It was a screensaver that I wrote between tech support calls. The CEO asked me about it, I told him I wrote it, and he put me on the dev team that afternoon. It was C and C++, drivers and apps on Windows.
1,454 karma · joined February 17, 2010
It's a big procedural crafting game. The long-term goal is to make a Civilization-like game set in a Minecraft-like world, with really good AI. It's also a testbed for a bunch of ideas I've developed about massive, virtualized simulation. What that means is that you could in principle have thousands of cities with millions of individual inhabitants going about their business. But it's sort of analogous to lazy evaluation in that things are only computed if they would be perceived by the player, or need to be consistent with past information the player already knows.
https://github.com/andy-wood/multi-threaded-profiler-unity/b...
So, as far as I can tell, the U.S. is practically unique in having the most liberal free speech protections, and actually unique among any countries that could be considered peers.
It's commonly debated whether math is discovered, or invented. I think it depends on which part of math you're talking about. I think 1 + 1 = 2 is way over on the "discovered" end of the spectrum. It's very strongly grounded in nature, reality, everyday experience, etc. The mainstream treatment of infinity, including infinite sets, "different sized" infinities, bijections, etc., rely more on definitions and consensus about what passes as an acceptable "proof". For example, the tangent function is cited as a mapping between [-pi/2, pi/2] and [-inf, +inf], which is supposed to show that a subset of the reals is the same "size" as the whole set. But this requires defining division by zero as infinity in this context, whereas that's commonly considered undefined. I also have a big argument with the use of bijections (mappings) to compare the supposed "sizes" of infinities, but I can't fit it in a comment. The summary is that I think the ideas of cardinality and infinity are inherently contradictory, and putting them together creates nonsense. The idea of different sized infinities is actually created by (rather than proved by) the conventional restrictions on the style of bijections / mappings that are proposed and considered. But that's just another way of saying I think this area of math is a lot more on the "invented by definitions" end of the spectrum, and that whole philosophical question is another area on which people are going to differ in their attitudes.
On equivocation: Infinity is neither a number nor a quantity. It's not a number, because you can't get there by counting. It's not a quantity, because it can't be measured. But in the mainstream treatment of infinity, all the common intuitions about number and quantity get mixed in, for example the idea of different sized infinities. Infinity means "in this place where a number belongs, the value is unlimited". It's not itself an unlimited number, because as soon as it becomes unlimited, it no longer refers to any number. Similarly, I believe a more reasonable treatment of sets would say that "infinite" and "set" are incompatible, and attempting to force the concept of infiniteness onto a set makes it no longer a set, but rather something else like an abstract category. I think it was a mistake to generalize sets to include infinite sets.
As to how I treat infinity, it simply means something is boundless, inexhaustible, unlimited. I have no problem saying there are infinite reals, while minding that "infinity" is not a "count" of the reals. There are also infinite natural numbers. It doesn't make any sense to say there are more reals than naturals, in spite of "bijection theory". Reals, integers, natural numbers, etc. can all be considered different ways of naming items plucked from an infinite bag. When laid on a number line, reals and integers acquire one difference - integers can be adjacent, and reals can't.
One last note: I'm fully aware that my whole argument can be easily refuted by saying that math is made of definitions. That's fine. My position is simply that when people say things like "Hey, did you know there are actually different sized infinities? Isn't that cool?" they should be mindful that they're talking about a convention within a theory based on conventions, and not a natural or logical fact.
The one thing I can't argue with is the money. Everything else has been highly volatile.
I liked TIS-100 a lot too, and Infinifactory is kind of like a visuospacial, high-production version of it.
If I either speed up, or consciously suppress it, I can read without the internal voice, but comprehension goes way down. There's some comprehension, but it's pretty ineffective overall.
If I'm in a relatively quiet place, I don't move my lips or tongue. If I'm in a very noisy place, moving my lips/tongue seems to help.
I once knew someone who said she could not read at all without whispering the words to herself.
As far as my goal - that's what I'm trying to figure out. For practical purposes, it may be mostly about avoiding webdev. However, this most recent job was not webdev, yet it was still an absurdly convoluted architectural hodge-podge. So, one thing I may be looking for is more homogeneity. It's not about size or complexity, per se. I've worked on many large, complex projects and had a good time.
What turns me off about webdev is a) new frameworks being hyped every month, and b) the architecture of a modern web app gives me a headache. I want to return to a time when I used to spend most of my time on data, algorithms, and writing code, with a single API being the worst "necessary evil" in the mix.
I once interviewed at a game/graphics startup and they asked me to implement a non-trivial graphics algorithm in a take-home test. I completed it successfully, but only because I've done graphics programming for decades, and in fact had implemented this very algorithm just months before in a side project. Someone without experience in that specific area of graphics programming would probably not have passed.
Nothing bullet-proof definitive here, but the consensus certainly seems to be that colds are caused by virus entering the respiratory system, nothing more.