I once had this kind of body recovery/stress level measuring thingy on me for a few days, and a doctor would then analyze my health and such. I was under some stress those days and (according to the measurements) I wasn't recovering properly even during the nights. But then there was this one, long, flat, deep green curve in the middle of my work day. I checked from my VCS what I was doing during that period: I was optimizing.
I've since noticed this many times. Optimizing is like meditation to me. It's very mechanical (measure), with a sprinkle of creative work (once you know what is slow, it's quite obvious how to make it faster, but just challenging enough to be engaging), and it has a very nice tight feedback loop: Something is slow. I make a change. Now it's fast. Next.
I spent 10 years straight doing C++ and assembly optimization. My work is still fun these days but that was probably the most enjoyable work of my career in terms of the actual day to day coding.
Code cleanup in general is the same for me, but it’s really hard to justify putting much time into that when running your own company solo.
The routines were individually benchmarked using some custom tools (iterate repeatedly and use statistical analysis to converge on an estimate). Always compared against a plain C reference implementation.
Then there was a system for benchmarking the software as a whole on a wide variety of architectures, including NUMA. With lots of plots and statistics.
Usually you’d eventually end up at a point where the improvements are below the noise floor or they help on some systems and cause regression on others. The rule was usually “no regressions”
VTune for multithreading optimization. Built a fibers and lockfree system for efficient scheduling.
I remember one fun time between jobs, that I stayed up till 4 or 5 am optimizing something. It always felt like I was making progress and about to beat the original implementation
Unfortunately I had to give up when I was still 10 times slower than the reference lol
Same here, last time I was between jobs I optimized my defunct startup's database from ~50K TPS to nearly 5M TPS (no durability, if you're wondering), and that was unbelievably rewarding.
There’s nothing quite like writing the final squashed commit message and saying “results should be bit-level identical, +25% speedup on average” or the equivalent. Even better if it’s a hot path that matters to the bottom line of the company.
I try to keep a few of these tasks lying around marked “unblocked” in case I need to unwind. It keeps me from doing it right after noticing, which is an extra bonus.
I also love optimization work. There can be a lot of creativity when it comes to reinventing how something is done. I've seen an algorithm taken to x10 after a ton of optimization by some insane SIMD techniques.
It seems there's less appreciation for this kind of work these days.
Was the need for optimization work something that was on your mind the whole time? Like a nagging feeling in the back of the head that the code is not working as well as it _should_ be working? i.e. stress.
And when you finally "fixed" the issue through optimization, your mind allowed itself to let go of these open loops (borrowing the GTD terminology), leading to relaxation?
I just put live a daily logic puzzle, Clues by Sam. I've been working on it for a while now, mainly on the level generator. It was tricky to generate levels that are solvable using logic (no guessing needed), and also fun to solve (no crazy long deduction chains, but also not just obvious things). I'm sure the implementation still has some quirks on some devices, so would love to hear if you encounter issues!
Highly enjoyable (after I finally read the definitions of "neighbor" and "to the right/left")! Did you write a program that can automatically generate these?? I'll definitely try this again. Note, the emoji graphic in "share" might be buggy? I'm seeing one green checkmark, one green square, and four red squares..
Thank you so much for trying out the game and taking the time to write the feedback!
I did! That was the main workload of this project, and is still ongoing. I have ideas for improvements, and I also have to fix some sentences manually sometimes. But it's getting there.
The sharing shows a kind of "health bar". Every time you make an illogical guess, it reduces one. Running out of "health" doesn't prevent you from completing the puzzle, but it does show up in your share. Based on this, you made 4 "illogical" guesses. If you didn't, then there's a bug. But feels like I should anyways clarify this, if it wasn't clear to you. Thanks again!
I was in a situation where I had to guess. It would be nice if there was a hint (after a successful guess) on why that box was 'ready for solve'. i.e., what other reveals can lead to this box being ready for a Innocent/Guilty choice.
I did enjoy the game though. Re-reading the clues is helpful - reinitialize your context window!
