It's one of those games that I wish I could love, but whenever I attempt to start it now I just remember that feeling of "ugh, why don't I instead code something, at least I'll create something".

I think these games are great at teaching people about concurrent programming, race conditions and locking though.

I run out of the one required for nasty bug finding, very soon, but when that one is gone (and after a short break to clear the mind) I can go on creating new code/architecture for hours.

Going back to the parent comment, one remarkable effect of this is that I rarely desire to play video games like I used to. It seemed like I always had enough juice for video games but rarely for other life obligations, but with the rainbow juice I am just as motivated to do all that other stuff as I am to play video games.

I do struggle a lot at times with focus, but I rather try to balance it with good and healthy livestyle. Lots of sleep. Exercise, meditation ..

But I have a toddler boy, who can mess with sleep and rhythm a lot, so having the possibility of a "rainbow juice" is definitely tempting.

Have you noticed bad side effects? Do you allways take ritalin(?) for work? Or just on special occacions?

Common side effects of ADHD drugs are loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, and increased heart rate. It basically puts you into fight or flight mode for 6 hours a day. More blood to your brain + muscles, less to everything else (digestion, immune system for example).

One weird thing about it is the first few times you take it you’ll get a feeling of euphoria, like you’re on cocaine. This is _not_ the way the drug is supposed to feel, it goes away if you stick with the same dose for a while. Some people keep going up because they think the euphoria is part of it, and that’s really dangerous.

It really does work incredibly well for me. Especially for programming, where you’re most productive when you’re not pulled out of a flow state. I went from a B average to straight A’s when I started taking it in college. It made it so easy to oranize my schedule, I just worked/studied from 8-6 every day. No late nights, no procrastination.

Personally, I have no feeling of withdrawal when I go off of it for weeks at a time. Though I have developed a bit of a psychological dependency around work, where I kind of tell myself I won’t work well without it, which becomes self-fulfilling.

It’s not all good, not all bad. Hopefully this helps!

Basically, it enforced my point of view to only try it out, if I really think it is neccecary.

I never done cocaine, but weed.

With the right time and settings it can help me get into a flow lasting for 10+ hours. But weed really does not help mid or long term, my productivity goes into steady decline after couple of days.

And coffeine I never liked, so I prefer the natural rhythm, with varying success.

Stimulants (Vyvanse in my case) are blunt instruments; they alleviate the specific behavioral problems that plague those of us with ADHD but also enhance performance in general. The biggest danger that I see in my own behavior is the tendency to forget about all the self-management practices I learned before my diagnosis. With stimulants, you can do irresponsible things like stay up late for no good reason, get four hours of sleep, and still be fairly productive once the medication kicks in. I have to be really honest with myself on a daily basis about whether I'm using it to overcome a deficit caused by ADHD, or a deficit caused by bad behavior.

The second biggest danger is developing unrealistic expectations about what I am capable of accomplishing. For example, I am currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, and the decision to do so was made by the medicated version of myself. I don't regret the decision one iota, and it's a goal I've had for many years, but I already had a long list of projects and goals when I signed up for this and I definitely deluded myself about just how many of those other commitments I'd have to set aside for a while (or forever) in order to get a PhD.

That is my problem right now, too. I am just scared, that medication really does not help me long term, for all the reasons you mentioned.

Thank you, for sharing.

If only my insurance covered mental health...

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

Look into Ego Depletion. There's academic disagreement over just how "consumable" willpower is. My assessment of SOTA is:

- ego/willpower is finite/depletable

- Most people have more or less the same amount of it as the average. People with "more willpower" typically are more efficient with it

- non-neurotypicals and those that "don't fit in society" (ADHD, ASD, bipolar, trans, nonbinary, anxiety, OCD) often spend much willpower on "passing"

- it's linked to everything from blood sugar levels, insulin levels, brain blood flow, dopamine levels, D1/D2 activation ratios, and probably gut microbiome

But, yeah, with "TIS-1000" it was just programming, and sort of unnecessarily (and unpleasantly) difficult programming at that.

