inexperienced big brain developer see nested loop and often say “O(n^2)? Not on my watch!”

complexity demon spirit smile

This hits too close to home.

Compiling to bash seems awesome, but on the other hand I don’t think anyone other than the person who wrote it in amber will run a bash file that looks like machine-generated gibberish on their machine.

“Merge pull request #8 from [branch name]”

Not the most exciting but hey, someone has to do it.

It’s a two part story:

1. The mobile market mostly targets kids and boomers and their resistance to microtransactions has been basically non-existent, making the market quickly become predatory and full of spam

2. Modern app stores have become abysmal, making it impossible for smaller games to see the light of day. 99% of google play is a dumpster fire, and the 1% that is decent isn’t published by a multi-billion dollar company so you’re unlikely to ever see it. There are good games out there, but the way the algorithms and ads work makes them constantly pushed down in the list. This isn’t “a problem” to a company like Google because they’re making bank off of all these ad spaces.

Anyways, most good games are paid, but here’s a list of stuff I’ve enjoyed playing on mobile:

• Fancy Pants Adventures

• Bloons TD 6

• Dicey Dungeons

• Dead Cells

• Slay the Spire (but the mobile port is rough on small screens)

• Knights of Pen and Paper +1

• The Enchanted Cave 2

• Let’s Create! Pottery

• BAIKOH

• Data Wing

Probably a lot more I forgot. Have at it.

Has it ever been better?

Actually, yes, by a big margin. Back in ~2011 mobile games were actually trying to be great. Games like Edge Extended, World of Goo, Bounce Boing Voyage, Zenonia 2 & 3, etc.

I remember early Humble Bundles being full of exciting games for mobile, now you’ll be lucky to find just one of them that isn’t filled to the brim with MTX or ads.

Be sure to check where the trackpad is. Centralized is better. My new one is more to the left and my wrist hits it when playing tf2 and I do occasionally get some movement from my wrist in game, but not much.

There should be an option in your OS to disable the trackpad while using the keyboard. My laptop also has a trackpad to the left and I often have my hand over it when playing but never had this issue.

Make sure you get a laptop with a modern Ryzen processor since the battery life (and performance on battery) is often a lot better than Intel. There are a lot out there that fit the bill like Lenovo’s yoga/ideapad lineup. Just be weary of two things:

• Some 14" laptops may have soldered RAM or SSDs making them impossible to upgrade
• Don’t go off of processor names, they’re often pretty misleading. For example a Ryzen 7 7730U is significantly worse than a Ryzen 7 7840U.

This is really cool. It seems to be getting hugged to death though, I’m getting a lot of server errors when I attempt to open most apps.

It saddens me deeply that consumers (gamers) just don’t give a flying fuck about this and continues to pay a premium for Nvidia cards.

It doesn’t help that AMD isn’t competing that much price-wise. Their only saving grace is higher VRAM, and while that is nice, raw performance is becoming less relevant. FSR also does not compete with DLSS, it’s strictly worse in every way. They also barely exist in the laptop market, I was just considering buying a new gaming laptop and my options are an RTX 4060 or paying more for the one laptop with a weaker AMD GPU.

I would argue Intel is shaping up to be the real competitor to Nvidia. They had a rough start but their GPUs are very price-competitive. Their newer integrated GPUs are also the best currently, they’re good for gen AI, their raytracing performance trumps AMD, and XeSS is a lot better than FSR. If I were in the market for a new GPU I’d probably grab the Intel A770. I’m looking forward to their next generation of cards.

That just because I’m a programmer that must mean I’m a master of anything technology related and can totally help out with their niche problems.

“Hey computer guy, how do I search for new channels on my receiver?”

“Hey computer guy, my excel spreadsheet is acting weird”

“My mobile data isn’t working. Fix this.”

My friend was a programmer and served in the army, people ordered him to go fix a sattelite. He said he has no idea how but they made him try anyways. It didn’t work and everyone was disappointed.

I still can’t understand why Google keeps hyping up Bard and then releasing it at a poor state just to ruin their reputation. First, we had:

• Bard 1, which was hyped up to be the ChatGPT successor. It turned out to be really bad.

• Bard 2.0, a massive update that was hyped up to make Bard so much better. It turned out to still be pretty bad (but in fairness it was a minor improvement).

• Google Gemini, their massive response to GPT 4 that was, on paper, the best LLM in the world. They finally integrated it into Bard last month and… It’s still not great. I could not tell an immediate difference between this and the old Bard. Oh, and the videos they used to advertise Gemini Ultra were fake.

