mntmoss

6 ms·

1.
by mntmoss 6y ago
The way in which Sega ultimately approached its console hardware business was actually similar from start to finish; you just have to look at the pre-Mega Drive consoles to see that the Mega Drive itself was the shining exception within a s
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by mntmoss 6y ago
I think it helps to consider this a problem of "slow vs fast". Society has displayed ways of sheltering and hibernating through tulmultuous times and subsequently developing some kind of response. Chief among this is the reuse of
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by mntmoss 6y ago
What ad-hoc code generation lacks, as a rule, is type constraints and structured expression(syntax and semantics). If it has those, it is bordering on being a complete compiler. But if your base environment doesn't have notions of type
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by mntmoss 6y ago
I'm pretty sure there's room for smaller verticals these days. It's been demonstrated many times that if you have the best front-end to the problem space, and you add some services on top, everything under it can be totally c
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by mntmoss 6y ago
I'm getting to 35 now and I had an experience that felt very similar to yours in my coastal magnet school. Lots of academics, lots of extracurricular stress, kids of immigrants who pushed for more, more, more. The guy who sat next to m
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by mntmoss 6y ago
Yes, this argument is one shared with some arguments for minimum wage. When a sector of the economy can set wage freely, it often races to the bottom on price competitiveness, neglecting automation and training improvements; businesses that
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by mntmoss 6y ago
What tends to be absent in the simple analysis that leads to these kinds of hammer-to-all-nails solutions is a full enumeration of the classes of errors or intractable problems in the domain, and how the proposal does or does not address ea
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by mntmoss 6y ago
Some time ago I realized, while standing in the midst of the Oakland Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, surrounded by old game boxes, this: "Most of these games are all marketing." That is, if you look at the art, and look a
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by mntmoss 6y ago
The distinction is in quantity and types of assets. In 2D you usually have some bitmap and vector assets, collision data, animations, and scene structures to tie it all together. In 3D you have all of those things plus the texture/mode
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by mntmoss 6y ago
Definitions of games are quite prolific. In academia many end up going back to Huizinga's "magic circle" [0] which he was writing about in the 1930's, before any video games were around(although many immediate mechanical
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by mntmoss 6y ago
I don't disagree. I believe, though, that our working philosophy limits us: "pursuit of property" in the Lockean sense, and "pursuit of utility" in the Bentham-Mill sense have guided a lot of what we currently build
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by mntmoss 6y ago
IME it's all down to the implementation these days, which is a low-bidder-gets-what-they-pay-for kind of affair. My phone is cheap and the Bluetooth is nearly unusable on it(it can only really support one device at a time and that devi
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by mntmoss 6y ago
In two parts: 1. Fix the underlying ergonomics. Put your monitor higher and your keyboard closer. The position you want is like the rest position of a dancer: elbows nearly against your sides, relaxed. (Taking an actual dance class will tea
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by mntmoss 6y ago
1. Write placeholder output, the equivalent of a Hello World for the task. 2. Start parameterizing parts of the program to generate the output, so that more and more of the output comes from a few source variables. 3. Eventually you want a
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by mntmoss 6y ago
For most programming tasks I would focus on the base of the pyramid: Make the storage low-latency for small files, then up the memory size and bandwidth, and then use a CPU appropriate to the workload(ideally, it can go wide and parallelize
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by mntmoss 6y ago
What I think Cook misses that Jobs got, and made for more exciting releases, is the idea of a totally integrated service. The iPod's victory was also a victory for iTunes. The iPhone was also the App Store. And when Jobs left, those ki
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by mntmoss 6y ago
The question to reconcile in my mind: Malleable systems with reproducable builds. It's very easy to get your hands dirty with the bytes and add various assumptions and dependencies. Most "hack solutions" go in that direction.
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by mntmoss 6y ago
Money is intrinsically related to debt and ability to pay one's debts. This has several meanings when you look at different scales of money. An individual's debts are related to near-term life needs: making rent, putting food on t
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by mntmoss 6y ago
It's a fine line. There are plenty of stories of games that dumbed down their AI because it started doing inscrutable things when fully unleashed - and simulating full sense perception for something like a soldier in a shooter game is
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by mntmoss 6y ago
"Factoring" is sometimes used in the Forth world, since code being factored into small words is of such eminence. And it offers good lessons about what's worth factoring and how. Forth words that are just static answers and a
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by mntmoss 6y ago
The real beauty of Nintendo's strategies, I think, is that they validate many forms of analysis. The design in them is never just great hardware, or great software, or great marketing, or any one objective quality metric, but some kind
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by mntmoss 6y ago
The military - and many essential services like police, fire, healthcare - differ in that a majority of the work is not "doing" but "preparing". The military does not optimize towards cheaply increasing daily metrics of
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by mntmoss 6y ago
Whether it works or not depends on how much your relationship is built on systematic, empirical decisions. Spreadsheets like this are hugely common in larger communal living arrangements. And there is a harsh quality to it, but I don't
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by mntmoss 6y ago
You may want to try raylib. It's written by a teacher who uses it in the classroom and geared for this kind of "let me code games in C but with only one dependency" goal. It does more than you need but that's a common th
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by mntmoss 6y ago
I don't collect things I "need to get to", if that makes sense. I collect things I'm willing to spend time curating, which generally means they go in a file somewhere under a directory called "References". Refe
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by mntmoss 6y ago
Foley mixing is still the state of the art in the majority of cases, but there is a lot more DSP power to throw at spatial positioning and acoustics, which makes the resulting mix a lot smoother.
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by mntmoss 6y ago
It's the Rule of Least Power in action. [0] You don't want to have extreme degrees of polymorphism the vast majority of the time. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power
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by mntmoss 6y ago
Some of the biggest early Haxe users like Tivo were explicitly looking for a vehicle to transition off of Flash. That part of it definitely makes sense. But more generally it is incapable of the kind of end-user tooling that attracts early
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by mntmoss 6y ago
In the end they're all situational formalisms. Imperative code is by definition implementing a state machine. One thing that you can often get by moving the state machine a bit away from the source code as tends to be the case with th
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by mntmoss 6y ago
In all markets, and generally as a life strategy, there is a "winner" method and a "survivor" method. If you play to win, you are most likely following accepted best practices to maximize gains - in your career, socially

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