Stay at home dad / domestic engineer. MS Applied Mathematics, BS Mathematical and Computer Sciences. Aerospace nerd. Theology geek. Sports nut. Gamer (single player and team-vs-environment focused).
Mail: tdarrow [shift-2] gmail [period] com
Submissions
Stupid Patent of the Month: A Token of Troll Appreciation
eff.org
1 points·by lotharbot··0 comments
The man who left behind $78M to revamp a classic space shooter
engadget.com
1 points·by lotharbot··0 comments
Italian restaurant protests Yelp by asking customers to leave nasty reviews
[Background: I am Dove's husband, and remember the incident described]
What actually happened was the professor posed the question in class as an open research question, which he regularly did, with no particular expectation that any students would work on it or make meaningful progress. My wife happened to sit down in her office and come up with a counterexample, which she wrote on paper and left in the professor's physical mailbox on campus fairly late in the evening. He had almost certainly already left campus for the weekend by that time. This wasn't a case of some sort of arrogance or lack of wisdom, just a case of non-instantaneous asynchronous analog communication methods.
This particular professor was extremely good at letting others contribute. As soon as the contribution actually reached him, he assessed it and used it.
Specifically, Overload was made by Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog, who were the original Descent developers. There were also major contributions from people like Dan Wentz (who worked on Descent 3) and from people who spent a lot of time playing the original game, like me and my wife (our 3 sons are all named for friends we know from Descent.)
Your comment was in fact snarky, a swipe, insubstantive, and unkind. I am quite used to directness in interpersonal criticism (I am after all autistic), and I understand the difference between direct and being mean, cheap, mocking, etc. Your latest response is full of pretty much all of that.
For example: the allegation of not getting a word in edgewise, two against one, "tag team crap" -- I made one comment in this subthread about geese (my other comments were in another subthread about chasing down the cat), and it was in reply to my wife's comment in which she had stopped arguing that point. And then I responded to your unjustified insults by pointing out they are a violation of HN's rules. This is hardly an unbalanced conversation in which you have been unfairly targeted and not been given space to argue your position.
And of course declaring that "neither of you argues very well in isolation" is just a gratuitous insult. So is "remarkably mealy-mouthed". And, for that matter, suggesting I must have no relation to my rhetorically-gifted first cousin some number of times removed.
This is the sort of hostile trolling I expect on reddit, not on Hacker News. I kindly request you not reply to me again.
that said, the respective odds of humans vs geese are not even remotely close. People sometimes get mild injuries from geese, and on rare occasions significant injuries, most often from losing their footing and hitting the ground hard. Whereas a human with even the slightest bit of knowledge and who isn't squeamish could easily end the lives of many geese in rapid succession.
Geese aren't confident because of some sort of rational assessment that they can put up a good fight against a human. Geese are confident because as a general rule, humans don't pick fights with them, and it's therefore safe enough for the group to hang around in places where humans are present at short distances.
FWIW it's not accidental that I see my wife's HN comments. I joined shortly after her and I have a bookmark for her profile just because I love to see what she writes. But it is fun when occasionally I reply to something she's written and it takes others half of the comment before they figure out that we're connected.
> "it made a break for it along the long side of the house and was visibly shocked when my runner of a fiance ran it down and cut it off"
I still remember the look on her face when I got to the corner before her. She looked at me like "what is this terrifying new creature?" as she stumbled backwards looking for a way to escape something faster than her. By the time she'd decided on a course of action, someone else (I think your brother) had grabbed her from behind.
There are several things in this comment I find odd.
The comment about developers being autistic is particularly funny because I personally am autistic, and my wife (who you are responding to) is very much not. It was a major source of tension for us for many years.
Likewise, the emphasis on people "outside the organization" and the suggestion that she is somehow deficient on that front is laughable -- she's extremely highly regarded by customers/clients, and has been for decades, specifically for her ability to understand and solve their problems by getting them a great product whether or not they have any idea what her actual coding ability is.
And then the comment about "really wanting this to only be about code quality" is strange, since the subthread going back to kasey_junk's comment is about how "we still can’t say what good code is". Your initial response is entirely about measurable attributes of code (like code size and build time); Dove introduces "softer qualities" including "solving a valuable problem" (which is more about "quality product" than any of your metrics), and then you go back to a different set of metrics. She responded with an extended comment that specifically noted the importance of "complex impacts - on users, on business, on other programmers". Her comments have consistently been more about how good code impacts the functional product, while yours have been about measuring things about the code, but then your complaint is that she's too focused on the code and missing the point. Then you make comments about her own state of mind: what she is "wanting" to do and what you "suspect" she will do and her "complete inability" to accept certain things.
