Redkey

Redkey, 6 months ago

Me too. I started with the little brown first-party stick that came with the Pro Pack, but soon switched to an inexplicably beige Quickshot II.

Redkey, 6 months ago

Assuming C/C++, dare we even ask what this teacher uses instead of switch statements? Or are her switch statements unreadable rat’s nests of extra conditions?

This is a good life lesson. We’re all idiots about certain things. Your teacher, me, and even you. It’s even possible to be a recognized expert in a field yet still be an idiot about some particular thing in that field.

Just because some people use a screwdriver as a hammer and risk injuring themselves and damaging their work, that’s not a good reason to insist that no-one should ever use a screwdriver under any circumstances, is it?

Use break statements when they’re appropriate. Don’t use them when they’re not. Learn the difference from code that many other people recommend, like popular open-source libraries and tutorials. If there’s a preponderance of break statements in your code, you may be using a suboptimal approach.

But unfortunately, for this course, your best bet is to nod, smile, and not use any break statements. Look at it as a personal learning experience; by forcing yourself sit down and reason out how you can do something without using break statements, you might find some situations where they weren’t actually the best solution. And when you can honestly look back and say that the solution with break statements is objectively better, you’ll be able to use that approach with greater confidence in the future.

Redkey, 6 months ago

Does anyone know if the AI also figured out how to make any of these materials, or if it only assessed that they could probably exist in a stable state? This article isn’t clear about that but it seems like the answer is the latter.

Redkey, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

This is a short, interesting video, but there’s really nothing here for any competent programmer, even a fresh graduate. It turns out they they update the software by sending the update by radio (/s). The video hardly goes any deeper than that, and also makes a couple of very minor layman-level flubs.

There is a preservation effort for the old NASA computing hardware from the missions in the 50s and 60s, and you can find videos about it on YouTube. They go into much more detail without requiring much prior knowledge about specific technologies from the period. Here’s one I watched recently about the ROM and RAM used in some Apollo missions: youtu.be/hckwxq8rnr0?si=EKiLO-ZpQnJa-TQn

One thing that struck me about the video was how the writers expressed surprise that it was still working and also so adaptable. And my thought was, “Well, yeah, it was designed by people who knew what they were doing, with a good budget, lead by managers whose goal was to make excellent equipment, rather than maximize short-term profits.”

Redkey, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I completely agree. And the video didn’t discuss how any of that actually happens, except to say that they send the update over radio, and to give a brief description of how the storage system on Voyager works (physically, not logically). That’s what I meant by “really nothing here”, “here” meaning “in the video”, not “in how the Voyager probe works and updates are carried out”.

That next line, “It turns out they they update the software by sending the update by radio,” was meant to be a bit sarcastic, but I know that isn’t obvious in text, so I’ve added a signifier.

Redkey, 6 months ago

Some of the things you mentioned seem to belong more properly in the development environment (e.g. code editor), and there are plenty of those that offer all kinds of customization and extensibilty. Some other things are kind of core to the language, and you’d really be better off switching languages than trying to shoehorn something in where it doesn’t fit.

As for the rest, GCC (and most C/C++ compilers) generates intermediate files at each of the steps that you mentioned. You can also have it perform those steps atomically. So, if you wanted to perform some extra processing at any point, you could create your own program to do so by working with those intermediate files, and automate the whole thing with a makefile.

You could be on to something here, but few people seem to take advantage of the possibilities that already exist, and combining that with the fact that most newer languages/compilers deliberately remove these intermediate steps, this suggests to me that whatever problems this situation causes may have other, existing solutions.

I don’t know much about them myself, but have you read about the LLVM toolchain or compiler-compilers like yacc? If you haven’t, it might answer some questions.

Redkey, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

it shouldn’t matter that much what language the keywords are in

Another problem is that the grammars of many well-supported programming languages also mirror English/Romance language grammars. Unfortunately, dealing with that is more than just a matter of swapping out keywords.

