wallstop

I'm gonna jump in here with some self promo - back in college I TA'd a class that, for a few weeks, taught Malbolge, and the only assignment was for students to write a program that printed their name.

After spending a lot of time thinking about the language, I came up with a relatively simple algorithm based on the language design - there are a few operators that mutate state, so basically just try combinations of those until your next memory cell contains the thing that you want, then lock those instructions in and advance.

Basically RNG yourself to victory.

The original code for that algorithm is here (python, + my own interpreter): https://github.com/wallstop/malbolge-toolkit/tree/dd942fb981...

I've since llmified it as an exercise.

BUT! The whole reason for this comment is to nerd say that printing stuff is relatively easy if you invest the time in learning the language's primitives and think of programming in it more as algorithms to operate on the op codes instead of literally writing code.

Now, to do more interesting things other than printing - I'd have to spend even more time thinking about the language, which I don't want to

I think the second sentence of the article covers that pretty simply? To run it in the browser with wasm?

> One of the most exciting things I've been doing with this is getting my Scheme to compile to the Web thanks to Hoot.

I guess we have very different ideas around what makes good music. Every single Suno produced song sounds like a 60kbps extremely compressed mp3 while also having extremely generic, uninspiring structures and complete lack of interesting sonic/instrumental layers.

It's great that people find joy in it, but as someone that is critical of both music production and fidelity, the current offerings fall incredibly short of anything I would ever want to listen to.

If this is a learning exercise, cool!

If this is a real thing, it needs a lot of work. Lots of failure modes, errors that are not being handled, sometimes exceptions, sometimes swallowing and printing to stdout, very inconsistent style, mixing and matching all kinds of C and C++ conventions, the fallback hard coded path of your specific user name + deep path ...

I would recommend not using this for any data that you actually care about.

Ah, yes, the "you're holding it wrong" defense. If one tool has a higher safety rating than another, significantly so, preventing entire classes of mistakes from happening that the other does not, in a kind of superset manner - even the most skilled craftsman will inevitably make mistakes that would have been prevented by the safer tool.

Sorry, what I meant by "system error" was more "notification system error". Not error as in "data loss", error as in "reporting".

Anecdata, they might have had a system error. My Microsoft account that I use the free tier OneDrive on had the same email sent (you're over x% full, consider upgrading!). I suspected everything you did - eventually I logged in after verifying the email - nope, 5% usage or so.

I then went and deleted more stuff, but my money would be on a reporting glitch than a malicious money campaign.

I don't think you really need a tool for that, you can just add something like "after the task is finished, have a subagent review the work in an adversarial fashion. If any defects, no matter how small are found, have another subagent implement the findings. Repeat this in a loop until all subagents achieve consensus that the product is of exceptional quality with no defects" or similar to each prompt. Each subagent gets its own, fresh, context window. No tooling required.

I'm not saying the tech currently exists in a form you can just plop into a project and have it give you the exact CRT look and feel that you want. What I am saying is that you can do that within any modern game engine - you just have to decide what, exactly, the look and feel you want is and how to get there.

As an example, I will quote the article:

> Retro Game Engine owns the full frame lifecycle. I decide what the input signals are, what the display does with it, how time affects it, what gets presented and when.

You can replace "Retro Game Engine" in that sentence with "Unity" or "Godot" and it is just as true.

From my experience with game engines and people that really care about CRTs - I believe the effect (confidence: 95%) can be entirely achieved with rendering glue in any of the modern game engines - Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc. Now, whether or not it is a literal shader, or a shader + custom sauce, not sure.

However, I have not tried, so I cannot verify that claim to 100% accuracy. The author ...might have tried? They definitely surveyed the landscape. My read of the article was that they went down this rabbit hole and back-justified it instead of investing a similar amount of time in a practical solution in a modern engine.

CRT look and feel is a niche full of very passionate and opinionated people.

This is cool. I took a look at the public GitHub (not too deep) and this appears to use classical neural network training techniques - there is an exposed API that the author came up with a clever way to encode Doom state and inputs into. Well done!

Typically my criteria for "production-ready" is "has been battle-tested in production".

Without any production dog fooding, I consider software (that I write) as "alpha", "beta", or "preview".

I wrote my own spin lock library over a decade ago in order to learn about multi threading, concurrency, and how all this stuff works. I learned a lot!

Thanks! My other problem was formatting. Just wanted to share that I see 0 swap usage and nowhere near 100% memory usage as a counterpoint.

Edit:

    wallstop@fridge:~$ free -m
                   total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
    Mem:           15838        9627        3939          26        2637        6210
    Swap:           4095           0        4095


    wallstop@fridge:~$ uptime

    00:43:54 up 37 days, 23:24,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

> Clean code will slow you down

Hard disagree. In fact, learning how to apply clean code and architectural patterns in game dev has kept projects manageable and on track and done nothing but level up my general software ability.

You can do the above in C#, I haven't written Java in a decade so can't comment on that. I don't really understand your argument though - the options approach is extremely readable. You can also do the options approach in C or C++. The amount of stuff that you can slap into one line is an interesting benchmark to use for languages.

This is a philosophy, or "opinion", and should not be confused with truth. If the world was 100% evil people and beings, across all of history, forever, the present would look very different than it does now. And none of us know what the future holds.

Interesting. When I do not feel up to the task of working, whether it is a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or arbitrary cause, I use one of my provided PTO days and email the team a short "I will not be showing up to work today" message, without explaining the cause.

I similarly don't bat an eye when a coworker takes off for whatever reason. We're allotted PTO. Why jump through hoops to convince ourselves that it's ok to use it?

This looks interesting. Maybe I'm not in-the-know, but why would you offload such important aspects like `sync` to the client instead of building in some protocol to ensure that file integrity is maintained? With this kind of design choice, it seems quite easy to lose data, unless I'm missing something.

For a game I'm making, I have a helper function that takes in a specified time (as a float) and returns a (heap based) wait instruction. The times are literals sprinkled throughout the code base of callers of this function, so I maintain a cache of time -> wait instruction to reduce allocations.

Does it? https://blog.stephencleary.com/2013/11/there-is-no-thread.ht...

Likewise Children of Time (https://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky/dp/1...), another piece of solid sci-fi that explores some ideas about the development of "intelligence".

Relevant - http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

Probably the parent, who has a username that indicates some affinity with the Go programming language.

Do you have a source for the majority of of azure running on Linux? Would be very interested to see this.

What kind of reliability issues have you had with Azure that didn't happen on AWS or GCE?

While it's great that you've never had one rejected, what would happen if that event occurred? Imagine a situation where you submit a proposal for a completely unrelated project, that you really want to happen, and they deny it? Further conversations, talks, they don't budge. What then?

Anecdotal counterpoint: I develop java and python at work, C# and C++ at home, use / have used Eclipse, IntelliJ, ST + plugins, vim, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio for development. Of all of the above, I've found that Visual Studio is by far the most pleasant to work in environment (for C# and C++), hands down.

Agreed, although other arguments could be made.

There's the key phrase

> I haven’t updated that app in years

Arguably, the most important place for clean code is everywhere, but the largest use-case for it is in projects that are expected to live, or in places that the code is seen / used by people who are not the original developer(s).

If your goal is to "ship it and forget it", great. Do whatever you need. Outsource it to some other country if it's cheaper, who cares? You're not going to be maintaining it anyway. Does this make something good? No. Is it excusable? Maybe.