I wonder where you felt like you had to guess. The puzzles are always solvable with logic. Your guess must have been by chance also logically deductible!
I think it's the green checkmark and the green square that are confusing. Like why is there a check on the first green square and not the second one? Maybe it would be cleaner without any checkmark at all? Anyway, nice game, I shared it with my sister who also wants to solve more of them!
I really enjoy this! I like Murdle, too. I was very interested in a sort of quest generation system that would use similar concepts to generate RPG quests, basically constraint solving I suppose.
Thank you!
This was definitely inspired by Murdle, so glad to hear it's finding the right audience. And yes, constraint solving is definitely at the heart of the generator. And you mentioning using it for RPG quests sets my mind racing...
If you haven't heard of it before, also check out Goal-Oriented Action Programming. I was looking at that for giving NPCs essentially their own questlines. So you have some random event happen ("Grug the orc steals Marf the orc's prized club!") and that would generate a quest for Marf to find his club. So he investigates; he sniffs the air (orcs have good noses). He strolls around and interviews the other orcs he sees and asks them if they've seen his prized club. Eventually, he might find his way to Grug the orc and they have a confrontation. Now, all of this is while you're sneaking through the orc hideout to retrieve some MacGuffin...
Great to hear! Preventing guessing was a critical step to make this concept click. Accidentally making an illogical guess (be it right or wrong) felt like it ruined the rest of the puzzle, since it spoiled the intended solve path. Happy to hear positive feedback on the choice!
This is great, but the need for a long glossary of terms is a sign that you might want to keep tuning language/word-choice.
As you've seen in replies here already, many term choices you've made have enough variety in how they're conventionally used that people incorrectly assume they know what it means only to see the "nope!" popup when they try to apply it. That frustration is going to spoil first impressions of what actually seems to be a really great puzzle system, which is a shame. The more you can reduce that experience, the less likely you'll be to prematurely burn off players.
A good measure for getting it right would be that you don't even need a glossary at all, or that you can get it so condensed that you can make it more prominent without becoming distracting.
Alternately, you could maybe use symbols instead of words to represent your rules, as more players would intuit that they should learn the symbols before making (wrong) assumptions.
This is great feedback, and I think you're spot on. It's been really challenging to find wording that is brief enough, but also specific enough. I hope it's something I can improve in the future as I keep exploring new ways of giving hints. The idea of using symbols is interesting, hadn't considered that!
After getting frustrated by the game not accepting my responses to the obvious clues repeatedly I resorted to clicking on each person and selecting both Innocent and Criminal.
- "My only innocent neighbor is to the left of Harold"
- "Barb and I have one innocent neighbor in common"
Thank you for taking the time to go through this. The hint should be clarified. It means "somewhere to the left", so on the same row to the left. It is either Freya or Gary since they are both to the left og Harold, and common neighbors of Barb and Cheryl. You have no way of knowing which one yet. This will be clarified in future puzzles.
Awesome! Thank you for playing! And well spotted, will fix!
The process of generating levels is based on constraint solving. For now I'm not going to say much more about it, since it's the most innovative and valuable part of the project.
frustrating. i eventually just clicked every single one, and keep getting the "This choice can't be made based on pure logic" message. maybe i'm just dumb...
You know Rose or Xena is criminal since there's one under Mary. Paula and Will have only one criminal neighbor in common, so it must be Rose or Xena. All other common neighbors must therefore be innocent.
You might be misinterpreting what "neighbor" means or what "to the left" means. There is always at least one choice that can be made logically. If the logical choice is, say, that Jess is innocent, and you say Jess is a criminal, the game won't let you do that choice. Maybe that's what happened to you?
I'm not sure how tongue in cheek this was, but I assume it's serious. Either way, it's a fun and smart read.
