hooby

This is not meant to be any sort of religious "my lang > your lang" discussion, or anything along those lines.

I've no big complaints about the langauge itself, or it's syntax so far. I picked C++ over C, because I'm used to working object oriented. That too has it's religious defenders and contractors - and I can definitely see it's downsides. But in the end it's a tool, and you prefer the tools you're good with, right?

All that pointer-stuff is definitely a bit difficult to get into at first, though.

Private servers for Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown now available

There are some valid reasons to use software in English as a German speaker. Main among those is probably translations.

If you can speak English, you might be better of using the software in English, as having to deal with the English language can often be less of hassle, than having to deal with inconsistent, weird, or outright wrong translations.

Even high quality translations might run into issues, where the same thing is translated once as "A" and then as "B" in another context. Or run into issues where there is an English technical term being used, that has no prefect equivalent in German (i.e. a translation does exist, but is not a well-known, clearly defined technical term). More often than not though, translations are anything but high quality. Even in expensive products from big international companies.

I'm actually of the opinion, that blue-green colors like teal or turquoise are both green and blue at the same time. Basically a mixture.

Having to pick just exclusively one - blue OR green - for such colors just feels, wrong and arbitrary?

You could also make a website that shows various shades of purple - and ask people is it blue or red? Well, both! Purple is a mixture of both blue and red. Why treat teal differently than purple?

"Shards" are the inlore explanation in Ultima, for why there would be multiple copies of the game world existing in parallel (the different servers).

Some sort of world-crystal being shattered into small pieces, or something...

Raph Koster is also currently working on a new game, that aims to take this ideas of social experience and player-driven virtual society and push it beyond what they were able to do with UO. (Also with less PK-ing, griefing, etc. - things he regretted about UO, but many people today consider synonymous with sandbox)

Interestingly enough, this new game is NOT going to have any shards or sharding at all - not even instancing - but just many (procedurally generated) planets, that are all part of the same shared universe and economy.

Thus, some of the very unique ambitions behind UO and SWG might actually become part of a new, more modern game:

https://starsreach.com/ (Fair warning: the graphics are still very early...)

I used to say that video games do everything you might find in any other kind of software - only difference being, they do it 60 times a second.

weirdly enough, when asking for documentation/problem solving types of questions - chatGPT actually is a good alternative. you still have to double-check since you can't trust it... but you shouldn't trust random google results either, so that's not a big change.

it's kinda weird how the web has increasingly become optimized for bots - and filled with content created by bots... to the point where as a human you now need a bot to cut through all the bloated SEO bullshit and filter out what you actually want to know...

Regardless of whether you hire in-house developers or hire a software studio that does contract work - I believe the key to success is giving the developer unfettered access to an experienced subject-matter expert who really understands what is needed.

No offense meant - but by my personal experience, executives like yourself are a bad choice for this - some experienced longtime employee that's deeply involved in day-to-day operations in the trenches, would be preferable, I think. Ideally somebody who went through process changes before - like was already working there before your current software had been introduced.

Don't get a developer who wants to start programming right away - you want somebody who asks for time to first really learn and understand the processes the software needs to cover - and who actually questions all the underlying approaches your current software takes - but does not just rule those out out of hand.

Then get that senior employee to mentor them and teach them the job - not the existing software. I would even advise have the developer DO the work for a while - under the supervision of that senior employee.

This game is definitely gonna be known for it's systems, mechanics and simulation, and not for it's graphics - that much is sure.

The Discord is currently the probably best place with the most information...

https://discord.gg/starsreach

Check "A brief, subjective history..." in "community-forum", for a rough summary of what is known so far.

Full player housing, with building options similar to Landmark. Also player-cities, and even player-governed planets.

Yeah it does - but it is early work in progress, and is gonna see several more passes before getting close to release.

According to Raph the goal is for the visuals to end up somewhere between Genshin Impact and Wind Waker. Roughly.

They all can be colored in 4 colors - if you don't care about giving the enclave the same color as the parent country.

If you insist giving those little islands the same color as the country they belong to, then things get difficult. That's not always doable in 4 colors.

see: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/4C...

So, there was this one question "Can every map be colored with just 4 colors?"...

And there I sit, knowing that every map of CONTIGUOUS territories can be colored with 4 colors - but on real world maps, there are enclaves - little islands that belong to a country that they have not connection to. And if those shall have the same color as their parent country, then 4 colors is not enough...

So I pick the answer "NO".

> you are wrong!!!!! every map can be colored with 4 colors! it has been proven!!!!!

I remember playing around with that like... 20 to 25-ish years ago.

