You might not need ECS

So around May of 2024, I finally got around to reading this article on lisp gamedev with ECS. It's very good and explains things really well. The author created a nice ECS system and if it fits your development style, by all means, use it and let's have more Lisp games!

However, I've been fairly skeptical of the ECS idea since I first came across it however long ago. Now, to be fair I'm just a nobody with no commercially shipped games and only a few relations with people who are in or have been in the industry, but I'm not the only one who is skeptical. Check out this short article from the creator of Godot explaining why Godot isn't ECS-based.

To grossly simplify that post, and arguments made by others elsewhere, the reasons for being skeptical about ECS mostly boil down to two things:

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Hammock bye-bye

According to Amazon, I purchased my first hammock in October 2013. I've been sleeping in one since, trying out a few different types over the years or just replacing one as it wears out and gets a rip.

I've sort of wanted and claimed to want my next "bed" to be a waterbed, but that should happen only after I move. Plus I'm renting and it might technically be forbidden in the contract, I don't remember...

But last month, I purchased a made-in-Japan Japanese style futon, and a small raised all-wood and slats bedframe to raise it on (about 12 inches) instead of on the floor directly. It's a twin XL for the extra length as I'm tall.

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Feature request to self: draft posts

I should really add some draft post functionality to this blog. Over the years I've had several and some of them I even finish but the way I keep the drafts around is just keeping the new post tab around as one of my hundreds of tabs. This used to be a lot more flaky and I'd lose some drafts that way, as the new post page is mostly just a simple textarea tag.

I also think I lost a few drafts when I did a tab migration from my old computer to my new computer and didn't think about some of the implicitly saved form state before I closed all the tabs on the old computer.

Anyway, it's just dumb to keep drafts around forever like this... And some I realize I should probably not post ever, or at least not for a long time, but I don't want to delete them, and I don't want to just stuff them in a corner of my file system....

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Japan Trip 6

Previously.

Had another good trip to Japan from December 6th to January 9th. I didn't need to be gone so long, but I wanted to be available on the 7th for reasons. (An extra reason ended up being a tekken tournament I went to, which was cool.)

A bunch of day to day details are in my Happenings post so I'll just very briefly summarize some things here I guess.

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It's probably over

Back home after a month trip (Japan Trip 6, will make a separate post later). It's so nice to be home.

It was a great trip. But at the end I did force myself to verify something I had been expecting and assuming for nearly 3 years (let's call it summer 2022) -- I kept finding reasons to add 9s to my 99.99...% certainty, I think I ended on 7 nines -- but it's good to have that final bit of clarity and kill any lingering doubt, hope, or ambiguity. It'll hopefully let me heal and move on.

But yeah, it's probably over, because of it... by that I mean I should probably back away from a lot of things once more, unfollow and unsubscribe to a lot of accounts, re-evaluate life, and close this recent chapter. Reminds me of my previous obsession with MLP. The start of this chapter is arguably my descent into watching a lot of vtubers, which I believe started sometime in 2019. By 2022 I was almost done, but since March 11th, 2022, I was brought back, at least for one vtuber in particular. But yeah, might be time to fade away...

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Brief thoughts on maybe programmers are bad talk

I love the title, though the talk isn't quite a match. Whatever. The link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUgl6pFx8Q

Overall I thought it was a good discussion, but I'd have challenged Casey a bit more on the assembly stuff. And as usual he has some perspectives I really disagree with at the level he presents them at, but I think if we could talk and dig into it more we'd probably agree on a lot. He might even say my very poor understanding of certain things is sufficient for his goals, and that if everyone was at least as poor as me, things would be better. Perhaps. Anyway, remarks just on the assembly stuff for now.

Can you really learn to read assembly well without having to write a good amount of it? I'm skeptical. The reason I'm skeptical is because it doesn't actually help that much to know "xadd [r13+16], r14" means "exchange and add" etc. The reason assembly is so difficult to understand and to write in general, despite for each line it being trivial to know (in a platonic sense) the full before/after instruction state of the CPU, is that what we care about is almost always about the side effects at some other level of looking at things (I don't want to say abstraction). Those side effects can be very platform and hardware dependent, the mapping very custom, and I think it's hard to get a feel for how such mappings work just by reading, you need to write. There's a reason every computer engineer learns to write UART, SIP, and I2C protocol code, whether in C or assembly, and often has to inspect it with an oscilloscope: you can't learn well enough just looking at the block diagrams.

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Some brief thoughts on the Yudkowsky / Wolfram chat

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjH2B_sE_RQ

I'm reminded when I started writing blog posts, thinking: "Ah, I'll write about this topic, and then I'll never have to make this argument about it again! I'll just have people read this." Naive youth, I soon discovered. And I see the same with almost everyone EY has ever had a discussion with: they haven't read the Sequences, and it's really painful to see EY forced to try to compress parts of them in the space of a few sentences. They really are needed as a ground-level common pool of information and arguments and counter-arguments that have been made, some with conclusions, decades ago.

(In an attempt to preserve my naive dream, I don't care if people don't read anything I've written, none of it's particular good or original, but I don't really want to have a serious discussion about AGI with people who haven't at least read some of the SL4 archives. (I myself was just a lurker.) They're invariably going to raise points that were brought up way back then and resolved one way or another. I see this again and again with people EY talks to. People say "what about..." and there's an answer, it was already thought of and addressed decades ago.)

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