Very hard to describe how embarrassing this is for everyone involved in the Web and, sort of, software more generally.
mobile.twitter.com/Suhail/status/
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Jonathan Blow
@Jonathan_Blow
Designer/Programmer of Braid and The Witness. President, Thekla, Inc. Partner in IndieFund. Working on good new things.
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Re-doing things, that didn't come out well enough the first time, is one of the most effective methods of making good things. If you're working on something new and different, you won't know in advance what is going to be best. You try some things, and learn what will be good.
I think I'm a good programmer, then I go do something that is way more complicated and messy than what is required, and I don't figure that out until 4 years later, when it's obvious.
This happens all the time.
How many web developers understand that a low-end integrated GPU on a laptop can draw full 4k screens of pixels at 3000 frames per second?
Is it weird that a programming language, with semantics that are highly authoritarian, seems to attract "community leaders" who are highly authoritarian?
Something to understand, about all the excitement around AI and how fast things seem to be moving...
This is what computers in general used to feel like, across the board. New cool stuff was happening all the time in all sectors. This started slowing down in maybe 1994, maybe… Show more
People ask me once in a while about Braid, Anniversary Edition.
It's still in development and will (finally!) come out, around the end of this year or the beginning of next year.
And we're hiring someone to help finish up all the commentary and general content wrangling!… Show more
In college I had professors who were very enthusiastic about recursion, and this enthusiasm seems even more intense in some communities out in the wild, on HN, etc.
Whereas recursion is powerful and you are missing something big if you don't understand it, wellll, on the other… Show more
If you are interested in finding out how to make a game engine, I have *lots* of game engine programming livestreams on this playlist:
youtube.com/playlist?list=
So you can see how it actually happens as it happens, as opposed to random stuff someone is just saying.
The Witness is participating in this First Person Puzzle bundle over on Steam:
store.steampowered.com/bundle/31753/F
All these games are very different from each other, which makes it extra interesting.
We just shipped beta 100 of the compiler to The People. That's approximately 1 beta per week since we started. I personally packed up and shipped all 100 of these.
The compiler is currently 87,050 lines of code, and compiles programs as quickly as it ever did.
Looking on Netflix, every sci-fi show has the tag "Dystopian". I suspect there is a very big opportunity for a show-runner who can imagine stepping outside that mold.
The other day, someone suggested I do design reviews, where I live-play a game and say what I honestly think about all the design choices (as constructively as possible). Could go badly, but, if you are interested in this and have a playable game, DM me...
This weekend I gave a speech saying that software technology has mostly stopped advancing, and stalled sometime in the mid-1990s. I had difficulty convincing many people (and seemed in able to communicate the idea clearly). Then today I open Hacker News and see an article ...
I have heard this idea that software is buggy because it is not tested enough.
This is obviously false. The function of a test is to detect a bug you would not otherwise know about.
Modern software is full of bugs that everyone knows about, and they still don't get fixed.
I should hate Las Vegas, because it makes most of its money with the kind of dark manipulation that I find icky in game design. But it's one of the few places left in the USA where ambitious projects can happen; it's somehow preserving a kernel of life.
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I recommend John Cleese’s very short creativity book. His advice is fully applicable to game design and (the serious version of) software architecture.
We are hiring game engine programmers! Work on new and experimental engine features at the leading edge of game technology. Experienced candidates only, remote work okay. DM me for details.
Deleting code is still the most rewarding thing.
This caused me a lot of trouble earlier in my career, when I was a contractor on projects where it really wasn't the best idea to rewrite huge swaths of code.
Now, though ... critical.
We just shipped beta #60 of the compiler to 90 beta users.
Current compiler size: 57,783 lines.
There is more money out there, available to invest in game development, than there ever has been. If you’re thinking of getting an independent project rolling; take advantage of this; these situations do not last forever.
This seems too ridiculous to be true, but I have had exact analogues of this conversation with real-life people I knew for years:
twitter.com/ClownWorld_/st
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We are hiring game engine programmers!
* Work on ambitious games
* Building a new engine from the ground up
* On a small team, so your work has big impact on the game
* And helps guide the feature set of a next-gen programming language
DM me for details!
Very few people seem to judge for themselves what's good and what's not, and it sure seems like this ratio is going down as we become more interconnected.
Some days/weeks I am bad at programming and kind of dumb and unfocused, but I think it's worth muddling through on these occasions anyway. The amount of progress made by this muddling is significant, and usually involves grinding on annoying/spammy stuff, which then means
Back when game programmers used to write their entire graphics engine, it was common to discover this was a very daunting task, start ratholing on various graphics problems, never reaching to the point where the engine really works, and then burn out and fail to make the game...
In an attempt to RETVRN to a time when people put their internet energy into useful/informative things rather than tweeting all the time, I posted an internal email I sent about a simple shader trick, to our old-ass Witness blog:
the-witness.net/news/2022/02/a
It feels criminal that this video has only 6k views, but I suppose the number of people who even kinda understand is pretty low these days.
I did some work on the compiler that had the side effect of speeding things up! Here are the current compile speeds on my desktop.
Current compiler size: 55,273 lines.
