I just want to say that this is incredibly impressive on so many levels. Your technical skills are obviously amazing but I really love how you were able to put this all together into an entertaining and well-produced video that anyone could understand. If you ever want to get paid 1/4 of what I'm sure you'll make as an engineer, you'd make a great teacher ;)
Thanks, was definitely hard to strike a balance between being understandable for non-nerds but also convey all the technical difficulties/achievements, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out .
That is amazing I understand how powerful of nerd skills it took to do all those steps. Maybe the most amazing one to me is that terraria mod to speed up their wiring code without changing any other behavior, and the combination of skills to do such nerdy stuff and also finish the project in a form that normies can appreciate and also making a popularization video of it. It's a very useful combo of skills and interests.
I guess I have a question, I know you did it yourself but it looks like you were in some community. Is it like a discord channel or was it some of your classmates or what?
It was pretty much just me by myself on this other than for the raycaster engine, which was done by a friend of mine near the end. I'm on a few Discord servers on Minecraft computing, but it's pretty vastly different and the biggest parallel is just with high level accelerator stuff.
You start with a NAND gate (NOT AND) and built the simple gates, multiplexers, ALU, machine language, VM, compiler for a high level lang, OS, graphics engine, culminating with a game you design that runs on this computer.
I was already impressed, then I got to the part where he wrote a tool chain with Rust and a test suite for RISC-V which runs in game.
Then I decided the kid was a young whippersnapper who's way too big for his britches and "kids these days" and all the other things old people think to make themselves feel better when they're being obsoleted.
I figure I would never have competed with this kid; he’s making people like jwz or antirez obsolete, not me! I’ll always be way more mediocre than this person.
I don't think he's dumb, but I also think a lot of people underestimate what they are capable of. Its a neat project, but it is one of those lots-of-grinding projects. Any tech professional should be able to pull this off, reasons abound why they won't (not motivated/mentally exhausted from work BS/have lives and no longer have infinite free time).
So I think "intelligent, and hard working", not "oh man could I never do something like that". Most of us spend time doing other, less geeky things, like reading, media consumption (spending time on HN).
Sure, as we get older, we "slow down", but that's OK - I could write up game engines or other complex projects in a couple weeks when I was younger, but I would also make a lot of mistakes. Stuff is mostly intuitive now.
Man, rustc compiling of binaries that run on this computer, docker, github CI, this kid's going places (no idea how old he is, but he's squarely younger than me, a millennial, ergo, kid).
I am thinking back to when I was a wunderkind. If I'd had access to modern technology (software and hardware) back then, could I have done anything like this? NO!
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I guess I have a question, I know you did it yourself but it looks like you were in some community. Is it like a discord channel or was it some of your classmates or what?
I think you might do quite well.
You start with a NAND gate (NOT AND) and built the simple gates, multiplexers, ALU, machine language, VM, compiler for a high level lang, OS, graphics engine, culminating with a game you design that runs on this computer.
There's also a book with the same contents (https://www.nand2tetris.org/book).
Then I decided the kid was a young whippersnapper who's way too big for his britches and "kids these days" and all the other things old people think to make themselves feel better when they're being obsoleted.
So I think "intelligent, and hard working", not "oh man could I never do something like that". Most of us spend time doing other, less geeky things, like reading, media consumption (spending time on HN).
Sure, as we get older, we "slow down", but that's OK - I could write up game engines or other complex projects in a couple weeks when I was younger, but I would also make a lot of mistakes. Stuff is mostly intuitive now.