getting treated more unfairly. I'm just not my best self today.

It's a complaint about inequality towards women, and also the inequality that men face due to misguided masculinity encouraging them not to seek medical advice (and instead rely on DIY nonsense).

It's a generalization that paints men in a negative light, which I took personally.

Anyhow, I don't usually pick fights online, I'm just particularly miserable today because my stupid health keeps hurting me for no reason.

To say something on topic - I've been talking to Claude about my health problems, and, while I still can't figure out what's wrong with me, I find it extremely helpful. It teaches me all sorts of things about health and medicine that no doctor would have the time or patience to explain, and helps out a lot, both with helpful information, and emotional support. I realize that it's kinda bleak to be receiving those things from an LLM instead of a person, but here we are.

I've been to dozens of doctors, spent a lot of money, they all were extremely unhelpful. Claude does offer a lot of advice and information that no doctor ever shared with me.

As a guy struggling with a confusing health issue for close to a decade, and having the exact same experience, I'll ask you to keep your stereotypes to yourself.

It's weird how people who complain about inequality and lack of empathy towards one group, are completely incapable or unwilling to offer any of that to other people.

I have switched to Namecheap from GoDaddy, and it's been great. I've been using Namecheap for a few years now, and never had an issue.

Just wanted to add my opinion to the thread and thank you guys for a very good service.

This is a little hobby project I'm working on, and I'm really proud of how it turned out.

Mirage is a lighthearted, social, easy to learn roleplaying game, focused on storytelling, improvisation, imagination and creativity. Your goal is to make up and play out a fun story. You will go on adventures, complete quests, find treasure, slay dragons, and gain awesome powers.

Mirage is made for the people who, like me, enjoy the social/creative aspects of Dungeons and Dragons, but don’t like the countless arguments over the intricate rules, the painfully slow combat encounters, and all the tedious arithmetics.

It’s perfect for people who want to get started with roleplaying but have no experience, and it’s great for getting your non-gamer friends or kids into RPGs. It’s great for improvisers and storytellers who want to focus on playing a fun long-form improv game, without the complicated rules getting in the way.

The rules are very simple, but deep and interesting enough for the experienced players to play over a long period of time.

Players can create a character and begin playing in 15 minutes. For GMs we have a collection of adventures that are easy to prepare and run: https://rpgadventures.io

You can play it in-person or over discord. It's super fun, and I hope you guys enjoy it!

Thanks for replying!

You can see the playtests of some of our adventures here:

https://youtube.com/channel/UC0TtjWQpHurgQMpLxMrWUsQ/videos

This is a little hobby project I'm working on, and I'm really proud of how it turned out.

Mirage is a lighthearted, social, easy to learn roleplaying game, focused on storytelling, improvisation, imagination and creativity. Your goal is to make up and play out a fun story. You will go on adventures, complete quests, find treasure, slay dragons, and gain awesome powers.

Mirage is made for the people who, like me, enjoy the social/creative aspects of Dungeons and Dragons, but don’t like the countless arguments over the intricate rules, the painfully slow combat encounters, and all the tedious arithmetics.

It’s perfect for people who want to get started with roleplaying but have no experience, and it’s great for getting your non-gamer friends or kids into RPGs. It’s great for improvisers and storytellers who want to focus on playing a fun long-form improv game, without the rules getting in the way.

It’s rules are very simple, but deep and interesting enough for the experienced players to play over a long period of time.

You can play it in-person or over discord. It's super fun, and I hope you guys enjoy it!

Do you have any ideas on how you would change reddit to fix all these issues?

Specifically the community moderation and voting system?

In addition to that google's AMP made reddit totally unusable, after clicking on a link it kept taking me to logged out version which hides most of the comments, and sorts them by "best".

Remember that there's an https://old.reddit.com, it still works great, I use only this version now. There are browser extensions that automatically redirect you to the old version (not on mobile, unfortunately).

There might not be a deep philosophical answer. Making games is fun, playing games is fun, that's all there is to it. If you can make money doing something you enjoy - why wouldn't you?

To try to go for a philosophical answer - why do we do anything? Cooking, writing, building shelter, sending spaceships to mars. I think generally, the purpose is to make human brains feel good. Ultimately, we all are going to die and nothing we do will have a lasting impact, but as long as we're here - we spend our time making ourselves and each other feel good. Games are one of the ways to make people feel good.

A more cynical answer - we make games for no good reason. Games feel good in the moment, but feel like a waste of time and energy afterwards, making a net negative impact on people's lives, like junk food or addiction. People play them against their best interests, because it feels good in the moment, and because people aren't rational creatures. People make games because making games is fun and makes them money.

One more answer - making games is art. Art is cool. Making games is an art that can be beautiful, interactive, engaging. It's a combination of multiple art forms (painting, sculpting, storytelling, music, etc). It's also way more fun than most kinds of art, people don't get addicted to paintings or books the way they get addicted to video games. I doubt that people got as much joy out of looking at Mona Lisa as they did out of playing Minecraft.

