@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

rygorous

@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place

Abstraction maker, abstraction breaker. FUN FACT: things I prefix with FUN FACT are sometimes fun and sometimes factual, but very rarely both.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

danluu, to random
@danluu@mastodon.social avatar

How long before formal methods are widely use in software engineering?

https://www.patreon.com/posts/102809124

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@danluu What exactly counts as formal methods? There's some snobbery around this issue.

Type checking, even with a very basic and inexpressive type system such as C's, is a type of formal method. Going by adoption of TypeScript and type annotations in Python, it doesn't seem to take a lot of convincing to get people to do it.

More expressive type systems let you do more with this, but I think a basic type system is table stakes now in a way it very much wasn't 20 years ago.

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@danluu Likewise, distributed systems folks seem to have come to model checkers and temporal logic all on their own (because debugging DS issues in the wild is such a nightmare).

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@TomF @danluu My whole argument is that type checking is a form of formal method and it's neither particularly expensive to run, hard to get people to use, or niche.

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@TomF @danluu Same for specifying (part of) input languages via regular expressions or context-free grammars. Also a type of formal method, also widely adopted. All examples noted in this thread are over half a century old, pretty popular already and, if anything, only becoming more so over time.

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@TomF @danluu I think another good example of a success story would be autodiff (most visibly integrated into ML frameworks) which has been around for decades but has seen a meteoric rise in the last 15 years or so.

That's more on the specification/development than verification side but it's a formal method all right.

pervognsen, to random
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

The Brothers Lionheart is isekai.

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@pervognsen @zeux Same here on all counts, never liked Karlsson either, and loved the adventure books. I also liked Kalle Blomkvist and remember the Bullerbyn books (Bullerbü in German). For TV Emil [Michel in Germany], Pippi Longstocking and Ronia are all fixtures of my childhood.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

It's not the corner of Unreal where I'm typically gnawing on the wires, but I like the word "swidget". It's got a good mouth feel.

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva alas, Slate is an acquired taste

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva swell

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva three senior engineers I know are in this picture and I don't like it

rygorous, to random
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Supervillain vandalism pitch: smash an enormous ink well into the summit of Mont Blanc to make a liar out of the French

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

you ever think about how humans are totally blind to the color alpha but haven't questioned why we reserve a color channel for it anyway

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva what you can't see alpha?

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

you ever think about how "copy" and "paste" don't have dedicated keys on most keyboards

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@zombierustpunk @aeva If you're a C/C++ programmer on Windows, your pause/break key tends to get used quite regularly

Scroll Lock, not so much though. That's just the "annoy your nearest Excel user" key

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva sure they do, they're called squints C and V

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@oblomov @TomF @aeva what do you mean "tried to". They very much did

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@oblomov @TomF @aeva That's not how standards work. Just because there's also wireless these days doesn't mean Ethernet is not still a standard.

Most Windows apps and controls to this day still support the CUA shortcuts for copy & paste.

Alt-F4 to exit? CUA. Ctrl-F for find and F3 for find next? CUA. F10 to open and highlight menu bar? CUA. Dialog boxes using <Return> to mean OK and <Esc> Cancel? CUA. Navigating form elements via (Shift-)Tab? CUA. Checkboxes square, radio buttons round? CUA.

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@oblomov @TomF @aeva I'm just old enough to have used several pre-CUA DOS programs from the mid-late 80s, and then seen post-CUA apps in the 90s and onwards, including Windows.

Trust me. They did not fail to standardize things on the PC. On the contrary, on the whole they were so successful that CUA's influence has become invisible because "shrug but everyone does that"

yeah. exactly. they didn't use to

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@oblomov @TomF @aeva Apple's Human Interface Guidelines on the Mac side and IBM's CUA on the PC side are the reason we still have a pretty consistent look & feel for GUI apps now going on 40 years on, and if you've used one of the few apps from before then, trust me, the difference is very much felt to this day

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@oblomov @TomF @aeva I had to learn how to select text, copy and paste it in WordStar, and had to learn it again differently in Emacs and Vim both (many years later). I also had to learn how to select text (shift+cursor movement) and cut/copy/paste in QBASIC/DOS EDIT. And then that one way I learned there worked also in Borlands Turbo Pascal IDE, and in Windows edit controls, and in Notepad and Write (later WordPad) and MS Office and the Visual Studio IDE and ...

danluu, to random
@danluu@mastodon.social avatar

Every once in a while, I think about going to work in the game industry.

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@danluu To be fair, NWN2 was 2006. Not that it makes it any better, but I also think you'll find plenty of ammunition for pretty much any sector treating employees terribly if you look at a 20-year window.

The equivalent would be treatment of say content moderators on social media, which is likewise terrible now. (Although the relevant cos are savvy enough to let subcontractors handle that so their hands are officially clean.)

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

It's a bit different now with live services games/GaaS but yeah most QA folks in the traditional model would be short-time contractors in some window around release, not FTEs.

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Again, not trying to excuse dumping folks onto the parking lot with no advance notice which truly is inexcusably shitty, but even the more normal version of this would end with most testers having their contracts run out after the game ships, and they usually would have been aware of this.

I think for the testers in question it was probably the "fuck you" of being promised a ship party to trick people out of the building, not so much the losing their jobs at the end of the project.

rygorous, to random
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Out of curiosity, does anyone know why the cases for glasses are usually specced with springs so stiff they can double as emergency bear traps?

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Maybe that's just sampling bias but every glasses box I've ever handled in my life has big "I'm super excited to have this job and I'm giving 500%" energy for no reason I can discern

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@aeva I regret to inform you containment has been breached and my glasses are in regular contact with my non-microfiber T-shirt hems

Doomed_Daniel, to random
@Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

WTF is the deal with Youtube's new page layout, it's fucking horrible

rygorous,
@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

@Doomed_Daniel That looks like you got served a variant of the mobile player

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • love
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • khanakhh
  • everett
  • kavyap
  • mdbf
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ngwrru68w68
  • provamag3
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • normalnudes
  • tacticalgear
  • cubers
  • ethstaker
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • Durango
  • anitta
  • Leos
  • tester
  • JUstTest
  • All magazines
    •