EDIT: I may have been unclear; I wasn’t trying to imply that this problem is greater than or even equal to the lack of documentation, tutorials, libraries, etc. Just that it’s another issue, aside from the individual words themselves, which is often overlooked by monolingual people.

Redkey, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I’m no linguist, but I have some Japanese language ability, and Japanese seems to be pretty different, grammatically, from English, so I’ll draw on it for examples. I also had a quick look at some Japanese-centric programming languages created by native speakers and found that they were even more different than I’d imagined.

Here’s a first example, from an actual language, “Nadeshiko”. In pseudo-code, many of us would be used a statement like the following:

<span style="color:#323232;">print "Hello"
</span>

Here’s a similar statement in Nadeshiko, taken from an official tutorial:

<span style="color:#323232;">「こんにちは」と表示
</span>

A naive translation of the individual words (taking some liberties with English) might be:

<span style="color:#323232;">"Hello" of displayment
</span>

I know, I know, “displayment” isn’t a real English word, but I wanted to make it clear that the function call here isn’t even dressed up as a verb, but a noun (of a type which is often used in verb phrases… it’s all very different from English, which is my point). And with a more English-like word order, it would actually be:

<span style="color:#323232;">displayment of "Hello"
</span>

Here’s another code sample from the same tutorial:

<span style="color:#323232;">「音が出ます！！」と表示。
</span><span style="color:#323232;">1秒待つ。
</span><span style="color:#323232;">「プログラミングは面白い」と話す。
</span>

And another naive translation:

<span style="color:#323232;">"Sound comes out!!" of displayment.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">1 second wait.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">"Programming is interesting" of speak.
</span>

And finally, in a more English-like grammar:

<span style="color:#323232;">displayment of "Sound comes out!!."
</span><span style="color:#323232;">wait 1 second.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">speak of "Programming is interesting".
</span>

And here’s a for…in loop, this time from my own imagination:

<span style="color:#323232;">for foo in bar {  }
</span>

Becomes:

<span style="color:#323232;">バーのフーで {  }
</span>

Naively:

<span style="color:#323232;">Bar's Foo with {  }
</span>

More English-y:

<span style="color:#323232;">with foo of bar {  }
</span>

You may have noticed that in all of these examples, the “Japanese” code has little whitespace. Natural written Japanese language doesn’t use spaces, and it makes sense that a coding grammar devised by native speakers wouldn’t need any either.

Now, do these differences affect the computer’s ability to compile/interpret and run the code? No, not at all. Is the imposition of English-like grammar onto popular programming languages an insurmountable barrier to entry for people who aren’t native English speakers? Obviously not, as plenty of people around the world already use these languages. But I think that it’s an interesting point, worth considering, in a community where people engage in holy wars over the superiority or inferiority of various programming languages which have more in common than many widely-spoken natural languages.

Redkey, 6 months ago

Drawing on Japanese, which is the only non-English language I have significant experience with, object.method(parameter) would feel more natural as object.(parameter)method, possibly even replacing the period separator with a Japanese grammatical construct (with no equivalent in English) that really suits this use case. Even the alternative function(self, parameter, …) would mesh better with natural Japanese grammar as (self、parameter、〜)function. The majority of human languages have sentences which run Subject-Verb-Object, but a handful which includes Japanese run in the order Subject-Object-Verb.

I gave an example of an alternative for…in loop in another comment here, so I won’t rehash it here. But following the general flow of Japanese grammar, that for at the beginning of the statement would feel much more natural as a で (or “with”) at the end of the statement, since particles (somewhat similar to prepositions in English) go after the noun that they indicate, rather than before. And since semicolons don’t exist in Japanese either, even they might be replaced with a particle like “と”.

There aren’t any big problems here, but a plethora of little things that can slowly add up.

Redkey, 6 months ago

I tought myself programming as a kid in the 80s and 90s, and just got used to diagnostic print statements because it was the first thing that occurred to me and I had no (advanced) books, mentors, teachers, or Internet to tell me any different.

