/*
It's a pretty long rant. Hope you didn't get bored :P
*/
So I have this friend of mine who has learnt Python at good level (that's what he says) and is with me in all classes in college. I have worked with C, C++, C# and Java only and hated Python when it was taught (wk44).
So the following happened in the last 2 weeks:
Once he wrote a Python function in terminal just returning a hard coded string (lame right) and will show me how cool is it and that it is sooo much easier.
Whenever we do a mini project together he will force that we use Python. Even in Image processing when everyone is ready to work on Matlab, he insists that Python would be a better option.
We asked that this XYZ is very easy to implement on Matlab.
We then had to listen about the large and great community of Python and that it has Libraries for everything and that it is the greatest programming language ever.
One day he saw my C# project for DFA and NFA simulation which was the greatest project I have "completed" myself, and went like "Hmph, if I was you, I would use python and make a more "professional" code" (then went on arguing as always)
This happened today in Networking lab-
(Sockets was taught and we are expected to learn its programming aspects)
All students: Open linuxhowtos.org and start reading on socket programming
He : Opens some websites and downloads books on Networking with Python or someting
Now while I am reading the documentation of sockets and bind, he opens spider IDE, copy-paste the code in the book and start bugging ME that he is getting all these errors like literally showing me those errors and whining about all those problems.
Me: We are supposed to learn this in C. Here take a look at this link.
HE: No I'll use Python cuz it is better than your C. It has libraries for everything and is much easier.
Me: Alright whatever I am fed up, do whatever you want

Advanced Traffic Simulation

Me, doing ui design: 'hm, i feel like jumping into machine learning right now'

Me, writing a ml chatbot: 'but what if i extend flutter with my old custom android components'

Me, porting java components to dart: 'hold on, p5js has vectors, i could make a physical simulation'

Me to me: 'why are you like this'

I'm getting increasingly convinced the world is a simulation and its curators have simply stopped caring.

If world is a simulation, then where bugs are?

Prof: So yeah this is going to be difficult. We're going to make the scalable math library. Then we have to make a functional finite elements library using that. Then make a multiphysics engine using that library. This could easily take your entire PhD. Are you prepared for that?

Me: May I show you something?

Prof: Sure, sure.

Me, showing him: We can use moose to code in the multiphysics. It's built atop libmesh for the finite elements. Which can be built with a petsc backend. Which we can run on GPUs and CPUs, up to 200k cores. All of this has been done for us. This project will, at worst, take a couple months.

Prof: ...

Guys, libraries. Fucking. Libraries. Holy fucking shit.

Just wrote a brute-force attack simulation in c. Going to run it on actual hardware, with an 8-character limit, including alphabet (Upper and lower case), 0-9 and a few special characters and see if it gets done tonight ;)

I'll see you all in about 360 trillion operations.

If we're living in simulation, then God should start releasing some updates, because world has too many bugs

God I'm fucking done for today.

We just finished a "Climate-conference-simulation" in school.

Basically ~90 students split into 6 groups representing a delegation of a country or a group of countries.

EU,
USA,
India,
China,
Other developing countries,
Other industrial countries

The target of our efforts was the reduction of global warming from ~4 C° by 2100 to around 2 C°.

My group (USA) elected me to speak and represent (I did kind of mimic the American stereotype of being egoistic and self centered, no offence intended)

As all the other nations and groups were planning great schemes, my group simply continued to put, well, basically rocks in their path by not playing along cause aforementioned stereotype.

It's the working phase after the second presentation of results, I'm sitting there with parts of the Chinese and EU delegation and suddenly two of my friends, in different groups, put my hood over my head, drag/carry me out of the assembly hall, toss me out and leave me there.

Was funny and all, but damn, it's fucking exhausting to stand in front of around 100 people (including teachers and stuff) and completely not play along with the other group's opinions and plans.

But hey, I've been congratulated a lot of times cause I've perfectly stayed in my role.

Yes it was weird

If we lived in a simulation, I wanted you to be the programmer.

You guys ever thought about the concept that our universe might be a simulation written by some alien kid for a school project and got a C- for it?

Yeah...perhaps I should go to sleep

When your specs simply won't run new code no matter what you do, non-conditioned (and unmodified) calls don't get called, and 2+2 somehow equals Q, you know it's time to give up and restart the simulation by going to bed.

