ermir

That's exactly what it was like for me when SC2 came out and I started playing the ladder, after a few weeks I got used to it. I then saw it again when I got my roommate to start playing, and I could feel his anxiety. I figured out that the main cause was the fog of war, people unused to scouting and extrapolating possible enemy forces are very prone to freaking out and turtling up, which will lose the game almost always.

Rule of law differs substantially from rule by algorithms since laws are created and interpreted by humans, and there's always the possibility of reasoning and making a deal with a human when the law is incorrect or there are specific circumstances. In rule by algorithm, you get a situation where "Computer says no", and there's no recourse, no deal to be made, nobody to reason with.

An entire society can be bootstrapped to be entirely run by thoughtless algorithms and it could end up in a situation where there's no way in to untangle the dependencies that these systems have with one another.

In some un-free countries such as North Korea the purpose of voting is co-opted to mean something completely different: the ritualized political humiliation of the population. By forcing you to vote in an "election" that everyone knows to be a fraud, you're forced to humiliate yourself and by extension delegitimize all voting processes everywhere.

My personal opinion is that humans are fundamentally a technological species, and even things like the wearing of clothes or primitive social organization could be argued to be "cybernetic augmentation". I don't know how to solve this issue. Could it be argued that humans are cyborgs just because they can learn how to drive cars and "merge" with them?

It's fundamentally a function of technology, just like Protestantism is only possible when you have a literate population and access to cheap books. The mainstreaming of what some call "Cyborg Theocracy" happens from the bottom-up in cases such as this: https://nypost.com/2022/05/11/madonna-reveals-fully-nude-nft...

and top-down in cases such as Yuval Noah Harari and "Homo Deus", the man becoming God. You also see this in Marxism, where the "liberated" human is finally perfected and has reached a godly state. I could show tons and tons of examples.

What I see happening soon: The mainstreaming of a new religion. Its tenets are broadly: the worship of technology and "progress", the cyborgization of the population, the proliferation of AI on all spheres of life, and the ultimate creation of the successor of humanity.

This is not new, it's been going on for at least 200 years, but finally the technology exists to do it in a decentralized, scalable fashion. Think of Nudge Theory, but applied at a mass scale and in every domain.

Reminds me of the classic Orsinial Winterbells: https://www.crazygames.com/game/winterbells

Maybe you can also integrate the accelerometer on phones for a compact and more fun example?

I am also working on JS client-server multiplayer implementations, and I've gone with WebRTC for the transport and a state-based communication (instead of events). The primary reason is to avoid desyncs, which is in my opinion impossible to avoid with JS because of the different JS engines and platforms that the game will run on. If you're expecting determinism when playing across mobile ARM, desktop x86, desktop ARM, and any combination of these, then the only way to achieve this is to use fixed point math and reimplement the behavior of JS primitives such as arrays and hash tables. It might be worth it for you and the game you're making, but for fast action games this is not needed, and just sending state to the players should work well.

A few years back I also used WebRTC with different backends (Kurento, Puppeteer, Mediasoup) to try and make an audio-based social network. I got pretty far but I was on my own and a grad student at the same time so the project died. A few years later Clubhouse became viral, it was essentially the same thing I was doing.

I still use WebRTC for my personal projects but the difficulty of compiling and embedding it in a backend makes it really hard to use by the masses. My next project is going to use Pion, and I'm going to make a static compilation and just distribute the executable and have the main service use IPC to communicate with the Pion module.

I was an AI skeptic for a long time, but I've slowly started to come around on the use of tools such as ChatGPT. I don't think they'll replace programmers, since in the end someone still has to make the judgement about integrating the output in a project in a coherent and useful way, and this takes just as much mental effort and training as writing the code in the first place.

Currently I'm playing around with ChatGPT and soon other tools in a collaborative and generative fashion, where I give ideas and prompts and get multiple choices. In the end I still have to make the choice (and if necessary adapt it to my needs).

A few years ago I did stuff like this using Puppeteer. This is not one of the advertised use cases, but normally Puppeteer comes with a fully featured WebRTC implementation, and for my needs, also included the WebAudio spec. Using a combination of these, I could route, transform, mix, broadcast audio without changing or renegotiating the connection details, and also preserve the privacy of the peers by having only the IP of Puppeteer be actually exposed. It worked far better than I had ever expected.

I remember the broadcasters also implemented this solution straight into the stream, the TV spectators did not have to do anything.

  Location: Kosovo, EU Timezone
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Node.js, React, React Native, AWS, SQL, WebRTC
  CV: https://suldashi.com/cv.pdf
  Website: https://suldashi.com
  Github: https://github.com/suldashi
  Email: ermirsuldashi@gmail.com

I'm a software developer with many years of experience working with all aspects of web development, including real-time video/audio. I'm currently looking for long-term senior positions in SaaS companies or other client-facing products.

I'm also writing a game development book with JavaScript, link can be found here:

  https://suldashi.github.io/gamebook/

This works for video games too. Warcraft 3 had a comprehensive editor and cloud functionality built in which allowed games such as DotA to be made. However, the base Warcraft 3 game is a masterpiece in its own right, which drove users to the platform. If only the editor had been released, it would have never gathered the critical mass for acquiring users.

