mntmoss

28 ms·

181.
by mntmoss 7y ago
It comes hand-in-hand with the rapid growth of people entering development with a commercial mindset. This has been a thing ever since there was a software industry, but as the profession has grown farther away from academia it's only
182.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Taking improv class, I got to meet a lot of people who - besides the acting part of improv - were basically interested in striking up conversation. I was a bit out of my comfort zone, but it was a good learning experience and it gave me a
183.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I don't think Unity3D has anywhere to go from here but down. Which doesn't mean it's dead, since there is a long sunset in sight - but the gamedev workforce turns over in cycles of under five years, which means that training
184.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Another way to think about it is that the contemporary dance sound is determined by whatever the hot gear is, and not by the artists using it(because they are disposable figureheads). And the gear market itself, well, it's also looking
185.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Seconding the Organelle as the OP-1 alternative. I haven't got one, but I have definitely considered pulling the trigger. (The "ultra-budget portable" option is to get a Casio SA and a digital FX pedal. Combine that with a li
186.
by mntmoss 7y ago
One of the "what ifs" I often have when looking back at this period is that if CGA/EGA had fully supported user-defined palettes(the actual support for it is "in some modes, kinda", with the original CGA monitor des
187.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I have a little rant on this. In the scale of "understanding imperative semantics", awareness of race conditions is probably near the very high end of difficulty, while pointers are only somewhere in the middle. And that's a
188.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I think I can sum it up in a Yogi-Berra-ism: The game industry is very industrialized. If you work on a commercial product, most of your effort goes towards making a product, and any specific details of the game are often a small part, one
189.
by mntmoss 7y ago
A large part of the answer is historical(80 column text is derived from the IBM punchcard standards of yesteryear). The remainder is in information theory: we tend to use textual language because the data is a nice compromise between "
190.
by mntmoss 7y ago
That's wonderful to hear, I just wish I had learned about it sooner. I kept looking back at TinyGo for WASM tasks, because it looked like the right combo of size footprint and runtime capabilities, then ultimately thinking "hmm bu
191.
by mntmoss 7y ago
A known phenomenon is that being homeless can work wonders for one's social skills. Being poorly presented and inarticulate is a form of privilege - it's traditionally associated with academia, but with the rise of the "compu
192.
by mntmoss 7y ago
An old story from my dad is of observing a couple while dining at the Cliff House(SF attraction looking out over the Pacific Ocean). The lady was asked what she thought of the ocean and she replied, "I'm very disappointed. I thoug
193.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I read the other day about geofencing being used to enforce speed limits for rental ebikes and scooters in some jurisdictions. It's not hard to imagine it progressing from speed limits to top-down traffic control programs. This probabl
194.
by mntmoss 7y ago
How do you do that in unsafe Rust?
195.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Many of these kinds of industrial-history questions can be answered along a few different angles: * Trade and access to raw materials. This is often one that limits development and diffusion even if the concept is known, and for the bicycle
196.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I definitely think there is a learnable aspect to design. Throwing data at the problem is expensive and does not create many deep insights. But focusing on communication and how the product communicates a coherent philosophy through feature
197.
by mntmoss 7y ago
You always have to set your own rubrics(self-critique, self-feedback) for success, from the very beginning. Society will always try to impose some on you, for big things(political platforms) and small(bringing the coolest lunchbox to the sc
198.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Another one-pass data point is Action![0] for the Atari 8-bit computers. The compiler is extremely efficient for its day and a source code release was made just a few years ago. [1] But good luck making sense of it -- besides being all 6502
199.
by mntmoss 7y ago
I came into the thread looking for this comment. The motivation in the 63-pass compiler is to get the job done in a very memory-frugal form. That it's relatively easy to follow is an additional bonus - a good lesson in software design.
200.
by mntmoss 7y ago
It's analagous to optimizations for resource-starved systems. If you have trouble processing 16 of something, you don't really benefit from improving the O(n) at the cost of higher overhead, you benefit from the same algorithm pro
201.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Minimum wages have some power to make an industry favor higher-skilled work and automation(and therefore, more valuable work). When wages are low, the whole industry is obliged to use cheap and unskilled labor to stay cost-competitive. When
202.
by mntmoss 7y ago
A latency hit is not a prime concern for retail builds of AAA games. Cache coherency can be done to a very fine-grained degree in a AAA asset pipeline when a few developers are pointed entirely at that optimization problem, since most game
203.
by mntmoss 7y ago
This is the way with any issue of public importance, which, as a capital-F Free Software project with a lengthy history and many contributors, GIMP has grown into. The software's functionality is commendable, and they have made some st
204.
by mntmoss 7y ago
Traditional merch takes a higher level of capex. Part of the appeal of microtransactions - and increasingly the preferred model when looking at newer multiplayer hits like Fortnite - is that you can get in that business for cheaper by selli
205.
by mntmoss 7y ago
With Bitcoin, there are certain elements that make it desirable as a bargaining chip during internal power struggles. The claim of banking and government being joined at the hip is true due to pragmatic convenience: If you want to have pow
206.
by mntmoss 7y ago
You might have some success with Wardley mapping[0] as a way of presenting the scenario and strategy and getting some buy-in. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardley_map
207.
by mntmoss 7y ago
"Fast is smooth, smooth is slow" is the phrase that comes to mind.
208.
by mntmoss 7y ago
That won't pencil out for everyone, though. If you convert "four times a year" to "one blockbuster a season" you are going to get gaps in which the theaters scramble to find other ways to use the space and keep the
209.
by mntmoss 7y ago
This is related to the general "is it luck or is it skill" question: At the broadest scales, luck increasingly explains every factor of experience. But in the everyday situation you can always point to factors of skill, until you
210.
by mntmoss 7y ago
You could make the argument that this behavior precipitated the '84 game crash, of which a major cause was consumers reducing their purchases and expectations after experiencing low quality products.

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