Except it's early afternoon and the project deadline is tonight. 😔

Back to debugging reality.

If we are living in a simulation then I am pretty sure that the quantum mechanics part was written in javascript.

Highschool culture...

Here in Italy we run a few exam simulation in order to prepare for finals in June.
One of the two categories of simulations, one of which revolves around the core subjects of our technical course which in my case is CompSci and Networking.

"Sounds good!" one would say.
And I'd agree, if only our CompSci professor graded solutions in a sensate manner.
If one does not exactly copy and paste the solutions we repated in class 100 times (which, by the way, are all EXACTLY the same solution but with different data in diagrams and other sections), the grade WILL be insufficient: no but's or why's.

This is only one of the prime examples of what school revolves around. Sometimes it just feels like we are trained to be sheeps in a world of wolves. Rinse and repeat over and over. No technical competency is (almost) ever valued or allowed to be expressed and is often looked down upon by old school professors who literally care about everything but their subject, students and school in general.

I'm glad this is almost over, and that greener pastures are ahead :)

How many of you think that we might be living in a computer simulation? 🙄😐😓

In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.

One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.

This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.

Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.

I'm taking a unit at my university called 'simulation and modeling'. Today was the first class and the professor was talking about random number generators.

Professor: Every language has a function to generate...Every good(emphasis on good) language has a function to generate a random number... Oh well even php does...

😂😂😂😂I'm already in love with the unit...

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

What if we're living in a simulation and we're the ones stealing jobs

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

A simulation sandbox game engine where you literally have to use tools and power tools to cut through raw materials to build things

The new iPhone simulator looks amazing :o

Client:we want dynamic mapping of network and packet flow visualization like;packet tracer simulation
Us: is 2D visualization enough.
Client:yeah
*fast forward after first demo*
Client: now make it 3D with pipes representing cable.and packets flowing through them like water.
Me: fucccccck

If we are living in a simulation, can they not afford threaded thoughts?

Tried to simulate spreading of viruses in quarantined vs non-quarantined environment.

Non-quarantined people are not understanding the concept of boundaries.

bro just learn C bro I promise it's all smooth sailing bro haha lol just take up HTML with CSS bro its a piece of cake bro what bro lol just start coding up differential equations with numpy library haha its so simple bro just start with Ruby bro it will take only couple days bro what lol bro take this aeronautical course on how to code an airplane simulation bro its so simple bro just start algorithms on cryptography bro its so easy i cant bro just start writing drivers for printers bro haha lol just start writing a bootloader for a new Linux distro bro lol haha easy bro just make a billion dollar company bro haha its so simple.
keep going bro haha invent your own JS framework over a billion existing ones haha bro typescript is so easy bro lol what u say take up redis bro go from the first command bro learn mongodb and mysql together bro its so simple.

but bro don't try to master JS bro .. u will regret it forever bro.

Damn simulation.

Some juniors grabbed keyboard and reprogrammed main species to stay at home and fear of death while I was busy working with other features.

Moreover someone made additional changes from infected computer and guess what....

Unfortunately it’s real time system with increasing entropy and we can’t revert changes so fixing damn shit would take from one to two decades.

We don’t have backups cause last time we used them we also killed dinosaurs.

It would be just easier to erase everything and start from beginning cause our statistics charts are fucked up - again but motherfucker boss don’t want to do it.
He’d rather teleport again to adjust the world. Damn fucker thinks he’s god but in fact he’s just prick with rich parents.

I’ve decided to piss him off by adjusting planet thermostat so we can start over.
2 years more and changes would be irreversible.

Damn job.

That fucking amazing feeling when something actually works in real life and not just in a simulation on a computer!

There's the possibility that all of you just live inside my head, but it is also considerable that I exist in one of your mind.

Everyone and their dog is making a game, so why can't I?
1. open world (check)

2. taking inspiration from metro and fallout (check)

3. on a map roughly the size of the u.s. (check)

So I thought what I'd do is pretend to be one of those deaf mutes. While also pretending to be a programmer. Sometimes you make believe
so hard that it comes true apparently.

For the main map I thought I'd automate laying down the base map before hand tweaking it. It's been a bit of a slog. Roughly 1 pixel per mile. (okay, 1973 by 1067). The u.s. is 3.1 million miles, this would work out to 2.1 million miles instead. Eh.