The article spots well the dark side of the moomins, but in my opinion goes too deep into it. My disagreements boil down to this: "One of the oddest aspects of the Moomin phenomenon is how these complex tales of apocalypse, breakdown and disfunction have been consistently misread as cutesy celebrations of domestic life." Yes, all these things exist, but the point to me has always been that they are cutesy despite that! The stories paint a very typical family dynamic (at least of the time, at least in a Finnish swedish speaking family like Tove's), throws it into weirdest situations, and they all survive together thanks to, and despite, their dysfunctions. And Moominmamma is the most wholesome character ever, period.
I've been listening to Moomin audiobooks and reading some of the books to my wife in recent years, and I started to spot some of the more adult/darker subtext in it (I'm still processing the one where the Moominpappa makes the entire family move to a lighthouse, and Moominmamma is desperately trying to cope with growing depression). Still, I have an answer for the author's conundrum, that's accurate for a significant fraction of the readerbase:
> "One of the oddest aspects of the Moomin phenomenon is how these complex tales of apocalypse, breakdown and disfunction have been consistently misread as cutesy celebrations of domestic life."
It's actually really simple. Here in Poland, myself and my entire generation grew up watching the children cartoon adaptation of the Moomins. It was cute, it was happy, it had nice art and music, it was suitable for small children but engaging even to older ones, and it was aired when all kids would be watching[0]. This was our generation's intro to the Moomins, and it colored how we read the books.
I imagine the case is similar all across Europe. A whole generation primed to read these stories as positive and light-hearted, because of a TV adaptation.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieczorynka - public TV (TVP1), every day at 19:00, just before the evening news slot. In times I grew up, watching this was pretty much a national tradition for any family with children.
Light hearted? Suitable for small children? Are you kidding me.
I'm in my mid-30's and still remember nightmares those stupid series gave me when I was in kindergarten. It was X-Files-tier scary ("The X Files" being other show aired by polish TV around same time), masquarading behind cute animations. How can anyone in their right mind call the episode where the Moomintroll swaps bodies with Stinky lighthearted and positive? What about the collection of monsters like Groke or Hattifnats? On some occasion I remember my parents would call me to get out from my room to watch the "wieczorynka" and I would pretend I can't hear and come out only as I hear the outro song starting, just to avoid whatever insane plot the Moomins would bring on me that time. I hate Moomins so much and wish could erase it from existence. Calling it "cute and happy" is like saying candybar with razorblade inside is delicious; technically true but not exactly an accurate description.
What you describe is the very reason I let my children watch moomins. Not everything needs to be bland and boring like today’s children’s shows. World is not like that.
Over here im Finland me and every other 90’s kids watched these shows, and mostly turned our fine. There’s so much nostalgia around it all.
I've not seen other Moomin TV-series than the one made in Japan, so I can't comment on the others. The Japanese-made TV-series was probably watched by almost all children of a certain age group in Finland. Of course not all children liked the series or some episodes etc. but I'd say the vast majority did.
And yes, empirically, there were several "scary" things which freaked out the smaller children but were just amusing for an older child. The scary parts usually had a logical explanation or a backstory which made sense (or reflection with an adult made it make sense).
For example (I hope I remember all the details right):
The angry Ant Lion preying in a sandpit: eventually the Moomins manage to shrink it to peanut-size with the Wizard's hat, and it's not so scary anymore. It's still an Ant Lion, but very small, and the voice is high-pitched. Why isn't it scary anymore?
The Groke is scary as it stares while making gnarling sounds and all other characters are afraid of it, but The Groke doesn't want to harm anyone. In some episode a character explains that The Groke is actually very lonely. So it follows people as it wants to hang around them, but expresses itself in a scary way and since The Groke unvillingly freezes things where it goes, others avoid it.
The Wizard was dressed in dark clothes, looked scary and rode on a flying panther. But while The Wizard had a stern face and voice, he did not want harm to anyone and helped Moomins too.
Stinky may have a scary appearance, but also he is is not evil as such, just smells bad and does mischief like steals stuff. Which is why the characters are not so fond of him.
