Professional writer who uses different writing apps for different occasions is me exactly. I’m also the (or at least a) guy who messaged you about inline comments. As soon as all the details of that feature are implemented, I’m buying it.
This is fascinating and harrowing, but I wish it contained more detail on why the devices were removed, particularly in Rita Leggett's case. The company that made her still-functioning device no longer existed, and trial participants were "advised to have their implants removed." But then she subsequently "tried to negotiate with the company?" And was then somehow compelled to have the device removed despite not wanting to--presumably due to some unarticulated consequence of not doing so; I don't think any surgeon would perform an operation like that without the patient consenting to it. I'd like to better understand how she was compelled to consent to the removal of something she "would have done anything" to keep. That seems like a relevant facet of the discussion of medical ethics.
Yeah, but if you own something that’s in my brain, I can imagine you legally forcing me to pay you for it, but I can’t imagine any court in the world forcing me to let you cut my head open.
“Companies should have insurance that covers the maintenance of devices should volunteers need to keep them beyond the end of a clinical trial”
I don’t think she was “forced” to have it surgically removed but this kind of complex implant probably requires ongoing maintenance in order to be operated safely. Since the company that made it went out of business there isn’t anyone around to provide the extremely specialized maintenance which is required.
It’s a sad situation but also a complex one. I imagine providing long-term support for this kind of medical device is non-trivial.
This is a fun example of how much difference a comma can make. "How ChatGPT was built, from the people who made it" is what this article should have been titled. "How ChatGPT was built from the people who made it" means something very different.
>Of course I wasn't the first to think of it but that didn't matter, the joy is the same.
Exactly right.
When I was in undergrad physics, I signed up for the intro comp-sci course (which is recommended back then but not yet required). First we learned the basic syntax of C, and in the second unit we learned about sorting algorithms. The Prof introduced us to bubble sort, selection sort, and insertion sort, and also the idea that the efficiency of a sorting algorithm was proportional to how many comparisons it required.
Being a physics student, I knew that there were physical process, like driven granular systems, that sorted objects by size without mathematically comparing anything at all. I wondered if I could beat the efficiency of all three of the algorithms by programming the computer to do something similar, treating integers like differently-sized grains of sand.
Over the weekend I first coded an algorithm I called jostle sort that sent the unsorted integers flying across a 2D array a distance equal to their magnitude, then picked them up again from left to right, top to bottom. This worked, but slowly because it had to look at every cell of the 2D array.
Thinking about it further, I imagined tipping the 2D array up from the bottom edge, so that all the integers in a column slid into a pile in the top row. I realized I only needed the count of how many integers ended up in each column, not the columns themselves. I could just initialize a 1D array of zeroes the size of the max value to be sorted, and increment the value in index n whenever I encountered n in the unsorted array. This worked really well, easily beating the other three algorithms in the criteria we'd been asked to test on our homework assignment.
I'd invented counting sort.
I would later learn that I wasn't the first, but that didn't lessen my pleasure. It's still my favorite sorting algorithm, because of that joy of discovery.
Maybe try it with an app on the phone instead? I've been using Synology's photos app to automatically upload everything in my photos library to my NAS for a couple of months now, and it's been seamless. Other apps, like PhotoSync, seem to offer similar functionality in a platform-independent way.
Thank you - I’ve had this suggested before but just couldn’t get it to work. I’ll have another go as that is obviously way better (and saves running a very large VM).
Sometimes games don't do this due to genre conventions/player expectation.
In 2006 Square-Enix shipped a simple programmable system for gameplay automation with the gambit system in Final Fantasy XII. It let you put together a hierarchical list of if->then statements for how characters behaved during battle. It essentially let players "equip" a battle strategy the same way they would equip weapons or armor. This seemed like something highly desirable, since Final Fantasy (and JRPGs in general) had lots of repetitive, grind-y encounters where the tactics didn't change from battle to battle.
People hated it. The popular dismissive criticism was, "Who wants to sit and watch a game play itself?" Players were used to picking and timing all their actions by hand during battles. Many Final Fantasy players back then resented the game "taking away" something they expected and wanted in the game. (It didn't; you could turn gambits off at any time and play the old way, but players got mad anyway because the gambit system seemed like how you were "supposed" to play it.)
In the years since there's been a much more positive re-evaluation. As of the 2017 release of the remastered Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, most of the retrospective reviews had come around to "actually, the gambit system is really clever." But the initial response was so strongly negative that we've never seen the like again in a Final Fantasy game.
There are some games where things not being automated is, for many players, the whole point.
The issue isn't with convention or player expectation for Final Fantasy XII. It automated a large part of the game. It made the game less fun. RPGs revolve around combat -- that's the only reason to grind for gear or stat bonuses.
By automating combat Final Fantasy XII basically made a big hole in the very heart of the game.
Contrast that with something like Minecraft where ComputerCraft is very popular. CompterCraft allows you to program robots to do boring, tedious tasks using Lua. It frees up the player to do more exploration or building, which is the heart of Minecraft.
Ive always felt opposite of minecraft. I build an iron farm so that I may skip mining not because I dont enjoy mining, but because the part that I want to mine is lower than the common iron levels. To have a robot do all of the mining for me is basically allowing me to play in creative mode. If I wanted to play creative, I would just play creative.
Even after Zodiac Age (which I liked fine, btw), the majority people still feel that way about XII's combat. In 2006, XII was a very hyped game (the last single player mainline FF was in 2001). In 2017, the people that hated XII didn't buy Zodiac Age, but the people willing to give it a chance or liked it did, so the discourse leaned positive.
I personally find it less engaging and very MMO-like - I'm not an MMO guy so I would not want to see the gambit system come back. I respect it however and am glad they tried something new. Its influences can be seen in later games.
Oh man, once I figured out how to use the gambit system I loved it. Arguably those were my first programs that I wrote (way back in middle school), and taught me how to think through things step by step. Easily my favorite Final Fantasy, maybe my favorite game of all time. Even back when it was just a CD without any updateable content, I would learn something new about it every single time I went back to play it every couple of years. I had so much fun looking into all of the nooks and crannies of that game.
> "Who wants to sit and watch a game play itself?"
Programmers do. Everyone else, not so much. For those of us that do though, there are a lot of good games to that effect, like Factorio, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, etc.