This very much feels like you just have a point you want to spike about measuring things (FWIW she does make it a point to measure things and to train her subordinates on making sure they're measuring things), and her comments (and my other one) are more excuses for you to repeat your point than actual ideas you're trying to interact with. Like you're not actually interested in engaging with the core idea that "Some of what code needs to accomplish - conceptualizing a problem well, communicating clearly - is inherently subjective, having to do with how it is received by another mind." It's just another opportunity for you to say that your set of objective measures are the only thing that matter, which, as I noted elsewhere, is itself a subjective position about which things to value.
> "bias isn’t helpful ... Let that determine what to measure"
Determining what counts as "bias" is itself a subjective activity. People who grow up in different cultures have different baselines for what factors matter the most and what factors they consider to be overvalued, undervalued, inappropriately accounted for, and so on. Not just different countries, but different subcultures within the same country (like, my cousins from the farm see a lot of things in society as biased toward big cities, which I never considered because I've lived in big cities for essentially my entire life.)
"start with the premise that bias isn't helpful" is, by the way, also not a measurable goal, which IMO supports what I'm saying. Knowing how to conceptualize a problem well (of which "eliminate bias" is a small subset) isn't something you can objectively measure, but it's something that will impact your objective measures down the line.
> "the view that only the objective is real ... has been increasingly producing absurd results."
As you rightly noted a couple of comments back, what this view does is it smuggles in subjective assumptions. That is, someone operating under this view is going to objectively measure something (like kloc or number of tickets closed or execution time on a test data set) but the selection of what to measure, and the selection of how to value each individual measure of an objective quantity in order to determine overall "goodness", is subjective. The step where they assign meaning to a measurement is a subjective step.
It's interesting to watch the development of "objective" measures in basketball and the dialogue around how to determine if a player is the best, most valuable, etc. over time. Decades ago, the only stats we had were "counting stats" -- points, rebounds, and assists. Steals and blocks came a bit later. There is a correlation between putting up big counting stats and winning games, but it's not as strong as you might naively suppose. Once more sophisticated metrics were developed, something that "subjective" observers had always noticed ("losing player with good stats" is something that was often said about specific players) started to be quantified: some players put up big stats because they're doing inefficient things that result in individual stats at the expense of the team, like taking a high volume of shots even if they're lower percentage shots than a teammate could get on that play, or not contesting an opponent's shot but trying to chase the rebound instead (leading to more opponent scoring but also more personal rebounds over the course of a large number of shots.) In the modern era, advanced stats like PER, VoRP, WS, and BPM are basically more sophisticated models built on top of counting stats that try to scale them and weight them according to regression models. These stats are better, but they still don't capture everything, they only capture things that can be inferred from counting stats. They don't capture things like -- Steph Curry has such strong "shooting gravity" that his teammates often have extra space to shoot because multiple defenders are trying to make it hard for him to get a good look, or Rudy Gobert being on the court changes an opposing team's play selection because he's such a good shot blocker that plays that would lead to a bucket against a different player are leading to him getting a block so teams avoid those plays. Someone insistent on "objective measures" won't even consider these as things to potentially care about unless they have a way to measure them (which, now that we have sophisticated player-movement-tracking, we can actually measure things like how close the nearest defender is on shots by a Curry teammate when he's on court vs off court, or what percentage of opponents' shots are taken in a specific part of the court when Gobert is defending them vs when he isn't. So those measurements are coming online over time.) And, of course, understanding that it means something that Curry's teammates have extra space to shoot, or that Gobert's opponents might not be running their strongest offensive plays because of his shot blocking, puts us in the realm of meaning rather than mere measurement. Knowing to make the value judgment of "it matters how this player is impacting the game in ways we don't have a good numerical measurement of, but that a sophisticated observer who values those things can watch for and give subjective consideration of" puts us in the world of meaning rather than mere measurement.
That seems to be the same issue underlying this discussion. Knowing that conceptualizing a problem well matters -- and that it will profoundly impact the end result in objective areas even though it's not directly measured -- is wisdom.