The Hattifatteners are like mushrooms, they grow from seeds, and move about, trying to reach the horizon in groups. They are drawn to thunder and electricity and they can zap someone with electricity if one touches the charged-up Hattifatteners. I always interpreted them like a force of nature, they're not looking to harm anyone, and are no more evil than wind that falls a tree is evil.
i wonder what you'd think about Brothers Grimm's tales :) And in general children folk tales in many countries do contain strong violence, cruelty, torture, etc. if you'd focus on those details.
I read them when I was older, no strong opinion either way. I'm glad all screen adaptions I saw as child weren't literal. I vaguely remember my parents reading me a few of them and I think they adjusted level of terror to what I could stomach at the time.
A lot of those stories try to teach children that going alone into the woods is a very bad idea. You have to read them in the historic context; don’t think they’re particularly suitable for modern children.
well, we may adapt them to what happens to the Red Hood when she crosses the road incorrectly and at the wrong place - not much different than meeting a hungry wolf. We may even add a video or two to spike the imagination and burn the lesson into the memory.
Some of the Grimms tales are incredibly gruesome, but it may be a misunderstanding to consider them childrens folk tales. Grimm collected stories told among adults.
In the 19th century it became a trend to publish fairy tales aimed towards children. But these were often sanitized versions of the stories told by adults.
Many episodes had darker undertones as well, especially those with the Groke[1] or hattifatteners. Tvtropes has a list[2].
> The Groke was so horrifying in fact, that in Poland it caused a nation-wide fear in almost all children, some of which were even left traumatised for years, leading to some parents forbidding their children from watching Moomins, and some using the Groke as a Bogeyman to scare their children into good behavior. Any 90s or 2000s Polish kid will know how it felt.
This is extremely exaggerated. The Groke is more of a meme here than some sort of night terror. Sure it had an impact and was memorable but there was no wave of traumatized kids spawned by it.
Maybe you watched a different cartoon, were not in that age group - or forgot?
There are many more accounts of that:
> The Groke has been widely considered one of the creepiest characters in fiction by many people and even by a study. In late 90's and early 2000's, when the 90's anime series - which is considered by many to have the scariest portrayal of the Groke in it - premiered in Poland, the Groke - known in Poland as Buka - caused a panic amongst Polish children. The Groke had different sounds - deep, eerie cold howls and moans preformed by voice actor Andrzej Bogusz. This, mixed with the darker colouring of the episodes (a trait shared with Finnish episodes and some other airings) and the fact that the Moomins were mostly played at night, in the Wieczorynka programming block caused the Groke to be widely considered one of the scariest childhood characters in Poland, both by 90's and early 2000's kids.
> Many children were horrified by her, were scared to go to sleep because of her, having dreams of her chasing them or turning into the Groke (some examples of such dreams could be found on the myslalemże.pl portal before it got shut down around early 2010's). The defunct portal Grono.net even had an Anti-Groke forum called ANTY-BUKA, where people would share their childhood stories about the Groke.
> [google translate] How is it possible that a dark, buzzing figure can scare small children? Hey, I can't. As a child I was very afraid of it. Now I don't know why. When I talk to my peers (15 years old) they say they were afraid too. Why?
The filmweb discussion comment pointedly notes the author is not afraid of it now, and doesn't get why it was scary then. Several other comments also point out she looked lonely and less scary than the hattifnattar. Hardly the all-traumatizing experience.
I love the books, I have read them all to my kids, and I agree that I think the article takes its thesis too far.
The books are strange tales. They have dark undertones. And sometimes the adults take actions that only someone with life experience would really understand (e.g. Moominpappa wanting to suddenly upend everything in the families life and move to an isolated island). But, my kids mostly pick up on the adventure and the friendships.
I feel that the Moomins are like most media that is enjoyable by both children and parents in this way (e.g. Bluey, Pixar films, etc.).
Another way to view it is a series that accompanies a child to young adult years. (It took me a few years to get through the series inbetween other books. I assume many bedtime reads for the first few, and independent reading for later ones). What starts as fantastical and whimsical, indeed becomes more somber and concerning interpersonal dynamics, especially those within Moomin family and those around them. "Moominpapa at Sea" is probably most relatable to adult readers. The underlying message of family unity, finding ways to cope with certain events, parenting styles, need to break routines (picnics), unrequited crushes.
