mrspeaker

I've been playing with this for 30 minutes, and I'm still smiling my head off. It's just so much fun. I have used Pico-8 a bunch in the past (so it was easy to jump into making stuff). Pico-8 is one of four bits of software that I put it in my basket of "software that sparks joy" along with Aesprite, Blender, and Propellorhead's Rebirth.

Pico-8 had so much care put into its goals and intentional limitations: and so far Picotron seems to have that same level of love and thought. It's delightful, and I don't want to stop making things with it.

I've used many of the clones of pico-8 and they all feel like they miss the point. They "improve" on the limitations, but are just... not satisfying. Funnily enough, I've tried three times to make my own JavaScript version of what Picotron is ("what if I made a more feature-rich version of Pico-8 to use for prototyping in game jams?") and each time abandoned it because it felt like the Pico-8 clones: adequate, functional, but not inspirational.

I don't know who makes Pico-8 and Picotron, but hats off to you amazing person/people for making such likable software!

Damn, really fantastic article - there goes the rest of my day playing with this!

Not sure why you'd turn this into a game (it's awesome though!), but for anyone who hasn't seen the movie - I'd recommend it. It really has stuck with me long after I saw it. Starts out with "Father Ted" vibes, but end up going... in other directions.

I can't believe you posted that - just yesterday I was thinking about how dark that song was.

The bit that really stood out was how "anti-Billy" it was: "He says his name is William, but I'm sure it's Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy". Like he was lying about his name/nickname. Then later - even when siding with him - says "They're nothing like Billy and me". He bloody told you his name was William!

The more I thought about the song the more I thought that the lyrics made a really interesting poem.

Then the next day I found out why!

Woah. I've spent the last year-or-so messing with coding the C64 and hoovering up any information I could find... and I never found this site/ftp. So much good stuff - there goes my evening!

I'd argue that CoffeeScript was dead before Typescript went mainstream, and that JavaScript killed CoffeeScript: or rather, CoffeeScript killed itself.

Many of the features that made CoffeeScript fun and useful were incorporated directly into ES6. The proposals even cited CoffeeScript and borrowed the syntax verbatim or with minor changes. By the time arrow-functions were accepted it was obvious that the cost of transpiling wasn't worth it any more, all that was left was "significant whitespace", which was the most buggy part about CoffeeScript anyway!

I felt the same way last year, and had just moved countries. I decided I wouldn't apply for any jobs that were "normal": the normal work I would do. No IT consultants/agencies, no web-dev companies, no finance, no advertising, no SAAS, and nothing where I'd have to write the same four programs over and over. It took a while, but I ended up getting a job in a completely new domain: but one that still required my core skills.

So I get to learn a lot of new things, while still being a productive team member.

I'm starting to feel that software development should be a means to an ends - not the ends itself, so focusing on the (non-software) domain is the play.

I had the luxury of being able to take my time, but I found a handful of interesting opportunities that matched my requirements. It's much rarer than regular-old IT jobs, but they ARE out there!

Good luck!

I like the "const TodoStore = class extends EventTarget" idea to trigger rendering... neat trick!

I think the article's argument of "...at a specific moment between 1688 and 1690" might be prior art.

Some feedback: "This is the first test on our app", "Option1, Option2, Option3, Option4", random pictures of fingers, "Dddd, "Eeee"... doesn't really give any indication on what this app is about or what it's supposed to be used for.

I spend 10 minutes looking at those screen shots, but have no idea what this app could possibly be about, and I can't see how it relates to the description about politics - it makes no sense!

This is great! I've been trying to learn audio programming for ages and this (along with repo: https://github.com/yamadapc/augmented-audio) look like really fantastic resources!

My blog has been going since 2004, I add between 3 and 20 posts a year. I write the articles for me, in the future. I enjoy writing, and I'm pretty much the only person who will ever read the posts. I don't care if zero other people read it. I certainly don't do it for internet points. It's my blog for me.

I love going back and reading stuff from nearly 20 years ago... like a little tech diary. On a bunch of occasions I've used it as a reference when I remembered "I did something like this 10 years ago..." and dig up the posts.

Oddly, its also help me get my last two jobs too - in the interview, someone found something on my blog (that they looked at that morning before I came in) and we've had a conversation about it. The topics weren't directly related to the position, but showed my interests (Like, a post on a small webgl voxel thing I made helped get me a job at a mainframe company!).

I can choose where I want to work now, so I feel like my blog is a helpful filter: if a potential employee doesn't like my blog, it's probably not a good fit for either of us.

