Codex

I’m making fun of the common practice, exemplified by Bethesda, of leaving bugs in their games for the modders to fix. The joke, in this case is that Rocket Werkz is leaving an “unfinished feature” in that is a Hard Problem in physics. There isn’t a general, easy solution to the N-body problem.

One reachier goal is to add an n-body physics system. […] RocketWerkz say there’s a “small chance” of RocketWerkz developing such a simulation internally - they’re currently trying to hire somebody with a PhD to apply the requisite high-density brain-magic - but it’s likely this will be left for modders to figure out.

The next Bethesda game is just going to have a bug dependent on solving the Reimann conjecture, smh, always waiting on the modders to solve the company’s intractable math mysteries.

I was wondering why HW3 was “controversial” and apparently I didn’t realize:

1. It’s been released.
2. It’s worse than the first 2
3. Because Gearbox is publishing it!

Thanks Randy! Fucking grease weasel ruins another great franchise.

Because it got 7/10 average review scores and didn’t sell as well as GTA. Then GTA3 (and its immediate spin-offs and eventual sequels) came out and started breaking all time sales records. So retroactively, GTA 2 was “a mistake” for not being GTA 3 two years early.

But like the guy says, the point of the article even, is that you don’t create run away successes without experimenting on the formula to find what’s good, without “failures” like GTA 2 to learn from.

IBM provided business machines (internationally, even) to Nazi Germany, probably a big help in bureaucratically processing those millions of murders they were doing. I can’t (or perhaps, “won’t” is truer) imagine how much cloud compute a modern genocide requires.

I don’t know exactly how much code reuse Sawyer had going back then, but if you’ve ever played Transport Tycoon (or more likely the open source version around today, OpenTTD) then you know that the interface and graphics are extremely similar. So it’s not like he started from scratch each game with nothing but a hot spinning disc and a magnetized needle.

But yeah, the main reason to put up with all the modern framework bloat is the ever-ephemeral promise of being able to write your thing once and have it ported to run anywhere with minimal to no further effort.

That’s a cool board. I’ve been thinking about something in similar form factor, kind of missing old slide phones with physical keyboards. The idea of building out little mesh devices for a local emergency network is quite interesting. Maybe with a few supernode base stations built around RasPis to act as data-storage/relays/service-providers…

It’s because they ruined Linux! Damn Linux users!

Reminds me of Diablo and how in the years after the original you’d see so many clones with “from one of the people who worked on the original Diablo.” I think Torchlight, Titan Quest, and Nox all got advertised this way at one time. I mean it’s pretty common in any industry. How many movies have you seen advertised as being directed by “the creators of hit movie whatever” and its like the 3rd unit DP in charge?

I don’t know who really got that trend going. I’ve enjoyed up to hour-ish long videos on more or less anything, but a few years back the first truly excessively long video I remember is Whitelight’s 7 hour long overview/miniseries on Death Stranding. And to be fair, I did find that faster and more enjoyable than playing Death Stranding.

(Also I get why folks make them: more ads plus having that much watch time heavily biases the algorithm towards you so it’s more money overall. And the kind of person that watches 7 hour long reviews in the background (or while sleeping), aka me, certainly help weigh the scales for super long videos.)

But also, I kind of like when shorts are like a minute long or less so I can watch one when I’m like, on the shitter and not accidentally end up with a video essay. I mean 10 minutes used to be the limit of every youtube video! Will they introduce a new, even shorter format? Bring vines or blips back?

Alright, I split the differance, I think that should make everyone happy.

Can’t wait for 10 hour long reviews of Elden Ring, BUT VERTICALE AND LOOPS NOW!?!

I made a little “reverse regex” library for fun ages ago. You give it a regex and it generates text from it. I thought of it as a toy, but people found use for it in unit testing. Eventually, someone forked it and added better test support because I am the world’s worst maintainer.

Anyway, I only say this because I learned that it is shockingly easy for some throw away idea you put up on GitHub to suddenly become the unpaid backbone of somebody else’s CI pipeline. Then, you’re getting angry PR’s and tickets about how a security issue or an unpatched dependency in your toy library NEEDS to be fixed and now you’ve got a new unpaid job!

Or you do what I did and abandon the project so one of the poor fools actually using it in production needs to maintain it. Us programmers though, we like when our code is being used, we like to help people, we want the work we put out there with our name on it to be a good representative of us, to show us as helpful, hard-working, and dependable. It can be so easy to fall into this feeling that because you wrote it, you “owe” your users some ongoing commitment.

And those users are often themselves beholden to their bosses, just trying to find the least-effort solution to get back to what they wanted to be working on. The shit all rolls down hill and ultimately I think our industry needs massive structural changes to thrive. I honestly sometimes muse about a return to the guild system. All feature requests and bug reports (and I mean like, globally, ALL tickets) come to the Guild and we shall assign them out under the principle of mutual aid (from each member according to ability, to each member according to their needs). In this way, the Guild will carefully train the next generation of holy adeptus mechanicus and make broad decisions on how technology can best serve the people.

A Call of Duty RTS? Only if they brought back WC3’s Heroes, and maybe gave you a whole Company of them to manage.

RTS’s need a massive new hit to redefine the genre. The starcraft style is stale and too slow for how most people game today. I’d kind of enjoy seeing people take another shot at where C&C4 and AoE3 were trying to go: something more tactically oriented with a greater emphasis on mobility. I think that era of RTS innovation got completely hamstrung by trying to force every game to not only have multi-player but also to be an esport and also to be a live-service endless money machine.

You may note that games today are still being ruined by the same forces.

Funny, the game I most associate with him is BoomBlox on the Wii. It’s a really great game, and I guess the wiimote is kind of mouse-like, particularly in that game.

He’s been involved in several games though, even had an office at EA for a while. Most famously, of course, is the original Medal of Honor. Arguably the success of MoH as a franchise led directly to Call of Duty and thus to the current state of gaming today.

It’s so good! The purist expression of factory building: no costs, no distractions, just automation.

It has a great concept too in the space layer. The game is played initially on a grid like any factory game. But then you can zoom out to a higher layer where you can place chunks to define the build able area and build “space belts” which essentially codifiy the main-bus style of building. (You also get space trains, which are like trains in other games.)

I “beat” the basic campaign and hopped back over to Satisfactory since 1.0 came out, but I’ll go back to shapez when I finish there. I hope they add more complex and tricky buildings and requirements, the challenge of assembling an efficient build in shapez is just so interesting and fun.

I guess assembler is sumerien then, only still written and understood? And cobol or fortran? Linear a and b?

Don’t forget their “leadership team” wanted to let everyone know that they’re hiring scabs right now. What an offer!

Wow, hadn’t thought about that one in a long time. I thought it was an old Scott Hanselman blog and I was correct! I’ll have to reread it, been years now.

I’m not sure there’s much why to it exactly. I feel like a small fraction of people I’ve met in life were truly passionate and excited about the work they did. Most had some passion for an art, or a hobby, or for their kids very commonly, but people who really want to grow and master their craft are somewhat rare generally. Most folks just want to do well enough to keep their jobs and then go home to whatever they actually care about.

Consider that to go on a site specifically for programming questions and then take a survey about it, you have to be the kind of person that cares about getting their code “right”. The majority of programmers I’ve met would only go there to copy-paste a quick answer, and those people have all moved to asking chat-gpt for code now.