Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles • Hacker News Board

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#471

Post by dismalaf » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:08 PM UTC

biophysboy wrote: post #418

dismalaf wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lab leak theory was always credible. Here in Canada there was a big scandal with Chinese scientists who worked for one of our labs who secretly transferred specimens from Winnipeg to Wuhan in 2019 and the subsequent police investigation went public in 2020. Here's a good article that's basically a summary of events (as well as teaser for a book): https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/from-our-lab-to-theirs-...

(Apologies to the thread..) Its not credible: two viral lineages emerged from the market ~1 week apart before the world knew what covid was; they differ by 2 nucleotides; mutation rates are 1e-6 per base per passage; doubling time is about half a week. A group of sick animals better explains the phylogenetics w/ these constraints. Everything points against lab leak: location, timing, and genetics.

You should google the definition of credible since it seems you don't know it... (Hint, it doesn't mean 100% true)

It really boils down to: do you trust a brutal communist dictatorship that has been attacking the West asymmetrically and wants to invade its neighbours to be honest?

Multiple Western governments believe it was a lab leak and coincidentally I'm sure, relations with China have been quite bad since.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#472

Post by mvkel » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #413

mvkel wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll find that most development -teams- ship about one game every decade. It's hard to find examples of that not being the case.

What? Its about 3-5 years for a AAA game and you ideally pipeline things such that a studio is shipping somewhat frequently. Almost no one can front a decade worth of development without shipping anything. Where are you getting a decade from? Consoles ship more often then that.

How many games has Valve shipped in the last decade? Square Enix? Bethesda? Epic?

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#473

Post by justin66 » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #237

creata wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is. It might if the game has a more-than-perfunctory story, because authors often incorporate their political or religious beliefs into their stories. (This is usually a good thing: most of the novels that people love would be nothing if stripped of those themes.)

It's unfortunate that The Good Scott Adams occasionally gets mixed up with The Evil Scott Adams. It's so ironic that they share a name. Many people know who the The Evil Scott Adams is, because he's such an unrepentant attention starved troll who is notorious not only for making a sock puppet to praise and flatter himself as a genius on internet forums, but for his obsessive unvarnished hateful bigotry, racism ("blac…

Good stuff. I followed the link to Good Scott's wiki page and learned he helped out on a text adventure as recently as 2018. That's pretty interesting.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#474

Post by Barrin92 » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:22 PM UTC

NeutralCrane wrote: post #212

ragazzina wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a relatively benign conservative Can it really be considered “relatively benign” when an extremely famous public figure is calling for people who disagree with them to be shot?

You are missing their point. They are saying they start with relatively benign views, and the intense overreaction to those views drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have. I can't speak for Blow, but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.

>that they otherwise might not have.

I think this is letting people off the hook. We're talking about adults in their 40s and 50s here. When people like that 'suddenly' endorse extreme views it's because they had held them back and feel enabled to say them now, an adult isn't going to become an extremist because someone was mean to them online.

I'm 20 years younger than Blow and even at my age I can tell I'm settled enough psychologically that adopting radically different views would require a lot of internal effort. Views don't exist in a vacuum, to believe radical things you have to radically alter all the other things you belief. I really don't think we should people like this like children without agency.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#475

Post by __alexs » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

psyopsy wrote: post #402

__alexs wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he's said exactly that in his own words but I think on balance it's fair to say he doesn't seem welcoming about it. He clearly has right leaning and libertarian views, and seems to be not very articulate or sensitive in how he discusses them so I can see why people might read into that more than they should maybe.

Thekla currently has 10 core permanent employees. 5 of them are women, including their studio manager, creative and art Director, a programmer, and 2 additional artists. You can say whatever the hell you want. Or you could spend 3 minutes actually looking at public information to see if you're wrong.

