The Car Example for OOP

The `Car extends Vehicle` or `Duck extends Bird` type of tutorial obscures more than it illuminates. In good OO programming, we don’t make class hierarchies in order to satisfy our inner Linnaeus. We make class hierarchies in order to simplify the code by allowing different parts of it to be changed independently of each other, and to eliminate duplication (which comes to the same thing). Without any context as to what the code needs to accomplish, you can’t make a judgment about whether...

 All Efficient Strategies Have Their Limits

At the end of the day, all of the efficient approaches and winning strategies have their limits. For example, say there's this great move in some fighting game that only a certain character can use. Everyone knows that using it makes you stronger, so everyone starts using it. Pretty soon, everyone's playing the same way. The move is so influential that everyone depends on it. I would never use that move in such a situation. It wouldn't be easy, of course, but it is never impossible to win wi...

 How New Games/Releases Impact the Meta

A new series release means more than just updated graphics or different character costumes; sequels can have new rules, or introduce entirely new systems, so everyone was starting more-or-less fresh. Experience and knowledge of previous games in the series help to some extent, but you're still learning the new rules from scratch. Being strong in the previous game means less than learning the new one, so without putting in the required work last year's champion can become this year's scrub. Th...

 The Moral of the Bees

Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive To make a Great an honest Hive. T’ enjoy the World’s Conveniencies, Be famed in War, yet live in Ease Without great Vices, is a vain Eutopia seated in the Brain. Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live Whilst we the Benefits receive. Hunger’s a dreadful Plague, no doubt, Yet who digests or thrives without? Do we not owe the Growth of Wine To the dry shabby crooked Vine? Which, whilst its Shutes neglected stood, Choak’d other Plants, and ran to Wood;...

 Don't Let the Simulation's Beauty Convince You It's Real

The architecture faculty who designed Project Athena’s Garden dreamed of transparent understanding of design process; today scientists are reconciled to opacity and seeing only a CAVE’s shadows. Over the past twenty years, simulation has introduced its dazzling environments and we have been witness to our own seduction. A mechanical engineer instructs his students: “Don’t be fooled by the graphics.”17 Luft says that beautiful codes promote the “illusion of doing really great scien...

 Students Reliant on Computer Simulations Lack the Technic...

In the 1980s, alternate visions of computers and the future of design were expressed in competing views about programming. Some architects believed that designers needed to learn advanced programming. If designers did not understand how their tools were constructed, they would not only be dependent on computer experts but less likely to challenge screen realities. Other architects disagreed. They argued that, in the future, creativity would not depend on understanding one’s tools but on usi...

 How Online Platforms Can Encourage Good Behavior

The technical architecture of online platforms, on the other hand, should be designed to dampen harassing behavior, while shielding targets from harassing content. It means creating technical friction in orchestrating a sustained campaign on a platform, or engaging in sustained hounding. For example, what if, after your fifth unanswered tweet within the hour to someone who didn’t follow you, a pop-up asked if you really wanted to send that message? It also means building user interfaces th...

 "Scandals" - Animals Evolved from Cancer Cells

Panchin knows the idea of cancer-derived animals sounds far-fetched — so much so that, in the paper, he and his co-authors refer to them as Scandals (an acronym for “speciated by cancer development animals”). [...] According to Panchin’s three-step scenario, a Scandal would start off as a cancer, but not just any cancer. It would have to be transmissible, so that it wouldn’t die when its host did. Then the cancer would have to spread to other species, and then independently evolve...

 Asymmetrical Psychology: Computers Use Knights Better Tha...

e. Chess players have the most trouble visualizing the moves of knights because their move is unlike anything else in the game, an L-shaped hop instead of a predictable straight line like the other pieces. Computers, of course, don't visualize anything at all, and so manage every piece with equal skill. I believe it was Bent Larsen, the first GM victim of a computer in tournament play, who stated that computers dropped a few hundred rating points if you eliminated their knights. This is an ex...

 Automation Improves Safety

The airports with their self-check-in kiosks and restaurants full of iPads are staffed by thousands of human workers (most using mano machine can do? Or, like operating an elevator and driving a car, is it because at first we don't trust machines to do a job where lives are at risk? Elevators became much safer as soon as the human operators were replaced. The human-hating Skynet from the Terminator movies could hardly do a better job of killing people than we do killing ourselves with cars. H...