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No thanks.

Depends how loudly, frequently, and annoyingly they mention "Oh I'm just not a fan of football."

For anyone who just wants a taste of this I highly recommend the game Shenzen I/O. The game is your writing a subset of assembly for products at a manufacturing facility.


Great recommendation, although the limited assembly language doesn't give you access to memory or a stack. Zachtronics have a couple more assembly-language-like games - TIS-100 and ExaPunks - both of which are also excellent for exploring the kind of coding you can do in a very limited programming environment. ExaPunks offers the most programming freedom (including a fully emulated handheld video game device you can use to implement actual games); TIS-100 is probably most like real assembly programming.


Maybe I’m in the minority but I’ve never associated a type system with scale/maintainability directly.

I treat them as I would unit testing: a useful tool to catch bugs early and if you’re skipping it, it should be an intentional decision where you’ve accepted the trade offs.


I feel completely the opposite. What would it look like in an alien war? Would we have defectors like we do in actual war? Could some of those fighting for the aliens actually be enslaved and riot?

All of this adds depth and texture to a game instead of "humans good, aliens bad". The world isn't simplistic and I really don't want a game with a theme to either.


Wait isn't the puppet human government a huge part of the story?

Not only the puppet government, but also the puppet resistance. You can't tell which side the Council is on.

I get that, but as I see it, this way of thinking about it just makes a mediocre IP that’s coloring by numbers. It’s exactly how you say it is, and it’s what’s expected. A typical war story. But let’s look at it from a Tolkien perspective, to me that lens of looking at things gives you a sense of what’s important to keep, and what values to adhere to. It’s not orcs vs. humans, it’s evil vs. mankind. It’s not aliens vs. people, it’s non-human vs. mankind. That’s just my way of looking at it, and I expect others to enjoy the game differently, and that’s fair.

So to make it less mediocre you’d make it more predictable?

To me there’s so little in the way of things which unite us on the concept of humanity. Our conceptualization of evil and what it means is somewhat aligned, but more than that what I think unites us is our way of thinking about things which give us hope. The takeaway from a lot of Tolkien’s work, and that of others like him, has always been about the nature of fairy stories and what they entail.

It’s the same with games about uniting as humanity to kill aliens, you exist in some liminal space between reality and fantasy to come to terms with what it means to be who you are, etc. That said, someone is free to make their game how they like, just as I am free to dislike its direction and make a comment on it. And so on, and so forth.


>What would it look like in an alien war?

Humanity would lose. The end. Rather boring game if I may say so.


For a short story which looks at this see:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11324814-vilcabamba


Oh I'm VERY interested in seeing how this will eliminate white collar crimes like wage theft, embezzlement, ponzi schemes and the like. Or do they mean the kind of crimes THOSE OTHER PEOPLE do?


for every crime it doesn't eliminate, there could be 2 new behaviors they can capture that will become crimes.

Say, parking outside the lines. Just expand the really crazy laws around towing vehicles to treat it like a red curb or an expired parking meter.


The back and forth discussion that led to this was extremely naive from Mastodon’s perspective. Instead of talking through how this was a bad law all around, all he wanted to do was have a pissing match over who’s decentralized solution was better. This will absolutely have the same effect on Mississippi users on US instances as it does on BlueSky users on US infrastructure. To assert otherwise is inviting legal troubles.


Well everyone seemed to turn on the AI ethicists as cowards a few years ago, so I guess this is what happens.


People got so upset that LLMs wouldn’t say the n-word to prevent a hypothetical nuclear bomb from going off so we now have LLMs that actively encourage teenagers to kill themselves.


This just feels like recreating exceptions, but with more complicated syntax.


Yeah but only if you were to always use checked exceptions, and have mandatory try/catch around every function call, and have a much nicer syntax for throwing exceptions with added context. I've never seen any language that did that but I guess it would be possible.


Sometimes it’s nice to have one control flow mechanism rather than too. One could argue that traditional exceptions are more complicated with a their alternative control flow and syntax.


I mean broadly that's my entire problem with errors as values: every implementation wastes a ton of syntax trying to make them like exceptions.


The common problems with exceptions isn’t the easy part of try/catch, it’s the execution model and “any function could throw” that causes most contention. Error values are logically simpler and fully document if and what errors the function can return. Checked exceptions solve that too, but in practice nobody used them even where available. And you still end up with hidden control flow with exceptions, the exceptional path through a function is syntactically invisible and difficult to audit without very strong language tooling.


And also the issue with checked exceptions is that one can't be generic over the checked exception, at least in Java. So it's impossible to write out a universally useful function type that's strictly typed on the error. This definition of `ThrowingFunction` for Java [1] needs just have `throws Exception`, allowing just about anything to be thrown.

Most functional-inspired languages would just have a single `f: T -> Result<U, E>` interface, which supports both (1) a specific error type `E`, which can also be an uninhabited type (e.g. never type) for an infallible operation, and (2) where `U` can be the unit type if the function doesn't return anything on success. That's about as generic as one can get with a single "interface" type.

[1]: https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/javadoc...


Go unironically gets this right - you just treat them like a normal value instead of trying to make them more "ergonomic".


Because if they have users in Mississippi they are doing “interstate commerce” and a federal court has the ability and jurisdiction to compel them to pay those fines.


Are users, who are not transacting with the platform, doing commerce? What if the platform were hosted in, say, Europe?


If they're outside the country they can freely tell Mississippi to pound sand—the state might compel entities they do have jurisdiction over (i.e. ISPs) to cut them off but that's the extent of it.


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