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The good: he spent a lot of time learning about logic circuits The bad: he spent a lot of time making a simulation of a logic circuit that has no practical app

The good: he spent a lot of time learning about logic circuits The bad: he spent a lot of time making a simulation of a logic circuit that has no practical application I can imagine It's probably a net plus overall, since learning and modeling what one knows is a great way to reinforce it, but one is left with the impression that this is a person who can spend a lot of time on things. I hate to be a prude, and everybody loves a hobby, but we keep seeing these stories of guys who spend hundreds or thousands of hours on these very unusual and detailed configurations of virtual goods -- the maximized Sim City guy comes to mind. Something about our praising this behavior bugs me. I guess it's not clear to me the difference between unnaturally focusing in on small things - -like in Aspergers -- and just having a hobby. Aside from this guy, who seems wonderfully well-balanced, I wonder if we're not praising people who might actually need help. I don't know. I probably didn't say that as well as I could.

kiba 16y ago
It's a lot better than watching TV 4 fricking hours everyday.(That's American statistics) It's a practically a part time job for many people. Better to use that attention span for something else, like minecraft.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  Really? Why? I can see "learning about computing is better than mindless entertainment", but once we've separated this into "learning" and "building" components, the "building" part seems pretty much exactly the same as being entertained some other way, except for the detail that it simulates achievement, which is arguably a bad thing.
  - kiba 16y ago
    I think building is still a lot better than watching though.
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      Understood. I just don't see why you believe it's better even when it's simulated building. This sort of thing seems amazing to me, but not necessarily praiseworthy.
      - chipsy 16y ago
        All of our educational methods are built around simulations and constrained, simplified problems. We don't ask first-year undergraduates to go out and start working on real-world projects immediately. Some of them can manage with sink-or-swim methods, but there's a lot of benefit to be had from a trivial context - it's like the difference between learning to trade stocks on paper(risk-free intellectual challenge) and putting real money out there(psychological stress, real world consequences). If you raise the stakes immediately, you may defeat the learning process. And most of the people doing these kinds of things, are, unsurprisingly, around college age.
      - awakeasleep 16y ago
        So what about programming a computer? That's surely simulated building.
        randallsquared 16y ago
        I don't think it is, in the same way. There are some languages and environments, though, that would seem very much like this. For example, if you were to reimplement the a linux kernel driver in the Whitespace programming language, it would almost perfectly analogous to this, except that it couldn't be removed by the failure of the implementor of the Whitespace interpreter. I have no actual criticism of doing this -- I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do. Instead, I'm saying that aside from benefits like aiding learning (separated out by the initial comment regarding good:/bad:), it's just a method of creating the sensation of having built something without anything having really been built, and thus it's very much pure entertainment, like watching TV.
        awakeasleep 16y ago
  - kd0amg 16y ago
    once we've separated this into "learning" and "building" components We should not separate them like this. Building something is often a great way to learn about it.
qntm 16y ago
If fate has doomed you to be a Minecraft fanatic, you might as well be the best damned Minecraft fanatic you can be.
Volscio 16y ago
Maybe you're on the wrong forum. Hackers do stuff just because they're curious. [edit: he should have a monetization strategy!!]
hugh3 16y ago
I'd rate this a lot higher than the guy who made a big effort out of trying to build Simcity city with the largest possible population. SimCity guy spent years on his city. I don't know how long this guy spent, but it can't have been nearly that long since the game is only a year or so old. It probably took some reasonable number of hours -- probably less than the average Minecraft player spends playing Minecraft without producing anything that anyone ever wants to look at. Secondly, SimCity guy was trying to get the highest possible score within the parameters of the game as defined, which is less creative than this guy who is using the game in an unexpected and novel way.
- duck 16y ago
  I agree, but I think the biggest net gain is how things like this show how cool and limitless Minecraft is, which will surely result in new users from the attention something like this gets.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Wait, was this done by the guy who wrote Minecraft? I thought it was done by someone else. If it wasn't I'm not sure how promoting Minecraft is a "net gain"... certainly encouraging more people to play video games is hardly an especially worthy goal.
    - JeanPierre 16y ago
