Zachtronics leaving game development is such a blow to the industry. Zach is directly and indirectly responsible for a lot of games we see today. His game Infiniminer was a major inspiration for Minecraft, he published a game that was also a book explaining his philosophy on puzzle design, and his games were genuinely fun with no BS.
I dislike the games, since they are too close to work/programming to be fun for me (just like Factorio). However, the success of Zachtronics - both business and creative, is undeniable. I wish they were the ones to gain success with the original 3D cube digging gameplay and not the massively popular Minecraft clone.
I hear this a lot, but I personally don't get it. These games are the best part of my job (the problem solving) without any of the nonsense. Most games today are a grindfest that we convince ourselves is fun because it's happening in a beautiful virtual world.
Less, but not zero. Personal projects can still suffer from obscure bugs or undocumented behaviour in dependencies, unattainable goals, costs, and other non-bureaucratic frustrations. A significant part of the satisfaction of Factorio for me comes from the knowledge that, if something isn't operating as I expect/hope it to, I can _just look at_ the surface-level representation of the system to diagnose it. This isn't possible in software projects without a huge amount of investment in observability - which is rarely fun or prioritized.
The programming game TIS-100 gives you a view of the internal state of the machine far superior to what exists with most systems. The exception being that Commodore 64 emulator that shows _everything_ going on in memory in real time.
More often (in the embedded world) you are debugging things via JTAG and a serial port (if you are lucky) or a GPIO-driven LED (if you are not lucky or this is super-early in the boot process). And often the JTAG is less than 100% reliable.
I absolutely loved playing TIS-100 despite having no clue what a real world counterpart would be. It was really nice understanding the limitations of the system and then trying to be creative to solve problems. I got through 3/4 of the game before I lost my save (on my GoG version). I just re-bought it on steam for the cloud saves. Same thing happened to my ExaPunks save.
The closest real-world thing would be something like The Connection Machine, which combined 64Ki processors in a hypercube. Individually, they had just a small amount of RAM for programs.
Today's GPUs are more about executing the exact same small program in a massively parallel way, and not individually programming each of the compute elements.
You know... it would be a fun project to make a TIS-100 in actual hardware on an FPGA or something. Actually, if you aren't the FPGA type, you could just write an emulator on an 8-bit microcontroller, and connect them all together. Bonus points for having each one with a display that shows its current execution state.
I remember hearing the same thing about the show Silicon Valley. People in the workplace would say things like "OMG I can't even watch that, it's so like our daily lives!" -- is it? Yes we're coders, but is it?
I view these games similarly. I don't think anything has helped me in my day-to-day decision making at work more than the time I've spent planning and designing my factory(s) in Satisfactory.
Zachtronics games give you a limited playing field with a limited set of operations. The fun comes from thinking carefully about small problems, and doing a lot with a little.
Factorio is more like work, because they don't know when to stop. There is just too much going on, too much complexity.
I always wondered how Zach felt about missing what’s arguably the biggest game industry boat of all time: his ideas in Infiniminer being the basis for Minecraft. In the early days the games looked almost identical. But one never became a household name and the other literally the top selling game of all time.
It sounds like he’s found peace with it and had fun and is on to something else. Good for him. That would be hard for me.
Well Western Culture generally gives the most credit to the first person to have an idea, when I personally find the second people (like Persson, also Sergey Brin) to deserve--in these cases--more credit. There's a shortage of second parties to inventions.
> You can tax air travel to encourage travel by other means where applicable.
This would never happen in America because it would require Americans addressing their views on transit and addressing their pitiful consumer rail or even consumer bus industries.
I think a better way to phrase what the parent is saying is that Leetcode is not software engineering. You can be awful at solving leetcodes and still be a great software engineer.
Now, do I think algorithms and data structures make people better programmers? Absolutely. But I feel like most people work on in an area like web development where the usefulness of it is severely reduced when you are working at such a high level of abstraction.
I agree. Memorizing algorithms to answer leetcode questions have their benefits but it’s extremely rare that a front end web developer would need those skills. If they did, that would mean the backend engineers aren’t using the right approach to organize and serve data to the client.
Samsung (and the rest of the TV industry, Samsung is just the worst of the bunch) has fucked up trust in them extremely hard and they are not showing in any way that they have learned from the past or how they plan to re-gain consumer trust. Until that happens, it is foolish to assume they would never implement something like "connect to an open wifi".
See you’re moving the goalpost here. You went from they can to they could. That’s exactly the point of people who require proof it has happened.
When we have proof of one manufacturer connecting to an open wi-fi network to send its snooping data, we’ll have a a reckoning on our hands. I guarantee it.
Of course I'm moving goalposts. This kind of shit should be banned before someone gets the idea (or audacity) to implement it. The time for "move fast and deal with the law later" is over - it's obvious that the technical possibility is easy to implement and hard to detect for the average user, it's obvious that there is nothing good for the customer that comes out of it, and so the law should for once be proactive instead of reactive.
If technological progress continues exponentially (including increases in human or machine intelligence to make them possible) then our understanding of biology and life-extension will continue to increase, and many such life prolonging-treatments will be made available to the public.
If one life extension makes you live 5 years longer, and during that time an new one comes out that lengthens your life by a few more years, you can see how one might keep "catching" these just in time and thus gradually transition from mortal to immortal.
If you live long enough, you may eventually live past the point where science makes it possible to live forever. For most of us, this is impossible because we lost the birth date lottery.
One misspelling, mixed metaphor, missing contraction.
Nobody writes flawlessly. It is hard to find your own mistakes, much less understand if content will make sense to someone else.
An editor is someone who can read your work, help catch errors and suggest improvements.
No you don't need to go pay someone, but either trade editing with a friend or find another way to compensate whoever is providing editing for you. I usually buy my editors dinner but adjust based on how much time investment you are asking of them.
You do not get to choose when a writer uses a contraction. You might expect that I'd have used "don't" there, but the simple truth is people use the full words even conversationally sometimes. This is especially true when they want to emphasize the "not" part of a phrase like "will not", "would not", or "do not". Your suggested edit changes the meaning of the parent post a shade.
Where's the mixed metaphor? You may be able to sell me on "weird gate to keep" being a trite metaphor or perhaps even an awkward metaphor. What's mixed about gatekeeping, which seems to be a single common metaphor?
If this is the quality of editing the tool offers, one may wish to stick with spellcheck. Encouraging a particular organization's writing style within that organization can have some nice effects, but you don't get to determine everyone else's writing style.
https://commodore.inc/ This is the company and I do not see them selling any retro PCs. They sell an Android tablet that is almost certaintly a chinese knock off and some "retro-inspired" games.