Isn't the sorting algorithm in question the famous BubbleSort? I understand the value of formally proving it works, but why is the name mentioned nowhere?

Could computers be built without perishable components such as capacitors? From my experience they're the first components that usually break down or have the shortest shelf life.

It's because if you only allow an app to access an approved and whitelisted API endpoint, that endpoint can trivially implement a proxy and essentially act as a gateway to the open internet.

High-quality drivetrains in bicycles can have an overall efficiency of up to 95%, can this system beat that? Of the force that someone puts on the pedals, how much of that drives the rear wheel in the end?

Most of these tools are too open-ended and pull the users in the minute details. I've been developing software for over 10 years now and I can handle it without any issue, but there are not many kids who could handle the extreme frustration that software developments sometimes causes.

Kids tools should be far more limited, it's useful both for creativity and to stop most crazy ideas, since they would be impossible.

Finally, it's a giant pain to get anyone to actually play what you make. How is a kid going to handle compilation, executable distribution, and much more. If you send an exe via email, the spam filters will catch it, if you find another way, the operating system will yell at you for starting an unsigned executable. If you want to make a web game, you'll have to figure out hosting, design, JavaScript, and all the rest. Sure, you could teach a kid this, but it would take months and any one impediment can stop the whole process cold.

The fact that I was able to figure out most of this stuff on my own, much of it without internet, goes to show that the tools I used had the perfect balance of complexity and limitations for my age. Of course nowadays I've moved way past them, but I can clearly see there's a gap in the mid-level tools that sit somewhere between a full programming language and Scratch which is too simplistic.

Interestingly enough, Arduino fills a bit of this niche. It's relatively easy but quite deep, perfect for a gifted child. The limitations of the electronic components also force you to push the limits of your capabilities in a way that a blank canvas just overwhelms you with possibilities.

As a child I got my hands on the StarCraft map editor, a reasonably complex tool that allowed me to create all sorts of scenarios. Similarly, an older cousin of mine had access to Worldcraft (now known as Valve Hammer) and Flash, all of these tools are complete in the sense that the end product is not a kid's throwaway project but a complete experience, equal to official offerings.

Unfortunately such tools don't really exist nowadays, maybe Roblox, but nothing outside of that.

You'll only exhale the CO2 you actually produce, if you increase your oxygen intake you won't actually increase CO2 production, you only do that with increased activity (that's why you need to breathe more). You can also try to hyperventilate, but it won't work for the same reason.

90% of weight loss is cutting down on intake, there are plenty of effective techniques that might work for you, but in the end the only way to lose weight is to eat less.

This is called a "desync" and is a bug in a particular implementation of multiplayer networking. In this model instead of the server sending the state to each player, it sends their inputs, and allows the local device to completely determine the state of the game. If there are any differences at all in how the game's calculations are made, the game will have different states in different devices. Even different models of the iPhone may have tiny differences in how they calculate the square root for example, and over time these minor differences cascade into totally different games.

Would you be willing to take a look at my JS game development book? Details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166371

I'm a web developer and I'm currently writing a book about game development in the web. The book is still a work in progress (it likely will never be "complete"), but it's quite usable and soon I'll be able to demonstrate small games with the currently existing chapters. The link is here:

https://suldashi.github.io/gamebook/

I'm looking for someone to try it out, give some feedback, and possibly even write a game by following along the instructions. The target reader is a somewhat experienced programmer (such as a close-to-graduation CS student) who won't need to be told what's a function or class, but you don't need to know anything about game development to make use of the book.

I would have absolutely loved this book as a student, and I’m writing a similar book for JS and gamedev, I’m really liking the diff style and I might adopt it myself.

https://suldashi.github.io/gamebook

Development will still be hard intellectually, but much easier when you don’t have to deal with symbolic manipulation. I don’t think no code is a solution for the web, but in specialized domains such as video games it could have a major impact. Think of games like DotA that first came out as mods made by specialized editors instead of programming languages.

Just as an interesting fact, the electricity price is 7 cents per kwh during the day and 3 cents during the night, these prices make GPU mining very profitable. In the North where the govt. is weak the electricity is simply not paid, this has allowed a ton of small and big mining operations to pop up, the big ones are backed by the local gangs.

There is a quota in Kosovo, but there’s a ton of small time miners that are distributed all around and none reach the quota individually but overall they affect the electric situation of the whole country.

North Kosovo is a very tricky political situation where the govt. does not have effective control of the region, for political reasons you can’t force the population to pay but you can’t also cut them off either, since Serbia will step in and undermine Kosovo’s sovereignty.

The electric situation has allowed domestic and foreign opportunists to set up extensive mining operations with free electricity, this has cost the Kosovo govt. tens of millions in bills they have to cover. My grandpa’s village is a popular spot, every house is renting out their garages at crazy high prices, I’ve seen videos of rigs worth hundreds of thousands sitting in the barn in shelves next to the cows who use the heat.

My initial thought was that was two particles that are infinitesimally close at the start of the simulation will have radically different reflections and paths when they hit the fractal, since the fractal has no local similarity, therefore the choice of the number of particles to use in the simulation will greatly affect the shape of the reflected wave. However by the same logic that the fractal has no local similarity we can also conclude that because the fractal has no derivative, and therefore no tangent, and therefore no way to calculate the reflection angle for any point at all.