      This guy learned how to make a 16-bit ALU (Which in my opinion is a great amount of experience) and got a job offer from playing a game on his spare time. Hackers that play video games want to learn and try out different things with the game, not only play it. I myself am really interested in how the game is saved (How chunks is designed, etc.) and is now currently studying linearly interpolated 3d perlin noise on my spare time because that's how Minecraft design the dynamic world. Hackers that have decrypted or learned how the game is saved will make tools to ease work, and/or to visually view their world, or to see it from a different perspective. Minecraft has made hackers design map-editors, cartograms and other things, including a 16-bit ALU in-game. Making programs and learning how stuff works is a net gain for the community.
patio11 16y ago
Part of me has the reaction you labeled prudish, too. The other part of me thinks this is sort of a rich-people's problem caused by a cognitive surplus and a societal decision to subsidize whatever he is doing right now, probably because he is a student. Yeah, Minecraft might be wasted time, but it isn't obviously more wasted than time spent acing the heck out of a degree in Studio Art. [I'm slagging excessively on art degrees. I simulated logic circuits for my Computer Engineering courses -- built an entire CPU, one line of VRML or whatever it is called at a time. It also has no practical application because it was thirty years behind state of the art, but it was a learning experience.] Besides, the nice thing about students is that they have the rest of their lives to do something important. I mean, personal experience here: to at least some degree, what I will do today is important: I'm helping a company help their thousands of customers help their millions of customers. Yay. If you were to flip back five years to the second, I think I was probably in a WoW raid. And there were spreadsheets for that WoW raid, and a complicated compensation system to maximize participation from 60+ participants (40 on any given night), and political issues, and blah blah blah. Five years later, does anyone remember that we killed the dragon and got the purple pixels in 3 hours instead of in 5 because of obsessive optimization? Probably not. Did obsessive optimization really help me out in the intervening five years? Oh heck yes. Is it going to help my client out today? Oh heck yes, except 5% of "really freaking big number" is better than 5% of what my sales are. Who knows where this kid will be in five years? He could be an architect. He could be a project lead. He could do something really important, like being a dad.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  Spot on. I agree completely. I was going to add something to my original comment, but I can't get the wording right, so I'll just express my feelings about the article. When I read the article, I was amazed! What a huge undertaking! And so much detail! But then, as he walked around showing everything, it hit me how much mundane and tiny little bits of work had to go into doing this. That's fine, but interesting that it has so much detail. Then it occurred to me that this kid actually knew how to build a real logic circuit -- a physical thing with value. The time he spent doing this he could have taken a FPGA and made the next super-bang-whizmo. That no matter how much work he put into his minecraft modeling, one day ten years from now they're going to turn off the game and he's got, well, nothing. Except memories and a story. Whereas he could have spent that same talent, knowledge, and hard work and at least have something you could touch. And here we are lauding him like he built the next lunar lander. And even that was okay -- nothing wrong with modeling out things you are learning as a way to reinforce your knowledge. I think this guy is smart as hell and is going to go far. But then I thought about all the other video-game creations that we've praised. I started wondering if for every one of these guys there aren't a thousand other guys doing the same thing. Guys building things with no real-world correlation or value. Not a happy thought. I'm sure it's just my contrarianism, but it bugged me. Enough to comment.
awakeasleep 16y ago
If that gets you, think about all the time people spend masturbating. What's wrong with taking pleasure from life?
makalu 16y ago
Art is also pointless in most cases, but--and I'm sure some will disagree with this--there's a value in the process and in what is produced. Whether it be real or virtual. I think this holds true for the logic circuit guy too. Also, there's no way to know if someone who posts something online "need's help" so that seems liks a pointless debate to me.
Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I worked for a company that did a lot of DARPA/DoD work, there were plenty of amazingly bright people who spent all of their time making things to make the military better. Sure many were for defense, and often found uses outside of the military. But at the end of the day they all support goals that in the end probably cause a fair amount of more suffering in the world. So if someone wants to spend their time on something that is completely harmless, and probably brightens a few people's days and may even inspire others to go out and learn something new, I feel that this is a much better way to spend someone's mental energy.
joshu 16y ago
Or maybe he has a tough job and finds this relaxing. I just dig big holes in minecraft and find it a pleasant, brainless activity. Remember: This is water.