Wrote the script to filter out all the ocean pixels, based on the elevation map, and output the difference. Still had to edit around the shoreline but it sped things up a lot. Just attached the elevation map, because the actual one is an ugly cluster of death magenta to represent the ocean.

Consequence of filtering is, the shoreline is messy and not entirely representative of the u.s.

The preprocessing step also added a lot of in-land 'lakes' that don't exist in some areas, like death valley. Already expected that.

But the plus side is I now have map layers for both elevation and ecology biomes. Aligning them close enough so that the heightmap wasn't displaced, and didn't cut off the shoreline in the ecology layer (at export), was a royal pain, and as super finicky. But thankfully thats done.

Next step is to go through the ecology map, copy each key color, and write down the biome id, courtesy of the 2017 ecoregions project.

From there, I write down the primary landscape features (water, plants, trees, terrain roughness, etc), anything easy to convey.
Main thing I'm interested in is tree types, because those, as tiles, convey a lot more information about the hex terrain than anything else.

Once the biomes are marked, and the tree types are written, the next step is to assign a tile to each tree type, and each density level of mountains (flat, hills, mountains, snowcapped peaks, etc).
The reference ids, colors, and numbers on the map will simplify the process.

After that, I'll write an exporter with python, and dump to csv or another format.

Next steps are laying out the instances in the level editor, that'll act as the tiles in question.
Theres a few naive approaches:

Spawn all the relevant instances at startup, and load the corresponding tiles.

Or setup chunks of instances, enough to cover the camera, and a buffer surrounding the camera. As the camera moves, reconfigure the instances to match the streamed in tile data.

Instances here make sense, because if theres any simulation going on (and I'd like there to be), they can detect in event code, when they are in the invisible buffer around the camera but not yet visible, and be activated by the camera, or deactive themselves after leaving the camera and buffer's area.

The alternative is to let a global controller stream the data in, as a series of tile IDs, corresponding to the various tile sprites, and code global interaction like tile picking into a single event, which seems unwieldy and not at all manageable. I can see it turning into a giant switch case already.

So instances it is.

Actually, if I do 16^2 pixel chunks, it only works out to 124x68 chunks in all. A few thousand, mostly inactive chunks is pretty trivial, and simplifies spawning and serializing/deserializing.

All of this doesn't account for
* putting lakes back in that aren't present

* lots of islands and parts of shores that would typically have bays and parts that jut out, need reworked.

* great lakes need refinement and corrections

* elevation key map too blocky. Need a higher resolution one while reducing color count
This can be solved by introducing some noise into the elevations, varying say, within one standard div.

* mountains will still require refinement to individual state geography. Thats for later on

* shoreline is too smooth, and needs to be less straight-line and less blocky. less corners.

* rivers need added, not just large ones but smaller ones too

* available tree assets need to be matched, as best and fully as possible, to types of trees represented in biome data, so that even if I don't have an exact match, I can still place *something* thats native or looks close enough to what you would expect in a given biome.
Ponderosa pines vs white pines for example.

This also doesn't account for 1. major and minor roads, 2. artificial and natural attractions, 3. other major features people in any given state are familiar with. 4. named places, 5. infrastructure, 6. cities and buildings and towns.

Also I'm pretty sure I cut off part of florida.
Woops, sorry everglades.

Guess I'll just make it a death-zone from nuclear fallout.

Take that gators!

It grinds my gears to no end as to how insanely BAD most Electrical engineering software is. Lets start with Tina. A circuit simulator. A few versions ago it was rather good but now it feel like its built upon more legacy crap than fucking Windows! This causes it to have memory access violations and crashes even when you look at it from an odd angle.
On topic of circuit simulation. LT-Spice! It has less errors than Tina but is impossible to use without being lobotomized first. Who the FUCK decided it was a good idea to reinvent keyboard shortcuts by movin all of them to the F-row at the top of the keyboard. Also there is no option to delete a component. YOU NEED TO USE CUT IN ORDER TO REMOVE IT!
And at last Altium Designer for Layouting and Schematics. Whose license costs 9 grand. No one outside of some companies will buy this because of the price. Altium realized this and made two watered down versions of it. Which dont really get updates anymore. (last one was in 2018) So they essentially made a cash grab from people who cant afford their actual product. There also exist other (and a lot cheaper) products than what Altium offers. The problem is that they dont work well with interoperability. Schematics drawn in one program will look distorted in another or not import at all. And since Altium is the industry standard you got yourself this nice steaming soup of impossible collaboration. Its kinda like Adobe being absolute shit at progressing their software just because they got no competition. Or rather they do but the industry wont switch cause adobe is so engraved into it.

