magic_lobster_party

Video game graphics seem to have reached diminishing returns at this point. Games are more expensive to make, but the end consumer barely notice any visual difference.

There was a time when having the best graphics in any video game was a selling point. People argued whether X360 or PS3 could produce best graphics. Now, nobody cares.

Writing maintainable code is an art form. Like most art forms it can mostly only be learned by practice. So if you don’t have much experience maintaining long lived systems, it’s difficult to know what works and what doesn’t. Most universities don’t teach this as well, so it’s mostly something people learn in the industry.

Then I believe there’s also some aspect of pride in writing overly complicated code. It’s the belief that ”other people can’t comprehend my code because they’re not as smart as me”, when it’s actually ”I suck at writing comprehensible code”.

Yeah, computer science is the more about theoretical side of computation and the analysis of algorithms. For example, proving that a certain algorithm is a solution to a problem and has a particular time complexity. That’s more mathematics than practical programming.

I believe publishers already have good control over their prices. If they feel a game isn’t selling to the extent they wish, they lower the price. If it’s selling well, then they have no need to lower the price.

It’s market economy.

Probably Team Fortress 2. It was a comfort game for me when I studied university.

Haven’t played it in a great while now. Heard there’s a bad bot situation with it right now.

I’ve haven’t had a burnout (knocks wood), but the most toxic environment I’ve worked in had tight deadlines, unclear requirements and many last minute changes on features that ultimately didn’t mattered. Combine this with long and tedious release processes and narrow release windows. If a bug slipped through our (not so robust) testing process, it was difficult to fix it.

It felt like the priorities were all wrong. Instead of improving the product for existing customers and improve our release process, it was all about adding pointless features some ”potential buyer” asked for (they never bought the product either way).

Now I work in a much better workplace, thankfully.

It’s just example code to demonstrate the idea of the optimization explained in the article. I also based my code on the code used in the article (and made some major changes to better fit my attempt of explanation).

Basically it’s just an optimization of a double nested for loop. It’s a way to avoid running the inner for loop when it is known there will be no hit.

This is useful when we for example want to find all product orders of customers in a particular country. The way we can do this is to first filter all customers by their country, and then match orders by the remaining customers. The matching step is the double for loop.

Something like this:

for order in orders:
    for customer in customers_in_country:
        if order.customer_id == customer.id:
            …

Many orders won’t match a customer in the above query, so we want to single out these orders before we run the expensive inner for loop. The way they do it is to create a cache using a Bloom filter. I’d recommend looking it up, but it’s a probabilistic cache that’s fast and space efficient, at the cost of letting through some false positives. With this particular use case it’s ok to have some false positives. The worst thing that can happen is that the inner for loop is run more times than necessary.

The final code is something like this:

bloom_filter = create_bloom(customers_in_country)
for order in orders:
    if bloom_filter.contains(order.customer_id):
        for customer in customers_in_country:
            if order.customer_id == customer.id:
                …

Edit: this comment probably contain many inaccuracies, as I’ve never done this kind of stuff in practice, so don’t rely too much on it.

I hate when coworkers tell we should do thing in a particular way because it’s ”better”. We try the thing and there’s no measurable difference. Well, it was a good idea in their mind, so it must be an improvement. Therefore, they insist it should be kept, even if it makes the code extra convoluted for no reason at all.

And yes. Profiling is great. Often it is a surprise where most time is spent. Today there’s few excuses not to profile since most IDEs have good enough profiler included.

Nice article. For the optimization related ones there’s a good rule of thumb: it’s not an optimization if you don’t measure an improvement.

That’s how DRY is described in Pragmatic Programmer, where DRY was first coined. They’re clear that just because code look similar, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the same.

I agree with the first point. Always go for clarity over cleverness.

I somewhat disagree with the second point. Consistency is important. Stick with the same name when possible. But I think mixing camel case and snake case should be avoided. It can make the code less ”greppable” IMO, because now you need to remember which casing was used for each variable.

Kind of agree on the third point. I think flatness should be preferred when possible and when it makes sense. Easier to find the variables with the eyes rather than having to search through nested structures.

I can already hear Fromsoft fans say “it’s for lore reasons”, “it’s Miyazaki’s vision”, “git gud”, etc.

It’s a surprisingly good game even it’s just a clicker game based on HTML forms.

Elden Ring. Even after finishing the final boss there was so many areas I’ve not been to. And all those areas are unique - some with unique enemy types. It’s the game that dares to hide a secret area behind a secret area.

Without the Naughty Dog reveal I wouldn’t have remembered the trailer 10 seconds after it ended.

Shadow of the Erdtree would be my pick. Mostly because I haven’t played that many other games from 2024.

And I think it deserves to be nominated even if it’s DLC. The amount of new content is more than most games.

A favorite from this year is the trailer for Doom: Dark Ages. Excellent pacing. Weapons I’m waiting to get my hands on. It makes it clear how it’s going to set itself apart from the previous entries, and I’m hyped for it.

An all-time classic will forever be the first trailer for Zelda: Twilight Princess. At the time it was the right trailer for a new Zelda. People wanted a ”proper” Zelda after Wind Waker, and what they presented was just mind blowing. In the end I didn’t enjoy TP as much as I wanted, but that first trailer still gives me goose bumps. At least TP made me find a new appreciation for WW.

I’m at the point where I think I can engineer anything. But I also know that it takes effort and I ain’t gonna do that unless there’s a paycheck.

Java with Spark.

Although I feel like I’m doing less of data science and more of data processing.