Then in university one of my lecturers insisted that diagnostic prints are completely unreliable and that we must always use a debugger. He may have overstated the case, but I saw that he had a point when I started working on the university’s time-sharing mainframe systems and found my work constantly being preempted and moved around in memory in the middle of critical sections. Diagnostic prints would disappear, or worse, appear where, in theory, they shouldn’t be able to, and they would come and go like a restless summer breeze. But for as much as that lecturer banged on about debuggers, he hardly taught us anything about how to use them, and they confused the hell out of me, so I made it through the rest of my degree without using debuggers except for one part of one subject (the “learn about debuggers” part).

Over 20 years later, after a little professional work and a lot of personal projects and making things for other non-coding jobs I’ve had, I still haven’t really used debuggers much. But lately I’ve been forcing myself to use them sometimes, partly to help me pick apart quirks in external libraries that I’m linking, and partly because I’d like to start using superscalar instructions and threading in my programs, and I remember how that sort of thing screwed up my diagnostic prints in university.

Redkey, 7 months ago

The definition of the Date object explicitly states that any attempt to set the internal timestamp to a value outside of the maximum range must result in it being set to “NaN”. If there’s an implementation out there that doesn’t do that, then the issue is with that implementation, not the standard.

Redkey, 7 months ago

Of course! There’s already a proposal for a replacement Temporal object.

Redkey, 7 months ago

The real problem, as I think we are all aware, is that copyright lasts for far too long. It should be a carrot used to support and encourage creators, not a stick used by publishers to beat both thieves and well-meaning people indiscriminately in a futile pursuit of unending revenue streams.

And here are some comments on specific points in the article:

“ESA and its member companies […] support efforts by cultural institutions to build physical video game collections.”

“It simply is not accurate that the industry has opposed efforts by libraries to have legal access to games for preservation purposes.”

That’s a carefully-worded statement. Yes, it would be fruitless and openly greedy to try to oppose things that libraries have an obvious legal right to do, like buy and preserve physical items. But that doesn’t preclude publishers from lobbying lawmakers and presenting testimony to reduce what’s legal in the first place, such as using tools and processes needed to keep the games actually playable.

The ESA says it recognises the importance of libraries, with Mgbojikwe observing that more than 2,500 video games have been donated to the Library of Congress to date.

While the Library of Congress’ so-called Mandatory Deposit doesn’t apply to video games (AFAIK), I would wager that most if not all of these games were “donated” to fulfil the mandatory requirement which is a part of the process of formal copyright registration in the USA. While this formal registration itself isn’t mandatory, the donations still probably weren’t given out of the goodness of their hearts.

Games like Sid Meier’s Covert Action feature ideas and mechanics not seen in modern games, yet remain unavailable.

Covert Action has been available on GOG for very nearly ten years at the time of writing. I get the point that they’re trying to make, but if you’re going to use a specific example, pick one that stands up to at least casual scrutiny.

Redkey, 7 months ago

I had this and the mouse back in the day. It was an absolute blast, although I never really played it on PC so I can’t compare the two. The mouse also works great on Alien Trilogy and Alien Resurrection.

Redkey, 7 months ago

This is fantastic. I’ve never had a real problem claiming the giveaways before, but today I had the same issue you described, and I remembered this post. Thanks for sharing!

Redkey, 7 months ago

It really depends on your expectations. Once you clarified that you meant parity with current consoles, I understood why you wrote what you did.

I’m almost the exact opposite of the PC princesses who can say with a straight face that running a new AAA release at anything less than high settings at 4K/120fps is “unplayable”. I stopped watching/reading a lot of PC gaming content online because it kept making me feel bad about my system even though I’m very happy with its performance.

Like a lot of patient gamers, I’m also an older gamer, and I grew up with NES, C64, and ancient DOS games. I’m satisfied with medium settings at 1080/60fps, and anything more is gravy to me. I don’t even own a 4K display. I’m happy to play on low settings at 720/30fps if the actual game is good. The parts in my system range from 13 to 5 years old, much of it bought secondhand.