I sometimes draw an analogy between low-probability catastrophizing and the Drake Equation.
The Drake Equation attempts to calculate how many planets there should be in the universe where intelligent life exists, by multiplying together all sorts of probabilities. But if you put error bars on the various estimates, what you find is that the overall calculation can result in anything from "there should be trillions of planets with intelligent life on them" to "humanity is some kind of fluke; even we shouldn't exist." Which means that using the Drake Equation to make arguments about what we "should" be doing about intelligent alien life is actually useless. It doesn't tell us anything meaningful or useful; it's just a way some people justify their own priors.
There are a lot of things I can spend my time, money, energy, and attention on. Some of them are entertainment (sports, video games, TV/movies, music.) Some are serious day-to-day life (family, parenting, work, chores.) Some are trying to interact with the broader world from a positive influence perspective (political/religious advocacy, voting, charity, counseling, encouragement.) Some are planning for negative outcomes to protect myself and my family (having good insurance, canned food, filtered water storage, ways to create winter heat, an evacuation plan or two.) Someone using Drake Equation type reasoning can suggest that their particular negative-outcome scenario has such high costs that I should expend literally everything to mitigate them -- but as soon as I allow for error bars and for alternatives that they might get me to ignore if I'm all-in on their issue, that transforms my whole thought process. The AI signularity might be so dangerous that I should invest everything to stop it, or it might be such a nothingburger that it's not worth the Doritos I ate while writing this comment. Without a clear way to distinguish, I should just filter it out. If they can't do enough in the time they've already had to convince me it's actually a real issue, they haven't earned the right to my attention.
when you add the extra degrees of freedom in Descent-like games, relative to Quake-like games (or flight/space sims but in different ways), there are some emergent behaviors that change how the game fundamentally feels. What frequently happens when random devs take on a 6dof project because they enjoyed Descent back in the day is they'll make a game that feels like a shooter with vertical flight, and is missing some of the key things that make Descent feel good. I've heard some 6dof games described as "it feels like I'm flying a camera, not a ship" (lack of turning momentum), or "it feels sluggish when I try to move in multiple directions" (lack of vector independence / trichording), or "it's just spray-and-pray combat" (undersized ship hitboxes relative to projectile speed/size and level size.) There are a lot of things we've learned over 30 years of playing Descent and Descent-like games that don't always get taken seriously by devs of other 6dof projects. And even when they do take everything seriously, there are things none of us have figured out how to articulate but that can make a 6dof game feel bad.
I think it'd be possible to build a great game in the genre, but you'd need a bunch of key things to come together, and then you'd also need great marketing to get the thing in front of millions of eyeballs to make enough sales to keep the community going.
It wasn't really considered either a bug or a feature by the original designers, it was just not something they put any thought into. After it was discovered, some designers had a negative opinion of it, others had a positive opinion, and it was a point of contention when the team got together to make Overload after years away from Descent. My wife and I tried some alternatives (by modding D1) and flew a demo for Mike/Matt/Luke/Dan and whoever else was in the studio that day, and eventually settled on "vector independence just feels good" which is why Overload has the ability to change from a normalized flight mode with faster 1D flight into the trichording mode.
"Overload" was a game made in Descent style, by the original creators of Descent (Mike and Matt), with a great deal of input from the Descent community. My wife and I spent a week at the studio (while ~6 months pregnant with a child we named for a Descent friend) working on Overload's flight model and tweaking some in-game stuff. The game is now largely maintained by fans, with significant multiplayer mod support and even a full remake of the D1 campaign!
Drakona, sitting next to me: "Dcrazy? I remember a dcrazy!"
There's still an active online community around Descent and Overload (Mike/Matt's spiritual successor.) If you look up Overload on Discord you'll find that server, and the #descent channel will have links to the various other Descent servers.
I thought about putting their actual names -- Michael, David, and Mark (even though Mark392 isn't really named Mark) -- but I thought it'd be funnier to just put their pilot names at first.
My wife and I met on a Descent forum, our 3 sons are named for Descent friends (KoolBear, Jediluke, and Mark392), and we've attended weddings (and sadly one funeral, RIP JinX) for Descent friends. Even though I considered D3 the weakest of the Descent games, this news makes me happy. Thank you, Kevin!
Mail: tdarrow [shift-2] gmail [period] com