ksymph

There's a great post on that by the lead Defold dev: https://defold.com/2020/05/31/The-Defold-engine-code-style/

In theory yes, data is just stored in json and there's a CLI utility [1] for building. It's pretty awkward though.

[1] https://defold.com/manuals/bob/

So much lua stuff on HN the past few days, I love it.

Defold is a great engine. It has a somewhat steep learning curve (steeper than you'd expect, anyway) and its fair share of quirks, but more often than not the quirks are deliberate tradeoffs that steer you in the direction of structuring your game well. It really feels like an extension of the lua philosophy of giving you a narrow set slightly odd, but very robust and flexible tools that you build everything else out of.

I'm back to using LOVE2D for general tinkering but a few months with Defold really changed how I approach things. I've been meaning to write up a post about it. Either way though, I'd highly recommend checking out Defold to anyone interested.

Not mentioned in the article is Nintendo's strongarming of retailers. The lawsuit wasn't settled until the mid 90s, and Nintendo failed to legally stop cartridge manufacturing until then - but what they did do was threaten to pull the NES from any store that sold unlicensed games. Most stores complied, unsurprisingly.

The example used doesn't seem like a good indication of reflexively reaching for a phone, as doing things while waiting at a bus stop is pretty reasonable and has been around long before smartphones.

You're right though, that's likely what was meant, which I agree with. The hyperbole was unnecessary.

I doubt you spend every second of your non-work time staring into space though. I like to read, for example; just because I do it on my phone in public sometimes doesn't mean I'm not finding other times for quiet contemplation.

Fun fact: there was a brief period after music recording, but before copies could be made with much quality, where if you wanted them to sound halfway decent each recording had to be a unique performance. Studio musicians were paid to perform popular songs over and over. When making copies became more feasible, there was backlash from some musicians, both for financial and artistic reasons - not unlike when recorded music started becoming popular in the first place. Not hard to see the similarities with modern distribution woes like piracy and streaming too.

The issue is that the artists who make it are getting paid very little, with no attribution, on songs that get massive amounts of plays and exposure. The entire purpose of the program is for Spotify to pay artists less and cut out real independent musicians. The decline in quality is an (arguably) unfortunate side effect, but not really the main reason for people to be angry.

> How is the score calculated? Oh man, this was harder than I thought.

Color is such a deceptively dangerous rabbit hole. A few months ago I entered a game jam intending to make a small pokemon-like where you collect colors rather than creatures. E.g. instead of fire>grass>water it would be red>green>blue, with randomly generated colors of any shade and about half a dozen 'types'. Trying to figure out the math of that nerd sniped me for a couple weeks, didn't even get started on the rest of the game before the jam ended.

I grew up mostly in the north and talk very northernly, but somehow the only exception is that 'howdy' became my standard greeting. 'yall' feels like too much, but 'howdy' just rolls off the tongue so smoothly. Other greetings always sound too terse (hi, hey), too formal (hello), or are questions (how's it going, what's up) which I just loathe. Though technically howdy is sort of a question too, coming from 'how do you do'.

What's 'a piece'? Don't think I've heard that one.

The future this (and similar legislature from other countries) points toward is extremely concerning.

I run a small site with some user interaction; though it doesn't seem the intended target of this particular legislature, it seems inevitable that there will be a law enacted somewhere that leaves the site vulnerable unless I'm constantly staying on top of the increasingly varied and specific requirements across the world. I don't see how anyone but big corporations can expect to deal with that, frankly.

I wish there was an international standard of reasonable moderation and data handling specifically for small sites. A static checklist of requirements like manual screening of user-generated content within a certain time period, gdpr-esque transparency of user data - things that any responsible webmaster should be doing anyway.

I suppose there are potential problems with that too, but either way that ship has already sailed. Instead we're all on the Titanic, ignoring alarm bells as we careen towards the iceberg of siloed corporatocracy.

I should have made my point/question clearer too; I agree that literacy is valuable for all the reasons you outline.

Tests are only as useful as what they measure. The qualitative changes to communication could have impacted the quantitative changes we're seeing (i.e. lower literacy rates). How much, in what ways, I have no idea; I was hoping to learn more by sparking discussion.

Unfortunately (and ironically) my poor choice of words has instead led to my apparent taking of an anti-literacy stance. Oh well.

To play devil's advocate: why does it matter? The purpose of language is communication, so it could be argued that if people feel they're able to understand and be understood sufficiently, classic ideas of literacy aren't really a useful metric. I suppose what modern language usage lacks in depth it makes up for in brevity and clarity, which seems like a natural correction to the low signal to noise ratio of a heavily interconnected world.

Edit - I don't mean to challenge the value of literacy so much as speculate whether falling test scores necessarily indicate the loss of that value. Language, how it's used, and how changes spread are all very different in the information age. How do we know traditional literacy tests accurately measure the role it plays in people's lives now?

