Wow! I never expected to see Barb talked about on hacker News.
There are a lot of us bald programmers..
Readit Newsvga805 commented on Ocarina of Time Randomizer ootrandomizer.com/... · Posted by u/nickswalker
I moved away from the front-end/React world, but until a couple of years ago, Svelte was the darling and the future of F/E development and now it's htmx.
I don't want to start another framework flamewar but was it something in particular that people stopped talking about it?
Svelte is great, htmx is great. I don't think the right way to think about it is that one of them is _the_ future of F/E development. One might be getting more attention at the moment but they are both (along with others) useful tools to have in the belt depending on the use case.
I recently took over a flask web app. Using htmx with it to get a more snappier SPA feel in certain places was a true joy.
Will I use it on a greenfield highly interactive webapp? I'm not sure yet. But it's been nice to discover a new tool that worked really well in a recent project I've taken over. The experience was a really good one so I'm not surprised it's been getting attention lately.
I read Consciousness Explained 30 years ago and at first I was miffed that it didn't touch on the possibilties of Quantum mechanics and consciousness, a buzzword idea that I was keen on at the time. But then every chapter was so fascinating - blindsight, p-zombies, Libet, the cartesian theatre.
If I can sum up in a very simple way, as a philosopher he was pointing to a simple but hard to grasp idea:
Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is. Most of our preconceptions about it are likely wrong. Because we're right in it all the time, it seems like we 'know' things about it. But we don't. Quick example: our visual consciousness seems continuous. But we know from saccades that it can't be.
We don't know from saccades that consciousness can't be continuous. We just know that the physical impressions on our retina do not map 1 to 1 to our visual conscious experience. The brain does all sorts of things to the raw information it receives before that information rises to the level of phenomenal consciousness.
The whole release of Grand Poo World III was one of the best things happening in the Internet last year. The chaos that broke smwcentral, how it beat Super Mario RPG in viewers on Twitch for quite a many days and how much fun every streamer seemed to have with it.
I can't get past the first jump though, but still, thank you barb!
Agreed, it was a blast to watch people tackle it. In addition to what you mentioned, I'd include Barb's Lunar Magic streams. They were super chill and it was some of my favorite content of the year, getting to watch him in his creative process working on the hack.
Linking to Lunar Magic, the community's Super Mario World editor that likely spurred Nintendo to create Mario Maker in the first place.
https://fusoya.eludevisibility.org/lm/
Also, go check out the Grand Poo World III videos. Absolutely peak Mario.
Barb (creator of Grand Poo World 3) is my favorite level designer and surely one of the best... But I would say peak Mario might have been the 2022 GDQ Super Mario World romhack race. Some of the stuff in that is truly mind boggling.
For me, it's game hacking (not online cheating, though!).
Such a diverse topic where you can do a lot of stuff, learn a lot of stuff (x86 assembly, reverse engineering, etc) and you can achieve things like free-cameras, spawning npcs, and understanding how the game actually works at a lower level.
With that, I like to experiment with different languages, I started doing it in C++, moved to Rust, but I also tried Zig and Nim, and since they are all 'system programming languages', and you can interact with FFI, it means you can do fun stuff.
One of my latest projects was to spawn lights in a certain games because I know some folks that likes to take photos inside games, and it was such a fun project to understand how the game manages entities, how to spawn entities and how to control them using an injected imgui.
It feels nothing like work and it's very rewarding.
+1 for game programming. I always wanted to learn ASM, it wasn't until discovering Super Mario World ROM hacking that it became fun and exciting enough to really dig into.
I find hobby coding to be more fun and rewarding when I do it with other junior developers. I used to teach coding and I've kept up with and continue to mentor some former students so if one of them has a project idea or they want to practice algorithms or learn some framework and they want some help I'll pair with them. Recently I went back out on the job market so as I study some more advanced algorithms I'll invite them to code with me.
I love teaching, I always have fun doing it. So the hobby coding ends up being fun and rewarding. Sometimes they'll come up with an idea that I quite like, so the aded outside creativity also makes it fun. Some ideas recently we might even release at some point, this also adds a bit of excitement.
vga805 commented on How safe is ayahuasca? Large-scale study explores technologynetworks.com/bi... · Posted by u/voisin
Ayahuasca ceremonies are among the most profound, cherished experiences of my life. I prepare for months before partaking in them to make sure my emotional, physical, and spiritual health is in a good place. And I can't imagine taking this drug without being under the care of experienced guides. I also wouldn't recommend it for anyone except those who really desire to push the limits of their mind. Some trips have felt like mystical, blissful experiences. Others have felt like an eternity in hell. You never know what you're going to get and you have to be ready for it.
Another aspect of this for mental health is that it is possible to experience the common "machine elves" that people encounter. I am as skeptical as it gets but I'm really not sure if I've encountered beings from some other dimension or if my own mind is capable of the weird, sometimes horrifying, always profound shit that I've seen. The first Ayahuasca trip I went on I immediately had intense hallucinations of the feminine spirits. They put out their hands and invited me to walk with them. As we were walking down some kind of hall I reminded myself that these beings were easily a creation of my mind, that we do this kind of thing all the time in our sleep. As I was entertaining this thought one of them violently turned around and yelled "NO". The other being, in a sad voice I'll never forget, asked me why I felt the need to reduce and explain away the experience. I think about this often.
vga805 commented on How not to teach recursion (2021) parentheticallyspeaking.o... · Posted by u/tosh
> but this time without using any kind of looping.
See, to me, recursion is a kind of looping.
Yeah fair enough, I agree, I could have worded that differently. They couldn't use any of the looping they'd come to learn up to that point.
vga805 commented on How not to teach recursion (2021) parentheticallyspeaking.o... · Posted by u/tosh
I agree with the overall sentiment. I taught for awhile and was happy with the approach I came up with. Students start out with the basics of learning how to loop through a list to transform some data. Once they have looping down, they are introduced to map and other built in methods. But, before using these methods, they are tasked with rewriting them using the looping they've learned.
Once they've "earned" the usage of the built in methods, they are tasked with rewriting them again, but this time without using any kind of looping. I give them a bit of time to think about how they may do this. Very few students get it but the plan is to live code it myself as an introduction to recursion. The task is still the same: to rewrite the map method. So the context for their intro to recursion is something they've become quite familiar with. It seems to have worked well.