The advantage of this compared to a console is that I can still try to run any PC game on my system, and I might be satisfied with the result; no-one can play a PS5 game on a PS3.

Starfield is the first game to be released that (looking at online performance videos) I consider probably not being worth trying to play on my setup. It’ll run, but the performance will be miserable. If I was really keen to play it I might try to put up with it, but fortunately I’m not.

You could build a similar system to mine from secondhand parts for dirt cheap (under US$300, possibly even under US$200) although these days the price/performance sweet spot would be a few years newer.

Redkey, 7 months ago

There are several reasons that people may prefer physical games, but I want people to stop propagating the false relationship of “physical copy = keep forever, digital copy = can be taken away by a publisher’s whim”. Most modern physical copies of games are glorified digital download keys. Sometimes, the games can’t even run without downloading and installing suspiciously large day 0 “patches”. When (not if) those services are shut down, you will no longer be able to play your “physical” game.

Meanwhile GOG, itch, even Steam (to an extent), and other services have shown that you can offer a successful, fully digital download experience without locking the customer into DRM.

I keep local copies of my DRM-free game purchases, just in case something happens to the cloud. As long as they don’t get damaged, those copies will continue to install and run on any compatible computer until the heat death of the universe, Internet connection or no, just like an old PS1 game disc. So it is possible to have the convenience of digital downloads paired with the permanence that physical copies used to provide. It’s not an either-or choice at all, and I’m sick of hearing people saying that it is.

Redkey, 7 months ago

I think that a game has to be “purchaseable” for $0 to have a “claim” option. If it’s just “free”, it won’t have a “claim” option. Some authors seem to switch this setting on purpose to stop people from keeping free download access to their game after the free period has ended. Sure, we could just keep the files backed up ourselves, but a) how many people really do that, and b) the author could release updates and DLC later to encourage a purchase.

Redkey, 7 months ago

I think a part of it is how we look for information in the first place. If you search/ask “How do I do (task) in (environment)?”, you’re going to find out about various libraries/frameworks/whatever that abstract everything away for you. But if you instead look for information on “How do I do (task)?”, you’ll probably get more generalized information that you can take and use to write your own stuff from scratch. Try only to look for help related to your specific environment/language when you have a specific implementation issue, like how to access a file or get user input.

We also need a willingness to learn how things actually work. I see quite a few folks who seem to be so worried that they’ll never be able to understand some task that they unwittingly spend almost as much or even more time and effort learning all the ins and outs of someone else’s codebase as a way to avoid what they see as the scarier unknown.

Fortunately, I’ve seen an increase in the last year or two of people deliberately giving answers or writing tutorials that are “no-/low-library”, for people who want to know what’s actually going on in their programs.

I would never say to avoid all libraries or frameworks, because many of them are well-written (small, modular, stable) and can save us a lot of boilerplate coding. But there are at least as many libraries which suffer from “kitchen-sinkism”, where the authors want so much for their library to become the pre-eminent choice that it becomes a bloated tangle, trying to be all things to all people. This can be compounded by less-experienced coders including multiple huge libraries in one program, using only a fraction of each library’s features without realizing that there’s almost complete overlap. The cherry on top is when the end developer uses one of these libraries to do just one or two small tasks that could’ve been done in less than a dozen lines of standard code, if only someone had told them how, instead of sending them off to install yet another library.

Redkey, 7 months ago

I think that it’s because a) the abstraction does solve a problem, and b) the idealized solutions aren’t actually all that simple.

But I still agree with the article because I also think that a) the problem solved by the added abstraction isn’t practical, but emotional, and b) the idealized solutions aren’t all that complex, either.