As an example, written communication used to primarily take the form of writing letters. With instant communication, ability to put thoughts into words quickly has a higher relative impact on communication compared to being able to spend as much time as needed to find the perfect words to convey a message.

You don't even need a preprocessor for that with var() and calc(). It's perfectly possible to write clear and easily maintainable raw CSS nowadays.

Feels very creepy knowing this much about a stranger (not to mention gamifying it) but also weirdly fascinating. My closest friend has diabetes, it can be hard. Hope you're well. I suppose I can just check though lol. Strange but well executed.

Very nice! It's a fun concept, and you did well with the execution. It runs smooth on my ancient phone and the swipe controls feel tight. Only suggestion as far as UX is to store game state in browser storage to persist across page loads.

I was a bit confused at first, being faced with a totally scrambled grid - the game clearly involves words so it's unintuitive how the first step to solve is randomly shuffling tiles, with the language aspect only kicking in once you've got a starting point. Perhaps having the top-left corner be the solved by default would ease the learning curve.

The core concept is brilliant. It requires thinking in new ways which is always the mark of a good puzzle. I feel like it's missing something though - some sort of hook or twist to the mechanics that breaks things up. Like, what if there were 2x1 chunks of letters tied together, or there's a score based on average number of green letters per turn divided by number of turns so you're incentivised to leave them in place when possible, or certain tiles/letters are hidden based on some criteria.

Don't get me wrong though, the game is fun as it is, just feels like there's even more potential here if you're interested in expanding it. Nicely done.

Is this tongue-in-cheek? It seems like it is, but I can't tell for sure. Disliking LLMs for coding because they're too helpful is an amusing concept either way.

They expressly state the result is likely because the AI poetry was more simple and direct than the poetry selected, which is more accessible for the average person not interested in poetry. They compare and contrast this with other studies where this was not the case.

Yes, it's comparing apples and oranges; that's the whole point. It doesn't make the experiment itself flawed.

I don't see how the authors are dishonest about it, or that the rebuttal refutes any of the actual claims made. They make it clear in the paper that they're specifically evaluating people who aren't especially interested in poetry, and talk at length about how and why this is different from other approaches. I suppose the clickbait title gives a bad first impression.

To summarize the facts: when people were asked to tell if a given poem was written by human or AI, people thought the AI poems were human more often than human poems. People also tended to rate them higher when they thought they were created by AI than when they thought they were human-made. It's speculated in the paper that this is because the AI poems tended to be more accessible and direct than the human poems selected, and the preference for this style from non-experts combined with the perception that AI poetry is poor led to the results.

I believe the confusion here comes from the ambiguity of the "It's a shame" comment, as it could be "It's a shame [that the gem cannot be safely stored in its home country due to the political situation]" or "It's a shame [that the gem is not stored in its home country despite the political situation]".

The "despite all evidence to the contrary" remark was in response to interpretation B when it seems interpretation A was the intended meaning.

For anyone else who hasn't heard it before, a bush lawyer is "One who is not qualified in law yet attempts to expound on legal matters."

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bush_lawyer

This is the first time I've seen Firefox's alternate stylesheets mentioned in the wild. Interesting.

The article has some weird stuff in it which makes the whole thing seem ridiculous (did we really need two paragraphs detailing the effects of loneliness?). The paper frames it much better:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00088-3

The question of 'Why bring back extinct species?' is fundamentally the same as 'Why save species from extinction?'. It's unspoken but seems to be widely understood that biodiversity and preventing its permanent loss has inherent value. It sometimes has economic or ecological value too, or the potential in the future, but even when that's not the case most would agree we should aim to minimize extinction of other animals - if for no other reason than it being easier to drive a species to extinction than revive any of the billions of extinct species out there. (at least for now)

It's curious that the response to bringing back mammoths and less-stripey-zebras is so lukewarm when there's very little of the same criticism directed at efforts to save obscure species that are in decline. Say it was discovered that a small herd of quagga had survived since we thought they died out in 1883, but without human intervention they will soon due to habitat loss. Imagine: "Why would we want to save them? The world is inhospitable to them now, their population declined for a reason. They have no use to us, and their niche isn't one that couldn't be filled by living species that we could import. To keep them from going extinct would be a cruel and irrational act of ego."

Small error: Oskar van Deventer's 17x17 is at 2009 in the timeline, but the description says 2011.

Off topic: it's always been strange to me that "lich" isn't pronounced like "like" like in "lichen". Even after hearing the 'correct' pronunciation plenty of times I still usually hear it 'like' in my head.

The focus seems to be on games, but I wonder how well e.g. Microsoft Office or Adobe apps run.

They make a reduced sodium variety. It's also best to think of it more like bacon than ham and use it as an accent.

I can't speak for how well it works but PixelLab [0] claims to support animations, rotation and other things that seem impossible.

[0] https://www.pixellab.ai

This is an interesting concept, but it doesn't seem like the article does it justice. Does anyone have suggestions for further reading on the topic? Either rejecting narrative thinking or crafting helpful ones.