Someday we will be smart enough to stop making cell phones out of the most frictionless materials known to Mankind.
Most people seem not to have noticed the collapse of the game industry (they go "huh??" when I mention it), but Doc and Shroud have...
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Today, nobody even attempts to write graphics engines, so programmers needed to find a new way of ratholing on an engine and failing, while maintaining plausible deniability that they were doing cool work; they converged on ECS as the new, more-tractable method of self-sabotage.
We just shipped the 75th beta of the compiler to our beta users. Due to a big jump in functionality, the source code is now a bit T H I C C e r: 83,533 lines.
It compiles your programs just as fast as ever.
The total count of beta users is now lucky number 108.
I was not the first to ship a game in the new programming language...
We're now hiring someone to help work on the compiler and surrounding tools like program visualization and debugging. Help save civilization from the vicious feedback loop of bad software, and accompanying skill deterioration, into which we are getting stuck.
I don’t mean to pick on the particular article or commenters, it’s just a very clear sign of how deeply stuck things are, and to what degree younger programmers do not see this because they are flooded with things to learn that look new but contribute almost nothing.
This is a good talk for people who are new to optimizing games, or programs generally. (There's Unity-specific stuff but you can just ignore that):
Knuth, predicting "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors":
Interesting video. There is a thing that happens where a designer sees something happening they don't like, and says, "I will prevent that by adding X1". Then other stuff happens, "I will require the player to X2", "I will make this less viable because of hindrance X3,"
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Is Tarkov going in the wrong direction? youtube.com/watch?v=D1II7O
I still accidentally read it as "Mad Max: Furry Road", every time.
True facts.
The silver lining to all the "tech" company layoffs, that will be ongoing through 2023 and 2024, is that people will have to start learning to program in order to get programming jobs, which hopefully means the quality of the output software will rise.
This is basically how I program 99% of the time.
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I have a new acronym that's useful to keep in mind when you're deciding which of many advanced data structures you should use: SUUA - Shut Up, Use Array.
The Dragon Book set back compiler classes around the world by like 25 years.
But the fact that CS professors did not know better is far more damning.
If you are looking to play a Witness-like, try this out...
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Taiji is an open-world puzzle adventure game coming to Steam and Itch on September 9, 2022
Explore
Solve Puzzle Panels
Find Secrets
store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Ta
mvandevander.itch.io/taiji
Explore
Solve Puzzle Panels
Find Secrets
store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Ta
mvandevander.itch.io/taiji
1:22
I started a short series where I program a treemap viewer (100% of programming done on-stream). Part 1:
This past weekend I decided to work more on the sample "game" that was the first demo for the .jai compiler, and make it more like a real game. There will be ~4 parts to this series, here's video #1:
We are hiring again!
* Game Engine Programmer
* Platform / Porting Programmer
* Compiler Feature + Optimization Programmer
Experienced only. Remote work okay. DM me if you are interested.
I just filed our official Close of Business notification with the City of San Francisco. It feels good.
(We closed our SF office last year, but I realized they would keep bothering me until I file paperwork.)
[The company is still going fine, just ... elsewhere!]
Is there a web site that is kind of like Hacker News, but where most of the posts are about actual technology advancement? That would be a pretty cool web site.
The reality that there should be 100x less software than there is (or much less) is automatically threatening because it means this whole giant social club would just go away.
Imagine the entire scenario right now if this one guy didn't decide to do SpaceX.
Is it possible that the software side of the game industry has mostly crashed, and for some reason nobody is talking about it yet?
One of the very cool projects happening in our beta community (actually a few at once!):
From-scratch operating system, software-rendered UI, running another user's Life program, on real hardware:
So obviously more tests won't help. The problem is actually caring enough to make the software good. Current programmer culture seems to use tests as virtue signaling, but there is not much correlation with quality since the shipped software is still broken.
Large C++ codebases are doomed in a historically-unique way: there's no escape route to any future programming language (short of rewriting everything). In any other language, if you have a lib/dll and know the calling convention, you can call the function....
This game is clearly inspired by The Witness, but also very different. If you like puzzle games, I recommend giving it a look-see!
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Taiji is an open-world puzzle adventure game OUT NOW on Steam and Itch
Explore
Solve Puzzle Panels
Find Secrets
store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Ta
mvandevander.itch.io/taiji
Explore
Solve Puzzle Panels
Find Secrets
store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Ta
mvandevander.itch.io/taiji
0:18
The editor in Visual Studio 2019, by default, now "autocorrects" you to put the * in the wrong damn place. No wonder kids can't program...
When I started making this compiler, I made the explicit decision to use correct grammar in all error messages, avoiding the caveman-esque traffic sign language that is traditional. I still accidentally do it all the time, sometimes not noticing for months. Brainwashed...
This does not mean that the initial work was wasted. The initial work was necessary to get to a place where you could see what was better.
We are hiring game engine programmers! Work on experimental engine features at the leading edge of game technology. Experienced candidates only, remote work okay. DM me for details. Thank You!
