do you think AI won’t be able to replace any other workers if it can replace programmers?
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Yes, it will help you understand coding in ways you’ve never considered before. It also has an element of understanding the deep aspects of the creative process that will change the way you approach coding in a beneficial way. I can’t really explain it, hence why I compare it to a Revelation title.
I’ll give an example that happened to me, which again is hard to explain. Once I understood how the simulated time in Unity worked and how that affects the way the game is rendered (it does so in “ticks” —intervals that you can modify), it dawned on me that this seems to be a lower, simpler reflection (game world) of a higher reality (ours). And as the creator of that world, I’m not subjected to the laws of time and space of that lower world. If we raise that concept by an order of magnitude, it could indicate that this reality — if created, would operate similarly as this universe is proven to be fractal. Then I began to wonder, how far does this go, then? Nested realities within realities and the such.
I don’t know why this result had such a crazy effect, but suddenly my ability to understand code skyrocketed and not just understand it, but actually utilize it as if I was speaking my native tongue. I realized that I’m no longer creating for money (though of course, I still want to generate an income), but for the act of creation as alchemy. By creating worlds and realities, I’m delving into myself and externalizing that for the sake of enhancing someone else’s experience.
Probably doesn’t make any sense, but it was a profound shift for me and changed me. And that was on the prototype.
For an individual like you, I would imagine that this title would help you understand why you were drawn to coding in the first place and what part of you needed expression.
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In that case I’ll commit to a few months running this to see how it expresses in me, alongside KBC.
Thank you.
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One thing I’ve been exploring while using this is the benefits and problems of test driven development, or TDD as it’s known. Agile, and especially DSDM, has a very heavy emphasis on TDD, but also on “enough testing”. As I began considering TDD in Rust, there are very clear documented ways on how to do this by decorating your unit testing functions with compiler directives, so that the testing code is not compiled into the final build. And this is very useful for the libraries and aspects of your code that you can unit test.
However, there is also QA testing and integration testing. Something I found when developing the first version of VAERity in Python is that, were I to rely on a solely TDD approach to testing, it would quickly become a nightmare. I found myself doing a lot more QA testing and catching bugs in the QA testing or integration testing phases than I did in unit testing. There are limits to TDD, and yet if you want to become a developer who works on a large development team, you’re going to inevitably come upon the need to consistently unit test your code and use this strange paradigm of writing your tests before you write the code.
When you’re developing a program that is fully event driven, such as a GUI based program, or a VR game for example, TDD creates its own problems. How do you unit test some code that dynamically generates a web form or a 3-D model or a mesh? Some might argue you know what the properties of a correct object will look, and your asserts can test that. Okay, but as the complexity of the objects grow, you spend more time writing your unit test than you do writing your actual code. And how can you test all the possible inputs to a callback that a third party library might throw your way? What is the definition of enough testing?
Then the problems get worse when you have to have confidence that your code will work on different architectures or hardware which you might not have access to. To some extent, IDE’s like Android Studio and methods of writing test harnesses that allow for those aspects to be mocked on your own hardware make this easier.
While pondering all this, I came across this video.
And the accompanying article on mocks.
https://medium.com/perry-street-software-engineering/unit-testing-experts-on-mocks-d5accda2d537
Here were some of the greatest advocates of TDD and testing integrated throughout the development process, asking the question is TDD dead? And discussing, in a very roundabout way, the exact same concerns I had. And Kent’s admission of how his psychological makeup influenced the development of this paradigm. Ultimately, TDD was developed in order for someone who was not a confident programmer (someone with a lot of anxiety, as he pointed out) to have confidence in what he was writing.
So that was interesting. And it was a good confirmation that, despite the benefits of TDD and how much it is hyped, and how important it is to understand that paradigm, it should not be made so important or used in the wrong ways as to ruin your code-base, or to hamper your development process.
I’ve always relied the most on QA testing and on-the-fly integration testing the most rather than formal integrated TDD tests, so it was good having IG: UPX help me manifest the right material to validate the benefits of my own paradigm and tease out where TDD can be used and where it can’t.
