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WalterBright

80,372 karmajoined vor 17 Jahren

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I Stopped Fighting My Tools and Built a Game Engine in D

blog.dlang.org
21 points·by WalterBright·letzten Monat·2 comments

comments

WalterBright
·vor 5 Stunden·discuss
The older I get, the closer in time these ancient civilizations become. It's really not that many lifetimes away.

It's stunning the progress humans have made since then.
WalterBright
·vor 5 Stunden·discuss
> magic wand

With today's technology, sure.

I never thought I'd live to see AI. But here it is.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Clarke
WalterBright
·vor 5 Stunden·discuss
> There’s zero hope of meaningful trade or exploitation of resources

Probably correct, but the transmission of information can be very valuable.

BTW, you'll never know what the lives of your grandchildren will be like. But you make children anyway.
WalterBright
·vor 12 Stunden·discuss
Now consider what happens with a government agency!
WalterBright
·gestern·discuss
If you can sent probes to other star systems, you can include with it information of the DNA of life forms and a device to create terran life.
WalterBright
·gestern·discuss
In the meantime, enjoy your life, and what a wonderful gift you have.
WalterBright
·vorgestern·discuss
> standardized

Proof that it is not obvious what it means. Besides, what would a pre-contact tribesman know about 50 year old standards?

> RTFM

If you cannot read DEFROST, you cannot read the manual, either.

In general, pictures of things is no substitute for verbs.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
Icons are worse than foreign glyphs because how are you going to look up an icon?
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
My point was the speech should say "jam" (in Japanese) and it will be better than a beep and an the text "jam" (in Japanese) is better than an icon.

My old truck had a lever that had 3 positions: COOL HEAT DEFROST. Modern cars have all these idiotic icons and I can never figure out how to defrost.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
I miss the days when SNL was funny.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
> no information about what I might do to improve my score

Classic!

One of the downsides of being a lifelong engineer is I see the obvious flaws in everyday designs, and it's so frustrating not being able to fix them.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
I've been in foreign countries with languages I don't have any knowledge of. Learning 3 words is not a problem, and is kind of fun. Usually, I learn yes, no, please and thank you. Those words will get you amazingly far!

Maybe some people think R2D2 beeps and chirps are better, but sorry, I have no interest in learning the binary language of vaporators.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
I don't want tunes. I want a voice. It is not any harder to learn 3 Japanese words than 3 random tunes. You don't have to learn Japanese. It's 3 words.

It's the same thing as those stupid icons on buttons. The rationale is that some pre-contact tribesman will have a car and not know English. Well, he isn't going to know what the ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp icon is, either. And learning 3 English words is not a tragedy. At least the words can be looked up. The icons (and beeps) cannot.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
I know. I've known about this technique since the 80s, and yet still we get those stupid beeps coming out of the speaker.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
A .wma music file is just an array of values ranging from -x to +x. Above a certain threshold, replace it with 1. Below, replace it with 0.

Now feed the 1s (+5V) and 0s (0V) into the speaker at the same rate as the sampling in the .wma file.

Since the speaker cone has inertia, the result will be an approximation of the original waveform, rather than a square wave.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
I've gotten beeps and something flashed on the instrument panel, but when I focused my eyes on the instrument panel, it was gone.

Freakin' useless.

A better user interface would be to have the whole panel turn red when you're about to hit something.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
You cannot look up "beep" in the manual when you have 40 beeps.

You are not objectively worse off with a word than a beep, even if you do not understand the word.

Driving a car with beeps and chimes and dings means they all mush together and get ignored.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
> and cars would go careening off of cliffs for no reason

Obviously, you're not familiar with Toonces, the Driving Cat.
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
Boeing found out the problem with "beeping" alarms.

The first time they installed a warning horn, I think it was the stall warning, it was a big success. So, they started adding different horns for other situations. At one point, in an emergency, the pilot got confused about which horn meant what, and had an accident.

So now, Boeing replaced horns with a voice, like "pull up". Sounds obvious, right?

But car beeps generally give no clue what they're beeping about.

Decades ago, I wondered why elevators announced floors with a beep. If you're blind, you have no idea what floor you're on. I thought a voice would be better. 50 years later, I heard some elevators announce the floor with a voice.

P.S. It's not a technology issue. The IBM PC had an I/O port wired to the speaker. You could give the speaker +5V or 0V, making a square wave only, an annoying buzzing sound. But then some genius discovered that if you ran a wave form through a clipper which gave a sequence of 1s and 0s, running that produced quite a credible voice sound.

P.P.S. My furnace gives its status in the form of a blinking LED. A fast blink means broken, slower blink means A-OK. Of course, when you're faced with a blinking LED, is it blinking fast or slow?
WalterBright
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
I think I'll keep my 1972 Dodge.