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End of an Era

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Re: End of an Era

#21

Post by tangus »

anyfoo wrote: post #14
cossatot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is evident in his description of programming in his later years: Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was perfect and Javascript was broken. He’d call me…

That quote about JavaScript is... huh. I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest programs without errors" when obviously, JavaScript (which I do not like, by the way) is productively used on a large scale (even back then), and constantly under scrutiny from programmers, computer scientists, language designers... it's jus…

>I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of ...

Obviously he's not serious, he's playing the part of the out of touch old man.

Re: End of an Era

#22

Post by anyfoo »

tangus wrote: post #21
anyfoo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote about JavaScript is... huh. I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest programs without errors" when obviously, JavaScript (which I do not like, by the way) is productively used on a large scale (even back then), and constantly under scrutiny from programmers, computer scientists, language designers... it's jus…

>I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of ... Obviously he's not serious, he's playing the part of the out of touch old man.

Ah, okay. Maybe it’s more obvious in context, or maybe my hyperbole detector is broken.

Re: End of an Era

#23

Post by jccalhoun »

He's always seemed very frustrated with the gaming industry and I hope he's happy in his day to day life. I remember running across Crawford's works and storytron back around 2000. I thought he was wrong then but I hoped he would find success. After all this time it is hard not to think that he's spent years tilting at windmills.

Re: End of an Era

#24

Post by yuchi »

anyfoo wrote: post #22
tangus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of ... Obviously he's not serious, he's playing the part of the out of touch old man.

Ah, okay. Maybe it’s more obvious in context, or maybe my hyperbole detector is broken.

Just as a small note I did not get that too.

Re: End of an Era

#25

Post by smaudet »

anyfoo wrote: post #14
cossatot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is evident in his description of programming in his later years: Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was perfect and Javascript was broken. He’d call me…

That quote about JavaScript is... huh. I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of "JavaScript [is] utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest programs without errors" when obviously, JavaScript (which I do not like, by the way) is productively used on a large scale (even back then), and constantly under scrutiny from programmers, computer scientists, language designers... it's jus…

Other languages have problems, but before some basic libraries (jQuery/Underscore) and language enhancements (Typescript/Coffeescript), it was arguably quite simplistic, and parts of the language were straight up anachronistic.

If you've ever been unfortunate enough to have to wrangle a VB script routine, it was (less bad) like that. If not, I would go find some assembly code and teach it yourself, and then imagine that instead of side effects in registers there were random effects on your code/visual state.

And like assembly code, you could now imagine that the same code might behave wildly different on different machines in different browsers.

So a bit of "old man"isms, but also I imagine his JavaScript was tainted by the early days. It's better in some ways now, worse in different ways, I don't mean to say that is the worst or the best, just to offer perspective on where it came from.

Re: End of an Era

#26

Post by smaudet »

anyfoo wrote: post #22
tangus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I do not understand how you can even begin coming to the conclusion of ... Obviously he's not serious, he's playing the part of the out of touch old man.

Ah, okay. Maybe it’s more obvious in context, or maybe my hyperbole detector is broken.

I can imagine grumpy an old man frustrated by a different paradigm shouting at his computer.

We all become that eventually, hopefully we can all be as poetic and humble (and honest) about it.

Re: End of an Era

#27

Post by dripdry45 »

cossatot wrote: post #12
lxdesk wrote: post #11

Crawford's work is worthy of study, as is the causation for why he experienced external failure. It embodies the "simulationist" aesthetic of game design: given enough modelled parameters, something emergent and interesting will happen. This was a trend of the 20th century: computers were new and interesting, and simulations did work when you asked them to solve physics problems and plan logistics. Why wouldn't it wo…

This is evident in his description of programming in his later years: Time and time again I would send my friend Dave Walker an email declaring that Javascript (or something else) was utterly broken, incapable of executing the simplest program without errors. Dave would ask to see the source code and I would present it to him with detailed notes proving that my code was perfect and Javascript was broken. He’d call me…

It’s a quality I’ve run into with a couple people: young or old, once they’ve ossified into thinking they are Better and Smarter than everyone else, they stop being curious and simply start mandating their wild “truths”

I’m sure we’ve all done it at one time or another, but repeated as habit without learning seems to speak of a certain kind of personality.

Re: End of an Era

#29

Post by socalgal2 »

gyomu wrote: post #19
socalgal2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree with his indictment of the video game landscape as being narratively poor. I think he would say they are narratively poor by his defintion that the narrative must be generated by the game/player combo and not just pre-programmed. People love "The Last of Us" for it's narrative but that narritive is something that can arguably be conveyed via book or movie. Crawford wanted something where the narrative it…

People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time. In the single player realm, there are games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, etc. Point is, the landscape of what "narrative" means in video games today is broad and deep. If none of those are even remotely like what Crawford thinks is "right" - and he's not able to d…

> People come up with complex shared narratives in multiplayer sandbox games like Minecraft/Roblox/Kenshi/etc. all the time.

That sounds no different from comming up with narratives on a playground. That's not a designed narrative, that's people making up a narrative where none exists. Hey, the jungle gym in our secret base! The swings are space ship! The ground is lava!

I think we can all imagine what he wanted to build even if he failed to come close to building it. He wanted to make a story machine where you could play the game and converse with the characters in a free flowing way yet still have the game provide a setting and conflict. Imagine talking to characters in the holodeck on Star Trek. Ideally where, over the course of the game, the dialog and interactions are designed in real time within the constraints of the setting. And, the way you treat characters influences how they react. Be a dick to the bartender, all his connections are harder to get consessions from. Be nice to one romantic partner, get snubbed by another, etc... And not just by canned responses. Tell one character a piece of info and it gets leaked to their closest contacts who then change their behavior/dialog based on this new knowledge.

Re: End of an Era

#30

Post by ezekiel68 »

I can so relate to this guy.

I'm "only" in my 50s now, but I am in my 50s now. For a couple of decades I've had this grand vision about how to build the perfect algorithmic trading system. The practical expression of this has come in fits and starts.

During the Pandemic, I finally devoted some time to building a bespoke server and hosting it co-located facility near a high-quality market data provider. I chose to do this before the software was ready in order to "light a fire under my a$$" and help motivate me to move things along. By the end of 2021 I had written, tested, and deployed a set of specialized clients written in rust to consume the market data and perform basic parsing of the real-time information. I stored the transformed output of these processes in log files as a temporary data sink that could represent the data "someday" moving downstream in a custom stream processing platform that would perform trades via an online broker.

And then, it stalled. There always seemed to be good reasons why I couldn't commit to one implementation strategy or another. Would I pass the data downstreeam via pipes? With Kafka? Via shared memory? Would the parsed input be represented via protobuf records? A custom binary format? Apache Arrow/Parquet format? Would the algorithms be expressed in custom rust code? Using Pandas(numpy)/Polars? Would I focus on my imagined "insights" into how prices move or make the transition to Machine Learning by trying to produce "special sauce" custom features that could be fed into models of various types? In the meantime, I have only collected a high volume of daily log files.

There has been some progress, of course. Last year, with LLMs as my pair programmer, I added vector processing to the ingest components, which made them run even more efficiently. I certainly enjoy the sporadic work I dedicate to working on the system. But there always seems to be a fog of possibilities ahead of me obscuring my view towards a broker API getting called.

My family and closest friends look upon this as the "hot rod in his garage" which I sometimes work on and which will probably never get finished.

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