It seems to me that many devs reach immediately for a tool or library, rather than looking into how to create their own solution, due more to fear of the unknown than a real drive for efficiency. And while learning the actual nuts and bolts of the task is rarely going to be the faster or easier option, it’s frequently (IMO) not going to be much slower or more difficult than learning how to integrate someone else’s solution. But at the end of it you’ll have learned a lot more than you would’ve by using a tool or library.

Another problem in the commercial world is accountability to management.

Many decades ago there used to be a saying in tech: “No-one ever got fired for buying IBM.'” What that meant was that even if IBM’s solution was completely beaten by something offered by one of their competitors, you personally may still be better off overall going with IBM. The reason being, if you went with the competitor, and everything worked out, the less tech-savvy managers were just as likely to pat you on the back as to assert that the IBM solution would’ve been even better. If the competitor’s solution didn’t meet expectations, you’d be hauled over the coals for going with some cowboy outfit instead of good old reliable IBM. Conversely, if you went with IBM and everything worked, everyone would be happy. But if you chose IBM and the project failed, it’d be, “Well, it’s not your fault. Who could’ve predicted that IBM wouldn’t come through?”

In the modern era, replace “IBM” with the current tool-of-the-month, and your manager will be demanding to know why you’re wasting time reinventing the wheel on the company’s dime.

Redkey, 7 months ago

That depends on your definition of “folding bike”. It may not fold in the middle, but where I live this type of bike is still considered to be a “folding bike” by vendors, and more importantly, by train and long-distance bus companies, which will let you ride with one as luggage.

The total volume of this bike when collapsed is actually significantly less than my middle-folding bike when collapsed, even though it is a bit longer in one dimension.

All that being said, I prefer my 20" inch wheels to the 16" wheels on these bikes, because I get a rough enough ride as it is. I don’t think I could put up with 16" wheels every day on some of the roads around here.

Redkey, 8 months ago

This isn’t a slight against you, OP, or this game, but I’m just suddenly struck by the way that, “aside from the first few hours,” or more commonly, “it gets better a couple of hours in,” has become a fairly common and even somewhat acceptable thing to say in support of a game, as part of a recommendation.

As I get older I’m finding that I actually want my games to have a length more akin to a movie or miniseries. If a game hasn’t shown me something worthwhile within an hour or so, I’m probably quitting it and never coming back.

Redkey, 8 months ago

I think that we mostly agree. My contention is that pretty much the entire game should still be engaging to play; having a long total play time shouldn’t excuse that, and a shorter play time simply doesn’t allow for it. Plenty of games have shown that it’s possible to gradually layer mechanics one or two at a time, creating experiences around those smaller subsets of abilities that are still entertaining. I work in education and this idea is vital to what I do. Asking students to sit down and listen quietly as I feed them a mountain of boring details while promising, “Soon you’ll know enough to do something interesting, just a little longer,” is a sure-fire recipe for losing my audience.

And as I think you may have intimated, creating environments that require the use of only one ability at a time reduces those abilities to a boring list. When you’ve finally taught the player each ability in isolation, and suddenly start mixing everything up once they get to the “good part” of the game, they’ll virtually have to “relearn” everything anyway.

We don’t need to give the player everything at once to make our games interesting, but we do need to make sure that what we’re giving them piecemeal is interesting in the moment.

Redkey, 8 months ago

I can’t respond directly because I haven’t played either Metroid Dread or Hollow Knight specifically, although I’ve played and enjoyed many other metroidvania games, including the majority of the Metroid series (I even enjoyed Metroid Other M… mostly). But I’ll say that there’s no rule that prevents metroidvanias from being entertaining until you unlock some specific part of the ability set. The search to unlock new abilities should be fun itself.

Redkey, 8 months ago

Yep, it’s probably easier to get an Android device and install readers on it than to try for a prepackaged FOSS reader.

I use several apps on my Android phone, but mostly Kindle (for Kindle, duh), PDF Reader (for PDFs, duh again), and Lithium (mostly for EPUB but pretty much everything else, too). I get most of my e-books as DRM-free EPUBs and PDFs.