senand

There’s a lot of weird stuff in the C++ version that only really makes sense when you remember that this was made in flash first, and directly ported, warts and all. For example, maybe my worst programming habit is declaring temporary variables like i, j and k as members of each class, so that I didn’t have to declare them inside functions (which is annoying to do in flash for boring reasons). This led to some nasty and difficult to track down bugs, to say the least. In entity collision in particular, several functions will share the same i variable. Infinite loops are possible.

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This sounds so bad, and confirms my prejudice that gaming code is terrible.

Comment · 1 year ago

Which doesn't protect these companies. The CLOUD act allows the US to access the data even if hosted outside of the US, if it's a US company - since 2018. That has been a looming threat ever since, but is now more perilous than ever.

Comment · 1 year ago

That's true. They were numerous attempts to introduce a European alternative, which (more-or-less) failed. The US cloud providers are years ahead. However, the EU is suffering from that; the US companies pay some taxes, but far less than you possibly believe, and it conversely doesn't have any tax revenue from their own companies. Not to mention the political and data independence that are now more necessary than ever.

Comment · 2 years ago

I like the simplicity. However, it is possible to rollout a feature flag only to a part of the user, e.g. a 1% canary release (cf https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CanaryRelease.html)?

If not, I'm not sure this brings more to the table than simple configuration changes that are rolled out through your next deployment, which should be frequent anyway, assuming you have continuous delivery.

Comment · 2 years ago

This seems quite reasonable, but I recently heard a podcast (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/24/280-...) that LLMs are more likely to be very good at navigating what they have been trained on, but very poor at abstract reasoning and discovering new areas outside of their training. As a single human, you don't notice, as the training material is greater than everything we could ever learn.

After all, that's what Artificial General Intelligence would at least in part be about: finding and proving new math theorems, creating new poetry, making new scientific discoveries, etc.

There is even a new challenge that's been proposed: https://arcprize.org/blog/launch

> It makes sense that the process of thinking and the process of translating those thoughts into and out of language would be distinct

Yes, indeed. And LLMs seem to be very good at _simulating_ the translation of thought into language. They don't actually do it, at least not like humans do.

Comment · 2 years ago

I don't disagree. However, often, when I use a library, I use it within a small function that I control, which I can then type again. Of course, if libraries change e.g. the type they return over time (which they shouldn't also according to Rich), you often only notice if you have a test (which you should have anyway).

Moreover, for many libraries there are types- libraries that add types to their interface, and more and more libraries have types to begin with.

Anyway just wanted to share that for me at least it's in practice not so bad as you make it sound if you follow some good processes.