sunrunner

So Shrek was teaching people the wrong idea?

I feel a lot of this comes down to player expectations of what counts as a "repetitive" puzzle, and perhaps how players interpreted The Witness.

Counting purely "raw mechanics" introduced in new panels then yes, you could argue The Witness did have a lot of repetitive puzzles. Once a new puzzle grammar was introduced then essentially entire areas were dedicated to expanding the complexity of how you could interpret that set of rules.

And yet I don't think there were many puzzles that you could say were the exact combination of ideas from another puzzle.

A significant part of the design idea in The Witness was in not showing you, the player, any set of rules but instead having you infer them from simple and deliberately restricted examples of those rules in use, and then testing your inference against larger and more complex versions of that same shape of puzzle.

Those later versions of the same puzzle shape would sometimes force you to rethink what you inferred and refine your understanding of a rule or sometimes show you what felt like an emergent property of that set of rules. "I didn't know I could trace the inverse of a shape too", "I didn't know pairs cancelled out", "I didn't know the shape could be rotated", etc.

This approach almost necessitates having a lot of puzzles that start from the simplest possible example, and gradually increasing in scope and complexity over a set of panels, which can end up looking like "a lot of the same kind of puzzle".

I always fancied the title of Tech-Priest.

And also:

* Potentially a mimic

It's just not worth the risk.

I imagine the future of computer interaction could evolve into a split model combining foundational capabilities that just make sense to be pre-built, tested and shared deterministic code - codecs, numerical solvers, geometry kernels, databases and transactional tools, compilers, theorem provers, cryptography, etc. - with a fluid interaction layer that accesses either local or cloud-provided versions of those foundational capabilities and is capable of synthesising any tools it needs where it would be helpful to build it first - either as a one-off or something to cache - for anything that can’t just be done as a task.

Applications are compressed bundles of some assumptions about how something should work and be interacted with. So you wouldn’t need VLC, it’s a shell around a foundational codec layer. Instagram is just a view over data in the Instagram social network, and you could customise it as you see fit. Transmit is a lovely application but you can delegate that to a fluid task layer that can do one-off tasks or make something you can re-use.

Everything in the fat ‘middle layer’ of software that is connecting a user to something foundational through interface assumptions might disappear, unless it’s more useful for it to exist as a permanent tool. Things that a lot of people share or that are more complex, Blender for example.

I also imagine there’d be a lot more focus on making explicit things like canonical records or schema, contracts, provenance, versioning, access policies, some kind of fixed views. Things that your local fluid interface would rely on the structure for when it came to connecting to your bank and doing whatever you want with your finances.

Not all software as we think of it might disappear, but the things that are lightweight layers over something more stable could all be subsumed with tools synthesised on demand.

Perhaps, at least.

Perhaps from the overhead of the language interface coupled with the ease of the expansion of the amount of 'stuff' you potentially need to read and internalise?

Human language can be wonderfully descriptive or terribly verbose as a way of communicating ideas. Writing everything out and being forced to externalise it is its own cost, which pays off only when the space of work to then do collapses with as little feedback as possible (and, ideally, with correct outcomes).

On the other hand the ease with which you can simply get back more text to process means the upfront language heavy interface is now just returning back more information to pull back into your internal model.

Which, for me at least, feels tiring, and stressful when doing language-heavy exploratory tasks that don't collapse or resolve neatly and simply give you back more decisions.

Wow, it's almost as long as the Every UUID V4 or Every Floating Point Number pages.

"And in tonight's news, the worldwide CRM solution Salesforce had a global outage affecting one hundred percent of its customer base. We interviewed users of the service to find out the scope of the impact. Everyone agreed that they were impacted, but strangely, nobody could describe _in what way_ they were affected."

Something that’s both civilised and representative of the future. Stratagema? Or Mornington Crescent?

Unfortunately YouTube captures the full set of extremes and everything in between, so I don't think it's fair to label the entire thing a cesspit of stupidity.

For every MrBeast there's a 3Blue1Brown. For every recycled clip from a well-known TV series uploaded purely to drive ad revenue for a bot-controlled channel there's a fine art restoration video showing a very niche process with a real, skilled human behind it.

And so on.

FreeBSD has had jails for decades now.

slop-detect.com gets an A+ 0/100 when given its own domain to analyse. Interesting.

Or, in French, Lambdeux.