kiba 16y ago

It's a lot better than watching TV 4 fricking hours everyday.(That's American statistics) It's a practically a part time job for many people. Better to use that attention span for something else, like minecraft.

randallsquared 16y ago
Really? Why? I can see "learning about computing is better than mindless entertainment", but once we've separated this into "learning" and "building" components, the "building" part seems pretty much exactly the same as being entertained some other way, except for the detail that it simulates achievement, which is arguably a bad thing.
- kiba 16y ago
  I think building is still a lot better than watching though.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    Understood. I just don't see why you believe it's better even when it's simulated building. This sort of thing seems amazing to me, but not necessarily praiseworthy.
    - chipsy 16y ago
      All of our educational methods are built around simulations and constrained, simplified problems. We don't ask first-year undergraduates to go out and start working on real-world projects immediately. Some of them can manage with sink-or-swim methods, but there's a lot of benefit to be had from a trivial context - it's like the difference between learning to trade stocks on paper(risk-free intellectual challenge) and putting real money out there(psychological stress, real world consequences). If you raise the stakes immediately, you may defeat the learning process. And most of the people doing these kinds of things, are, unsurprisingly, around college age.
    - awakeasleep 16y ago
      So what about programming a computer? That's surely simulated building.
      - randallsquared 16y ago
        I don't think it is, in the same way. There are some languages and environments, though, that would seem very much like this. For example, if you were to reimplement the a linux kernel driver in the Whitespace programming language, it would almost perfectly analogous to this, except that it couldn't be removed by the failure of the implementor of the Whitespace interpreter. I have no actual criticism of doing this -- I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do. Instead, I'm saying that aside from benefits like aiding learning (separated out by the initial comment regarding good:/bad:), it's just a method of creating the sensation of having built something without anything having really been built, and thus it's very much pure entertainment, like watching TV.
        awakeasleep 16y ago
- kd0amg 16y ago
  once we've separated this into "learning" and "building" components We should not separate them like this. Building something is often a great way to learn about it.

qntm 16y ago

If fate has doomed you to be a Minecraft fanatic, you might as well be the best damned Minecraft fanatic you can be.

Volscio 16y ago

Maybe you're on the wrong forum. Hackers do stuff just because they're curious. [edit: he should have a monetization strategy!!]

hugh3 16y ago

I'd rate this a lot higher than the guy who made a big effort out of trying to build Simcity city with the largest possible population. SimCity guy spent years on his city. I don't know how long this guy spent, but it can't have been nearly that long since the game is only a year or so old. It probably took some reasonable number of hours -- probably less than the average Minecraft player spends playing Minecraft without producing anything that anyone ever wants to look at. Secondly, SimCity guy was trying to get the highest possible score within the parameters of the game as defined, which is less creative than this guy who is using the game in an unexpected and novel way.

duck 16y ago
I agree, but I think the biggest net gain is how things like this show how cool and limitless Minecraft is, which will surely result in new users from the attention something like this gets.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Wait, was this done by the guy who wrote Minecraft? I thought it was done by someone else. If it wasn't I'm not sure how promoting Minecraft is a "net gain"... certainly encouraging more people to play video games is hardly an especially worthy goal.
  - JeanPierre 16y ago
    This guy learned how to make a 16-bit ALU (Which in my opinion is a great amount of experience) and got a job offer from playing a game on his spare time. Hackers that play video games want to learn and try out different things with the game, not only play it. I myself am really interested in how the game is saved (How chunks is designed, etc.) and is now currently studying linearly interpolated 3d perlin noise on my spare time because that's how Minecraft design the dynamic world. Hackers that have decrypted or learned how the game is saved will make tools to ease work, and/or to visually view their world, or to see it from a different perspective. Minecraft has made hackers design map-editors, cartograms and other things, including a 16-bit ALU in-game. Making programs and learning how stuff works is a net gain for the community.

