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So true, we should also ignore Picasso and Degas for saying things we find disagreeable
Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
421–430 of 654 posts
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference in participation within STEM between men and women is not well explained by biological differences. Blow has repeatedly claimed that it is actually the primary factor and seems actively disinterested in other explanations. This is "controversial" in that it's a position that is not well supported by evidence and he has repeatedly used his platform in the past to make unsupported claims to the contrary.
Is the opposite explained? I haven't read literature on the topic, and I'm by the way also somewhat of a sceptic of science on such topics, as a layman. But it seems super obvious that girls/women on average are not wanting to spend their teenage years in the basement programming geek stuff, like many boys/men do. In my experience, here in Germany, and you can probably extrapolate to the West in general, it's not lik…
It is much easier to put in the hours of gaming when you're not repeatedly called for your rape or have someone trying to stalk you or similar aggressive behaviors towards people perceived as female in these spaces. I pretended to be a woman in gaming spaces for some time just to see if these women had a point and the level of harassment I experienced is way more than even my most unmoderated cod xbox days. It's a simple voice modulator in chat.
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> From the perspective of a pre-abolitionist society, it evidently was I sincerely doubt the slaves would agree with you. Just because one group was economically and societally OK with it, doesn’t make it morally OK. > but that's not a political issue you're gonna have to deal with in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century Again, I doubt the slaves would agree with you. > Consider yourself lu…
> I sincerely doubt the slaves would agree with you. Just because one group was economically and societally OK with it, doesn’t make it morally OK. That is wrong, slaves were happy to be alive instead of killed in most societies. It wasn't "slavery or freedom" it was "slavery or death" in most cases. America is an exception there, but in most areas with slavery it was done to criminals that otherwise would have gotte…
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think it is acceptable to link to a submission to a place called "SubredditDrama" filled with bad faith links to secondary reactionary sources? Am I supposed to take this seriously?
What is the good faith way to link to "(It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks.)"? The link exists in the post but you object to that link as a bad faith way to link. So what is a good faith way to link to this tweet?
Even your pseudoquote here gives me nothing to work with.
"It" doesn't help? Seriously? What am I supposed to make with this vague out of context snippet?
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't played any of these games, but "explains otherwise" seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow's game combines ideas and rulesets from several other previous games. Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked > But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's…
They have a nice collation of his greatest hits over on Reddit[1] [1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...
> If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?
Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:
1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.
2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.
3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.
4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.
Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.
Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.
Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.
Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.
More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether one is allowed to pose some particular questions is a political topic though!
curious what you mean. i dont actually take any side on the original question. i dont really know enough to have an informed opinion - and im a bit skeptical one could prove anything given the confounding variables but the idea that you cant even a-politically pose a question about biology - i dont really get the logic there. seems antiscientific
I also don't think that's bad - you can say blatantly racist things with that template, and I'm ok with those things not allowed to be said in lots of contexts.
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like the original puzzles were licensed for this game, in which case why not?
> These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together. > I made two free games which were later licensed to be used and remixed in this project. Seems indeed to be the case. Blow designed (I guess) the mashup and "composition" if you will, but the puzzles themselves have all been designed and licensed by others, so seems the title of the HN sub…
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may not have a public* release but, over the last decade (starting pre-Zig/Odin), Blow has discussed it extensively in his videos[0], enough that even ~10y was possible for someone to make a toy independent implementation[1]. [0]: https://inductive.no/jai/ [1]: https://github.com/Sharir/jai *Although there has (always?) been a private alpha/beta release.
Still then, it's a stretch to say that Jai influenced other languages. How could it when only a handful of game-centered applications have been built by a handfull of devs? Rust and Zig developed features by cutting their teeth on large amounts of real software, not by following one guy's personal project that has no source, no library, no spec available.
Odin's creator has credited Jai as an influence. You can see him in the comments of old jai youtube videos (videos that go into a lot of depth about the language design). Odin's syntax and features are very similar to Jai, the influence is pretty clear. Odin has other influences of course but you could say it's "jai but open source".
Lastly, jai is not open source but it doesn't mean it's not available. You can message blow to get access to it. Many programmers have used it. There are third party jai libraries on github.
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have a nice collation of his greatest hits over on Reddit[1] [1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...
Do you think it is acceptable to link to a submission to a place called "SubredditDrama" filled with bad faith links to secondary reactionary sources? Am I supposed to take this seriously?
Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
With Blow the devil is simultaneously in the details and at the meta level. For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new…
To each their own. I found the Witness to be excruciatingly monotonous, forced and, ultimately, boring.
That said I’ll probably buy this game if it comes out next year.