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.

See Full Post and Comments

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.)

See Full Post and Comments

Bad science reporting

This article about a new gout study is really quite annoying.

The headline: "Huge Study Shows Where Gout Comes From, And It's Not What We Thought". Pure clickbait. Nothing has changed the basic fact that gout is caused by a buildup of uric acid leading to micro crystals. The only thing the study has found is more genetic markers to make gout susceptibility more or less likely. Genetics having influence on these things is not surprising to anyone except perhaps blank slatists.

Gout is often associated with drinking too much or not eating healthily enough, but new research suggests genetics play more of a factor in developing the arthritic condition than previously thought.

See Full Post and Comments

Game design considerations of phobias

There was a twitter thread a few days ago that ultimately got deleted because too many people made uncharitable reads of it. The underlying idea was a bit interesting though. I wanted to riff on it, and twitter's not a good place for that. So here's some unorganizeed thoughts.

The underlying idea was just wondering whether games that have well-known phobia-associated things in them (e.g. spiders) explicitly consider whether their game needs to have such elements, or could use something else.

Despite a recent post, I have done some game design.. and such a thought never entered my thinking. But I'm not a designer. Would Romero consider it? There's a spider in Doom. It didn't need to be there. Did he consider it in the context of arachnophobia existing? I doubt it... Others in the threads who have knowledge one way or another have brought up cases where it was considered, though. e.g. apparently Guild Wars 2 cut out a spider mount explicitly because of players with arachnophobia existing.

See Full Post and Comments

Hero Driven Development

Just a brief thought or lament on a common pattern in open source development. It's the dependence on "heroes" of the ecosystem.

Heroes are individuals or groups who "step up" and, for continuous years, make new stuff and maintain it. When they make promises and commitments, either explicit or implicit, you can count on them.

An example of an implicit commitment is registering a domain name. Are you going to be cool and keep that URL working forever? If I ever have to use a site archiver, you have failed, and I'm a bit sad.

See Full Post and Comments

Where's my game?

Nowhere in sight.

And not any time soon.

Ok, I just want a preface effectively saying: don't listen to me about making video games. I have very little to showcase that I know at all what I'm talking about.

See Full Post and Comments

AI Songs

I came across this silly song today, Colors of the Lisp. At the bottom is a link to a youtube video of someone performing it. I don't mean to be rude to the singer; my opinion is that it's kind of a bad performance.

Taking a step back real quick, I think it's sort of a shame that most humans suck at singing (this definitely includes me) -- maybe most could be trained up to something approaching "not grating", if we all had time and inclination, but I don't know. In the past, I don't think it was any different either, most people were bad. But it mattered less, because you didn't have an endless supply of excellent music to listen to any time you wanted, so people sang more even if they weren't very good. And when singing in a group, even if there are a lot of bad singers, the whole sound plus the experience of the individuals can sort of make up for it.

Vocaloid has been around a while, I enjoy it. I also think the idea is implicitly accepted there: even if a singer sounds quite robotic, it's still a lot better than a random human giving an attempt.

See Full Post and Comments

Older Posts