EDIT: Also, there’s this that I found on Meta’s website which is actually helpful for a change:
https://developer.oculus.com/resources/automation-performance-testing/
(although some of their suggestions aren’t my bag baby)
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This was also very insightful about how a big gaming company tests their own products and how complex it can get. And I laughed my a$$ off at the Twitch reaction right at the end. Never mind the fact that it’s four years old. I still think there’s still a lot of relevant stuff here.
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Posting this here too
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I’ve had related thoughts about natural language processing and word context in language. When you’re reducing a word or set of words within a corpus to a vector, it has its own unique position within the dynamic system known as language. As the size of your corpus grows, if words continued to have the same context, you should start to see the vectors converge towards a fixed value as more data becomes available, particularly if you have a large enough LSTM buffer size. The vocabulary should approximate a multidimensional fractal with clusterings of words in well defined relationships to one another, all interconnected in the multidimensional space.
But what about hermetic drift and the weaponisation of language? How do things like this affect the ability of a machine to grasp the structure of language? When the meaning of words change, the structure of that language fractal changes, maybe only slightly at first but over time as the changed meanings affect the word vectors more and more, will it cause difficulty for a machine to come to accurate conclusions? The implications of changing word meanings or even just new euphemisms or idioms and its impact on a machine trying to grasp language is a fascinating thing to consider.
Even humans have a problem with context when translating things, one of the interesting subtle examples I found recently was Galatians 1:16, in which some translations use “in me”, others “to me”, which in English creates no end of confusion and can only be resolved in a wider context. How much more trouble would machines have grasping this fractal structure against the background of language changing over time?
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This is such a cool title would defnitely have used This if i was still into coding
Here’s something for all you AI aficionados looking to write the next big LLM using Index Gate to consider very, very carefully 
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The crazy things we do on IG: UPX and EB.
Creating and texture painting from scratch a realistic mushroom with 4K texture on a laptop with 8GB RAM and no GPU (in Blender) 
EB’s stubbornness won out in the end over my computer’s protests.
(For context: I re-installed Blender 3 days ago after over 10 years of disuse and little success prior, and was doing other stuff during those three days that took much of my time, so the skill pickup is pretty incredible. Plus I’m battling my own not-so-hot fine motor skills)
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Probably now I’m having a recon, hence the interest that made me to learn programming all the time has gone for some time. But, nevertheless, a fire happens when I actually learn programming. It might be coding, reading according literature or grasping information from any other source.
By the way, now I prefer learn theory rather than actually coding. I even bought one book about algorithms and another one for a language I’m using and using the language for making apps.
Yet, I’m very satisfied with the product. Still believe it’s a game(life)changer for me.
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thank you, sir.
yeah, Swift is my primary language.
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I created a public facing thread to document my own journey with IG: UPX so as to not clog up this one: The Road to Alexandria (IG: UPX)
I’ll be not holding back on the technical jargon over there because the objective is to provide a reference for other programmers that might be trying to follow the same path I have, without losing my potential market edge by blabbing about the USPs of the programs I’ll be developing. So it’ll focus on the existing tech and resources available and the relevance to VR development.
Just wanted to mention, I continue to be pretty impressed by how fast I’ve been learning while applying myself to this process. Granted, I was already pretty good with learning new tech, but this has definitely magnified it by a big degree. I can more easily filter out the BS of content creators that waffle on and quickly identify the good ones who focus on just the facts that I need to know. And the manifestation of resources has done well to adapt to my pretty non standard way of searching for resources.
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May the Swift be with you
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Running three minute loops of Genesis and Index Gate for this cycle. Not adding anything or switching.
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I know I have commented it before but I will say it again. Stick with it for a long term.
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Highly recommend this book.
Some of this is general life stuff that goes beyond just programming/developer work.
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This would be perfect to learn a skill, that could make me independent in a relative short period.
Is there any legit way to stack 4 ZPs without rotating them and still getting decent results?
Like playing each for 5 mins?
I have to get self-sufficient now.
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The philosophy is to always encourage experimenting so if you think you can handle 4 titles then go for it
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