bemmu

Then the next step is apps that are 3D-aware, to let them draw beyond just a flat plane.

Lua on top of Roblox.

Not only can they learn to program, but their friends will be able to interact with what they've programmed, which should be much more motivating.

    mov ax, 13h
    int 10h

The two most important lines of asm for any teen trying to emulate their demoscene heroes.

Here's a better view of the explosion, along with reactions from Everyday Astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=16259&v=l4-PwxnJimg

I've always shared my numbers openly (http://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes). It makes a lot of sense for getting feedback and some initial customers as well, especially if you're just building something alone.

I think his belts alone cost more than my entire wardrobe.

This would be easier to read if the number of comments was dropped in favor of making the Y-axis be the average sentiment, and X-axis time (one month or quarter year buckets).

After I had to put my subscription box Candy Japan on covid pause, I started exploring new projects.

First I created a baby name finding website, which had a bit of popularity, but only made a few dollars.

Then I got curious about the Roblox platform, learned to script there, launched a game and have been updating that ever since. It's doing pretty well, and is also the most fun I've had programming since the times of MUD wizarding.

I was into Minecraft before, and now launched a somewhat successful game on Roblox. I don't think the games are really comparable at all, about the only similarity is the blocky look of the characters, and even that is changing soon, as skeletal animation was just launched.

If I had to compare to something, I'd say it's like Unity, except with their own app store from which you can instantly launch games/experiences, and with cross-platform multiplayer taken for granted.

What I love most about Roblox is how the community is leaving behind a lot of the old game tropes and coming up with completely new things, as a lot of the game makers are kids. Turns out most games don't have to involve shooting anything.

Also when running campaigns, I’ve seen an ad suddenly get way more clicks than usual in a short timespan. Depending on how clicks are counted, just one user who gets click-happy could skew the result.

But in this case I suspect people were just curious why the ad looked like that and clicked to find out. Those may not be the people likely to convert.

* Roblox has a massive IPO that values it at $20B after one week of trading. Facebook makes an offer to buy the company to boost its VR efforts, but the offer is rejected.

* The vaccine efforts work out, and travel begins to open up again after August.

What sci-fi would you recommend if I want to read more about this computronium?

Two books that describe what it's like to be somewhere else, living a different kind of life. I love these books that really transport you there, like having a really good friend explain things to you casually.

First of these is "Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road". What it's like to grow up while having family in a labor camp. What it's like to have your entire business or house confiscated. How hard it is to be a student. Also just plenty of interesting little tidbits on day-to-day life.

Second one is "The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery". It's about a foreigner who leaves his life behind and joins a zen monastery in Japan. It covers in detail the day-to-day experience of it, such as collapsing on temple grounds from lack of sleep during particularly demanding meditation sessions. But monks are human too, and on some occasions sneak over the temple walls for some fun outside.

Both of these transfer to you the "feel" of these places.

I injured myself ~20 years ago because of Corewars (well mostly stupidity, but Corewars was involved).

I wrote a little evolution routine that would take some corewars code and randomly change instructions around to see if it couldn't evolve a more successful program this way.

I let it run for hours and hours, and it did come up with short programs, and I was eager to see how it would continue. It happened that I needed to install a new light fixture in the same room as the computer... can you see where this is going?

Well, I didn't want to turn off the simulation, so I figured that if I instead just turn off the lights, then even without flipping the breaker for that room, I could be sure there would be no live wires leading to my new light fixture.

I was standing on a long stool and was about to start screwing in the light fixture to the ceiling wires with a lustre terminal and bam, I was hit with 220 volts.

I thought the only outcomes from getting electrocuted would be to either die or survive, but I discovered a third thing that can happen: I lost a bunch of color in my skin, and it never came back.

Lessons? Be careful with electricity, and try not to get too obsessed with Corewars.

I make games on Roblox. When a user spends $1 in your game, you get to keep about $0.25 of it ($0.70 if you spend the funds to buy other stuff on Roblox).

Basically 1/4 is the Apple/Google cut, 1/4 is Roblox profit, 1/4 is what they say is used to run servers etc.

This is not a complaint. I’m a big fan of the platform and think they provide huge value to developers. Just thought some might find the economics of it interesting.

Not even just a feeling - they really can build these experiences themselves. I just watched our 5-year old kitbash together a city full of cars in about 4 hours, which is now online for anyone to visit.

I find the platform very appealing even as an adult, as you can script in Lua, and then watch as hundreds of visitors interact with what you just wrote. This week I hacked the Bad Apple music video to run on Roblox, and then had a great time seeing people react to it.

I took this same approach and from about ~50 things, 5 made enough money to make it time well spent overall.

They were tiny like the projects listed here, so it's possible it could work out for the author, and I'm still sticking to the same approach now.

Launch something quick with little self-criticism, then double down on anything that seems to have traction.

Exactly. Back then it seemed like a word that people not much into the computer scene or non-specialist magazines would use, while to geeks the word was a joke.

Slightly off-topic, but which trade platforms are trustworthy for buying stocks in pre-IPO companies? I see in this post that SharesPost appears to be legit. Any others?

Also curious to hear if anyone managed to make such a purchase in a US pre-IPO company without being US-based.

Same for me. When the news broke, despite getting the latest app there was no button, but now there is (Japan).

For me it's seba = source env/bin/activate

Kind of like build time. Even with only a small fraction of time spent compiling, it can distract you and make it less enjoyable to code vs. seeing your changes instantly.

Another thing I'd like for small projects is for "obvious" modules to be imported without having to say so.

For example if I do glob.glob("*.txt") it's rather obvious that I also wanted to "import glob".

I loved this feature in when chatting on bulletin boards. So much so that I wanted to recreate the feeling: http://sysop.chat/

Which ones for example?

Growing up In Finland it was the only candy we would really want to eat, and if given a bag of mixed sweets would first fish out all the salmiakki (salty liquorice), and in the end reluctantly go on with the other, more lame sweets in the bag.

My old Nokia phone had a few feature I discovered during my first class in front of a new professor. I turned off my phone at start of class, but little did I know that the Nokia will ring the morning alarm even if your phone is off.

It was very loud in the quiet classroom, he gave me a look of “now I hate you”, and I didn’t even try to explain that actually, the phone is off.

Sure does, I have the same day as you. But wasn’t it pg’s blog and not Reddit that sent the initial users? Starting to get hazy on the details.

Nice, your now smartened ones are actually cheaper than our dumb ones then. I was looking at CS-220DFR, also for 6 tatami, for which the best price on Kakaku is 49k (tax inclusive).

But in the end we got three Daikin ones from our moving company, because their prices were similar (actually almost felt like we get the moving service as a bonus), and it seems very convenient to have one company do everything.

Curious to see if they try to sneak in some extra fees at the last moment, because as it is I wonder if they're actually making a profit with us.

I also live in Japan, and recently bought 3 new air conditioners, but my instinct was the opposite: forego anything "smart".

For tech like that I want it to be as dumb as possible so that there are less things that can go wrong with it. As a bonus the dumb ones are much cheaper as well.