There used to be a site called Forgotify that would only play songs from Spotify that had zero listens. So each song played, of course, removed that song from the set that could ever be played by Forgotify. Doesn't look like it's around any more, sadly.
https://vid404.com/ is for videos with zero views. It generates search queries for finding them.
For videos with low views there's https://petittube.com/ (loads a random video with low view count) and http://astronaut.io/ (which has an "automatic stream" of videos).
Yeah, I think this is an unfortunate casualty of the AI age. Instead of discovering a weird fast food employee orientation CD or somebody's niche garage album from 1996 that was semi-accidentally uploaded by whoever happens to own it now, you're just getting thousands of fake songs made by bots.
I feel like it'd be worth it for someone to create an online library of CDs. People could send in their CDs if they weren't already archived, the music would be ripped and stored as flacs, and the CD would be sent back. The library could provide access to the files for the sort of thing nobody is going to issue a takedown for (aforementioned orientation CD or niche garage album) over the net
I know there are communities of people dedicated to doing this with old VHS-tapes and DVDs, so I am guessing somebody is likely chipping away at CD's like this in some capacity. It would be wonderful it it could grow into something like what you're suggesting.
A major surface area for this sort of work is oddly enough on youtube - you can find truly obscure demo tapes and records digitized and uploaded there. You'd think the copyright demons would eat these videos alive, but it seems like they don't.
I'm with you, came here to ask this too. This is how I would have read it:
"Crack engineer" someone who is an excellent engineer, I feel like this goes back to at least the early 20th century, certainly long before gaming culture.
"Cracked engineer" a damaged person who is an engineer
The Merchant Princes series is fun, and I really enjoy the story of why he wrote it. It starts out as fantasy for basically the whole first novel and then some. But you can find some evidence from the start that it's really sci-fi, and by the end of the series it has dropped all pretense. It's sci-fi through and through.
This is all because he had an exclusive contract for sci-fi with his other publisher. But not an exclusive contract period. So he stealth wrote a second sci-fi series without actually breaking that contract until later.
I'm not sure if The Laundry Files was done for the same reason. It's possible. I haven't read those past the first novel. But I'm a big fan of everything else he's done.
"Moving left" is NOT an input. An input is "The controller is pushed to the left" (with perhaps a numeric value of how far it is pushed to the left). "Firing once" is similarly NOT an input. "The fire button is down" and "The fire button is up" are inputs. That is how well implemented first person shooters have worked since the Quake days (I think Quake 2 actually).
The point of the article is actually that the server doesn't validate anything. There's nothing to validate. The only data it gets from the client is the state of the controls. Then it runs the real simulation. The client only ran a prediction of what it thought the server would do. Sometimes, it's wrong and corrects itself when it gets new values from the server.
Just today I was arguing for not moving something off of Oracle. No one's really happy the thing in question is on Oracle, but it is live in production and most of the time does what it needs to. It ain't broke. Changing to "something else" carries way too many unknowns for my comfort level.
If I'd read this last night... I still would've argued the same thing, but I would've been really unhappy about it.
The author also created SpaceChem, which is one of the best programming/engineering games out there. For just programming games, I'd call it my second all time favorite just behind Robot Odyssey, an ancient Apple ][ game.
This gives some great context to where SpaceChem came from. Thanks Zach!
I thought I recognized the favicon! He's also the guy behind Infiniminer (the primary inspiration for Minecraft) and KOHCTPYKTOP (a game where you design basic digital circuits that I'd like to personally thank him for, for expanding my mind beyond the "pure" software realm: Thanks, Zach!)
I only skimmed it, but I didn't see anyone in there who took years. They were all on the order of months. Entirely possible I missed it.
That said, adding networked multiplayer to a game is very difficult. But designing a game around networked multiplayer is not nearly as hard. Single player or local only multiplayer games can get away with lots of assumptions that completely break multiplayer, and detangling all of those assumptions is the most time consuming part of converting a game. If you do it "right" from the start, you don't ever allow yourself to make any of those assumptions and everything just works. If you know you're going to build a multiplayer game, then write it as a client server architecture from day one even if you know you're not going to play with other people for the first several months of development. Future you will thank present you.
"Implementing online multiplayer was very difficult," developer Casper van Est tells me. "People always warn you about it, and even with that taken into account, it turned out more difficult than we expected. We're a small two-person development team, so we already knew implementing it was going to take a while, but it ended up taking us several years."
