06 JUL 2024 by ideonexus

 Review

 
Folksonomies: reviews gamespace
Folksonomies: reviews gamespace
  1  notes

There were issues with this book, but I appreciate how the Critical Theory aspects of it serve as a sort of "red pill" to break us out of our complacent acceptance of the world--specifically in video games. Many reviews complain about the erudite verbiage, but all Critical Theory makes use of newly-invented words in order to circumvent our preconceptions about the social constructs that rule our lives. I appreciated the concept of the "allegorithm" of how the programming of games is used to define a world, the questioning of "play" in games when really many games are actually work, criticizing the concept of "flow" and calling it "non-contemplation," and the idea that the best gamers are merely the ones who most internalize the algorithms. This book is not for everyone. It is dense and obtuse, but also highly effective and will be very enjoyable for the right readers.

02 MAR 2021 by ideonexus

 Loss of Legacy Programmers Means Loss of Systems Understa...

At Livermore, a legendary senior weapons designer is about to retire. At the Spring 2005 MIT workshop, his colleagues discuss this retirement and refer to it as “a blow.” They are anxious about more than the loss of one man’s ability to make individual scientific contributions. He has irreplaceable knowledge about the programming that supports current practice.10 His colleagues fret: “He has such a great memory that he hasn’t written down lots of important stuff. How will people kno...
Folksonomies: abstraction simulation
Folksonomies: abstraction simulation
  1  notes

The newer users only know the interface, the abstraction, they don't know the code beneath it.

02 MAR 2021 by ideonexus

 Where's Transparency With So Many Layers of Abstraction?

Some older scientists, for example, justify their use of opaque software by pointing to the infinite regress of computer representations. After all, they argue, it doesn’t really mean much to know how your simulation is programmed if all you are looking at is a high- level computer language. The “real guts” of the program is in assembly language and in all that lies beneath that, and no one wants to go to that level with today’s complex machines. In the 1980s, Professor Barry Nilo= in...
Folksonomies: abstraction simulation
Folksonomies: abstraction simulation
  1  notes
 
02 MAR 2021 by ideonexus

 The Danger of Black-Box Abstraction

When I was a graduate student, if you were going to convert some data or something like that, you would write the FORTRAN code to convert the data yourself. That’s how you would do it. Now there are these programs. There are these windows and you click. I .nd with my students all the time, they don’t know why something isn’t working. I’m like, well, did the data convert properly? Open the .le and look at it. It is so black box and it is going from the time when you knew how the data w...
Folksonomies: abstraction simulation
Folksonomies: abstraction simulation
  1  notes
 
31 OCT 2018 by ideonexus

 Bumper Sticker Computer Science

A few of my favorites, not found in the linked article: "There are two ways of constructing software. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. The other is to make it so complex that there are no obvious deficiencies." C.A.R. Hoare "The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it." Dr. Pamela Zave "The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build." Bjarne Stroustrup "T...
  1  notes
 
13 DEC 2017 by ideonexus

 Why We Can't Have "Intuitive" Programming Languages

If a procedure named INSIGHT has been defined and then called seventeen times in the program, and the eighteenth time it is misspelled as INSIHGT, woe to the programmer. The compiler will balk and print a rigidly unsympathetic error message, saying that it has never heard of INSIHGT. Often, when such an error is detected by a compiler, the compiler tries to continue, but because of its lack of insihgt, it has not understood what the programmer meant. In fact, it may very well suppose that som...
Folksonomies: programming intuition
Folksonomies: programming intuition
  1  notes
 
16 FEB 2015 by ideonexus

 Argument Against Teacherbots

Computers can do a lot in education. Of course, books and magazines can do a lot in education. Of course, a lot of what computers do well is simply replacing books and magazines. A children's library needs a librarian. It's not a dumpster full of books. Librarians (like teachers) know what children will like and understand at different ages. They can recommend books, and buy books that are popular, so you can look at the spines of books on a bookshelf, pull out a book, and find something inte...
Folksonomies: education automation
Folksonomies: education automation
  1  notes
 
29 SEP 2013 by ideonexus

 The World is a Function

Kakeru Seki: A fact is somehow related to another fact. Unless you understand these relationships, you won't be a real reporter. Noriko Hikima: True journalism! Kakeru Seki: Well, you majored in the humanities. Noriko Hikima: Yes! That's true--I've studied literature since I was in high school. Kakeru Seki: You havea lot of catching up to do, then. Let's begin with functions. Noriko Hikima: Fu...functions? Math? What? Kakeru Seki: When one thing changes, it influences another thing. A ...
  1  notes

As a programmer I know that algorithms can relate to the real world, and since these algorithms are constructed in computers that ultimately run on bits and boolean logic, then the real world may be imagined to deconstruct to pure mathematics.