Viewing profile — mntmoss

The way in which Sega ultimately approached its console hardware business was actually similar from start to finish; you just have to look at the pre-Mega Drive consoles to see tha…

I think it helps to consider this a problem of "slow vs fast". Society has displayed ways of sheltering and hibernating through tulmultuous times and subsequently developing some k…

What ad-hoc code generation lacks, as a rule, is type constraints and structured expression(syntax and semantics). If it has those, it is bordering on being a complete compiler. Bu…

I'm pretty sure there's room for smaller verticals these days. It's been demonstrated many times that if you have the best front-end to the problem space, and you add some services…

I'm getting to 35 now and I had an experience that felt very similar to yours in my coastal magnet school. Lots of academics, lots of extracurricular stress, kids of immigrants who…

Yes, this argument is one shared with some arguments for minimum wage. When a sector of the economy can set wage freely, it often races to the bottom on price competitiveness, negl…

What tends to be absent in the simple analysis that leads to these kinds of hammer-to-all-nails solutions is a full enumeration of the classes of errors or intractable problems in …

Some time ago I realized, while standing in the midst of the Oakland Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, surrounded by old game boxes, this: "Most of these games are all marke…

The distinction is in quantity and types of assets. In 2D you usually have some bitmap and vector assets, collision data, animations, and scene structures to tie it all together. I…

Definitions of games are quite prolific. In academia many end up going back to Huizinga's "magic circle" [0] which he was writing about in the 1930's, before any video games were a…

I don't disagree. I believe, though, that our working philosophy limits us: "pursuit of property" in the Lockean sense, and "pursuit of utility" in the Bentham-Mill sense have guid…

IME it's all down to the implementation these days, which is a low-bidder-gets-what-they-pay-for kind of affair. My phone is cheap and the Bluetooth is nearly unusable on it(it can…

In two parts: 1. Fix the underlying ergonomics. Put your monitor higher and your keyboard closer. The position you want is like the rest position of a dancer: elbows nearly against…

1. Write placeholder output, the equivalent of a Hello World for the task. 2. Start parameterizing parts of the program to generate the output, so that more and more of the output …

For most programming tasks I would focus on the base of the pyramid: Make the storage low-latency for small files, then up the memory size and bandwidth, and then use a CPU appropr…

What I think Cook misses that Jobs got, and made for more exciting releases, is the idea of a totally integrated service. The iPod's victory was also a victory for iTunes. The iPho…

The question to reconcile in my mind: Malleable systems with reproducable builds. It's very easy to get your hands dirty with the bytes and add various assumptions and dependencies…

Money is intrinsically related to debt and ability to pay one's debts. This has several meanings when you look at different scales of money. An individual's debts are related to ne…

It's a fine line. There are plenty of stories of games that dumbed down their AI because it started doing inscrutable things when fully unleashed - and simulating full sense percep…

"Factoring" is sometimes used in the Forth world, since code being factored into small words is of such eminence. And it offers good lessons about what's worth factoring and how. F…

The real beauty of Nintendo's strategies, I think, is that they validate many forms of analysis. The design in them is never just great hardware, or great software, or great market…

The military - and many essential services like police, fire, healthcare - differ in that a majority of the work is not "doing" but "preparing". The military does not optimize towa…

Whether it works or not depends on how much your relationship is built on systematic, empirical decisions. Spreadsheets like this are hugely common in larger communal living arrang…

You may want to try raylib. It's written by a teacher who uses it in the classroom and geared for this kind of "let me code games in C but with only one dependency" goal. It does m…

I don't collect things I "need to get to", if that makes sense. I collect things I'm willing to spend time curating, which generally means they go in a file somewhere under a direc…