Simulation doesn't provide enough framerate?

Easy. Change gravity, weights, and steps in the simulation.
Welcome to your real world.

... I wonder if that's what God did. 🤔

General purpose logic gate simulation

I was giving a demo for a university project. It was a simulation of a bunch of healthcare robots in a 3D world.

When the demo started, two of the robots attempted to path through the front door at the same time and promptly got stuck on each other. We were allowed to manually unstick them, so we did so.

Once they were going again, they decided to not to turn down the hallway like they were supposed to. Instead, they drove through one of the walls of the house and continued until they disappeared of the screen.

We never saw them again.

So we had a guy who spend decade in automotive, flight simulation and stuff. C mostly. Lasted only a month of his probation period. Didn't seem to know about double pointers. Maybe coding standards in automotive even discourage them...

But made me wonder how to judge skills. - I tend do be on the cautious side, as I hadn't really understood inheritance and many basic things when I started. But luckily my first boss believed in me, saw me gnawing through (Well about my 'initiation' that'd be others stories to tell). Well, guy was hired as a 'senior', so they expected bit more. Dunno, still feel a bit strange about it, even if I ranted about his chattering before, coz he also had his heart in the right spot, but maybe it's for the best anyway...

But guess who's taking his place in our team! Drumroll.. Yes, Mr gitmaster is.

!rant
How to earn a lot of money as a programmer?

So this question might sound a little naive and too simple, but earning a lot of money is what we all want after all right? Collecting experiences from people in the business should be a good idea.

So this is the position I am in:
I am a German student in my 13th year of school (which means I will graduate this summer) and I am very interested in information technology. I know C++ pretty well by now and I have built a rendering engine for a game I want to make using openGL already, which I am very proud of.
I would love to turn this passion into my profession and thats why I plan to attend a dual course of computer science next year (dual means that I will be employed at a company (or similar) in parallel to the studying course).

But what direction should I be going in if I want to make big money later on? I am ready to spend a lot of time and work on this life project but I don't know which directions are the most promising. I hate being a tiny gear in a huge machine that just has to keep spinning to keep the machine alive, I want to be part of a real project (like most people probably) and possibly sell a product (because I think that is how you really make money).

Now I know there is no magic answer to this, but I bet many people here have made experiences they can share and this could help a lot of people directing their path in a more success oriented way.

I personally am especially interested in fields which are relatively low-level and close to memory (C++), go hand in hand with physics and 3D simulation and are somewhat creative and allow new solutions. (These are no hard lines, I just thought I should give a little direction to what I know already and what I am interested in)

But really, I am interested in any work you are likely to earn a lot of money with.

A 2d simulation of the mars rover curiosity and its commandControl station. Pure java. The two components talk to each other via apache-kafka. Rover has its own operating system (kernel) and resource management. Hooked up some sensors to NASA API.

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

How important is understanding heap vs stack memory allocation?

Who knows--I'm a python developer after all.

Also I completed by first alife simulation. Took me from 7 pm yesterday to 10.30am this morning.

Feels good. I'm at the part of familiarity with the language that my thoughts are pretty much directly parsed and translated into code, without any effort.

Alife's just for the standard math shitposting though. Was fun regardless.

Wrote a bunch of Python scripts that alter an lsf script for software that we use in our lab. So now we have a Python 'library' of sorts that runs the simulation files, changes variables in the files, exports data, analyzes, tabulates, and continues until done.

I've automated potentially weeks of work to happen in minutes. I know this is run of the mill here, but I am fairly proud.

If the simulation theory is correct, my life have millions of bugs

What are you doing crashing on me Windows?

All I was doing was running a flight simulation, compiling a build, and doing a regex search over 6 directories. Try to open one little document and it all goes to hell.

Surely you can handle that Windows?

Apparently not.

I have a new personal project that I hope I'll share with you guys one day. It just came to me. A fog simulation for a window manager such that it has fog behind the transparent console while you code and the fog goes in front when the terminal is locked. How about it?

We are in a simulation!!

Resolve to leave laptop at home on a long weekend vacation away to force yourself to relax and not work on anything. Spend parts of weekend thinking: "this would be the perfect spot/cafe to work on the snail simulation!"

