201–210 of 219 posts
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... And math is just applied philosophy, and philosophy is just applied wine drinking. So let's drink some wine and be merry.
I am of the firm conviction that ganja produces better philosophy than wine.
You make some very good points here. I've watched the talk too and criticism of it is important. I have to say though Blow is right when he says: "you can't just Draw pixels to the screen" I am a game engine programmer at a 'medium sized' games company and it is becoming VERY difficult to hire anyone to work on graphics code. DX12 (and others of the same generation) is a massive step up from what previous generations…
I teach the systems class at Montana State, where we go from transistors up to a real computing system, and I have students that don't understand what a file system really is when they start my class I agree that blow is wrong on some details, but I really think we need to be thinking hard around a NAND-to-Tetris style education that starts in high school for our technical students. I use "outdated" models like Littl…
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I think you're getting close to ad hominem. It should be sufficient to point out how little overall people like Blow have accomplished. Blow is a hard worker, and yet it took him and his team 8 years to develop The Witness, which as you pointed out isn't anything revolutionary. I think there's a weird form of elitism at play here. Working close to the hardware isn't hard. There was a point in my early 20s where I too…
Blow routinely trashes software he’s never had to write. Single user software that is the sole focused application when it is running. It saves nothing of importance and doesn’t alter any system to any appreciable degree. You know what’s more impressive than The Witness? Any web browser. It has to deal with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector. A web browser…
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The Witness isn't revolutionary, but it is crafted with the care of someone who cares about the small details of 3D worlds. Besides being easily one of the deepest/broadest puzzle games of the decade, it is GORGEOUS, and filled to the brim with visual scenes that take your breath away. To me it's something more akin to the iPod. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." was absolutely a correct way to dismiss it…
I thought it was boring and not was not impressed by the visuals.
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I am of the firm conviction that ganja produces better philosophy than wine.
I'd expect that firm convictions are usually produced by tea- or coffee-drinking analytical philosophers, rather than by either wine or cannabis :)
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Blow routinely trashes software he’s never had to write. Single user software that is the sole focused application when it is running. It saves nothing of importance and doesn’t alter any system to any appreciable degree. You know what’s more impressive than The Witness? Any web browser. It has to deal with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector. A web browser…
You take for granted that delivering the user value of a web application needs to be in the form of dealing with "HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector." There is nothing inevitable about that.
I actually said nothing about web applications themselves.
Don't mistake flash for substance. The Witness may be pretty, but it gets to throw away a lot of complexity. Even as a game, it's not terribly complex.
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The concept of files and file systems is useful to regular computer users, even when they have no interest in knowing how things work under the hood. The issue is with mobile OSs, and that software companies like their apps to be a walled garden for your data as much as possible, and therefore resist exposing your data as files living in a normal shared file system. Even if you already work with files, they have you…
Yes, also the curse of modern desktop os’s trying to trick people into storing data in the cloud. The notion of just having files somewhere accessible and organized in a reasonable manner isn’t clear to many (most?) of my students.
And as someone who had their house (whole town actually) burn down recently, cloud storage saved all my data, thousands of baby photos, etc...
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You take for granted that delivering the user value of a web application needs to be in the form of dealing with "HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector." There is nothing inevitable about that.
No, I'm saying the web browser itself is an incredibly complex piece of software that has to deal with a lot more than what The Witness does. I actually said nothing about web applications themselves. Don't mistake flash for substance. The Witness may be pretty, but it gets to throw away a lot of complexity. Even as a game, it's not terribly complex.