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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoProgrammer Humor@programming.devNode Modules
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    23 hours ago

    I don’t know about “fine”. It has a lot of weird stuff baked in. Hoisting. Unexpected type coercion. Too many ways to loop over something and I always forget which one is which. “There’s more than one way to do it” is kind of a recurring problem, come to think of it. Several function declaration syntaxes. Dot notation AND bracket notation for objects.

    Also it will forever bother me that object keys aren’t quoted.

    const foo = "hello"; const bar = { foo: "world" }

    That should be, in my mind, { "hello": "world" } . It’s not. It’s { "foo": "world" }

    But if you want to do that, you need to do const bar = { [foo]: world }. Which looks like your key is an array with one entry, a string with a value of “foo”

    You also end up learning a whole framework, with its syntax and idioms, every couple years. Angular. React. Redux. Whatever.

    There’s also a lot of people who have never used anything else, and want to use javascript for everything.

    Javascript is basically D&D. Wildly popular. Full of legacy jank. People try to use it for anything even though there are better or more specialized tools.



  • At the very least form unions. That will help with stuff like wage theft, some people getting underpaid, BS firings, etc.

    More aggressively, maybe some sort of collective ownership. Not this “options” bullshit where they never even vest for most people. The whole thing where management pays you $100 and sells what you made for $3000 needs to go. That $3000 needs to be more fairly shared among the people that made it happen.

    But I don’t really know. I’m just some guy with entry level knowledge and a sense that the current system is wrong.


  • They could live more modest lives in more rural areas

    Living in a rural area for many people is literal hell, on top of having an array of less obvious costs. The big one is going from not needing a car to needing one. Your rent might drop $500 but you need to spend a lot on gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.

    Also the social options might fall off a cliff. Humans are social creatures. I live in a city and I can walk to dozens of social activities, many of them free. Board game meetups, free music in the park, free museums with tours, free sport leagues, etc. Out in the countryside there just aren’t as many options.

    If you’re queer or another minority, you might also have a worse time in the countryside. Maybe even fatally. A city is going to have a queer scene.

    Also, there are likely more jobs in the city. Remote work and economic upheaval have changed things, but even so, most of those offices in Manhattan are full of jobs. There’s just more stuff where there’s more people.

    Now, to your point, some people are certainly living in a $5900/mo apartment with a doorman and in-building gym that they can’t afford. They could move to a less “nice” place in south Brooklyn or Queens for less than half that, likely at the cost of a longer commute, and losing easy access to a neighborhood they feel a part of. There is a housing crisis though, and people are getting priced further away. That’s probably not going to be solved any time soon because capitalism doesn’t care and will happily eat itself.

    Anyway. Long tangent but I’m extremely pro city so I spoke up.



  • Morrowind’s combat system is… if you’re feeling generous: weird. if you’re not: bad.

    You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you’ve been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you’ll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.

    You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.

    If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set “always use best attack” to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.

    The “bound weapon” spells are also good- they’re kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There’s a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.

    Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it’s better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.

    Also fun: If you damage someone’s strength to 0, they can’t move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.

    also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that’s what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don’t want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.




  • Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

    Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

    Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.






  • There are a small subset of people who legitimately just don’t understand game development fundamentals though, and they actually believe that things would just be fully interchangeable. As in, you buy a skin in Fortnite, and you can then open up Roblox and set it as your player model.

    Those ones are especially not the brightest.

    The people who are like “you can just take your skin from Skyrim and put it in gta5 and it’ll just work!!” people really are baffling. The hubris and ignorance is so much