Ask HN: What projects are you going to work on if no need to work?
I think we can all dream. I'll start:
- I will read geological surveys and find fossils.
- I will teach myself Physics and see what happens.
- I will read geological surveys and find fossils.
- I will teach myself Physics and see what happens.
BitGrid[2] is a green field approach, and I need an accountability buddy to keep me focused. Replacing everything is hard.
Also I might finally have the time to get back into making music and learning art that I could eventually make games with good enough art/music of my own that can actually attract people's attention, instead of just sometimes being serviceable enough that it doesn't look like a tiny step above programmer art (and the music isn't just kinda boring)... I've released games with both before, and I will again, but it'd be nice to have the time to actually make them kind of decent without resorting to a minimalist art style (flat textures and basic shapes and typography).
Besides that, I would love to have the time to start learning something a bit more academic, maybe climate or environmental science. Maybe I can figure contribute there in some tiny way.
A pitfall with teaming up with an artist is there's no guarantee they're going to stay motivated to work on the project (it can happen for me too, I take long breaks sometimes, why I haven't really tried to team up with anyone lately even though I have years ago). I've had a couple games I've had to scrap because the artist lost interest or had things going on in their personal lives.
There's also paying for art, but that's a bit of a risk, especially with a lot of people either reselling the same art assets with slight tweaks to a bunch of people, using generative A.I., or just selling you art assets they took from elsewhere. So you need to do your due diligence and verify the work of an artist and their skills before you employ them. I have a couple friends that I know that I'm planning to hire to fill in some gaps of my art when I nail down the rest of two of the games I'm working on.
You can do a minimalist art style too, but that doesn't always grab people's atention, so it's a risk. You can make things look more interesting with a lot of movement and animation 'juice' though, instead of making everything static. Two of the games I'm working on use a pretty minimalist art style. One is a modern refresh of a game I released 20 years ago that got millions of plays as a Flash game that I released with (frankly not great) art, so it's possible to make games people will enjoy without amazing art.
But you're really not wrong at all that artists seem to have better luck learning just enough code to use a modern game engine like RenPy or something than vice-versa nowadays, and seem to enjoy a lot more success. Or they can just make beautiful board games, which don't require coding at all and gamers are even more drawn to great art than they are in video games, imo.
(I dont need those contracts, i just desire them. Which gov is interested in fossils? The right gov)
leisure/schole != lack of projects
(my project, like mikewarot's, is to greenfield Informatics as if we hadn't incurred the path-dependent legacy of [pragmatically driven by miniscule machines of the time] decisions made in the 1960s; unlike his I'm making a totally different likely-wrong set of other decisions :-)
EDIT: hnthrowaway0328, finding fossils (in the right strata) is nearly trivial. Challenge: find some Ediacaran fauna!
Challenge 2: if you haven't already, work through the Feynman Lectures: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu
(that'd be ~8 startups/doctorate programs, so the goods are odd even if the odds are not good)
* to get SAK's long jumps in fitness space
Case study here of phoneboothknifefight elevated to a streetside assassination attempt? Positively Getting holyroman here…
You may be familiar with the following characters :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135916
CH should be optimally hilly for the Odding in the next 3 decades :)
(More frank/brian herbert refs TK)
As with W40K, I guess I have a "gentleman's knowledge" of the Herbertiverse?
And on the optimal hills: at least we haven't been notified to clear out wine and skis and stock up yet — I was impressed by how efficiently my wife laid up 2 weeks' rations in the "cave" when the italian tourists first brought us Covid, and she asked, what, don't americans learn how to stock their shelter in elementary school too?
Nothing deep required .
Just the general ecodoomer vibe, plus awareness of the intended message behind the Golden Path/the Weirding Way
a) we gave our army the task to procure PPE, as they are the sole national entity which is both in the habit of buying things for millions of people at once, and could negotiate a cash&carry discount in china by sending cargo planes and logistics people to pick them up.
b) a local company bought a chinese mask-making machine with some public support for the gamble; that turned out to have been an out-of-the-money option, but had we needed the capacity, I'm sure that equipment would have been even more thoroughly reverse-engineered than it had been by the time of installation.
c) in between all of this, a few too "enterprising" people were charged for buying up N95 stocks and attempting to scalp them online.
Oh, and there was also a bit of a shortage of morals, as a few people tried to take advantage of various public support programs for enterprises; as far as I can tell although money was helicoptered pretty quickly to where it was needed, the forensic accountants were only a year or two behind to ferret out those marginal cases when it had gone places where it had not actually been needed. (like with no-personnel stores, this is one of the times where a high trust society pays off)
(I was once watching the semifinals of the women's epée nat'l championships, and a former Olympian told me that "B always does the right thing, and that's why she won't win: A knows how to do the wrong thing at the right moment, and that's why she's a champion")
wrt to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42216196 : my impression of non-human violence is that they are better than we at avoiding violence when the power balance is clear; it's mostly with young animals or moments where the status quo threatens to have been merely a stasis quo that application of violence becomes necessary. (compare Cherryh, Foreigner)
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic02W1bWeFU
Shorter Herbert? https://read.gov/aesop/048.html