Another great "foley" movie is Rajio no jikan (Radio Time) or sometimes called "Welcome Back, Mr McDonald: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133170/

Its the story about a team of B-list celebs putting on a radio play where everything goes wrong. The most famous celeb requests a slight change in the script, and it snowballs. The CD library is locked so the new sound effects required have to be made by the security guard who used to do foley back in the day. Good movie!

I use this as a productivity tool: See something interesting on HN, click the link... it's a blank page. Close the page, do something else. Often I remember I'm procrastinating and use it as the bell to get back to working on my side projects.

Even if I'm happily time-wasting - there's a heck of a lot of stuff on the web, no need for dealing with sub-standard websites!

Just wondering... (really interested, not being snarky!) I see this opinion with family members and other people who aren't in tech/computers (the majority of people). I figured it was because they don't know how impressive data science has become.

But you most likely do know: so what would it actually take to make you care about what they are doing over your wifi?

Transmit every remote control button push? Send hashes of audio keywords recorded from you talking and use that to recommend shows/products? Raw lidar data? Raw audio/video recording of you/your house?

Is there potentially a line they could cross, or is data just data, and therefore equally fair game?

It's in the faq under "can I post a job ad?" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

  "Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs."

They pop up quite often (even multiple times for the same company).

I felt the same. During my last job search I decided to click on anything that looked like it wasn't "regular-old" web - no web tech companies, no agencies etc. I looked for different industries that needed (close to) my skill set.

I found a few interesting things - most weren't "right", but eventually I went to an interview where things were great: in mainframe computers! I've been there for a while and have been having a ball - learning a lot of new things, and glad for the change.

You got me wondering what was going on - 425Kb seemed pretty high. I imagined there would only be around 50K of non-compressed source code. Turns out the 200Kb+ culprit is the texture atlas I nabbed off the internet: https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels/blob/master/res/m... - I'm only using a handful of cells out of that, I should chop it!

Nothing at all - rewriting it for WebGL1 would be trivial (if you rely on OES_vertex_array_object being present). But really it was just me learning, and I naively assumed WebGL2.0 would be ready "any day now". The only non-supporting browser was Safari. That was 4+ years ago!

I can't believe it's actually happening - I was resigned to the fact it was dead.

I once (4 years ago, sheesh) made a "Pure-JS, no-build-step-required Minecraft Thing": https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels

When I made it I needed to specify it "Requires ES6 modules and WebGL2 support." At the time I was sure WebGL2 was going to be widely available soon and that ES6 modules would probably never be supported!

Oh boy, I dread when someone goes to show me something on their phone! (Here, let me show you a youtube video about it xD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9EWf-wXQ3o).

I think it's a bit of a hack for people like me: everyone has been taught to sound super-confident, make everything super glossy and slick and over-produced. Almost always it's to cover the lack of original or substantial content underlying the delivery.

Now the more confident-sounding and charismatic someone is, the less I believe there will be anything interesting I can learn from them, and the less I trust them!

I think they are intentionally being obtuse - everyone in the community just calls it G19A and gets on with it.

Which comments here?

Hmm, I've read it a bunch of times now but am still unsure: they ARE sending every bit of data - position, scale, rotation etc - about every cube/model/asset for a scene ("Since the scene is marked for replication [...your quote]")... and then after that they are syncing selected properties of that data ("player_name", "positions") every 16ms. Is that right? If you have a Fortnite-style map, every time you joined a game you would get all the map/model pos/rot/scale data sent to you?

And for messaging, I wrote "Why is integrating state synchronization with messaging a useful thing?" but I guess it would have been clearer if I asked "Why is integrating state synchronization with RPC a useful thing?"... what are some examples of what that's used for?

Great article - couple of questions:

"when the server adds the scene to the SceneTree, it automatically sends that information remotely. Each connected client will then instantiate the scene automatically,"

What information does it send remotely? Is it all the 3D info for every object? "Put a cube at 10,10,10, with scale 1, rotation 0 etc"?

"The RPC system will also work appropriately for the nodes spawned this way, so you can easily integrate state synchronization with messaging."

What is "messaging"? Why is integrating state synchronization with messaging a useful thing?

Also "Youtube Video Skip Ad Trigger" is handy one for automatically pressing the "skip ad" button - so you don't have to!

I think the biggest problem the art project will face is that nobody actually wants 19.5TB of not-terribly-good art.

If there wasn't a fun speculative element, then most of the artists would have trouble getting anyone to download their stuff even for free (just like most game devs struggle to get anyone to play their games - even when they're pretty good).

So really, if this art project does succeed it could be an interesting new distribution channel!