One more related thought - the real world is overrated. We have the power to make imaginary worlds that are far more engaging and satisfying than the one where we live. Better ones. So we make them.

These are different possible perspectives, pick yours. There can be a bunch more I'm not considering.

Did anyone manage to make a good Emacs config for effective React webdev?

I'm really missing graphql and styled components syntax highlighting and generally a bugless properly working webdev mode. Currently it keeps messing up indentation and losing syntax highlighting.

I tried moving to VS code, and I saw how amazing an editor designed for webdev can be. But despite all the issues, I'm still much more productive in emacs, so I went back.

I really wish it was possible to setup emacs for modern webdev, but I haven't found a way yet.

Any tips/advice?

Houdini/Nuke nodes and vex. It's for a very specific application (computer graphics), but it's incredibly powerful and works amazingly well.

It seems like their admission requirements demand a technical (math/CS) bachelors, and my diploma is from completely unrelated field.

- Take an improv class. It's excellent for building confidence, meeting new people, learning social skills, practicing creativity, being funnier, and generally having a really fun evening once or twice per week.

- Writing posts or making video tutorials is really great. Can be profitable, lead to professional growth, but also it's a great hobby and a fun way to create some value. Even if you don't become a successful/professional blogger/youtuber, it feels awesome to record a tutorial, see the views go up, and receive comments from people who found your video helpful. Also it develops writing/speaking skills, motivates you to learn the topic in more depth, clarifies your thoughts and understanding, gives you valuable feedback from more experienced people, grows your audience.

- Gamedev and Computer Graphics are REALLY fun to do. For people here I recommend Godot and Houdini, it's incredibly interesting, entertaining, and satisfying.

Here's a quick tutorial that I've made on procedurally generating a pretty landscape with Houdini:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=o3mbIRZhv20

I'm planning to get a Masters degree in CS, and it bothers me that the program I chose uses Java as the primary language. They have an awesome theoretical curriculum, but it looks like I'll have to use Java to complete all the practical tasks.

I'm a Node/React web developer, I want to build a SaaS startup, and I'm not really interested in writing Java apps, I doubt I'll ever want to use it for something.

Do you guys know if Java would be really painful to learn? It's hard to get motivated about learning a thing I'll probably never use in practice.

Speaking of improv - we have a fun little community doing improv over discord voice chat. We have a few experienced improvisers running sessions and sharing their experience, and a bunch of novice people eager to learn and to play some games. Come join us, it's really fun!

https://discord.gg/XHwFXQs

No experience necessary, if you want to learn and play some games - you're welcome!

For the past couple of weeks I've been trying to do something like that for DnD. Come up with a system that doesn't have countless intricate rules and tedious arithmetics, but instead focuses on the social/creative aspects of the game, encourages creativity, improvisation, and storytelling. Keeping the rules fun, simple, accessible, yet flexible and powerful. Something you can play with your kids, or introduce to non-gamer friends to have a fun evening or two (but also is capable of supporting longer campaigns if you get into it). You can learn everything you need to play the game by reading a couple of pages, or teach it in 10-15 minutes.

The project is still in the very early stages, basically a draft, but I'd love to know what you think:

https://playmirage.io/

(For people who have some good ideas about the rules, or want to contribute ideas for spells, magic items, and adventures - project is open source and available on github: https://github.com/raymestalez/mirage)

When I want to go to bed, I have to write down the first thing I will do the next day.

Wow, this is excellent. Thank you for sharing, I'll try to implement this one.

Although my problem is that I break this type of unbreakable rules regularly, I have upsettingly little control over what the future me is going to do.

"I am not afraid. I am not afraid because if I let myself get too scared I might not be able to do what needs to be done. And I'm not the type of person who backs down. I am the type of person who does the right thing, even if it's hard. Right now, the right thing is to [x]. And even if it doesn't work, I'll just do the next right thing, and the next, and the next. I'll keep on trying until I figure out a way."

As a newcomer to Unreal, I have a question. Is C++ really that verbose and difficult to use, or does it get better as you gain more experience?

I'm relatively new to gamedev, I've spent several months learning Godot, and now I'm trying out Unreal. Unreal has many exciting things, but from what I can see so far, C++ looks like nightmare. It seems like everything I'm trying to do takes me 5x lines of code and 10x the time compared to doing this in Godot. Also the code looks far less readable and way more confusing. Granted I'm new to Unreal and C++, but I didn't have the same problems with other programming languages I've been using.

So my question is - does this get better/faster/easier when you get used to it and gain more experience? Or is this something you struggle with every day?

I know that Unreal has Blueprints, but they also seem pretty slow and limiting. I've been watching a tutorial where a guy has spend 40 minutes explaining how to do a thing in Blueprints which would take me like 3 minutes and 15 lines of code to do in Godot.

I really want to use all the sexy exciting features unreal has, but C++/Blueprints are really holding me back.

I have started by following "Discovering Godot"[1] video course on Udemy, I still think this is the best place to start.

