devbug

Thank you.

Every supportive comment leads me closer to finishing it, knowing it would be enjoyed.

> I think that's a good literary caricature of a very real possibility of how a post-scarcity or even post-singularity economy might look.

Unfortunately so. "Scares" me too.

> It would also be in the best interest of your ruling class to occasionally drop money from helicopters-- think potato salad guy but systemic, maybe guided by algorithms to stimulate increases in monetary velocity. Post-scarcity postmodern Keynesianism?

I did not think of that, mainly because it does not make sense in the management economy that rules this fictional world. Ideally it would be completely self-sustaining and would likely continue on until an extinction event, however there is a "management debt" accrued as the result of business and government inefficiency and abstraction (see failed government-contractor negotiations). If left unchecked it would result in collapse of such a system because everything would become horribly fubar. Thus, to prevent the collapse of their system, the ruling class in interest of its own survival could indirectly (AI) or directly "pay off" the management debt by investing or creating (and importing selected individuals from the non-ruling class) ventures that fix the dilapidated systems or provided exploratory break through (space travel). This raises some from the non-ruling class to the ruling class in the process, of course, but is of little impact. Additionally, potato salad ventures could be used in a lottery system to provide hope to the non-ruling class, or completely replace the previous method of management debt checking, allowing the system to operate for much longer than it normally would... until it suddenly collapses under the insane amounts of inefficiency it introduces.

(Interestingly, this explains large corporate behaviour.)

> I could see Martian colonization and other difficult endeavours being undertaken by those who see this existence as empty and pointless and who actively desire a real challenge... possibly led and capitalized by factions of the ruling class who share this sentiment.

Every good story needs rebellious outcasts and non-ironic hope for humanity. A musky settlement on Mars like you describe is just perfect. :)

> Wait... are we even talking about fiction here?!? :)

The more of the world I experience, either through my own eyes or vicariously through the wisdom of others, leads me to closer to the conclusion that no, in fact we are writing humanity's (short?) biography.

> If on the other hand problems like fossil fuel depletion cause us to fail to reach anything like post-scarcity, I could see a scenario very much like William Gibson's Neuromancer. I think Gibson's "sprawl" 'verse is a world where the singularity failed to reach orbit so to speak. Going even more extreme I could see The Hunger Games -- tiny ultra-urban enclaves of super-rich surrounded by and served by feudal peasants. The Hunger Games (as opposed to Mad Max) is probably the most accurate picture of what a worst case scenario peak oil collapse would look like.

I think we may see both scenarios, and a revival of the us versus them mentality that dominated the Cold War. :(

Interesting.

I have caught myself, on more than one occasion, extrapolating our current economy and politics to similar end-states recently. I think such views are the more realistic--or perhaps just the pessimistic--flip-side of the post-scarcity economy. I have (internally) dubbed such economic systems "management economies" and have even gone as far as to write the openings of an allegorical novel that explores the consequences of such an economy.

In the novel, the ruling class (de facto by ownership) does nothing, and I mean nothing, but manage value. Instead they have fully automated the means of extraction and production with artificial intelligencies, leaving the non-ruling class to provide the market. Which they do so "willingly" because they are all marketers and are the only people that can be marketed to.[1] Thus, the non-ruling class is perpetually marketing products and services to itself all while the actual value is produced by artificial intelligencies, and the ruling class extracts value for itself.[2] Consequently, the unintentional side-effects of such an economy, where all value creation is abstracted, become increasingly visible, e.g. unsettled disputes between the "government" and contractors (the entire process automated) results in the road signage differing from the intended road signage, leading to pileups on highways where self-driving taxicabs crash into non-ruling class commuters. All of which is "solved" by an artificial intelligence which creates an app to tell commuters intended road signage.-

Just take the non-value-add parts of Wall Street, the general ineptitude of large businesses and the government, the hilariously out-of-touch culture of Silicon Valley, and the increasing availability of resources, products and services, and blend it together.

[1] It is likely to take me many chapters, and perhaps even a whole story, to prove this. So enjoy the tautological reasoning...

[2] I don't feel like logically arguing "why?" right now (12:28am) so please pretend I have.

---

If anyone wants to discuss such topics in-depth, or wants to read a satirical novel about such topics, please do ask/tell.

As Arelius mentioned, it is more performant to just keep an array of alive objects as you're only touching memory that needs to be touched. That said, however, bitvictors/bitsets are incredibly useful if you have no easy or clean way of separating variations of objects.

An example would be "scene-graphs" in my game engine. Ostensibly they are stored as components (but my game engine doesn't have components) which are accessed by an unique identifier via an indirection table. Something like Bitsquid.[0]

Like Bitsquid, my "scene-graphs" can be linked to other "scene-graphs." This allows me to "glue" weapons to character's hands or armour to their torsos. This means I have "scene-graphs" that can be updated (nodes repositioned) in parallel (as they have no data dependencies) and others that cannot (linked "scene-graphs"). For performance reasons, I identify which "scene-graphs" can be updated in parallel, so I can kick them off to appropriate tasks which satisfy their data-dependencies. Thus enters the bitvector/bitset because copying my "scene-graphs" around and then adjusting other "scene-graphs" pointers (that point to the moved "scene-graph") when linking or unlinking results in a complete iteration (once if you batch) over all the "scene-graphs," or some form of indirection (some with memory fragmentation too!). Not to mention such approach complicates the code for handling "scene-graphs" a lot. Beyond that, I have to sort my "scene-graphs" (pointer list) by link depth when updating, so I don't update children before their parents, and the like. It's messy, but bitvectors/bitsets are a great solution.

