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Coffee Is Hard

stilldrinking.org

211–220 of 232 posts

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#211

Take a look at rules engines and Expert Systems technology. Its a more declarative way to handle complex logic that allows you to state facts and let a inference engine handle the nested nature of dependent logical conditions. It will decrease the amount of work needed to code this part of your game. With your current approach you end up in the logic programming version of Node's call back hell before we had tools li…

Callback hell is easily avoided by naming callbacks.

Async/await has its own footguns, except they’re so difficult to debug that you need static analysis tools (Typescript or ESLint) to use them safely.

It’s one of that most special class of APIs that let you add a bug in one part of the system (e.g. forgetting an await) that causes a totally different part of the system to fail inscrutably. (Although really it’s Promises that unlock this ability, but potato/potahto.)

Callbacks are easily debugged with just a normal JavaScript interpreter.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I gameify all those chores and try to do them more perfectly each time I do them. I find this especially effective filling up the dishwasher more perfectly optimizing the layout each time. I guess I approach these chores like Zen gardens. Anyway that’s how I tricked my brain into turning the chores into quality time. ;)

Lol — I always joke with my partner (an artist) about how much chaos he brings when he loads the dishwasher. There’s a proper way!! I swear it!

You jest, but it’s totally possible to screw up loading a dish washer. In the best case, you just wind up with dirty dishes. In the worst case, you end up with damage.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#213
post #93
post #3

Probably worth noting that he also wrote the very well done "Programming Sucks" article, https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks and the original HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667825 . If you hadn't read that post, definitely worth it.

I like the core description of programming, but the framing - that programming is tougher than manual labor - is childish. Life is not a competition for whose job is hardest, and if it were, no one on Hacker News would win it.

> no one on Hacker News would win it.

That might be true, but it doesn’t seem like a thing you could know.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#214

There is a famous Zen saying (which) describes nothing-yet-everything about this: “Before Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”

One day the Master [Joshu] announced that a young monk had reached an advanced state of enlightment. The news caused some stir. Some of the monks went to see the young monk [Kyogen]. "We heard you are enlightened. Is that true?" they asked.

"It is," he replied.

"And how do you feel?"

"As miserable as ever," said the monk.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#215

The Coffee part of this article resonates with me. I have a stovetop espresso machine, and I'm constantly amazed at the new and ingenuous ways I come up with to mess it up. Making coffee before you've had your morning coffee is the great connundrum of our generation. Here's a short list of failure modes I've run up against: - Machine on stove, no water - Machine on stove, no coffee grounds - Machine on stove, complet…

The coffee part also resonated stongly with me, for a completely different reason :)

I spent last year thinking on how to implement a text-only simulation that could cope with just about any situation. Most of my models were mentally evaluated on this "simple" task of making coffee. The design I came up with (still to be implemented) is not code driven, but data driven. Instead of executing bunch of nested if-elses, I'd have a big list of tuples that contain . When action is performed upon object, this list is traversed. For each element, it's preconditions are compared to current world state. Based on this criteria the most suitable element is selected, and it's reaction is applied to modify world's state.

Your list could be used as preconditions for action of brewing coffee; each would produce different results ranging from nice coffee to yucky mud or broken machine. I'd like to include a nice built-in editor that could be utilized to quickly modify or add reactions, objects, or world state variables. I have most of it figured out but it's a lot of work to put together all the pieces.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness I think I first heard it here. https://youtu.be/7qNGWjDzxpQ

I like the "Discipline is Freedom" on that guy's t-shirt. Its arguable, but its deep.

The person talking in the video is Jocko Willink [1]. He's written quite a few books, one of which is entitled "Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual"[2]. His whole concept is that increasing your discipline leads to more freedom.

How can one be free when they are a slave to their discipline? A great example is time, everyone wants more of it. The way to get more time is to not waste time. Being discipline with ones time is how not to waste it.

I'm far from the most disciplined person (practicing discipline is pushing the rock), but in the ~2 years since I really put more discipline in place it has changed me as a person. Highly recommended.

[1] He has podcasts, and many books. I suggest listening to Tim Ferris when Jocko was on as an intro.

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Equals-Freedom-Field-Manua...

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that game must have an incredible ontology underneath it that would be amazingly useful to other ventures... I also recall playing it and, at a certain point, realizing that I was stubbornly uncreative in using the variety of options available to me. In retrospect maybe that wasn’t true, and the game managed the massive potential for variance by condensing things into smaller buckets. Either way thos…

Take a look for yourself: https://gamasutra.com/view/news/300313/Scribblenauts_dev_sha...

The twitter thread has been deleted :( This is the only reference to it I can find:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/comments/6ibtrf/sc...

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got full points on that game. I think I wasted months on it before giving up. Maybe my favorite KQ memory was KQ 3. Just getting out of the house took my family weeks. Every single misstep turned you into dust. And once you figured it all out, just walking down that stupid path you were 1 pixel away from death in some places. Those were some fun games.

The @#$#@@$ key on top of the closet man...

Heh- same with the handle/lever in the hole in the tree...

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#219
post #50

Always pining for more adventure games that remind me of the Sierra/LucasArts games of my youth. Can we start a thread here of great modern examples? I recently played Machinarium, and enjoyed it a lot. My wife and I played it for many evenings on the couch, and computer games are not her thing at all. I'm finishing up Infamous Machine on my Android phone. It's a fairly silly, small game, but a direct homage to Lucas…

Peasants Quest (although it’s not that new)

Fester Mudd - Curse of the Gold

Broken Age

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I gameify all those chores and try to do them more perfectly each time I do them. I find this especially effective filling up the dishwasher more perfectly optimizing the layout each time. I guess I approach these chores like Zen gardens. Anyway that’s how I tricked my brain into turning the chores into quality time. ;)

Me too! If I'm going to clean, I might as well work towards being amazing at it. Same tetris with the dishwasher too as well as trying to find the correct amount of detergent to use per load over a period of time with different loads and soil levels. Sad I know!

Check out this guy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx-aak2zK_Y

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