It's a "forever project". [0] If you look at a lot of luminary careers, they also involve forever projects that happen to produce a digestible result. There's a

It's a "forever project". [0] If you look at a lot of luminary careers, they also involve forever projects that happen to produce a digestible result. There's an element of needing a bit of direction and structure so that you don't go full "mad scientist" and lose your grounding. For me, the actual forever project, if I had to put words to it, is something to do with studies in the cybernetics of creativity, or in ELI5 terms: "why is making games hard?" It's not really approachable just by making a slightly better tool, or a great tutorial, or a magic algorithm, or by organizing a great team for a single project - and the scope is multidisciplinary, making it less legible what I'm doing or why. But if I examine all my attempts there is an orbit to it that is gradually getting tighter. With respect to examining low level issues in computing there's a huge pull to engage in forever projects because everywhere you look, the solutions being built on are rough-and-ready ideas rushed into production decades ago and then examined only occasionally afterwards. My own efforts started getting sucked into the gravity well of "perhaps I need to write a language, an operating system and a runtime environment to properly express this" - I managed to climb out again recently by focusing on formats, data portability and conceptual specifications instead of concrete ones with actively maintained production code - it's always the maintenance that is a killer and I can see that being an issue for Piet's current strategy too. Our ability to conceptualize always outstrips the daily grind, but we need to have one to stay in that grounded mode. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917834