I don't agree with the parent commenters characterization of Karpathy, but these projects are just simple toy projects. They're educational material, not production level software.
I largely agree, but there are conflicting goals which makes it hard to evaluate if this really is a bad long-term play. Canada has environmental commitments, and giving the population access to cheap EVs will help meet those goals. I don't think this decision is just a short-term political win, there is potential for it to help with the longer term vision of Canada. But I do agree, this is bad for the local automotive industry in Canada.
I mean Canada's largest trading partner is the US, which also has many examples of large scale human right abuses.
As a Canadian, it's not really relevant to me that a country we trade with isn't liberal, and I don't agree with the premise that China is inheriently anti-west. Anti-western values, yes, but China does not threaten west violently in anyway that I can see. They mostly threaten western dominance economically.
IMO, Canada should just do what's best for its citizen, which is get good trade deals, and ensure that our values don't morph into something unrecognizable. What other countries do in their own borders is largely irrelevant.
> in the US, which also has many examples of large scale human right abuses.
Excuse me? Citation is needed here for present day human rights abuses in the US.
> Canada should just do what's best for its citizen, which is get good trade deals, and ensure that our values don't morph into something unrecognizable. What other countries do in their own borders is largely irrelevant.
It’s extremely relevant, if you believe in personal liberties and democracy you should to do business with societies that uphold personal liberties and democracy it’s that simple.
- Depending on who you ask, you could also point to large-scale violations of the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, as well as the over-policing of minority populations.
The US also does not consistently uphold the same values that you say liberal democracies should. It does business with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others.
As for your second point:
“It’s extremely relevant. If you believe in personal liberties and democracy, you should only do business with societies that uphold personal liberties and democracy. It’s that simple.”
I would ask, why? I believe in personal liberties and democracy for my people, my community, and my country. If another country’s population does not hold those beliefs as a majority, why is that my concern? If we truly restricted trade only to countries that share our beliefs, our list of trading partners would be very small. What would the benefit be?
Additionally, given your request for citations, I suspect we would disagree significantly on which countries actually reflect our values. I am not sure we could arrive at a consistent list of partners that share our values. For example, I do not believe the USA has a strong democracy. It has a rather weak one. Should it be excluded as well?
Really, I found 5.2 to be a rather weak model. It constantly gives me code that doesn't work and gets simple APIs wrong. Maybe it's just weak on the domain I'm working in.
He saying that using a single metric like GDP isn't sufficient for claiming that the economy isn't tanking. The economy != GDP. For many regular people, it's terrible right now.
See my other comments in this thread that surfaces other metrics like: debt burden ratios, repayment behavior, GDP per person at market exchange rates, Adjusted for price differences, and Adjusted for prices and hours worked.
I'm not saying that Americans aren't under more economic strain than a few years ago (pre-pandemic), excluding 2007 - 2008.
However, I think if someone is going to claim the economy is tanking OR that Americans are fast becoming destitute or something extreme like that, you gotta give some quantitative data to back up that claim.
Those metrics are all aggregate ones. A group containing Bill Gates plus one destitute homeless person $1M in debt has great metrics of that sort. Total debt is a tiny fraction of total income. Income per person is huge, and doesn't stop being huge when you adjust for price differences or hours worked or anything else you care to adjust for. But that destitute homeless person with a $1M debt is still destitute and homeless and $1M in debt.
I haven't commented on "repayment behaviour" because your other comments don't actually mention that. Maybe there's something behind one of the links you posted that explains what you mean by it. I did have a quick look at the not-paywalled ones and didn't see anything of the kind.
(The above isn't a claim that actually the US economy is in a very real sense tanking, or that not-very-rich Americans are heading for destitution, or anything else so concrete. Just pointing out why the things you've been posting don't seem like they address the objection being made.)
Sean has been on Jon's stream, and there's a good video where briefly Sean states that he have Jon some syntax advice for Jon's language Jai.
I assumed they were friends as there are several videos of them conversing. The parent comment pointed out that Sean agree's with the negatives about Jon, which could not mean much, but the fact that Jon's negative as described in the Dreknek are really bad indicates to me that Sean likely doesn't view Jon as a good friend anymore. This is surprising to me because I really did enjoy one of their videos where they try and solve a problem together.
The fact that Sean agrees with this critical take of Jon is further evidence of how much Jon has changed since the pandemic.
STB Is the intial's for Sean T Barrett, who also created a software library with the same name.
Frankly STB is a bit of a lefty nutjob, those types are known for excommunicating good friends over minor political schisms... Talking from experience.
Ah I honestly don't know about STB aside from his header libraries and his tech talks, what makes you think he's a lefty nutjob? Briefly looking over his website and X profile, he seems like he's on the left side of the political spectrum, but what inparticular gives you the impression he's a nutjob?
Is it typical for the marketing for a game to reference those who worked on the game? Those designers were employees of Thekla as far as I can tell, why would they get a shout out?
Shhhhhh… don’t spoil their little hate party. Everyone knows that the whole marketing team really wanted to include every employee’s name in the 90 sec trailer, but Jon said, “absofuckinlutely not!”
Jai is designed for games, it aims to do a few things that can help game developers, as well as developers in general.
- Lower compilation times for debug builds.
- Better debug messages.
- A standard library that comes with a production ready graphics API, so gamedevs don't need to worry about the current state of graphics API and can just dig in.
- Standard input API for cross OS development.
- AOS to SOA automatic conversion to simplify code that needs to be performant, while retaining a clean syntax.
- A context system, which should help with simplifying functions definitions while keeping things strongly typed.