After that I have watched "Top-down Tank Battle"[2], and I highly recommend it, absolutely brilliant series of tutorials(all of the tutorials on this channel are great). Really helped me to understand all the concepts much better.

For intermediate/advanced tutorials, watch GDQuest. They have a youtube channel[3] and excellent video courses[4]. They are planning to release courses on procedural generation and multiplayer too, I'm really looking forward to watching those.

Finally, a shameless plug - I'm making some tutorials on Godot(alongside with some general Digital Art and Houdini videos). I'm still just getting started, but people seem to like them. The most popular one I've made so far is "Creating Platformer Character Movement in Godot - Wall Jumping/Sliding, Double Jumping, Dashing"[5].

[1] https://www.udemy.com/course/godot/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsk-HSGFjnaFC8kEv6MaL...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxboW7x0jZqFdvMdCFKTMsQ

[4] https://gdquest.mavenseed.com/p/home

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8pC8n4s-_I

Since people seem to be sharing their favorite quotes, I'll share a couple of my own. It's kind of like a litany to repeat in difficult situations, replace placeholders as needed:

“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it."

"If [scary thought] is true, I want to believe that. If [scary thought] is not true, I want not to believe [scary thought]. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want. If I'm living in a world where [scary thought] is true, that’s what I have to believe, I have to know what’s coming, so I can stop it, or in the very worst case, be prepared to do what I can in the time I have left. Not believing it won’t stop it from happening."

"I am not afraid. I am not afraid because if I let myself get too scared I might not be able to do what needs to be done. And I'm not the type of person who backs down. I am the type of person who does the right thing, even if it's hard. Right now, the right thing is to [x]. And even if it doesn't work, I'll just do the next right thing, and the next, and the next. I'll keep on trying until I figure out a way."

Fallout is probably my favorite example of that.

I keep being curious about notion(and evernote), but can't get into it. Probably because my current solution works well for me.

I simply use markdown files synchronized using dropbox. I use Emacs Org Mode on desktop, and Editorial on iOS. Editorial is still by far the best markdown text editor on iOS, although it's, very sadly, almost never updated anymore(it's still pretty close to perfect, so I keep using it).

I write down all my thoughts in one single journal - a "Notes" folder in dropbox, with markdown files for every 2-3 weeks of notes, called like "2020-05-02.md". Sometimes I use a bash script to combine them all into one big file to easily search through them.

I use ">>" symbol to mark the important ideas/insights so I could easily search for them later.

I use hashtags to organize ideas and notes by topics. Like #pst for blog post ideas, #gamedev for everything I've learned about game development, #book for books I want to read, #health 2020-05-02 for daily notes about my health, #todo 2020-05-02 for todos, etc.

Notes aren't organized in any other way, it's just stream of consciousness. When I have an idea or learn something - I open Editorial and write it down at the end of the currently open file, and if it's important I mark it with a hashtag or ">>".

Every few weeks I search through all the important thoughts of the past few weeks I've marked with ">>" and collect them into a separate file, so I have a kind of a summary of what I've learned/thought about in the past month.

Works really well for me.

Also I can highly recommend Dynalist, it is like a superior version of workflowy. An app for nested lists. Can be used as trello, as an outlining app for writing, as a way to keep a list of your project ideas and the tasks you need to accomplish. I use it to outline fiction, organize my ideas for games and 3D art I can make, and for anything else that fits well in this format.

Finally, Track And Share is the best habit tracker on iOS that I could find, highly recommend it.

Are there resources like this for Calculus/Prob/Stats?

Cool! Is there such thing for Flask? For Node?

I got into gamedev and discovered really good .io games only recently, and now I really want to try to make something like that myself.

I was very surprised to learn what's possible with html5 games now, a few days ago I've learned about https://krunker.io/ - absolutely incredible that it's possible to create something like this, especially for a solo developer.

----

What I'm really curious about is the stack that would be optimal for such games. Here's what I learned so far:

- For 2D people seem to use pixi.js(very fast webgl rendering framework), or phaser(2D game framework).

- For 3D the leading frameworks are three.js(some say it's more focused on creating pretty demos, and is suboptimal for games), babylon.js(html5 3D game engine from microsoft), playcanvas(proprietary web-first game engine). Krunker was made in three.js.

- For networking people seem to use socket.io, I'm not sure what else.

- Engines like Godot and Unity can build games for bowser. People call Unity builds "bloated" and keep mentioning something called TinyUnity as a solution to this. Godot is supposed to implement WebRTC soon, which apparently should be great for multiplayer (https://godotengine.org/article/godot-webrtc-report3).

Can anybody add something to this? I'm just starting to figure things out, and any tips/advice on picking the optimal stack, or links to good learning resources would be very useful!

Shameless plug - my app, Writing Streak, has the "typewriter" mode (Alt+T) that prevents you from editing the text you wrote, and a "blurred" mode (Alt+B) that hides the text you type, achieving the same effect:

https://writingstreak.io

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.