Some people actually have mouths to feed. Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years; that doesn't make their products "garbage".
> Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years
Wait, how did they gain this "luxury"? Are they trust fund babies or something?
Or did they earn their big stash of money by producing "garbage" and now retroactively are preaching ideals that they themselves didn't follow or what?
This line of "criticism" doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
After all both in question live off money they've made and/or are making from their (arguably) uncompromised quality work.
That is to say their uncompromised quality work has directly resulted in them being able to not release anything for close to 10 years, and practice their ideals in software they ship even if the "shipping" takes 10 years to do.
It would be more fair to say, that most people don't have the craftmanship and skill (and not the luxury) to be able to produce high quality work and software that enables them the so called "luxury".
>Or did they earn their big stash of money by producing "garbage" and now retroactively are preaching ideals that they themselves didn't follow or what?
In the JBlow case - yes, he made his money using C++. So far, he hasn't shown that using Jai is particularly productive for software engineering.
> So far, he hasn't shown that using Jai is particularly productive for software engineering.
And how would he do that exactly to whatever ungodly standards you are setting for the man?
Many people have criticized C++ in past (which is very easy to do), yet he's practicing what he's preaching in the most direct way humanly possible, he's both (1) designed and implemented a new programming language (that has directly addressed most of the issues), whilst (2) also making a complete non-trivial game in the newly designed language at the same time.
His games have always taken long time to make, and now he's making game + engine + programming language. At the same frigging time!
The only "luxury" JBlow has is that he's an exceptional individual and you're not. He has rare combination of ability, perseverance and work ethic, and by all accounts most people are neither of those things at once.
Most criticisms 99% of time are either misrepresentitive, misinformed jealousy or something to do with politics.
I have no issue with personally acknowledging that some rare individuals are simply way better than me.
And to prevent sounding like a gushing-fanboy, I suspect that his newest game won't sell very well, because his first two games have atleast something to appeal to general public (either visuals of Witness or time travel mechanics (somewhat novel at the time) of Braid) while this game doesn't appear to have the same draw.
This game has too much of a generic-sokoban puzzler vibe to it to appeal to the general public who aren't already ardent puzzler fans (and are there enough of those and can he reach enough of them? etc). And the trailer doesn't help to change this perception.
>And how would he do that exactly to whatever ungodly standards you are setting for the man?
By providing a result in a way that will be superior to the current status quo. Maybe there will be results, but right now there are none.
I have no idea why you are so invested. I don't care about the man's personality or whatever qualities he has. I look at what he does, and so far, he spent 10 years making a game that you yourself admit won't be even that good.
Of course, you could say that changing the course of the industry not possible in one man's lifetime, so you'll need to gather round more people to get the action going, but this tone actually prevents you from starting a Jai revolution.
>I don't care about the man's personality or whatever qualities he has.
The only thing I'm addressing is the so called "luxuries" you alluded to, and the alleged "luxuries" he has is directly a result of his personality and his qualities.
The only reason you don't have those so called "luxuries" is because you're not even in the same ballpark as good. It really is as simple as that.
> By providing a result in a way that will be superior to the current status quo.
But he's done exactly that.
> I look at what he does, and so far, he spent 10 years making a game that you yourself admit won't be even that good.
I'm not saying that the game won't be good necessarily, I'm saying the game probably might not sell very well (atleast not to justify the amount of money spent from purely business perspective, etc)
He hasn't. He made a programming language that allows making a sokoban game in 10 years. That's probably not what people need. The industry can make similar games in a course of several months. It doesn't look like a groundbreaking achievement to me. A monumental amount of effort, sure, but the _result_ isn't there.
Plus, _in the past_, he made Braid, in C++, in a relatively practical way. He made money using the industry standards, now he loses money deviating from the industry standards. The question I'm interested in is: why would anyone listen to what the man _says_ if his own preaching makes him lose money?
But okay, you don't want to hear any of that. You keep fixating on the "luxury" part. The reason we talk about JBlow is because he made Braid back in 2008, and it was an awesome game, and it sold well. More importantly, the timing when it released - it was what kicked off the boom of the indie game development back then. He also made The Witness, and although it was also a good game, it was most likely not as groundbreaking as Braid, considering that he chose Braid instead of The Witness for a remaster. And then he complained that it, quote, "sold like dogs**", end of quote. Unfortunately, what was the jewel of the indie game development in 2008, doesn't really excite the audience that much in 2024. The world has moved on.
The music indsutry is well aware of a phenomenon of a "one-hit wonder". If the JBlow's qualities were the only reason he could make Braid and get rich enough to not release anything for a decade, then surely anybody with these qualities could make Braid 2 and do the same thing, correct? Well, nobody can do that. Not even JBlow himself. Not anymore. It's not 2008.
> The music indsutry is well aware of a phenomenon of a "one-hit wonder".
He made two hit games, Witness was released 7.5 years later.
> Within a week of release, Blow stated that sales of The Witness had nearly outpaced what Braid had done during its first year of release.
> The Witness is widely regarded as one of the best games of the 2010s. The game appeared on 'Best of the decade' features from IGN,[103] Polygon,[104] NME,[105] CNET,[106] and National Post.[107] Edge considered the game the 22nd-best game of all time in 2017
Calling him "one-hit wonder" simply has no basis in reality.
He's at minimum a two-hit wonder.
> it was most likely not as groundbreaking as Braid, considering that he chose Braid instead of The Witness for a remaster.
Now you're making shit up on the spot to make an argument.
Think for a second will you, how exactly would he remaster Witness? Braid Anniversary Edition was announced on 2020,
at which point Witness would merely have been ~4 year old game.