- The ability to rewrite ASTs, to do compile time programming. Ideally simplifying code, while keeping runtime speed performant, and keeping compilation speed fast.
This is just to name a few off the top of my head. The performance and API stuff is directly going to help game devs. I view it similar to Odin, something that is in production software right now, where you can have a clean langugae, with a strong standard library and primitives to help you develop quickly.
More like, shipped 2 hit games, which were both technological and artistic feats for their time. And developed a blazingly fast compiler. Casey also was a developer in RAD game tools developing animation tools. Their output is probably better than most industry developers. I understand if you don't like their attitudes and the way they attempt to teach/preach to other engineers, but IMO their work speaks for itself. I take their advice and try to apply it to my own work, because it seems to have work for them.
I'm not saying I don't like their attitudes but it's a viewpoint I am struggling with myself.
I'm starting to realize caring about all these minutia of details that don't really matter for my professional goals. I know my software isn't special, caring about pumping out as much performance as possible when I just sling JS professionally feels a tad myopic?
What is the point of it just continues the pattern of procrastination towards the actual goals I want to achieve? Does this also apply to them?
What is the point of espousing all these supposed virtues when the output isn't that special? I mean Braid is still good, but let's not act like greener devs haven't put out good games too without all the jackassery baggage.
Yea I largely agree with you on that point. I think when discussing Jon, Casey (and to add another, Mike Acton), there's actually a series of advice that they give that get lumped into a whole, and people don't really see the parts of what they're saying and instead focus on the part that sounds most critical to their work.
I do agree that if you take from their "teachings" that every dev needs to optimize every thing, and never use any other language than system languages, that advice is myopic for most devs. However, I don't really see them arguing for that, at least not entirely.
From following their teaching for a while, they mostly preech about the following things which I agree with, even when talking about higher-level languages, technologies.
- Get the clowns out of the car: Don't make things needlessly expensive. Write simple procedural code that maps cleanly to what the hardware is doing. This is essentially stating OOP, large message passing, and other paradigms that abstract the problem away from the simple computations that are happening on your computer is actually adding complexity that isn't needed. This isn't about tuning your program to get the highest amount of performance, but rather, just write basic code, that is easy to follow and debug, that acts as a data-pipeline as much as possible. Using simple constructs to do the things you want, e.g. an if-statement versus inheritence for dynamic dispatch.
- Understand your problem domain, including the hardware, so you can reason about it. Don't abstract away the hardware your code is actually running on too much where you lose vital information on how to make it work well. I've seen this many times in my professional career, where devs don't know what hardware the code will be running on, and this inevitably makes their code slower, less responsive to the user and often drives up cost. There are many times in my early career (backend engineering), that just simplifying the code, designing the code so it works well for the hardware we expect, greatly lowered cost. The hardware is the platform and it shouldn't be ignored. Similarly, limitations that are imposed by your solution should be documented and understood. If you don't expect a TPS greater than some value, write that down, check for it, profile and make sure you know what your specturm of hardware can handle, and how much software utilization of that hardware you're getting.
- Focus on writing code, and don't get bogged down my fad methodologies (TDD, OPP, etc). Writing simple code, understanding the problem more deeply as you write, and not placing artifical constraints on yourself.
Now each of these points can be debated, but their harder to argue against IMO then the strawmany idea of them proposing that you must optimize as much as possible. And they argue that you will actually be more productive this way, and produce better software.
FWIW, you may have some datapoints showing that they do propose what I called a strawmany version of their ideas, but I have seen them advocating for the above points more so than anything else.
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I do want to add, for Jon Blow, I don't think he has a problem with people using engines. From what I've seen he's played, and loved games that used engines in the past, and had no problem with their output in terms of gameplay or performance. From his talk about civilization ending relating to game dev, he's more concern that if no one tries to develop without an engine, we as a civilization will lose that ability.
> I don't think he has a problem with people using engines. From what I've seen he's played, and loved games that used engines in the past
He's also said quite openly that if you're only starting, it's fine if you reach for a ready-made engine. It's that you should try and understand how things and systems work as you progress.
Yes, this is well put. I was heavily influenced by Casey back in 2014 and the advice I give juniors now is always that first point about "getting the clowns out of the car". There's a lot of crossover with the "grug brained developer" here too, which is much more aligned with the web/enterprise world.
I find it very hard to convince people though. It runs counter to a lot of other practices in the industry, and the resulting code seems less sophisticated than an abstraction pile.
Aha! I think I know my contention with this advice now. Who can actually disagree with this? Like I'm saying yes to everything, no one I know would say no to this. Never had a coworker say aloud: "I want to write code to make things worse."
These are the platitudes of our industry that no one disagrees with. Like you said, this is what Blow + Muratori teachings can be distilled into. But there is something worse it also assumes, coming from such people.
Both Blow + Muratori have extremely privilege dev careers that a good ~80% us will never achieve: they have autonomy. The rest of us are merely serfs in someone's fiefdom. Blow has his fief, Muratori his. They can control their fiefs but not the majority of us devs. We don't have autonomy in the direction of the company, we don't control the budgets, we don't even control who we interview or hire.
Assuming that this onus of organizational standards has to be placed on someone with no authority to dictate it isn't just. Also as someone who has consumed content from these two for about a good 8ish years as their videos pop into my feed: I've never see them advocate for workers to be empowered to make their environments better. They mostly just trash on devs that have no authority.
With that mindset I need to seriously decouple myself from these people. Plenty of other devs advocate for the same things in our craft while also advocating for better rights as workers.
Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie.
Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good.
So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.
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