An hour long video with comments turned off? A summary would be useful...
Towards the bottom of the thread there is a pretty reasonable summary.
The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
71–80 of 107 posts
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found him passionate and smart. But rarely right. Like him bashing SOLID principles. It read like a man arguing against hammers, and instead suggesting using drills (which is fine if you need to drill a hole but bad advice if you want to hammer a nail). Like yeah, SOLID is over used and over-stated, but they were invented to stop certain set of problems.
> SOLID is over used and over-stated, but they were invented to stop certain set of problems. The problem is, when was it ever shown they solve any problem? Where are the measurements showing less dev time or less bugs or better performance? Where even is an algorithm to show your software is SOLID? People can't even agree on what those mean.
SOLID is for long-term development and use software. Games are developed during a relatively short time, and then released, and then not changed very much. The next game is developed independently, as a separate project and effort. SOLID is meant to alleviate continous development where changes and new features are constantly needed. Game development does not easily fit in this mold.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#73I'm curious in how to use Conway's Law to be more effective. I can learn from Brooks and Amdahls to improve software, but how to apply Conway's?
I think the closest thing is Bezos's API mandate. This is an attempt to flatten communications across a vast organization, with the upfront cost that each team build and maintain an API.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outside of the U.S.A. (notably in the U.K.) the computer science department is known as the informatics department. This makes the larger claim that the field's interest is information theory. Consider the information theoretic guarantees of total order broadcast and it's equivalence to consensus. Consider also the relationships between automata and languages, computational complexity theory, the relational calculus.…
This is kind of getting into weird semantics. For what it’s worth I hold a BSc from a large, reputable UK university in computer science , not informatics , so it’s not as universal as you suggest. I do also hold an undergraduate degree from a French university in informatique , a contraction of “information automatique”. Both words are equally important in the name of that discipline, and the “automatique” part is v…
Thank you for the correction, I should have used softer language. My sample size is small but my edit link is gone. To clarify my meaning, I don't mean to contradict process being core to the field but rather that process is within what I consider a more broad scope for the theory of information. While we could talk about the process involved in proving the equivalence of an automata to a language it feels like a stretch to call the fact of their equivalence a part of the study of process itself.
If you're game, I'm curious what seems weird about the semantics?
Not just the map but the terms written on it. :D
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#75Quoted post unavailable.
I think it's fair to have opinions, but you are overstating your case here -
> You could have had an entire career in the video game industry in the amount of time he's managed to produce some pile of crap that doesn't even have a complete gameplay loop.
Including taking time to explain concepts, Q+A, and design choices made to educate that are then iterated upon (eg, doing 2d graphics from scratch then moving to 3d), he has accumulated approximately 28 weeks of full time work.[1] That's a very sad "career" in video games.
[1] Math: Using playist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnuhp3Xd9PYTt6svyQPyR... with a calculation tool https://ytplaylist-len.herokuapp.com/ gives an average of 1 hour 40 minutes per video. The tool has a limit of 500 videos, so multiplying average length by true playlist length, then dividing by 40 hours per week gives 27.83 weeks: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281+hour+40+minutes%29...
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#76Conway's "law" is such a cop-out excuse for shipping shitty software... There's no such law of nature that says you must ship shitty software. Enterprises ship shitty software because the average tenure of their developers is 2 years, and they have no incentive to improve things beyond what's necessary to pay the bills.
I mean at the end of the day it boils to few things. - Entropy - Capitalism - Greed To not be vague, user greed for features and less for performance cause increase in complexity. A complex system is by definition more chaotic and harder to optimize. And Capitalism rewards doing just a bit better than competition. I.e. optimize your time on quickest things that gives most users satisfaction.
Greed and capitalism don’t explain it. We get shitty software from governments and research labs that have no competition and that get no rewards for shipping extra features.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#77An hour long video with comments turned off? A summary would be useful...
I would say just read Conway’s actual paper “How do committees invent”.
This is one of those talks where I’m convinced the person is being paid by the second. By the time we had got to the third iteration of “before I tell you the thing I’m going to talk about let me (define what a law is/critique Harvard business review/give an irrelevant sidebar about the language of technical papers and the fact ‘Datamation’ still exists”) I totally had lost any and all interest.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#78Casey's name should be in the title! I think a lot of HNers respect him.
Really?? I have no idea who he is, and this video didn't impress me at all.
With you on that. I had no idea who he was and definitely didn’t come out of that talk wanting more of whatever he is selling.
Incredibly trite and wildly overlong is how I would describe this.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that’s how you know somebody has only second-hand experience of science - having never reflected upon, or examined the (very human) limits of the knowledge they have been given by others. What scientific procedure would you use to establish whether one working scientific model “matches” reality; while another working model doesn’t? Nobody has direct access to reality outside of their own theoretical paradigm of u…
>What scientific procedure would you use to establish whether one working scientific model “matches” reality; while another working model doesn’t? See what model1 gives as a prediction for input X. See what model2 gives as a prediction for input X. Input X in the world and compare what actually happened. The models that more closely predict the observations are more likely to reflect reality (aka being closer to the…
You haven’t really tackled the strongest interpretation of my question head on.
If two different models/theories are observationally equivalent; if two (or more) different curves can be fitted to the same dataset which model is “more true”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_equivalence
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermina...
And how do you go from “F=ma for the usual symbols…” to solving the symbol-grounding problem? Symbols are epistemic entities, not ontological entities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem
The model works. That is all there is to be said about it.
If you begin asking questions such as “is the model true or not? Do the terms in the equation correspond to real world entities?” you are no longer doing science, you are doing philosophy.
Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]
#80I’m fairly conflicted by this, because it’s fairly insightful, but it’s also probably overselling itself. They expound quite hard on the idea that abstraction is inherently bad, and I feel this is a poor choice of words, and perhaps a mistake. Abstractions have cost . In many forms, and especially if the abstraction is a poor one. However… they don’t seem to differentiate between good and bad abstractions. They seem…
> They seem to regard all abstraction as simply unnecessary... I would be surprised if the video author agreed with this statement. My understanding of his point is something more general and almost trivially true, i.e. a given set of abstractions can't solve problems the same way as a different set of abstractions. The strong version is a Venn diagram ┌──────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ Implementations expressabl…
I just wanted to say what a great work you did on that diagram. Thanks for that