I am experimenting with other methods to manage linked "scene-graphs" which fall under a split (linked/unlinked) array method, but I don't have anything yet, especially when I consider that I get a free iteration over all scene-graphs anyways (which hides a lot of the cost of the current method).

[0]: http://bitsquid.blogspot.ca/2011/09/managing-decoupling-part...

Edit: And I completely forgot to mention the performance concerns of having multiple cores touch the same memory: irregular stalls!

Awesome! Thanks.

Can we get the raw data?

(I assume you've collected and cleaned up the raw data from the bfs.)

Interestingly the average salary for "computer systems design and programming" has gone down whilst the number of jobs have gone up.

Says a lot about the motives of the "altruistic" individuals who permeate the myth that "everyone can code."

Just force yourself to read two pages of some classical text of choice every day; even if you stop after the first couple (highly unlikely) you're still progressing through the text. The sense of accomplishment comes later, when I ponder what I have read, usually in the shower. :)

You can do all of those now, even with only an hour a day; I do.

You should definitely check out bgfx (https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx). It abstracts various graphics APIs for you, making development and debugging markedly easier. It also stops you from having to deal with the complex state-machine known as GL.

And then the asinine fees to change your Steam profile's background...

And then the asinine fees to sell an item to another player...

And then the asinine fees they take for community map rotations...

And then the asinine fees they take for community skins and items...

It's both amazing and disgusting how much money Valve makes from their little value-add services.

Would you mind producing a lil' write up?

Too bad Sony is chucking everything not in their core business model overboard so they don't sink. That includes gaming.

And every time you try to explain this to those who will be affected (software engineers) they argue that the movement is alturistic, or that they can't be replaced even though they're just maintaining a simple CRUD app...

> Those games look like shit compared to a PC that came out on the say day, let alone years later.

1. Developers had no experience with the hardware during the initial years of the consoles.

They had to switch from an out-of-order and forgiving x86 to an in-order and unforgiving PowerPC that had substantially less cache (32k/32k vs 64k/2mb/8mb) than its PC counterparts of the day. Just ask any PC-gone-console developer of that age about LHS[1], or the off-the-wall Cell Broadband Architecture[2].

2. Developers had to manage 512MiB between the GPU and CPU.

Everything has to fit into that including the operating system... and I found 1GiB uncomfortable for PCs in 2006!

+ It was split on PS3, and you had to DMA into 256k for SPUs. + EDRAM was slightly too small to fit 1280x720x32x4 render targets.

3. Developers had no guarantee of permanent storage.

So everything had to be streamed from disk... which is unsavoury for various reasons.

Contortionist programming springs to mind[3].

4. PCs get upgraded.

'Nuff said.

[1]: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132084/sponsored_featu...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR8CVLVmKQs&t=4m

[3]: http://doublebuffered.com/2010/03/17/gdc-2010-streaming-mass...

(I'm assuming Gen 7, i.e., the Xbox 360 and PS3.)

Absolutely! It's one step closer to sustainable and exploitable Q+ nuclear fusion and to DEMO.

And look at the scope.

I have to disagree with Terry's sentiment.

It's impudent to Vancouver's culture--and more generally the world--to insinuate that we're "blindly [competing] to build the next Silicon Valley". We're not. Canada's not. Vancouver's liberal lifestyle is innate, not superficial, not a failed attempt to clone Silicon Valley. And our immigration policy is definitely not to "bring immigrant entrepreneurs together"; it's the result of a small population, the demand for skilled workers[1], and the correction of a historically xenophobic foreign policy. This creates a large influx* of liberal and skilled immigrants--known risk takers. Hence the entrepreneurial honeypot (our social programs help). It's necessity that's bred Vancouver as a technological center, not ambition. Thus, similarities to Silicon Valley are purely coincidental, or are the result of correlated effects rising from the increasingly entrepreneurial working force.

As for investors? I don't know enough to comment.

[1]: http://www.engineerscanada.ca/files/w_Engineering_Labour_Mar... [2]: http://www.gamedevmap.com/index.php?query=Vancouver

*: Immigration levels have been relatively low, recently

They use Linux for embedded systems, i.e., the Dragon and Falcon; and Windows on the ground.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1853ap/we_are_spacex_s...

Not the end of the world. Cross platform (and "architecture") hooking libraries exist for this very reason[1]. It's not a hard issue, and symbol lookup for callstacks is not an issue either[2]. I wouldn't say it's trivial but it's certainly not novel.

[1] http://www.gamedeception.net/content/193-Cross-platform-x86-... [2] http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man3/backtr...

Absolutely. However, the extent of C++ usage (and more generally "system languages") has indisputably shrunk over a wide range of domains. Startups are a great example.

Base it off listening habits?

I've thought about this for quite a while and have concluded: you could start a community and weight comments based on concurrence with the community (most likely from the get go) but unfortunately it's a fine line between stagnation and simplification.

Ideas were floating around for this: http://i.imgur.com/BuF7d.png