I've been a customer of theirs for at least 12 years, I think (I have an entry in my password manager from about that long ago, and I might have had an account before that). It's been fantastic, in general: I can get a phone consult anytime I've wanted one, and can get in to see a doc with pretty short notice. They are good at giving me the referrals I ask for, even if they are weird (eg., after listening to Chamath Palihapitiya talk about Coronarary Arterial Calcium scans, I got curious and wanted one, and 1med got me the referral I wanted/dealt with insurance, etc.). About the only downside is that it's a bit harder to keep a very consistent GP, in that 1med seems to have a fair amount of turnover. I don't know if it's hard to keep a consistent GP in other contexts, as I pretty much didn't go to doctors between the time I left high school and when I started using 1medical.
I felt that way too, but I have mostly changed my mind. My wife, who has a FT job, a purse company, and 2 kids, plays a SHOCKING amount of Maple Story. She never pays money, but at a reasonable-for-her time value of money, I'm sure she'd be well into 10s of $K/year of cost. Is that malfeasance on the developer's part? I dunno. I'd generally prefer she play less, but she is an extremely functional adult, and she gets to make her own choices.
Thought experiment: if she spent 10X less time but $2K/year on the game, would that be more or less troubling? If she took that trade, she'd be an addict by your lights, but she'd be spending 10-30 min rather than 3-5h/day, and I'd be THRILLED. It's interesting to me that we are generally totally fine with something that sucks up (or alternatively, makes enjoyable) all or more-than-all of someone's free time, but we get upset when it takes even trivial amounts of their money.
That's actually part of the problem I have with this model. These companies are charging you to reduce the amount of time you have to play the game to achieve the goals set in the game. They could make a game where you get the same satisfaction in 30 minutes as you do in 3 hours now, but then they wouldn't be able to charge you for the shortcuts.
I have my own gaming addiction (with games that have complex systems), but I find the mobile gaming model perverse and manipulative.
Ultimately, entertainment is just "A time waster". Games from their core commercial history involve ways to get more money or time (often both) from a player. including:
1. Arcade machines meant to be overly difficult to extend playtime and each quarters
2. early console game made to be extremely difficult with punishing systems (limited lives, lack of save states, etc) that artificially extend the playtime of what's not ~3-5 hours on an emulator
with these features
3. early online computer games inflating engagement with horrendously low drop rates, and requiring groups to be formed to very slightly accelerate the rate at which content can be cleared so they can keep a monthly subscription up. Bonus points for the group forming an in-pressure to stay engaged, possibly after you've tired of the grind.
4. splitting of the game into 2 or more "versions", which have minimal differences but require both versions to truly gain completion or some specific rare item. Again, bonus for forcing social interaction amongst peers to give pressure to buy the game (or a different version so you can interact).
5. in the realm of 4), sometimes rereleasing a "director's cut" a year later at full price with cut content (that you can argue was cut purposefully) in order to get more money out of 90% the same content
6. DLC that includes anywhere from cosmetics that used to be available in game to the direct "time saver" item packs that is now often contributed to mobile games.
We're just at the newest iteration. And much of the west is already moving from #7 being taled about today (stamina systems and random chance at drops) towards 8) Battle pass structures to encourage playtime and give extra rewards on a pseudo-subscption system. An interesting combination of 3) and 6).
Pokemon is the biggest example and it's been ingrained in fans for 25 years to
1. choose 1 or buy 2 versions of a game that is 90% the same (example, Gold or Silver, whose differences are in some dozen pokemon exclusive to one version)
2. a year or two out, receive a 3rd version with extra content charged at full price (Crystal). Often acting as the "definitive version" for that generation.
It's not the most common model, but a few other franchises outside of pokemon have definitely applied their own take on it (often Nintendo related ones).
I've been getting into SplitGate the last few weeks, I've been using my one hour a night of free time on it. Every minute has been a blast, but it has put a real dent in my progress on my side projects . :)
> if she spent 10X less time but $2K/year on the game,
Does that matter? Is it a meaningful option?
If she made that trade, she'd have free time, and there are a milion more addicting options (plenty of which are free!), so the steady state would likely be the same time spent on similar whatever, plus the $2K/year. Or, if she finds a better hobby (yay), no need to pay $2K/yr!
depends on how you value time. Which seems to change based on age. At 14 it wouldn't matter, I'm happy spending hours grinding. Now at 27, it's much more ambivalent.
>she'd have free time, and there are a milion more addicting options (plenty of which are free!), so the steady state would likely be the same time spent on similar whateve
maybe, maybe not. I've had friends who quit big mmo's just play other MMO's. Some just moved to a new MMO, some moved to new hobbies. Sometimes even more expensive (oh boy, I'm SO glad I'm not a car junkie. Geez, the money and time spent on parts... not to mention the danger. ), some "productive" and even profitable (e.g. I helped give some tips to a friend learning to program and said he quit Lol, which I remember him playing pretty heavily even before college).
Have you looked at SICM? (Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, the far less popular half-sibling of the SICP) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-... -it has you derive classical mechanics, which is to say most() of Newtonian physics up to around 1900, by writing a giant pile of scheme that drives graphical simulations.
() For a curious value of "most" that elides thermodynamics, electromagnetism, etc..
More generally, I know many many people (maybe literally tons by weight?) who continue to work long after they don't need to, usually because they're just deeply interested in the domain. I've seen this up close with my father, who continues to farm at 70, and with some founders who keep founding despite having more money than they will ever need. So when someone in that situation says they work on a thing because it is interesting to them, I generally believe them.
This does exactly what it looks like: search google for whatever you're looking for, but only for reddit pages. You access it by getting into the URL bar, hitting r<tab>, then you should see whatever you named this, then do your search and off you go.
Sadly, this is substantially better than searching reddit for the same string. (I work at reddit, and hope to help fix this sometime in the first half of next year)
reddit's search has been a running joke for as long as I've been using reddit* and I worry that improving it this late in the game might unexpectedly wipe out the entire site and severely damage the surrounding internet.
These questions aren't useful for evaluating pg's work (or frankly that of most PL implementors) because it concerns things, like syntax, libraries, user culture, etc., that is outside of the rather narrow domain Atanassow cares about.
He believes languages are utterly defined by their type systems, saying in the LtU comment you linked: "Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl and Lisp are all the same language". I'd assume that he would say the same about js, lua, etc.. AFAICT, he's quite knowledgeable about PLT, formal methods, static typing, category theory, etc., but he disregards
everything else.
It's worth considering whether he is right to do so. A waspish answer is to observe that companies built on languages he deems to be "in the corner" (c, java, dynamic languages) constitute the entirety of companies with significant market capitalization, and ask (apologies to Aaron Sorkin) "If your type system is so smart, why do you lose so always". A better answer is to note that a bunch of stuff that he deems trivial (generally anything outside of the type system, but specifically libraries, syntax, bindings to existing systems, etc.) matters, so javascript is different than python despite being identical in his eyes. Specifically, js runs in the browser and has a pretty good runtime for building web services, while python has exceptional ecosystem support for data science and machine learning.
have you thought about publishing the full source from then? The HN source was dense but very educational, and it would be really interesting to see internal tools written in arc.
You wouldn't learn much more from reading it, because (to an almost comical extent in retrospect) the internal code was just like HN. In fact, not just like; it was mostly the same code.
