danschuller

This is some of the most clear, easy to following writing I've seen when talking about graphics programming. The illustrations are excellent too - good stuff!

Virtual and augmented reality seem like the endgame for what phones do for us now. Instead of a computer on every desk, or every pocket, it's one in every eye.

I'd rather follow a set of virtual arrows to my destination than have to keep checking my phone. This goes for a lot of tasks I use my phone for. Though the privacy concerns are more worrisome than mobile phones!

I loved Ultima 7.

An amazing feat for the time! The world simulation aspect of it was really cool (and something even now you don't see that often. Like a baker going to through process of baking bread everyday)

Neat. The speed-up with respect to cores is particularly impressive (though it would be interesting to know the exact conditions. Or is just some type of average-case?)

I think conscious isn't a binary yes/no kind of property. It's more a range, where you can put humans arbitrarily at 1.0 and then a mouse might be 0.05 or something like that. It certainly has self-awareness of somekind, even basic biological homeostasis requires self-awareness of a limited kind.

Other animals then present more consciousness, like chimps, dolphins, elephants etc and would place somewhere between the mouse and humans.

This is a neat. I like the idea and implementation!

Reminds me a little of the .plan files from the old Quake days, mixed with twitter / social media.

http://floodyberry.com/carmack/plan.html

I've signed up. Here's my little log: http://littlelogs.co/rpgdan/

I have quite fond memories of Swansea, I use to walk down to the beach on mornings in the summer and read there for a few hours before starting my day.

I think everyone would win if it became a tech-hub.

The city center is a bit ugly (probably due to rapid post-war reconstruction after being bombed, combined with the general horrors of UK 1960s architecture) :D but cost of living is definitely cheap.

Because of general UK drinking culture and Swansea being a University town the town center is pretty raucous most nights and especially at the weekend. At least that was the case when I was there about 10 years ago!

There's a lot of beautiful scenery - like the Gower http://www.visitswanseabay.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Rh...

And away from the city center it's much quiter and rural. People are super friendly and warm in my experience, definitely more so than average for the UK!

This doesn't mention any Eastern traditions of fake meat which are also pretty interesting and stem from Buddhism.

I've visited restaurants here in Hong Kong where everything is mock meat (usually tofu processed in some cunning manner, or fried gluten). From whole roast "ducks" to "chicken" skewers.

Some of the "meats" can look pretty convincing, though unless it's an unusually thick sauce, the taste and texture are different.

Pork Belly: http://static4.orstatic.com/userphoto/photo/4/3HT/00OUM883DA...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_duck

This was previously the Bitsquid engine. Really nice engine hope Autodesk can take the tooling to the next level!

Interesting stuff.

In a modern system an MVC (or similar) type architecture would work well for dialog. Of course writing that kind of thing on the NES where every byte counts would be a lot more challenging.

Singapore is a great place. Very meritocratic, high-tech, modern and forward-looking but it is a sort of benevolent dictatorship.

This is Lee Hsien Loong, the son of Lee Kuan Yew who built up Singapore (obviously a brilliant leader but also, with little oversight, worryingly quick to jail his critics). The People's Action Party (PAP) has been in power since Singapore's formation and opposition party leaders have found themselves in jail or sued into bankruptcy. Benevolent dictators and dynasties work great until they don't.

It will be interesting to see how Singapore fares a few leaders down the line. Hopefully pretty well and more politically tolerant; as it's a nice place with great, talented people!

Pandoc is great. I'm writing my book in markdown and using some Lua scripts and a latex style file with Pandoc to produce a nicely formatted pdf. (It's also one of the more prominent Haskell products but you wouldn't even know because it just works!)

I'm looking forward to increasing support for things like figure labelling (Automatically linking figure numbers and labels e.g. see figure 1.2) at the moment I handle this manually.

Agreed. A more generic VM seems the way to go.

.NET's CLR does well supporting a wide array of different languages very well C#, F#, IronPython, IronRuby etc

I'm living in Hong Kong now and I see old people collecting cardboard and looking through bins more than once a day. It's not a good situation! There are more news stories of older people commiting suicide compared to the UK.

Five-ish years ago I was living in Singapore too but I don't recall ever seeing it there, especially nothing compared to Hong Kong.

An interesting read but poor tools can't only be attributed to shipping culture. A more important reason is the tools are good enough (only just, but that's enough) and at that point priorities change. And once momentum becomes big it's hard to change direction i.e. Javascript, so hard to revisit the fundamentals.