Moominland Midwinter is interesting character study too, with sporty "artistic" coded Hemulen proving too much for most of the cast to handle, the forgetful grandpa. Perhaps the message was it is okay to not be friends with everyone as it is a bother.
Compare it to "Finn Family Moomintroll" which is just a constantly stacking ridiculous lighthearted escapade with a few more mature jokes mixed in.
I started reading the novel stories when the kids were 3yo and 6yo. Both love them. My 3yo for the drawings mostly.
There are a number of excellent picture book adaptations of stories that have been published too. But, we read those afterwards and obviously they aren’t as enjoyable to me.
Because this is HN: My tradition is to use my Inkpalm 5 and read them with the lights out at bedtime- we pass the reader around to look at pictures.
Not the previous poster, but based on my own experience as a kid and also my kids I'd say age 5 is perfectly good age to introduce the books.
As an adult you pick up on some the more serious themes but as a kid you just enjoy the story and the bit of danger and overcoming and the overall wholesomeness.
Mine started 5/6, but the more recent books are made for kids. The
earlier newspaper cartoons are not. Same with TV, the later
Japanese/Dutch produced TV series is lovely. The earlier TV series
(there are several) are dark as the cupboard under the stairs and the
Groke goes postal killing everything in one.
While all the books have both humour and darkness, the early books are more whimsical and playful while the later books are more about loneliness, alienation, and loss.
Spot on. I think the author did not think through their argument:
""One of the oddest aspects of the Moomin phenomenon is how these complex tales of apocalypse, breakdown and disfunction have been consistently misread as cutesy celebrations of domestic life.""
But that's exactly what makes domestic life worth celebrating - at best it sustains you through disaster and hardship. What better way to celebrate it than to show it's strength?
Is it really a celebration of family life when Moominpappa uproots the whole family because of his midlife crisis and sends Moominmamma into depression?
I would say yes. In my standards that still accounts for interesting-life-choices-but-safe-and-sane. But I grew up in an alcoholic family so realize my standards are likely slightly low-bar for what accounts for 'admirable'.
They come through it wiser and more in touch with themselves.
A family is a place where you should be able to also be something else than the ideal version of yourself that you’d like to show the rest of the world, something less perfect and more work-in-progress. Moomins lean heavily on showing how that actually makes their family stronger.
> They come through it wiser and more in touch with themselves.
Are you sure? Or is this just projecting the ideals we think childrens books are supposed to have? How is Moominmamma changed after the ordeal on the lonely island? - we don’t know, because the next book is about missing her and about how her absence affects the characters left behind.
The darker threads in the Moomin books are not hidden. It is all in plain view.
Like the squirrel which is too absent minded to seek shelter when the hard frost hits. Guess what - it freezes to death. They give it a nice burial though.
Here's one in Clojure using its core.logic library. I'd say it's pretty neat. You can do something similar in something like Prolog, but a Java implementation would look very different.
You mention the point is to make it portable. Does the project have any other goals, like, what kind of games could be made with it, how fast does it need to be? Do you have any performance metrics to share?
Performance boosts and metrics I do intend to look into, in particular acceleration structures (probably a BVH?) for the ray tracer and more optimized methods (e.g. a better scanline triangle fill and some clipping algos) for the rasterizer.
As for portability, not sure yet, this is meant to more or less be a rendering/animation engine that is lightweight, probably portable to embedded processors like ESP32s?
I can relate to many points. I made a lisp (a scheme) as a scripting language for my game dev purposes, and went through many of the same phases. I really wanted continuations in my scripts (super useful for sequencing things over time across multiple frames, which is mostly what games do). So I had to get comfortable with cps style. But oh, it blows up the stack. But what if I had my own stack?
