Agingcoder

Ff7 is an interesting example : I’ve never understood the appeal of the original game which I’ve always found to be truly hideous, including when it came out. It looks like chunky pixel soup - I’d rather have 2D pixel art which looks clean.

Now, I played the remake recently - the game is actually excellent ! It’s just that at the time ( to me at least ) the original art was so ugly as to ruin the game / break immersion. This is an issue I’ve never had with 2D games, pixelated or not.

No, as the previous poster said, this is my lived experience, and I play games these days. I’m neither criticizing modern gaming nor rambling on how old games were better. If anything I have a very solid gaming culture, having spent a great amount of time trying out things.

What I’m saying is that there was a time ( which lasted for a while ) when 3d games experiences were worse than 2D games, and it took a while for 3d games to catch up.

Surprisingly enough ( to me at least) games evolved in the right direction (immersive games with stories and good gameplay and not just more empty technical demos ) when the industry might have gone wrong instead.

I’ve been busy catching up with what I’ve missed ( which is extremely enjoyable since time is a very good way to find out what’s good ), and it feels like things got better around 2010-2015 so 15 years after it stopped being interesting.

I remember TA very distinctly - my brother was very good at it, I’ve always been hopeless at RTS games.

You’re right - 3d improved the game. However outside of examples such as this one , I feel that it generally took a while (15 years maybe ?) for game designers and coders to eventually find a middle ground , as in use the latest technical fad, but still make a game that is pleasant to play and better than without the technical fad.

Yes. I stopped playing video games when 3d happened ( mid to end of the 90s) because most games were either uninteresting (3d for the sake of 3d), or plain ugly.

I started playing again during lockdown, and that was a bit of a shock - modern games are gorgeous, use 3d properly, and often enough have brilliant stories. I still play pixel art games - as you say, it’s timeless .

No that’s correct, I fully agree.

It’s exceedingly frustrating, and you either get an awful lot of exposure ( say you stop reading in English , only read in Norwegian and read 10k pages a year ) or you grind and learn word lists.

The good news is that word lists are now much easier to learn thanks to SRS systems.

The main problem here is that even if they revamp it, it likely still won’t work since the most basic features don’t work as advertised . It’s like buying a car and it won’t start every other day and will only move backwards.

Maybe I’m getting really old, and I know we live in changing times but the fact this works at all is insane, as in black magic insane.

I assume I’ll get used to it, but my mental model of what’s possible hasn’t been fully rewired yet.

Fair question.

I expect the following from such a system : I set a time limit per app/set of apps,and the phone locks said apps once the limit is reached. In theory, this is what it does, in practice it almost never works : it doesn’t lock, gets broken whenever you upgrade the os, gets broken whenever your child upgrades the os, can be trivially bypassed by a kid, cannot be unlocked when you want it to unlock remotely etc I’ve also seen trivially bad data ( phone usage when it was in my pocket ). It’s worth noting you also need an Idevice to set it remotely - if your significant other has an android device he or she is out of luck.

I was very surprised at how appallingly bad it was - just try it for a few weeks and you’ll immediately notice it’s badly broken but somehow doesn’t fix it.

Contrast this to google’s system which, well, works.

Edit : it’s so mind bogglingly bad that I’m genuinely curious to talk to someone who works at apple about this.

Thanks this mirrors my experience. I’ll try your trust and verify approach then.

Yes and that’s my point. I don’t care about any ui or features change - I want the very basic functionality to work and it currently doesn’t.

That’s a good idea . So you’re telling me that I can trust the on device numbers enough?

Try an android keyboard and go back to an iphone. Having switched back and forth between both systems it’s quite remarkable how bad the iphone keyboard is. In practice , typing on an iphone means constant typos, bad autofix, and bad suggestions.

I don’t want a new screen time experience , I just want it to work. Much to my surprise, it’s extraordinarily brittle, to such an extent that it’s virtually useless.

The lack of faceid is very surprising - it’s by and large one of my favorite features esp in winter.

So that’s what I thought - but if I hadn’t been exposed to it early I don’t think I’d have gone back to it as an adult.

So I think it’s useful.

I got bitten by that one - I remember my 3d engine going all wrong because I hadn’t realized I couldn’t mix mmx and fpu registers unless I was willing to pay for the extraordinarily expensive EMMS (?) instruction

Yes im reading it now. I find that the total lack of formalism makes things difficult from time to time just like his insistence on using basic geometry when there are easier ways. That being said, its an excellent book.

Ok so stl here is not standard template library. I was very confused for a minute.

Doesn’t work for me. I used to be able to read in cars but over the years I’ve reached a point where I last maybe two minutes, except if I’m on a straight road where it takes longer. I was really hopeful this would work but clearly it doesn’t .

Yeah I tried to have a conversation about security yesterday with Claude and it immediately stopped me - I was taken aback, I didn’t expect it at all.

This is highly problematic.

Indeed and I’m not American, and don’t work in the US. It is however fairly obvious to me. We agree to disagree.

Models are treated as weapons with export controls - if they can do this it’s with the blessing of the Chinese government who’s getting something out of it.

It’s fairly obviously about being a nuisance to the US.

I know but I’m not sure it actually matters.

To many people the internet and internet explorer ( or edge ) are the same thing, and for almost everyone I know , the daily driver is the phone or tablet OS not the laptop/desktop OS. And I’m not even talking about the ones who live in a browser.

I started using Linux in 96 and for many years it was going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. It never happened , and I’m not sure it’s that important these days , given the gigantic presence Linux has, and the way people interact with computing devices in general these days .

Edit / clarification : there are a lots of computer professionals on HN, and as such see actual pcs / Macs etc a lot. Many people don’t and just see their phones.

Linux has gone mainstream a long time ago - from dvd players to android phones. It just hasn’t succceeded on old preexisting markets ( personal computers ) but has taken large parts of most of the newly created ones ( servers , mobile devices , embedded devices etc )

Do you have references ?

Compiler bugs are surprisingly common - most people simply never notice them. Whether these bugs are major or not is a different topic.

If you have a very large scale test suite for your application, a large codebase, and exert most compiler features including the optimizer , you’ll probably find a few every time you upgrade .

Yes. Most people don’t actually understand what a program proof is - the answer is usually ‘I have very good tests’.

Now, go write the code for an artificial heart , and sleep at night thanks to strong testing !

Physics is an endless source of frustration to me. It feels like a mix of random tricks, most of which I don’t understand.

I find math and compsci reasonably understandable, can read research papers in both fields ( and have published papers) etc. There’s something specific about physics I don’t get but I’ve never been able to figure out what. The main symptom is that most cause -> consequence in such demonstrations , which are seemingly obvious to everyone, make no sense to me.

Am I the only one ? Are there good resources to learn it?

Formal methods allow you to prove that it works for all inputs, and not just for the small subset that will be sampled by property testing

It’s a proof, not a successful experiment.

I have found that asking an llm for an Eli 5 ( along with the important follow up questions ) usually works out