It booted, after months of working on a god damn simulation with various BIOSs revisions and fixes, with millions of kernel builds and a million of fixes of recipes. It booted from a first try. I almost fainted :D

Disclaimer - Day in the life of a whitehat student.

Whitehat Whitehat Whitehat

What is this????
When I attended my first white hat jr online free trial class, I got to know that the teachers does not know the difference between java and javascript. Infact they were saying blockly as javascript. I was knowing the difference between the same. There were 3 types of courses -

***Note : - This information is taken from the whitehat official website***

1.) Introduction to Coding :-

Sequence, Fundamentals Coding Blocks, Loops
(Teach us to drag and drop blocks of code.org(blockly))

2.) App Developer Certificate:-

Events / UI,Conditionals, Complex Loop, Logic Structures, Turtle Coding
(Advanced drag and drop(blockly))

3.) Advance Coding with Space Tech -

Extended UI/UX, Rich GUI app, Space Tech simulation in Space Lab / Game Lab, Professional Game Design.
(GUI - with tkinter(python), Game Design - Blockly(code.org))

These things are rubbish ......making GUI's is simplest with tkinter and the students who make games (with code.org) submit their codes to the whitehat community (because the teacher says "they will compile it to an android app, then you can publish it to playstore" --- this is for 1% students who are able to design their own games).

The thing whitehat do with code given by 1% best students:-

Export to HTML from code.org
Download HTML to APK Convertor
Setup SDK
Successfully converted to APK!
Publish it to Whitehat Jr console account
Credits of the students
Income of the exporters

Rest all students will only think to be the CEO of google one day.

My Opinion - StackOverflow, Unity for Game Development, Android Studio, Dart, Flutter and Kivy (using google colab for compiling the python code to an apk) for app development and Flask, HTML, CSS for web development.

Thought experiment time:

Imagine that this whole universe is a simulation created by a Group Of Developers (GOD).

- Who would make up this group?
- What kind of design patterns would they follow?
- What type of programming language would they use?
- What kind of bugs are there if any?
- How do they test?
- Assuming the use of quantum computing, what are the implications? Parallel simulations? All possibilities play out?
- Would the controller input be life?
- Who is AI and who are players?
- Has all time already been rendered?
- Do we respawn?
- What would the leaderboard look like?
- What kind of stats are tracked
- What are dreams, nightmares, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, birth and death?
- How is memory stored, accessed and pruned?
- What kind of neural net is used and where?

etc etc, if you can think of any other interesting fire away

For my graduate level people(aka Masters degree students or holders)

How normal would you say that: giving dense ass lectures in NN with absolutely NO practical examples and just a fuckload of theory + 1 simulation project in Pytorch in which a robot is to detect collisions is?

is it normal? i mean I knew about Pytorch from a very shallow overview, but these assholes gave that project and expected it completed in a week with a fuckload of dense ass lectures and no practical exmaples.

I know school is supposed to be hard, that is not my gripe, but in yalls experience are teachers more descriptive and fun in other institutions? do I just have shit luck with teachers? I don't feel like wasting my money. If your experience was better then let me know, cuz I want education yes, but i want it better.

Maybe I could write a simulation using an ai to control traffic lights to assasinate crude disgusting wastes of space with as many brain cells as they have toes

Class about to end, instructor announces quiz. Looks at friend, sees him opening up algo app on his phone playing all algorithms in simulation mode 😂

I dun goofed

made a neural net that runs against a simulation. Wanted to run it overnight to get some meanigful stats and insights

But yesterday afternoon I changed something in the simulation and ofc tested it without the nn ... and then forgot to put it back on
So while I expected to come in today and start plotting and analyzing the data while the runs finish, in reality I'm sitting here on a lot of useless data, not knowing what to do.

I kinda want to just start it again and go home

Wasn't a "real" interview, but a simulation, with a internship maybe if the HR is convinced. Yeah, not a real interview but with a job. whatever.

So I made my interview, and the guy was also there to tell me what's good, what's wrong and give me some tips for my CV.

But since it wasn't official, he told me with a big smile that I should cut my hair because that's not "clean".
And it was one of the big lines of his feedback.
Worse is, he asked a friend to remind me that, and since he said he will send by email the recap of the simulation, told me one more time to cut my hair.

Well, I got an internship somewhere else, they were more open-minded to hair apparently.