What I have currently is very close to the stack interpreter described in the fantastic paper Three Implementation Models for Scheme, while initially it was built iteratively based on Lisp in Small Pieces. Though I don't use "real" continuations, just an "await", "race" etc. which is just syntactic sugar that is easy to implement once there is a cps conversion in place. There are some important optimizations that can't be done (or are really hard to prove) if there are real continuations. For example, who knows if a closure can be magically re-entered if the language basically supports goto? Better not put it on the stack, even if it seems like it won't escape the scope.
I remember this! I ported one of my games and indeed got a blackberry tablet. Then I ported another one and gave it to my friend to submit, now he also had one... It was huge for a poor student!
Something that could be interesting is processing all videos in some subgenre, like say "game development", rank them by popularity, summarize them, and then analyze for patterns. This would be valuable information for anyone wanting to make a video with higher chances of being shown to people.
That was actually my initial thought for what I would test with a tool like this. How much does quality matter?
Quality of course has many definitions, but in the light of this tool, the measurable quality could be "how much novel information does this video have?" I'd hope a trend that pops out is that content with more information around a focused topic would perform better. But as it is, I only have my personal preferences and my suggestions list (based on my personal preferences) to go by.
I'm not a content creator myself, but if I was, I might find this kind of analysis interesting enough to pay for.
I'm making a physical product with my wife: an illustrated narrative puzzle magazine. It's similar to escape games, but it's more story driven and easy to do in short sessions and at your own pace.
It started with my wife making the first magazine pretty much by herself. Since then we've made more magazines together and the business is slowly growing.
We're selling them mainly on our custom lightweight online store. It's done with minimal JS and Node as backend, Stripe as payment provider. We have a Meta pixel to help us track our advertising conversion, but we've disabled cookies, they just felt somehow dirty... It's nice to have power over these things when running your own business. As a next step for the website I'm thinking of including a templating language in the workflow, now I'm still doing edits with search and replace, sometimes missing things... but I do enjoy the simplicity.
The actual business has two main challenges:
First is discoverability. It's a pretty unique product, an adventure escape game in a magazine. It doesn't sell well in physical game shops since it doesn't look like a game. We sell well in conventions where we get to explain what the product is, but we also want some weekends for ourselves! Meta ads for our online shop are working surprisingly well though.
The second and bigger challenge is shipping. Our flat is filled with boxes, and the time I spend sorting magazines, enveloping them, printing address labels, carrying them to the post office... it's really not worth my hourly rate as an engineer (Nor my wife's, but I do it since my schedule is more flexible, and I've automated some parts of the process with a string of incredibly user hostile shell scripts). And the shipping costs are downputting to many, we're quite cornered here in Finland. We are slowly gaining some distribution partners in Europe, but we should also be looking into better shipping options, like perhaps some kind of shipping warehouse exist? Our volume is slowly getting big enough so that it might be feasible. I've only done some cursory googling on this but don't exactly know what I'm even looking for, and there's only so many hours in a day.
A lot of work, small margins (ads+printing+misc takes a big slice), but around $500 profit per month. Feels absolutely fantastic to have an actual concrete business we own!
Just bought a set for my kids who are currently obsessed with escape games and puzzles in general. Looks like a huge win for long car rides/airplane trips!
Those were called "choose your own adventure" books.
On an early version of my personal website, I created one of these, but as the reader, you could reach an unwritten section. Your reward was that you got to write that page of the book, and the choices (or ending) that the character received.
I seeded a few pages to set a story, and then let the readers go wild. It was pretty fun.
Thank you!
That's the sort of game that springs to mind for many when we explain the concept, and they were definitely an inspiration for us. This however is a more linear adventure, focused around solving enigmas. No choices and no way to lose. Once you know the answer to the puzzle, like "whose fingerprints are on the gun", you turn the next page and the story continues.
I've since noticed this many times. Optimizing is like meditation to me. It's very mechanical (measure), with a sprinkle of creative work (once you know what is slow, it's quite obvious how to make it faster, but just challenging enough to be engaging), and it has a very nice tight feedback loop: Something is slow. I make a change. Now it's fast. Next.
Optimizing is my happy place.
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