A good game inspired by The Witness is coming out in a few weeks. You can see the trailer here:
"Antimalware Service Executable" makes my new, expensive laptop feel painfully slow, as (I guess) it man-in-the-middles every file operation. It hinders my ability to get work done. But now you can no longer opt out of this "Service", and ...
This dumb pizza box thing tonight is the most scary internet moment for me in 2022... very bad way to end the year.
Just sent out beta #50 of the compiler. We are now up to 76 beta participants. We shipped an average of one beta every 8.5 days.
Current compiler size: 56,128 lines.
Thanks to everyone in the beta program who wrote software and helped spot problems. It's been a good year!
We're working on expanding the beta to more people. More news here when we have it.
In 3 hours, I'll be livestreaming a game design discussion with Casey Muratori. Link will be posted when we go live!
So what we are observing is, since the Web started, it has become so much slower that a supercomputer would no longer be able to run it? Does that make sense to anyone?
twitter.com/Suhail/status/
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… but this is the most compact explanation I have seen.
mobile.twitter.com/OrwellNGoode/s
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Windows force-updated on me last night without asking, after the update had only been downloaded for like 2 days, and now I can't even play YouTube videos any more without them stalling all the time.
The source code to Piotr Pushowski has been posted, for those who are interested...
(I haven't looked at it, do not condone or condemn, etc!)
When I was up-and-coming in the games industry, any time you gave me a choice between a cushy job that paid well, or a challenging job that paid less, working on something meaningful or boundary-pushing, I chose the latter, even if it came with unpleasant circumstances.
I finally gave in and bought a laptop without trackpad buttons, because I couldn't find anything else and my current laptop was so bad it was driving me nuts.
Tap-to-click is so bad, it is a clear sign of Clown World that it's the only option provided any more.
What are the best, non-AI-related, CS research papers from the past couple of years, that I should read?
This seems to make sense until you realize that almost all Silicon Valley programmers are not competent at programming. Then a new picture of the world, which becomes fully coherent, is revealed.
"Excuse me sir, how much does it cost to park overnight?"
"The same as a AAA video game you would play for hundreds of hours."
if you have symbols. Also you can collect statistics from many core files.” At the time of this tweet, none of the HN comments have said hey wait, this is 1985 debugging, what is the 2021 part? (The 2021 part seems to be, it’s now much harder to get the core file).
Every time I read something to try and learn more about Category Theory, I come away unimpressed. It just always seems like vapid nonsense.
If I were to read one and only one book (or paper/video/etc) to convince myself that category theory is good, what should it be?
"As the person who used to be in charge of thing at dumpster fire web site that has always been the laughing stock of competent technology people, I can definitively say that the most successful founder in the world has no idea what he's talking about" is an entire genre now.
Journalism
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Readers added context they thought people might want to know
While the article is grounded and written by Ukraine experts, the headline is misleading. Chernobyl is already Ukraine's own Chernobyl, because it is a city in Ukraine.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl
If you are a programmer, please watch.
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[1/2] Here is a demo of a simple, completely unoptimized terminal renderer I wrote over a few days. Supports scrollback, line wrapping, Unicode combining, RTL-over-LTR, multicolor fonts, changing fonts on the fly, etc.
It runs at several thousand FPS.
youtu.be/hxM8QmyZXtg
We are hiring an animator! Details below:
------------------------------------
Senior Level 3D Character Animator
The game studio that made the critically-acclaimed game The Witness is looking for a highly experienced animator. You should be able to work quickly and fluently in… Show more
Word to the wise: Remember to turn off float exceptions when you ship your game on PC, so that 3 years later when AMD ships a driver that divides by 0 on startup, your game does not start mysteriously crashing for 1/3 your audience.
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The advantage that 0x7ff8.... has is that it's a floating point signal NaN, both in single and double precision. Using it will give you an immediate exception if you have those turned on, and if not, bugs from math with NaNs are easier to spot than bugs from math with -6.2598e+18 twitter.com/despair/status…
The people who are very upset about Twitter layoffs do not see the underlying context, that the next 5 years in Silicon Valley is going to be this times N million employees; Twitter is just going a little more preemptive:
If you systematically hound, deride, ridicule, demonize, etc, the people who are trying to do difficult things, you'll end up only with people who aren't doing that, and advancement will be curtailed accordingly.
Companies never get credit for having *provided* massively overpaid, cushy jobs for years. They only get nega-credit for when the jobs end. Such critics have worldviews far too fragmented to allow them to make anything like a successful company. So, seeing this kind of criticism
that's a positive. DM me and we can discuss / I can give you further details how to apply.
Please do not apply if you like web programming, or if you want to implement a garbage collector.
This is pretty much every modern "tech" company. They grew due to all the free money laying around, not based on any traditional economic dynamic. Most of the people do not really do anything.
I did another interview with The No-Frauds Club:
The Secret of the BS Programming Jobs is getting out:
I played Tunic this week and it's a neat game with a lot of cool stuff in it that may surprise and delight you. (Be prepared also to be frustrated by head-against-brick-wall boss battles; I was! There is a menu option to get around these.)
The year Neuromancer was published.
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Long-awaited, cool compiler feature is now in the works ... just in time for beta 100.