In my day job at the time the game came out I was doing node.js microservices. So it was refreshing to work at the bit level again.

I could sit here and get virtual levels and virtual money... or go raise my actual human fitness level, or go work on my actual business for actual money.

Games are an easy win to feed you nuggets of feeling like you did stuff, but a poor substitute for real life.

If you want to be a workaholic and spend your free time working, go right ahead.

But you will end up like my father, mid 70s with no real relationships with your family, obsessed with "completing your legacy" and a general inability to enjoy anything that isn't "work".

If that sound like fun to you, go right ahead.

Me, I'll continue to work at work and spend my free time on relaxation.

You only get one life, spending it chasing dollars and dimes is a poor life plan

A mechanic can enjoy working on his own project car in the off time.

Both of these things are productive in a way that playing games isn't, but they're still recreational. It's not spending your life chasing dimes. It's looking at the different recreational things you could be doing, and choosing the ones that also intersect with being productive and have a side-effect of helping you professionally.

Productive is all relative anyway. Children learning by playing is productive, the productive part is the learning that is a byproduct. Working on a project car is fun in itself. It doesn't become less fun if the person doing it is a professional mechanic. Would you tell a person who plays games professionally in an e-sports league that they must do something else for fun?

I think it is a sign of good life when you find a way to get paid for doing what you enjoy. And if you enjoy it, then it is still fun when you do it outside of work. The productive benefits of it do not make it less fun.

I disagree. I have fond memories of discussing Zelda on the playground as a kid. Similarly, online communities are formed around basically every notable single player game. It's still a shared experience, even if it's not shared at the same moment.

Maybe there's something to be said for opting to lead a more creative rather than consumptive lifestyle. Ultimately though, something only matters if you think it does. My work is largely bullshit, and I can't think of a business I'd want to get into that also wouldn't feel like bullshit. I think the value I'd extract would precisely be in the connections made and the problem-solving itself. How important is another piece of enterprise software to extract money from people that no one thought they wanted until it exists?

I'm eyeing off a few avenues, I wouldn't mind not writing software for money anymore but it would also be cool to use my hard earned experience to my advantage. One avenue I thought of was music composition, because there are ways to automate some of it with code that I could use to provide some extra value, but it's also enough of a leap from my current career that it would be a wildly new endeavor.

I do have personal projects, one to do good, others out of curiosity. Mostly out of an urgency to be creative. I don't think this carries more meaning than pure leisure.

Real life is fun too. But games are part of life.

I understand that there's satisfaction in it. That satisfaction can be hard to get at work sometimes. At work, you can be asked to work on things you don't like, that sometimes feel even more pointless than a game.

Part of the reason why I have programming side-projects at home is because they're an outlet to get the satisfaction of building software the way I want to.

I have it too, and it's a consequence of growing up and/or having more responsibilities.

I can either play Factorio, or I can spend time with my kids. Factorio, which I love, loses every time.

The only games I play now are ones I can play with my kids. ... so I set my daughter up with Starcraft 2 and am teaching her about strategy while still scratching that gaming itch.

My dream is to have a multiplayer LAN based VR Elder Scrolls game to play at home with the family.

I have little to no problem getting myself to play Starcraft II or other strategy games which I love. Low-effort story-based games are also easy to get into.

The game has some major transition points where refactoring makes sense, but often the correct solution is to tactically upgrade as much as possible, and get to the better point to rebuild.

Seablock playthrough once updated for 1.0.

In fact it's exactly like this because that's what the game is about.

...which itself isn't all that different from software development.

For example, I am playing on an OARC server, basically new players get their own base space, and I'm trying to get to my friend we both kinda picked 'far away' as options so we wouldnt clash with each other, so I've got blueprints I keep dropping that keep expanding my logistics network + power grid northward / westward as I make my way to him. The construction bots do all the work, my factory gets all the materials to them.

I've taken a break since, but then once I can reach out to him I will probably build train tracks going to and from his base and mine. I'm also using the robots to build a massive base. I can just ghost place whatever I want where I want it as long as the robot tower can cover that area.