Braid was also made for a 720p console, the Xbox360 Xbox Live Arcade service, so remake atleast makes some sense.
> The question I'm interested in is: why would anyone listen to what the man _says_ if his own preaching makes him lose money?
What exactly is he _preaching_? Not what you have cooked up in your mind, but actually _preaching_?
Why would anyone pay attention to the man who has made TWO hit games in a row, and a third one in his own programming language (that has inspired countless other programming languages like Zig and Odin), yes, why indeed people would listen to an exceptional guy who has repeatedly demonstrated competency and delivered results, whilst always putting it all on the line?
Can you make atleast one hit, not two, just one? Or anything of note?
No you can't, you can do nothing, that's why you don't have the "luxuries" and people don't listen to you, but pay attention to him. You might not like it, but it is what it is.
And you like to comfort yourself with the thought that you don't have some sort of unearned "luxuries", because otherwise you would do great things.
But the reality is that he's exceptional and you're not.
Just to be clear, your comments are implying everyone who doesn't write everything from scratch is shipping garbage.
Ignoring how misinformed that opinion is, I would say The Witness is a very compromised game. Maybe if less focus went into the technical aspect, it could've been better.
About 30% of people worldwide use a language that's not written in Roman alphabet.
Additionally, being written in Roman alphabet doesn't neccessarily mean it's clear how to pronounce it. Hungarians calls their country "Magyarország", but unless you know Hungarian, you will be surprised with how it's pronounced. Same as "Chenonceaux", "Tekirdağ" or "Crkvina".
Those are especially pathological cases, and not especially relevant to this discussion, as the romanization rules are explicitly designed to be consistent.
We're not talking about words like worcestershire. I'm talking about words like "bat" "monkey" "chimichanga". Those that follow the rules. There can't possibly be irregular spellings using the romanizations we're talking about!
"人" is "human", "工" is "work", so "人工" becomes "man-made". "智" is "wisdom", "能" is "able", so "智能" is "intelligence". Nouns flow into verbs and into adjectives much more freely than in English. One character is one LLM token.
I think this might be why, during the reasoning process of GPT and Gemini, even for purely English prompts the model may choose to think in Chinese. That may make it easier for the model to express what it means, and thus be more conducive to its reasoning.
Of course, a better way to reason is to think in vector space rather than by producing tokens that humans can read.
Surprisingly my experience has been the opposite with qwen, if you can force the thinking trace to English the results seem better. But probably just due to the amount of training data.
Not my experience, unfortunately. I worked on a SceneKit project, it was bad.
In general, it suffered from the problem of even Apple not knowing what it was made for, and what it even is. For a 3D API, it has less features than OpenGL 2. For a game engine, it… also has way less features than the competition, which shouldn’t surprise anyone - game engines are hard, and the market leaders have been developed for _decades_. But that’s what it looks like the most - a game engine. (It even has physics.)
Customizing the rendering pipeline in SceneKit is absolutely horrible. The user is given a choice between two equally bad options: either adding SCNTechniques which are configurable through .plists and provide no feedback on what goes wrong with their configuration (as like 3D rendering isn’t hard enough already), or using “shader modifiers” - placing chunks of Metal code into one of 4 places of the SceneKit’s default shader which the end users _don’t even have the source code of_ without hacking into the debug build! Or pulling it from Github from people who already did that [_].
If you just need something that can display 3d data, SceneKit is still fine, but once there’s a requirement to make that look good, it’s better to throw everything away and hook up Unity instead.
It’s just a blog post. No academic is going to read it as more than a very promising early result.
The issue is that lay people read every paper or post as if it were a final proclamation. They’re not. Even a peer reviewed paper on the cover of Science or Nature is still not “proof” of anything, science doesn’t produce positive confirmation. It produces evidence that taken together suggest one prior is more likely than another.
Bayes Rule is very intuitive. We update the prior by the likelihood of the evidence under a given prior divided by the likelihood of the evidence. That’s all it is.
Unfortunately, there is a very strong motive to flag plant. Academia is a water full of sharks.
Certainly! We didn't get a chance to test it on more people before we had to take it apart, but we thought the result was too cool to share. Would love to see other folks run with the idea!
My friend was on a guided tour to North Korea, and they aware of a lot of things. For example, the population of the North and the South was somehow accurately described to the tourists as 25 and 50 million, and they don't question that fact.
I have never been a big enterprise integrator, and I thought exactly like this.
Then in 2024 the CrowdStrike BSOD screw up happened, and I was surprised to learn that no, not everything is airgapped. Apparently, businesses are okay with untrusted, unvetted, self-updating pieces of code that run in kernel mode.
From my experience in Europe, this comes to being the least bad choice amongst a large series of bad choices. They install CrowdStrike in legacy devices running in critical industries like manufacturing because a lot of devices are legacy (think Windows 2000 and XP in 2025) which cannot be changed because either the company is bankrupt, the machine change would cost millions or the company is strapped for cash and/or labor to actually update all of the necessary (and not supported) industrial computers.
This + corporate shit policies from departents disconnected from the needs on the terrain.
Imagine you are an American designing a system. What about non-Latin alphabets? Yeah, these should probably be converted, nobody's going to bother with those. What about Hungarians, should we care about their O / Ó / Ö / Ő and U / Ú / Ü / Ű? And Icelanders - should we allow their Ð / Þ?
I understand that seeing your name misspelled hurts, but pretending ASCII is enough for everyone is an understandable simplification.
Let's not equate Cyrillic to Russian. Cyrillic is also a script of multiple other languages, including Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian (when Serbs feel like using it).
Answering your question - basically, this comes down to the traditions of the languages.