patio11 16y ago

Part of me has the reaction you labeled prudish, too. The other part of me thinks this is sort of a rich-people's problem caused by a cognitive surplus and a societal decision to subsidize whatever he is doing right now, probably because he is a student. Yeah, Minecraft might be wasted time, but it isn't obviously more wasted than time spent acing the heck out of a degree in Studio Art. [I'm slagging excessively on art degrees. I simulated logic circuits for my Computer Engineering courses -- built an entire CPU, one line of VRML or whatever it is called at a time. It also has no practical application because it was thirty years behind state of the art, but it was a learning experience.] Besides, the nice thing about students is that they have the rest of their lives to do something important. I mean, personal experience here: to at least some degree, what I will do today is important: I'm helping a company help their thousands of customers help their millions of customers. Yay. If you were to flip back five years to the second, I think I was probably in a WoW raid. And there were spreadsheets for that WoW raid, and a complicated compensation system to maximize participation from 60+ participants (40 on any given night), and political issues, and blah blah blah. Five years later, does anyone remember that we killed the dragon and got the purple pixels in 3 hours instead of in 5 because of obsessive optimization? Probably not. Did obsessive optimization really help me out in the intervening five years? Oh heck yes. Is it going to help my client out today? Oh heck yes, except 5% of "really freaking big number" is better than 5% of what my sales are. Who knows where this kid will be in five years? He could be an architect. He could be a project lead. He could do something really important, like being a dad.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Spot on. I agree completely. I was going to add something to my original comment, but I can't get the wording right, so I'll just express my feelings about the article. When I read the article, I was amazed! What a huge undertaking! And so much detail! But then, as he walked around showing everything, it hit me how much mundane and tiny little bits of work had to go into doing this. That's fine, but interesting that it has so much detail. Then it occurred to me that this kid actually knew how to build a real logic circuit -- a physical thing with value. The time he spent doing this he could have taken a FPGA and made the next super-bang-whizmo. That no matter how much work he put into his minecraft modeling, one day ten years from now they're going to turn off the game and he's got, well, nothing. Except memories and a story. Whereas he could have spent that same talent, knowledge, and hard work and at least have something you could touch. And here we are lauding him like he built the next lunar lander. And even that was okay -- nothing wrong with modeling out things you are learning as a way to reinforce your knowledge. I think this guy is smart as hell and is going to go far. But then I thought about all the other video-game creations that we've praised. I started wondering if for every one of these guys there aren't a thousand other guys doing the same thing. Guys building things with no real-world correlation or value. Not a happy thought. I'm sure it's just my contrarianism, but it bugged me. Enough to comment.

awakeasleep 16y ago

If that gets you, think about all the time people spend masturbating. What's wrong with taking pleasure from life?

makalu 16y ago

Art is also pointless in most cases, but--and I'm sure some will disagree with this--there's a value in the process and in what is produced. Whether it be real or virtual. I think this holds true for the logic circuit guy too. Also, there's no way to know if someone who posts something online "need's help" so that seems liks a pointless debate to me.

Homunculiheaded 16y ago

I worked for a company that did a lot of DARPA/DoD work, there were plenty of amazingly bright people who spent all of their time making things to make the military better. Sure many were for defense, and often found uses outside of the military. But at the end of the day they all support goals that in the end probably cause a fair amount of more suffering in the world. So if someone wants to spend their time on something that is completely harmless, and probably brightens a few people's days and may even inspire others to go out and learn something new, I feel that this is a much better way to spend someone's mental energy.

joshu 16y ago

Or maybe he has a tough job and finds this relaxing. I just dig big holes in minecraft and find it a pleasant, brainless activity. Remember: This is water.