Back then only pre-rendered cut-scenes could come close to having graphics like that, and I dreamed of the day when games actually look like that realtime.

Kinda ironic that now that games actually do look like that (if not even better), I prefer to play retro pixel-art indie games, which actually put their focus on gameplay instead of graphics.

Many years ago, I've been playing around with similar ideas - although my attempts were probably more like "abstract fonts" then actual ciphers.

What feel kinda curious to me about this one, is that I see no reason or pattern for why certain letters are circles, squares or triangles. It seems to be a case of just taking all consonants in the order they have in the latin alphabet, and then randomly making the first four circles, the next four squares, the next four triangles, etc...

In my own attempts I would always try to have meaning to the shape. Like is it a voiced sound or not? Is it a plosive? Is it "soft" or a "hard" sound? etc.

So, if you a see a triangle, you know that imparts a certain quality to it... the only distinction you see here is between vowels and consonants?

All of that sounds like, that torrent-based updaters/downloaders should be the absolute killer-app for environments like that.

Infinitely resume-able, never looses progress, remains completely unfazed by timeouts, connection loss, etc. - and the ability to share received update-data between multiple devices peer-to-peer.

"I invented a ranking system that cannot be gamed!"

By my experience, ALL ranking systems can - and will be gamed, no matter what. I'm still willing to give you the benefit of the doubt - maybe you are the one who can finally truly come up with an un-game-able system. But I'll consider that an extraordinary claim - and will require to see extraordinary proof for that.

might save your own life as well

when I made my drivers license, you were still taught that if all your breaks fail and there's no way to stop car, you should use "body braking" - i.e. use the friction of scraping your car's side against something, preferably a wall - to get to a stop

"Rapid Unstructured Energy Dissipation" is a nice euphemism for the robot crashing into pieces...

but I really feel there's a missed opportunity there, to come up with something that abbreviates to "S.P.L.A.T." rather then "R.U.E.D." ;)

So, each stage/each FROM has it's own scope basically. If you define an ARG in the global scope, you have to import it to the local scope before using it.

Not terribly unusual, but I wasn't aware of it - so yeah, wouldn't hurt if the docs for ARG mentioned it.

Maybe submitting a PR for an addition to the docs would help more people than writing a blog post about it?

Having fruitful complex discussions and staying factual/rational, and not succumbing to impulsive answers, emotions and knee-jerk reactions, is a social/culture problem. And I'm not convinced that this types of problems can be solved with technology.

What I'm trying to say is, that within a team with a good discussion culture, it will work, regardless of what tools you use. Even when the discussion is held in person.

When your team has a bad discussion culture though, it doesn't really matter what tool or tech or discussion structure you use - you'll struggle with straw man arguments, fanboy logic, going in circles, people not listening/understanding each other, etc.

To teach and foster a good discussion culture, you first and foremost need a genuine willingness of all participants to honestly try to improve. And this is a very interpersonal and soft-skill dependent thing to achieve.

Some piece of software might help insofar, as that the change of format can help people to change their discussion style as well. It's easier to fall back into bad habits when discussion are "as usual". Shaking things up a bit, can make it easier for willing people to adopt new behavior...

I'm pretty sure that the policymakers did NOT understand ML models in 2014 - and still do NOT understand it today.

I also don't think that they care. They don't care that ML is a hodgepodge of data & compute, and they don't care how hard it is to remove data from a model.

They didn't care about the ease or difficulty of removing data from more traditional types of knowledge storage either - like search indexes, database backups and whatnot.

RTBF was not proposed with any specific technology in mind. What they had in mind, was to try and give individuals a tool, to keep their private information private. Like, if you have a private, unlisted phone number, and that number somehow ends up on the call-list of some pollster firm, you can force that firm to delete your number so that they can't call you anymore.

The idea is, that if your private phone number (or similar data) ends up being shared or sold without your consent - you can try to undo the damage.

In practice it might still be easier to get a new number, than to have your leaked one erased... but not all private data is exchangeable like that.

Over some decades of doing development work on legacy systems - sometimes by my companies own design, sometimes contract work for a customer - I've seen lots of things that make me believe that certain customers do prefer complex, buggy software for a very specific reason:

They can hide behind it. "I couldn't finish the task on time because the software had a bug" - sort of stuff. "I couldn't do X because the software doesn't support Y", "The dog ate my homework", etc.

In many cases, it would have been quite possible to design simple, easy and far less bug-prone solutions - but then people working with the software would no longer be able to hide that certain failures might be due to their own incompetence, rather than being a software issue. Therefore - especially in companies with high top-down pressure - people actually prefer working with software that their managers don't fully understand, and that's known for having some bugs and problems.