noodles_nomore's comments

Haltet euch da raus. Euer Circus geht mich nichts an. Wenn ihr mir einen Gefallen tun wollt, seid einfach ehrlich mit eurem Boss. Ich muss jetzt lernen.

So sehr ich auch dankbar dafür bin, dass ihr mich über Kevin informiert habt (wenn das denn überhaupt wahr ist), tut mir Leid, aber ihr habt euch das selber eingebrockt.

I'd expect that any kind of logistics would need tight bounds on min-max 'performance', and not be up to the whims of artificial stupidity. Am I wrong?

Please explain how you made this connection.

Desktop Dungeons blows my mind because it is so incredibly well balanced and I have no idea how it can be. It's a puzzly kind of "coffee break roguelike." It marries an emphasis on the puzzly aspect of gameplay (e.g. enemies don't move) to the typical rogue-like fashion of explosive combinatoric possibility in a perfect way that just doesn't make sense. The result is that you'll often find yourself looking at impossible-seeming situations and still finding a way through. I've not had as much relief-extacy with any other game, including adrenaline-trembling hands, despite -- or maybe because of -- the fact that it's entirely turn-based.

Thanks for posting this. It's better than I remember.

Refusing a good faith debate with an audience of millions of people is silly. Insisting that a good faith debate has to be done in real time is silly. The only salvation for this rotten society is a return to literacy.

The legal system is a game that is played for profit. Being able to sue anyone for anything is advantageous for the big dogs. So it's imperative that as many laws as possible cover as much seemingly innocuous human conduct as possible with the highest stakes possible. Unrestricted expansion of intellectual property, the ability to lay claim to arbitrary regions of the ideosphere, makes perfect sense.

That's exactly right. You've been successfully filtered.

I can't believe Microsoft would do this, *huff* *puff*. What an outrage!

In the 90s people worked really hard to draft up universal standards of what makes UI usable and intuitive. Most of it tends to be ignored nowadays. Try teaching an old person how to use a smart phone some time. Just some bullet points:

* Apps feel generally disorganized. Buttons are unlabled. Many things are hidden somewhere between layers of unlabled buttons. In the past you could count on the menu bar giving you quick access to anything.

* Lack of functionality / composability. Avoidance of the file system. Tunnel menus that you have to take one step at a time.

* Every program has UI that works and looks differently, made worse because even the same programs redesign their own UI periodically.

* Flat design. Lack of 'affordances'. Buttons don't look like buttons, draggable things don't look like they're draggable. E.g. scroll bars in the past had this serration to suggest interaction. This leads to hidden features and surprises, where things that seem like static images suddenly hide important functionality.

* Lack of configurability. Configurable Toolbars, arrangeable view panes, tabs etc. And unnecessary limits even when you can configure things. Like, Firefox only has a list of preset zoom levels, to get finer zoom levels you have to go into about:config. Or the fact that it limits the size of tabs to a rather large minimum. For no reason at all.

* Lack of consistent (or even discoverable) keyboard navigation. Rebinding short cuts is not a thing anyone seems to care about anymore.

* Readability, use of space. This applies more to the web, but grey text, ultra-narrow columns, inconsistent scaling.

The article tries really hard to avoid the thing everyone outside this field seems to know: Concurrent with this 15 year golden age, UX has become universally terrible.

I had chronic sleep paralysis for many years. One thing I eventually figured out is that I still had control over my breathing, and I could hyper-ventilate myself awake. Sleep pararalysis then stopped either because I aquired that skill or because I stopped eating gluten.

'Dynamic Programming' has to be the worst name for a concept in all of computer science. I can never remember what it refers to. Then, now and then, I come across something interesting that makes it seem like a big deal, look it up, roll my eyes and immediately forget it again.

facilitate: 1. To make easy or easier. From French faciliter, from Latin facilis ("easy").

What you're describing is a dopamine rush. I get the same thing when I watch videos of games I was addicted to once. It's not the device itself that causes it.

As a counter-experience: I'm over thirty and only got a modern smartphone a few years ago. The thing is awful. The touch interface is finicky, even after long use. Holding the thing for an extended amount of time is uncomfortable, even after long use. UI design seems universally terrible. All the apps I tried were disorganized and didn't quite serve the purpose I had expected, but they did always give me way too many unlabeled buttons and random pop-ups to tap, and asked for my money/attention every few minutes. The Android OS is obscurantic and loves to give you completely meaningless things to tap: "Tap here to optimize your device", like fucking what? I downloaded a game that appealed to me with loot boxes and sexy characters, but after an initial "wow, phone hardware has come a long way," the novelty wore off very quickly. Frankly, I now loathe the thing. The amount of frustration I've had with it, and the idea that it will just become ever more mandatory as every asshole company and government office loves the idea of shoving you through exactly, for their purposes, calibrated UI that you can't control or argue with -- it outweighs any positive experience I've had from it by a large factor. I don't feel any magic feel-good screen powers, only irritation.

An average programmer's main job is to track down and fix bugs that shouldn't exist inside software that shouldn't exist build on frameworks that shouldn't exist for companies that shouldn't exist solving problems that shouldn't exist in industry niches that shouldn't exist. I'm 100% convinced that, if someone comes along and creates something that actually obsoletes 95% of programming jobs, everyone would very quickly come to the conclusion that they don't need it and it doesn't work anyway.

Lol, zerohedge called it. Shameless.

It's the vision of the net at the time of the transition to web 2.0. The web as a giant database of the world's knowledge, but now curated not by experts on their own little websites but distributedly through the collective wisdom of humanity. Think wikipedia, imdb, tvtropes. SO's gamification is primarily geared towards cleanup, not participation. However, databasing questions never really made sense. It works remarkably well, but the subject is just too open ended. What we really needed was a collective effort to produce great, searchable, navigable documentation. Instead, we now have a collection of hyper-specific, often outdated snippets that do not educate, and the effortfully produced helpful introductions, overviews, and explanations you want to read are dying disorganized somewhere on diverse wordpress blogs.

Compliance is the constitutive purpose of surveillance.

An earlier version of wiktionary had that definition. Apparently it was deleted for lack of citation other than Tolkien which might be an in-universe term.

> 1. A person in their twenties, between 20 and 29 years old. Possibly including 30-32.

> 1954 "The Fellowship of the Ring", J.R.R. Tolkien

> At that time Frodo was still in his tweens, as the hobbits called the irresponsible twenties between childhood and coming of age at thirty-three.