I’m not going to armchair analyze a hugely successful company, but from my point of view it really shows how mismanaged Google has been in the past decade. Failed projects upon cancelled projects upon increasingly frustrated employees.

/rant. Anyways, you should consider using Perplexity if you want something with search capabilities, I’ve had decent success there. Claude is also significantly better than Bard, but they made free usage very limited lately. Might be a good option if you’re willing to pay.

Total missed opportunity to write this in Emojicode, but I love it nonetheless.

Competitions where individuals or teams try to solve complex programming problems as fast as possible. Websites like Codeforces even have weekly online competitions and leaderboards. It’s great for learning problem solving.

I’ve reached a point where I avoid these types of updates. An update post like that either means nothing important changed or they’re up to something.

A while ago I saw that style of patch notes, updated an app, and suddenly I can’t use it anymore because it got limited to a maximum of 2 devices. Another time I updated an app putting a harmless “we improved the user experience” message, they put dark mode behind a paywall. This isn’t counting the number of times an app got redesigned to make the user experience worse for no reason. Maybe they wanted to justify hiring 5 UI/UX interns in that quarter or something.

The patch notes look harmless, but my god, they are usually up to something.

I’ve heard this a lot and I get it, but I feel like there’s a breaking point where most juniors just won’t put up with it and there will be a drought of genuinely good talent in the industry. Personally the vast majority of people I know have given up on working whatever they wanted to work in (Embedded systems, cybersecurity, gaming, etc) and just became web developers or settle for whatever “easy” jobs they could find. Ironically you catch companies that don’t hire juniors say things like “It’s so hard to find anyone that cares” or recruiters saying hiring for one spot takes months because they can’t find the perfect candidate. Something has to change imo, the path should become clearer than telling everyone to get 5 years of experience then come back when they’re ready.

This isn’t mentioning how recruiters now rely on AI to scan a CV and filter people. It doesn’t even matter how good you are most of the time or what amazing projects you could make, you’ll get filtered if you don’t have that arbitrary thing they’re asking for.

I know this post probably wasn’t intended to be malicious but it is insane you wrote this without realizing how it’s emanating privilege and not understanding why people can’t find a job.

I graduated over a year ago from my CS degree. Excellent GPA, with honors. I’ve been learning game dev since college and have been (sort of) doing it professionally since graduation. I’ve done a 4-month internship, two mediocre part-time jobs, some freelancing, and I still can’t find a proper job. The industry is collapsing and the job market is flooded with talent that have a dozen years of experience. Combine that with the fact that I live in a poor country where there aren’t many game dev jobs and companies are scaling down work from home, and finding one is a nightmare.

Let me get this straight. The blog post says you’ve been working for 10 years, maybe more. You already have insane amounts of experience and a past history with companies.

So what did I do right?

Maybe working in the industry for a dozen years has something to do with being able to find a job easily. If you had <5 years of experience you would have struggled to reach an interview. If you did reach an interview, someone with a more stacked CV would take that job instead. This has some “Why don’t millennials just buy a house?” energy.

• git pull

• git add *

• git commit -m “Some stuff”

• git push

And occasionally when you mess up

• git reflog

• git reset HEAD@{n} (where n is where you wanna roll back to)

And occasionally if you mess up so hard you give up

• git reset --hard origin/main

And there you go. You are now a master at using git. Try not to mess up.

FWIW not everyone using source control is a programmer. I’ve seen artists in game dev using GUI tools to pull new changes and push their assets.

We have a big conference every year where I live for the tech industry. It’s hit or miss depending on the person presenting, and it’s usually a miss. Many talks can last over an hour when they could’ve been a much shorter youtube video and are just there to pad time. Also 95% of the people are there for other motives. Looking for investors, trying to get hired, browsing the booths, etc. Despite being very crowded it’s very clear most of the people don’t actually care about the talks and do anything else on their phones.

I think in-person conferences can be great experiences when done right but I really got anything out of it. For all the talks about networking with others they give very little opportunities to do that. When everyone is looking for opportunities from other people it felt almost like a competition to try and talk with companies and important people, and it usually boils down to them asking for my contact info so they can flush it down the toilet. I don’t know, I just have a bad experience with them.

There’s also GPT4All which has the same concept but comes with a convenient GUI rather than run on the command line. I had some fun with Mistral-7B but honestly the weaker models are too dumb to be useful.