You can just place ghost items by hand (press shift) but not much point. The advantage is being able to smack down whole bunches of machines in blueprints.

They can build anything if the products are in provider chests. They have the exact items, they won't build from intermediate materials.

You can also start a Sandbox game mode to explore everything you can do (note infinity chests are extremely useful, you pick a item in the game, and it will produce as many of them as you want perpetually, then your inserters can pull those out into conveyors simulating different parts of what you'd like your factory to look like). Definitely recommend this approach, you can explore as much as you'd like to explore.

Also note, there are a few websites with prebuilt blueprints as well.

Edit: fixed a typo

There are tons of designs you can do with bots, some have built completely belt-less bases using them. They're limited by their speed and range however, so you always have to balance to the constraints of the tools you use.

It takes a lot of the tedium away when you made a miscalculation and need to be just a little bit closer or further from something.

Now you can cut, move over 1 and paste.

I've also found it really nice for rails. If you want a t-junction, just go away from everything and make a 90-degree rail curve. Then cut it.

Then go back to where you wanted the t-junction and paste in the curve and rotate it and paste again to get perfectly lined up sections of track.

and then you can have blueprints and upgrade planners and destruction planners.

upgrade planners let you convert say all slow belts to fast belts and leave the inserters alone.

destruction planners let you remove only walls but leave the electrical towers and rails alone.

it just goes deeper and deeper.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80...

The wiki page is fine, but the video is quite literally Not Safe For Work. My German boss at the chemical company showed the whole team. Kinda gorey but in the Monty Python Black Knight sort of way, and similarly hilarious. Klaus' story is made up but it's based upon thousands of tales written in blood. Definitely gave me an enhanced appreciation for safety culture.

Forklift simulator is a game you can buy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/939450/Forklift_Simulator...

Short films have been made about this, and of course Ender's Game.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/dont-...

Of course I'm also doing it in VR and with a steering wheel setup

If recreating a portion of your factory "feels too much like work" to do it really sounds like you haven't availed yourself fully to the tools the game gives you to do it.

[1] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Construction_Drones

[2] https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Nanobots

The WR time to launch a rocket and get 'space science', the final science is currently about 1hr46m.

When I now see those videos on Youtube with huge factories I wonder how many hours that person has wasted. I'm not against enjoying a video game, but when the activity is so similar to real work... why not do that instead and get something real in return?

Because dopamine :).

Are you using drones and blueprints?

Once you unlock drones, you can create huge swaths of factories in seconds. You just need to come up with a design that works, and then replicate it.

I heard scripting is possible? Do experienced players use it, to automate things?

That was when the creative:tedious ratio got rebalanced for me.

You can most certainly launch a rocket (i.e. ship your final product) with any kind of setup but if you want to build a sustainable rocket launching platform, you will most likely have to nuke production (as in, you can literally nuke your production) and re-build it.

The point of the late late game is to minimize UPS (updates per second). It becomes memory bandwindth bound at some point. It demonstrates what's possible with today's technology. In comparison, Microsoft Word can not keep up with my typing in a new, blank document.

Walk speed is a surprisingly big constraint on the early game, until you get various upgrades; you build a small factory because you don't want to walk round a larger one.

Rather, I find myself trying to build a factory top down. I write a bunch of sticky notes with material requirements and calculate backwards “how many labs do I need?” “How many gears do I need to make the beakers?” “How much do I need to mine to match that hourly throughput of gears?

It’s the perfect candidate of a game to write an algorithm for. Assuming a known seed, it’s trivial to design the most efficient system based on those parameters.

And at that point it just becomes work. It’s really designed as a bottom up game, but I think about problems top down and for that reason factorio drives me nuts.

It's enough to know that you'll need lots of gears and to know that you'll need high-capacity mining eventually. But there's no great harm from having a few extra or from having not quite enough to max out beaker production; just start the process, get some gears, get some beakers, and refine as needed. Without a little top-down vision, you'll end up severely overproducing some things and underinvesting in others, which is no good, but you'll never be able to build an optimal factory without first building a suboptimal one.