Seriously, that asshole pissed me off that much back then.

The day I read The Simulation Argument, by Nick Bostrom, a thought popped into my mind: "if we are made of code, maybe there are ways to hack life as you would hack some random program", I started thinking privilege escalation over the simulation, buffer overflow, picking signals as if I was eavesdropping... it was an epiphany and also fun

Saturday evening open debate thread to discuss AI.

What would you say the qualitative difference is between

1. An ML model of a full simulation of a human mind taken as a snapshot in time (supposing we could sufficiently simulate a human brain)

2. A human mind where each component (neurons, glial cells, dendrites, etc) are replaced with artificial components that exactly functionally match their organic components.

Number 1 was never strictly human.
Number 2 eventually stops being human physically.

Is number 1 a copy? Suppose the creation of number 1 required the destruction of the original (perhaps to slice up and scan in the data for simulation)? Is this functionally equivalent to number 2?

Maybe number 2 dies so slowly, with the replacement of each individual cell, that the sub networks designed to notice such a change, or feel anxiety over death, simply arent activated.

In the same fashion is a container designed to hold a specific object, the same container, if bit by bit, the container is replaced (the brain), while the contents (the mind) remain essentially unchanged?

This topic came up while debating Google's attempt to covertly advertise its new AI. Oops I mean, the engineering who 'discovered Google's ai may be sentient. Hype!'

Its sentience, however limited by its knowledge of the world through training data, may sit somewhere at the intersection of its latent space (its model data) and any particular instantiation of the model. Meaning, hypothetically, if theres even a bit of truth to this, the model "dies" after every prompt, retaining no state inbetween.

Working on a poker card simulator. Currently benchmarking the hands by giving them a rating (high card value, pair).

In the simulation there are three players. The first player who get the hand cards first seems to have advantage. Does this make sense?

Dr Lanning from I, Robot:

There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul. Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space, they will group together, rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behavior? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote... of a soul? 

One day they'll have secrets... one day they'll have dreams. 

This afternoon I had my first close encounter with a core dump, while working on my C++ simulation. It was brutal and I probably opted for the less efficient solution to avoid the problem, after hours of fighting. But hey. I'm alive and that is what matters most.

if our life is simulation, what purpose we're living in this world?

Can anyway recommend a book (or other quality resource) on tensor programming that isn’t focused on all this ML crap?

I’d like to use GPUs for some simulation modelling, so interested in vector and matrix manipulation.

If we really are living in a simulation, it's
fucked up that I'm made out of code
but can't write 3 lines of it without
googling the syntax.

At school during my first Java project we had to make a simulation of a parking garage and what effects price changes would have in order to find the most optimal business model from some company.

At the project kick off.

School: "we will be checking your code for plagiarism. if you use code from the internet, even if its 2 lines you need to mention the source. otherwise you will fail this cource."

We go on to do the project.

Friend of mine who was in another class sees a group presenting a 2 days old version of my teams application. theres literaly a credits button that displays the names of the people that worked on it in a popup.

Me: mentions to a teacher that my project was stolen.

They literaly didnt even change the name and pulled the entire repository from github and handed it in.

The fucking teacher doesnt even check the code / git logs after i mentioned that the entire codebase was stolen from a public github repository.

There was an endless mountain of proof to support my claim such as our team members names hard coded in the code they handed in and about 500 commits from our accounts.

I will from now on NEVER EVER mention sources when i hand in code at school.

We are being run in a simulation. But the simulation is physical. We exist as humans being run on the simulation called Earth. Our brains are designed to interface to a hub. This brain power is used to do calculations for a much larger system. The benefit to using biological systems is they self repair and reproduce. This allows the simulations to scale over time.

Another benefit is we are creating all terrain vehicles (humans) for alien consciousnesses. Big foot is an upgraded atv for high mountain ranges.

Just started a simulation of the effects of social distancing, havent done behaviour modelin in a looong time so my skills are pretty rusty. Other than that im mostly drawing, i cant just code all day if i dont want to burn out.

!rant

I am so bored and wanted to see some cool moving charts. So I started work on a little market economy simulation with different sources, drains and recipes for a variety of resources. Traders buy stuff, produce stuff and sell stuff at prices. They look at the market, how it has evolved, offers and requests to determine the prices for which they want to buy and for which they want to sell their stuff.

