In the spirit of true randomness, I like to speculate about aliens. What’s your favorite theory about them? Anything’s fair game: whether they actually exist, methods of propulsion, origins, exobiology, exopolitics, eyewitness reports by credible reporters (pilots, military, air traffic controllers, high-profile political leaders, etc.) whether abductions are real and, if so, why they do it, etc. If you’ve had an encounter, I’d love to hear about it.

Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.

What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.

Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.

Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.

So far the theory.

In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.

They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.

configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))

You might immediately guess what has happened here.

DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.

Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.

Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.

But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....

Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....

What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.

This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.

So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.

At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).

It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...

So much joy for such a stupid thing.

So, I'm still not certain if it's actually a bug or merely my lack of experience, but I've been working on a 2D platformer game (using only C++ and SDL2) for roughly 2 years now (on and off; sometimes off for months) and I'm extremely embarrassed about this, but for the life of me, I cannot seem to get the player character's movement and collision physics working properly. It's driving me absolutely insane.

I've read articles and tutorials, referenced books, and posted about it in game development communities (e.g., gamedev.com, Discord servers, etc.), but even though the fundamental structure and explanations made sense, getting the code to work has been unsuccessful, albeit not completely so, but if I get one thing working, another thing breaks. It feels like I'm trying to repair a vase that fell off of a skyscraper and turned to dust on the street below.

I've always been a very tech savvy person with a fiery passion for programming, electronics and game/software/embedded/web development, but to be honest, having such a difficult time with things like this that — in theory, at least — seem like trivial bumps in the road have made me feel like I'm never going to be successful in this field. But regardless of the depressing thoughts of worthlessness, my passion doesn't let me stop trying. Who knows, maybe it'll have to remain just a hobby. 😕

*leaning back in the story chair*

One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.

Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.

One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...

I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.

Error: incorrect password.

I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.

WTF? Did I change my password or what?...

Fuck.

Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.

I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.

---

Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?

I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.

Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk.

Holy shit man...

I know its supposed to be hard but I cant ignore how much I want to give up right now.

I've been learning JS for months now, doing daily algorithm challenges, going strong on my freecodecamp dev map and still, I feel like I might no be cut out for this.

It's been more than a week now trying to implement a minimax algorithm into my tic tac toe game. I can't, for the life of me its just getting more frustrating by the day and its driving me crazy! How the fuck am I supposed to ever get a junior webdev job if I can't do something as simple as this!, And I keep reading and reading the theory but I cant implement it into my code! It just makes me want to quit (again)!

I really need to work on my attitude...

Im a software developer, and make games as hobby and sometimes as actual job. Recently I started looking into game design, through my work I can can do a study for free.

The main thing I would like to learn is Character development and using GDD's

Would you recommend doing such a course or is the quality of these things way to low to actually be of use?

Is there reading material I should read?

I do own a digital copy of "A theory of fun" already which Im gonna read the coming days.

1Hr left for the day, should I start a new ticket or not?

The overwhelming code smell when you finally got a chance to do a quarterly project-level code review as a team lead.

It's my fault for feeling like they are teaming up against me, and I don't know how to fix it.

Don’t have much to do right before Xmas, so I started learning game theory. Jeez, it’s so easy to create dictatorship in voting🤔

Fun story

tl;dr; analog FTW!

so we've just had a nice game. A few teams internationally gathered together in the aws gameDay. We had aws accounts set up [one per team] and our goal was to maintain our t2.Micros to deal with incoming load. The higher the latency - the less points we get, the more 5xx - the more points we lose. The more infra we have, the more points we pay for it.

So we are quite new in aws, most of us know aws only in theory. And that's the best part!

So at first we had some steady, mild load incoming. But then bursts came up and we went offline. It's obvious we needed an lb w/ autoscaling. Lb was allright, we did set it up and got back online. We also created an autoscaling group and set it up.

Now what we couldn't figure out is how the f* do we make that group scale automatically, as a response to traffic! So we did what every sane person would do - we monitored LB's stats and changed autoscaling group's config manually 😁

needless to say we won the game w/ 23k points. 2nd place had 9k.

That was fun!

!rant

I see a lot of people complain about uni degrees and stuff because they don't learn how to code etc. Is this really the standard?

I mean I'm only in fourth semester bachelor and had coding knowledge before starting uni. But we had basic to intermediate java in the first two semester, now learning how to write secure code and OS-Level stuff in C++, we had a module with practical Assembly coding all while still learning all the theory.

At the end of the first semester we had to write a terminal game in Java. I mean of course that's not "real experience" but if you dive in you definitely learn the basics you need to get started in real life.

Or am I wrong completely / just in a weird uni?

Me teaching to myself because the school I've been to so far either hired bad teachers ("You know how to add ints together ? Alright let's make a rally game in C++"), dudes that were only here for the money or dudes that didn't have time to go in details so it was exclusively theory

Computer games is always been a on a great demand. As demand increases, production also increases. Gaming industry has been on a rise since the 19th century. The first computer game "Space Wars" in 1962 gained a large success. Since then, the evolution in the gaming industry is thrilling. Currently, we have access to many immersive games. With the introduction of AR and VR, the gaming industry is going to take a great burst in business. Don't you believe after decade the games would be so advanced that it would be so much life like. According to the predictions, after a hundred years, games would be vastly different from what we play today, realistic feature would be a sidekick for them. A time will come when the games would reach a singularity where the characters would have consciousness. Isn't that like our real world, as if we are the characters in a advanced game of some advanced beings. What if it is true? Scientists are doing a intensive research on this field to find a clue, whether we are in a game or not. This is the so called "Simulation Theory". Some clues in relation to this would be worth noting. The flower are following a series to have their petals. To be precise Fibonacci series is the base to the no of petals in a flower. (Fibonacci Series: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55.....) Flowers would either have 3 or 5 or 8 petals, but no flower is having a number of petal which is not following this series. Isn't it interesting, there is no brain in flower, even then how could a flower decide, how many petals it will contain? Sometimes, it feels like there is some kind of computer code is responsible for this. We will discuss about it furthur.

I have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.

Okay, great, so what?

The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.

I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.

From rock, paper, scissors to poker.... Wow some game theory examples.