tombert

Yeah; way before I knew how to program I would still say "He said do this or else!"

I remember reading this article when it was new, and I left fully agreeing, but more broadly: modern video compression is magic.

Like, it's baffling to me how much we can compress high-quality video nowadays. HEVC and AV1 and VP9 are all also very cool and they still sort of break my brain. I understand how they work but it doesn't feel like it should compress as well as it does.

Yeah but then that sort of invalidates the wager right?

The premise is that it's trivial cost to believe with very high potential reward and no downside if you're wrong. That's simply not true; if it turns out that there isn't a God, and if it turns out that there is no heaven or hell, and that this is the only life we get, then you have wasted everything for a false premise.

Seems unlikely to me. We even gave up on Trump's tax returns, and gave up the emoluments clause given that he is the CEO of a publicly traded company and has multiple cryptocurrency scams. This administration has plot armor. Feel free to fill in the reason as to "why"; my opinions would likely get me banned.

I never really understood Pascal's Wager.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.

I remember hearing about that.

Of course, this is just when they got caught doing it. Who knows how often it happens where they don't.

Tinfoil hat thoroughly fixed upon my head, but a part of me kind of thinks that this might have been a long-game from big tech in the same vein as Grapes of Wrath.

Software engineers make a lot of money, at least historically because of supply/demand mechanics. By suddenly and continuously flooding the market with lots and lots of software engineers, you effectively can bring down wages, since if people are unemployed long enough they're likely to take a lower salary.

I think the problem is that people view MS Office as the "standard", and therefore any deviation is considered "wrong" or "broken".

If you genuinely think that California or New York are anywhere even approaching "communism" then I have to question where you got that information, and for that matter your definition of "communism".

You're not wrong, but I never really got over the "Haskell and monads" phase of it.

To each their own, and I guess it goes to the point of the article even more.

Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.

I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.

I had some skepticism from a friend when I told him that graduate school is significantly easier than undergrad. It's not that the work is "easier" in any kind of objective sense, it's that almost by definition if you're going to graduate school it's for a topic that you think is interesting, and as such you're going to have more interest and/or aptitude for it.

I had trouble with university the first time around, but it wasn't for the stuff that I thought was interesting. I did fine in my math classes and physics courses and the like; the thing that I struggled the most with were my "easy" courses (e.g. multicultural film). I just did not care about anything that wasn't math or computers, and as such I had trouble forcing myself to do the homework or study and of course I did poorly in the courses.

I've gotten a lot better at forcing myself to do boring work now, but ironically once I decided to do grad school and get my masters, I found it a lot easier. I didn't have to do any courses that I thought were boring. I got to focus on data structures and math and programming languages. You know, fun stuff! As such the masters was (comparatively speaking) a breeze for me because I didn't mind spending hours studying every day.

It occurs to me, though, that this advice might just be about me specifically, which I suppose is the point of the article.

Mario 64 is probably the game I have spent the most amount of time playing.

I had never really played any "open ended" games before it; sometimes I would just load up the game to run around, with no goals of collecting any stars or making any progress or anything. The platforming controls were fun even when there wasn't any specific "goal", and to a six year old kid the worlds felt huge.

As a cynical grownup who more or less knows how to write software, I now know that a lot of the "gigantic" feeling you'd have in N64 games was smoke and mirrors, but I didn't as a kid. It felt like if I just swam to some yet-unexplored corner of Jolly Roger Bay there would be something waiting for me. It doesn't hurt that the music is actually really good (particularly in Jolly Roger Bay).

Without hyperbole, as a thirty-something now, I've probably played through the game around thirty or forty times; I have most of the stars pretty thoroughly memorized and I can get an "any%" completion in a couple hours. I will still load the game up every now and again on my MiSTer. Despite being one of the first big 3D platformers, I still think it's one of the best.

It just made me sad. He didn't seem like a bad person.

I know he's an adult and he's allowed to make his own decisions and he's allowed to throw his money away if he wants. I'm not his dad and I can't make decisions for him, but it seems really gross that there's an institution that exists seemingly purely to extract money from people who don't understand math.

I've never been a big fan of D, but I also haven't done much with it so it's possible I would like it more if I did.

So, simple question: why D? Keep in mind that "I think it writes pretty code" is a perfectly valid answer.