Better tools are coming, such as Lighttable / Bret Victor's talk: https://vimeo.com/71278954 . But it's not clear when they'll arrive! Will we still be developing web-apps in Javascript after another decade? It feels like we can do better.

Just because they use it doesn't mean it's not still despised :)

Until very recently C++ has been the best tool for the job (or more usually C++ and Lua or other scripting language).

Creating a game a month is hard enough - impressive to see it completed using many different programming languages and frameworks

I used to work at Stainless, along with one or two other people I've spotted in this thread. It's a great place with good people.

Here's a little background for those who might not know:

Carmageddon was the precursor to games like Grand Theft Auto.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqrftlCAic0

It was made by Stainless Games on the Isle of Wight, a small island off the southern coast of England. The same developers are still developing day-to-day and recently made the Magic the Gathering video game series. The magic codebase is certainly not as sweary as the one linked here :)

Stainless lost the IP to Carmageddon but recently managed to get it back (it wound up at Square-Enix through various acquisitions) and successful kickstarter a reboot. I really hope they do well with it.

Any recommendations?

I'm loving Serial, I listened to nearly all of it today. Occasionally I listen to Startups For the Rest of Us (http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/) but it's hit and miss if the content is relevant for me. Hardcore History is excellent.

It'd be nice to discover some more.

It's interesting sometimes it's harder to go from language A -> B than B -> A.

If you're born Japanese then you lost the language lottery. Japanese has a limited set of sounds and there are very few close languages grammatically; Korean being the major one. So even the global language, English, is a massive challenge. It's easier for a Chinese person to learn Japanese than the other way round. (Japanese speakers at least have a big leg up on reading Chinese)

I wonder if it's easier to go from Chinese to English, they certainly have more sounds/tones an English speaker will have never spoken. In reality, major different is probably a power difference, it's a lot more useful to know English than it is to know Mandarin in the general case. (If a Chinese student goes to France they'll be using English)

I think this just demonstrates the power of the internet/social networks and an increasingly interconnected world.

Notch creates a small game on his own, improving on Infiniminer, it catches the imagination of an entire generation. Without the internet and social networks this would have never happened. Without this game having a multiplayer mode added (which happened fairly early on) it wouldn't have happened. I wonder what it would be like it Doom was first released into a similar environment but maybe it's a little less universal.

People in their bedrooms recording themselves playing video games speak as loudly, or more loudly than traditional media. PewDiePie has 30 million subscribers - he can make any game just with a mention.

It's interesting now our networks are concentrating and distributing influence, power and wealth. Nothing I could have predicted and I'll enjoy seeing what comes next.

I wish is a little bit more ubiquitous everywhere else. It's a great language and would have been a far better Javascript!

Scientific terms, especially biological, tend to more apparent. Our words have the legacy of Greek and Latin.

Metalua is a good example of a macros with an Algol-like syntax. It's built on top of Lua - as you might guess from the name.

http://metalua.luaforge.net/quicktour.html

I really enjoyed "The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles".

I've have it recommended a few times but the title sounded a bit self help-like so I avoided it. Eventually I did ready and it's pretty great. It covers how people manage to get work done, which is pretty important for everyone.

Last year I read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. It's non-fiction, though I believe the central premise is a little tongue in cheek. An ancient Roman manuscript that's rediscovered and helps set off the enlightenment and our modern culture.

For Buddhism I enjoyed Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps, mainly a collection of translated koans. If you've never it I recommend Godel Escher Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid, as it also likes to play with Buddhism. It's a book that tends to get a bit of hate but I found it quite fun and playful.

Non-fiction for sci-fi and fantasy: Robin Hobb and Vernor Vinge.

If you're working on your own projects or freelance, all you need is a bit of shade. Depending where you are then using mosquito coils, once the sun goes down, is a good idea.

I was in Ubud, Bali earlier last for a few months and worked in my garden under an awning. ( photo here: http://goo.gl/p1HdNG ). The garden had a power socket. Nicest working location I've had! On the downside wifi could be a bit spotty and there were occasional power outages.

Independent developers need money to fund the development, being exclusive to a platform gives you those funds, as well as marketing and various other forms of secondary support.

The alternatives are a publisher (historical a pretty mixed bag, gaining control of your IP, changing the focus or name - see Divine Divinty) or crowd-funding (usually not enough to fund the entire project, unless you're Star Citizen :)).