I don't think these statements are contradictory.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#476

Post by z-dev » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

EvilTrout wrote: post #204

piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage. They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago. Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.) Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now. These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers…

I don't much about casey, but jblow seems to have gotten popular partly because of the timing with live streaming becoming mainstream and also because people find his brash "tell-it-like-it-is" opinions refreshing. It's the same reason why people tend to gravitate towards guys like linus or stallman. Having opinions and not being a fence-sitter makes you interesting.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#477

Post by __alexs » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:27 PM UTC

psyopsy wrote: post #391

__alexs wrote: post #156

Earlier 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.

When you say, "not well support by evidence," you're either wrong, anti-science, or lying. Numerous studies absolutely show very large average differences in interests based on sex. And those carry over into occupation preferences. Just one more recent study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812... Plus: Jon never said it's the "primary" factor, as you claim. He said it's a large factor, that…

This study confirms that there is a gender difference but it doesn't explain why. I didn't claim that there were not differences, but that they were not well explained by biology.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#478

Post by biophysboy » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:32 PM UTC

dismalaf wrote: post #471

biophysboy wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Apologies to the thread..) Its not credible: two viral lineages emerged from the market ~1 week apart before the world knew what covid was; they differ by 2 nucleotides; mutation rates are 1e-6 per base per passage; doubling time is about half a week. A group of sick animals better explains the phylogenetics w/ these constraints. Everything points against lab leak: location, timing, and genetics.

You should google the definition of credible since it seems you don't know it... (Hint, it doesn't mean 100% true) It really boils down to: do you trust a brutal communist dictatorship that has been attacking the West asymmetrically and wants to invade its neighbours to be honest? Multiple Western governments believe it was a lab leak and coincidentally I'm sure, relations with China have been quite bad since.

My evidence is genetic material; your evidence is state intelligence

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#479

Post by dismalaf » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:37 PM UTC

biophysboy wrote: post #478

dismalaf wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should google the definition of credible since it seems you don't know it... (Hint, it doesn't mean 100% true) It really boils down to: do you trust a brutal communist dictatorship that has been attacking the West asymmetrically and wants to invade its neighbours to be honest? Multiple Western governments believe it was a lab leak and coincidentally I'm sure, relations with China have been quite bad since.

My evidence is genetic material; your evidence is state intelligence

Your evidence is a Chinese claim of genetic material. They've certainly never covered anything up before...

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#480

Post by jstimpfle » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #455

jstimpfle wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The therm "fascist" is definitely being thrown around like it was nothing, for the most unnewsworthy opinions or statements. There are definitely people who call anyone fascist who would dare to claim that there might be differences between the sexes on average for example. Doing so probably has a fascist element itself (not accepting different opinions). It's also unreasonable, and let me say _ridiculous_, to even d…

"There are differences between men and women" isn't a fascist-coded statement because of the statement itself - it's obviously a true statement no matter what you believe. It's fascist- coded . This statement is almost exclusively said by fascists, for reasons that have not much to do with the statement itself. Why is that? IMO it's because fascist slogans always tend to drift away from their actual meaning, towards…

I for one have said that sentence you're discussing a lot, and you'll just have to take my word that I'm far from being a fascist. I even draw conclusions from that sentence, but I'm trying hard to not draw any conclusions about specific members of any given sex.

I of course get where you're coming from, but don't you think it is intellectually dishonest to try and police certain "obviously true statements"? Isn't it similar to banning kitchen knifes because they can be used to kill? Doesn't it put under suspicion a lot of people who are simply following their intellectual curiosity?

I would argue that the ideas you seem to be advertising can lead to similar societal catastrophes as the ones you're trying to prevent from reoccurring.

For sure, the misguided idea that men and women are absolutely, 100% the same, and that any other outcome than some equal distribution between males and females means there must be mysoginy and patriarchy at work (which I don't say you're proclaiming directly), has lead to a lot of real problems in the past decades. And that includes aggressive propaganda against males in general, and against some actually valuable male virtues as well as female virtues, in some circles.