> Over a few months I designed an entire Factorio base without testing any of it. The goal is to create a mid-sized base capable of building a megabase. A secondary goal is to not break down or rebuild anything ever.

The challenge isn't that it's hard to figure out the ratios or math out the machines you need, it's in getting to having the production to make that base without falling asleep waiting on things. Continual bootstrapping towards that end goal is the gameplay.

I don't really see the appeal compared to ordinary programming. My favorite programming game has actually been a flash game where your goal was to transform binary strings (represented as sequences of blue/red dots) into other binary strings. You were still writing in Befunge, but the rest of it came off as trying to be helpful to the extent possible, rather than giving you a goal and then disabling the tools you'd want to use to get there.

Finding the most optimal solution in real programming is impossible because the scope is always enormous.

I stopped playing exapunks because of this before the end. The limited instruction set, limits on movements, etc. are cool - they force new solutions. Not having functions or advanced templates is just annoying - I need to implement the same thing multiple times, by copy-pasting.

Pretty much everything programming isn’t in the real world.

It's also much easier to find a solution if you know there is a good solution to be found.

http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/

Probably my favourite flash game.

It's even less of a game, but I also had a lot of fun with http://incredible.pm .

Some things off the top of my head that I find annoying:

- Puzzles start feeling like they're asking more for busywork than for puzzle-solving. I enjoy thinking about "how do I do this?" I don't enjoy thinking "well, I know exactly what I want to do, but it's a huge slog to actually go through the motions."

- You can't rotate the thing that accepts a polymer. So if you end up making the correct thing, but your orientation is off, you get to manually re-lay every part of your machine, instead.

- Everything uses the same clock.

- You can't even apply purely mechanical fixes for everything using the same clock, like a three-arm grabber with one of the arms cut off. There goes the conceit that the rules are justified by the theme.

I like that Opus Magnum scores you separately on time, space, and monetary cost. That was a good idea. I like working out fundamental minimums for how quickly I can produce something (based on the source pieces I'm allowed...) and designing something that can achieve that. The animation of a completed machine is fun to watch.

I think the monetary-cost mechanic seems underdeveloped.

I think you will enjoy this puzzle game:

http://qrostar.skr.jp/en/jelly/

Don't let the cutesy graphics fool you, this is a masterpiece in puzzle design.

In case you are not on Windows or don't want to download the exe for some reason right now, you can try this html simplified version

https://avorobey.github.io/jelly/

I guess it’s like Harvard vs. Von Neumann. Harvard is more practical, but Von Neumann allows more fun hacks.

Plus, it has trains :-)

Which will run over the programmer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8SBp4SyvLc&t=1m17s

Though I already have weekend programming projects that are more fulfilling and work towards something more concrete than "yay, solved a puzzle", and the games just made me wonder why I wasn't putting this time into those hobby projects. Factorio made me feel this way too.

On the other hand, I've been playing Morrowind lately (OpenMW) which gives me a nice mental break from programming. Apart from the fact that I couldn't help but write a parser for its game files once I saw how simple and documented the format was. Bit more fulfilling to have a `tes3_parser.go` at the end of my puzzle-solving session than to have solved some contrived TIS-100 puzzles for a fantasy computer.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:Mod_File_Format

Factorio was fun at first, but then it quickly felt like a pencil and paper optimization problem for something that doesn't even exist. Whether that tickles your fancy or not is probably like whether cilantro tastes like soap to you or not.

https://regexcrossword.com/

https://rampion.github.io/RegHex/

And it teaches that humans can do whatever they want to a world, level all the forests, kill all the locals, because eventually we are going to fly away. Not our problem anymore. Space people are above the petty concerns of terrestrials.

I know later in the game more options open up, but that doesn't help me get there.

I wish for a Factorio-style game where I can just drag (groups of) machines and conveyors around, and I just pay cost for however much just changed.

You can get really good at burner inserters or learn about electricity.

Or keep get fancy with belts... or learn about trains.

or get a personal roboport and learn cut/copy/paste

There are no past videos there but you can follow him.