timknauf

I thought this was pretty great! “Codebase and tooling as extended cognition” is a helpful way of understanding why it just feels so bad when technical debt passes a certain threshold.

I’ve seen this sentiment a lot, and I do understand it but… I just feel so completely differently. The 2000s web, early web apps and Flash, the iPhone and smartphone revolution, the incredible buffet that is modern video games, virtual and mixed reality, and yes, even (imperfect, fraught) AI have all seemed as magical to me as those wonderful things from the 80s and 90s. Probably not coincidentally, many of those things have featured in my working life pretty heavily!

Thanks for taking the time to write that! I really enjoyed hearing about your journey, and I learned a fair bit about the Coco too, which wasn’t really known in my part of the world. Sounds like a great little machine, actually!

Maybe not in 1982, but as other commenters have pointed out, by 1985 you had the Amiga, which definitely DID have serious co-processors.

I had the same reaction, and had to read it three or four times to make sense of it. (Native speaker, with a degree in English.) I think it’s a very hard-to-follow sentence construction.

Egads, that spell checker is absolutely beautiful.

I guess it’s worth pointing out that he does support one of the arguments the article makes:

But they didn't, and come to think of it, why should they know about something so far outisde their specialty?

So yeah, he’s implicitly saying, “I have a lot of domain knowledge here.”

But that said: wow, that code is so concise and elegant, it gives me tingles. If anyone IS a 10x engineer, it’d surely have to be Norvig.

Is there a mechanism for applying, or were you able to ask via a friend? This is right up my alley — I like the Lobsters format, and have long wished for a game dev-specific take on it!

For a recent side project, I made a short incremental game to teach myself F#. I absolutely loved the experience, so put my hand up to do what turned into a fairly big blog post for the 2024 "F# Advent Calendar".

Thank you! I never understood the expression, but this explanation was immediately clarifying for me.

No-Bullshit Games [1] is a good resource for finding quality fixed-cost / premium games.

[1] https://nobsgames.stavros.io/

In my country (New Zealand), while we wouldn’t expect that wealth necessarily came from cheating and stealing, the idea of money as “abstraction of reputation and honor” would be foreign to most, I think. For example, while there were some Trump supporters here, I think nearly everyone was confused about the assumption that his personal wealth implied anything about his worth or worthiness.

I’m just on 1080p and a GTX 1070, so haven’t experienced it for myself, but from Digital Foundry’s breakdown of DLSS 2.0 in Control, it sure looks to be more than a “cute hack”.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-contr...

I read “niche within a niche” as referring to multi-lingual accessibility within the ‘niche’ of Gemini.

“Same rules for everyone” resonates very strongly here in New Zealand. There is a book-length study [1] on our national obsession with ‘fairness’ (contrasted with the USA and ‘freedom’).

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12112539-fairness-and-fr...

As I understood it, that particular activist had gone public by that point.

I think the “Reddit one-upsmanship” that the parent was referring to was actually in the other direction; i.e., people “one-upping” how long it took them to read it.

I’m pretty excited about the upcoming Playdate: https://play.date/

I've been constantly surprised about how little scrutiny that kind of statement has received in the media - American or otherwise. I thought it would've publicly raised more hackles here in New Zealand (but I guess we all ultimately just feel powerless in the face of such determined surveillance might).

My understanding is that, as a non US-citizen, I'd be generally considered 'fair game' for a lot of blanket surveillance that would not be applied to Americans. Maybe this is what scrrr is referring to? [Edit: I see this is what harkyns_castle alludes to as well.]

Yep, those kind of 2d metaballs are indeed doable in GLSL - I have a WebGL proof-of-concept lying around. I really struggled to get good performance, though my shader-fu isn't up to much.

Having just completed a large project with Lua, I have to say that the indice/ordinal notation thing is something that we quickly got used to. In fact, some nice succinct idioms work because elements run from 1 to arraySize (inclusive).

Lua's core string manipulation has been kept (as I understand it) deliberately limited in order to keep the implementation simple. What is present - e.g., simplified pattern-matching - is cleverly designed and often useful but, by design, there's nothing to compare to Python's rich built-in set of libraries.

Yeah, I've basically had to institute a 'no working after dinner' rule for myself. If I have extra tasks to get done, I get up early - sometimes very early - but an early morning start feels far less intrusive on my family life than working in the evening. (It's an easier rule for me to keep than it would be for some, since I'm a morning person, and the evening is a low-productivity time for me.)

Yeah, perhaps I was wrong to focus so much on Steam in my comment. Gamersgate, GOG and Green Man Gaming (to name a few) also do a fine job of drawing attention to less mainstream titles.

I know not everyone gets their PC indie games from Steam, but their very pro-indie store design certainly helps keep the market vibrant. They often feature games from tiny companies in front-page promo spots, they promote indie packs in their sales, and their 'you may also like...' suggestions don't seem to shy away from obscure 'long tail' titles. All in all, discovery is pleasant and easy.

Your mistake about the purpose and timing of the $17M notwithstanding, it certainly still sounds like a lot of money to me. The amounts of venture capital seemingly just 'floating around' in the West and East coasts of the US are staggering to me as an outsider. (That's seemingly — I realise that companies do actually have to work to attract funding.)

True, though as jevinskie says, we're not talking here about the way images are stored on disk but about what needs to go in the GPU memory.

Yeah, iOS device GPUs support lossy texture compression in the form of PVRTC. There's no lossless texture compression support, as far as I know. (I'm talking in-memory here, obviously, not on disk as PNG or JPEG or whatever else.)

100K is the salary for one developer at a large game company in North America. There are tons of us indies around the world running a lot leaner, so to speak.

I believe the idea is that the Wiimote will continue to be used alongside the new controller in e.g. local multiplayer games. At least, that's what they had set up in some of their E3 demos last year.