Currently just basic stuff and testing manually since I haven't completed the whole market simulation tick method. And I want to verify if the Traders work as I expect.

Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:

Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?

Final synposis.
Neural Networks suck.
They just plain suck.
5% error rate on the best and most convoluted problem is still way too high
Its amazing you can make something see an image its been trained on, that's awesome....

But if I can't get a simple function approximator down to lower than 0.07 on a scale of 0 to 1 difference and the error value on a fixed point system is still pretty goddamn high, even if most of the data sort of fits when spitting back inference values, it is unusable.

Even the trained turret aimer I made successfully would sometimes skip around full circle and pass the target before lining up after another full circle.

There has to be something LIKE IT that actually works in premise.

I think my behavioral simulation might be a cool idea, primitive environment, primitive being, reward learning. however with an attached DATABASE.

Fun story:

I once was in some kind of SSH-ception, my machine and two remote machines where the same, as in the username and hostname (local name) where equal. All with and Hitachi 500 GB disk.

I was going to nuke the remote machine 1, so later that day I would rebuild the system and all that good stuff, so it would be equal to remote machine 2.

I check the disks and see that it is what I expected, and proceed with the so called "sudo rm -rf /".

Turns out, in my madness, I was doing this on the remote machine 2, not on remote machine 1 (too many terminals), and after I pressed the button and 5 minutes are passed, I realize my mistake...I had just killed a big part of some research I was doing for college (100 or so simulation files, 2GB each).

LESSON: Always triple check your drives and sessions.

P.S.: Something similar happened with me once doing dd to make a ubuntu bootable flash, I ended up erasing 800GB of backup files.

Made a simulation/game in java using swing that runs on this algorithm:

-2D array was made (kinda like a chessboard).
-Random living cell was placed on the board.
Repeat:
-If a cell has X or less cells around it (living) it duplicates.
-If a cell has Y or more cells around it, it dies.

I was amazed at the types of shapes this created. There were so many variables I could play with, and probably spent hours just experiementing. I was really satisfied in the end. 😄

Fucking hell my insights are late ones...
So I am working with fluid dynamics simulation. I went home fired up the laptop and started the calculations. This is how the events went:

9 PM: starting the calculation
10 PM: checking on the graphs to see whether everything will be alright if I leave it running. Then went to sleep.
2 AM: Waking up in shock, that I forgot to turn on autosave after every time step. Then reassured myself that this is only a test and I won't need the previous results anyway.
5 AM: waking up, everything seems to be fine. I pause the calculation hibernate the laptop and went to work.
6:40 AM on my way to the front door a stray thought struck into my mind... What if it lost contact with the licence server, while entering hibernated state. Bah never mind... It will establish a new connection when I switch it back on.
6.45 AM Switching on the laptop. Two error messages greet me.

1. Lost contact with license server.
2. Abnormal exit.

Looking on the tray the paused simulation is gone. Since I didn't enabled autosave, I have to start it all over again. Well. Lesson learned I guess. Too bad it cost 8 hours of CPU time.

Computer games is always been a on a great demand. As demand increases, production also increases. Gaming industry has been on a rise since the 19th century. The first computer game "Space Wars" in 1962 gained a large success. Since then, the evolution in the gaming industry is thrilling. Currently, we have access to many immersive games. With the introduction of AR and VR, the gaming industry is going to take a great burst in business. Don't you believe after decade the games would be so advanced that it would be so much life like. According to the predictions, after a hundred years, games would be vastly different from what we play today, realistic feature would be a sidekick for them. A time will come when the games would reach a singularity where the characters would have consciousness. Isn't that like our real world, as if we are the characters in a advanced game of some advanced beings. What if it is true? Scientists are doing a intensive research on this field to find a clue, whether we are in a game or not. This is the so called "Simulation Theory". Some clues in relation to this would be worth noting. The flower are following a series to have their petals. To be precise Fibonacci series is the base to the no of petals in a flower. (Fibonacci Series: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55.....) Flowers would either have 3 or 5 or 8 petals, but no flower is having a number of petal which is not following this series. Isn't it interesting, there is no brain in flower, even then how could a flower decide, how many petals it will contain? Sometimes, it feels like there is some kind of computer code is responsible for this. We will discuss about it furthur.

GTC Keynote be like "here's our AI car tests where we simulate the car driving into other cars but stop the simulation just before the crash. It's super safe, we promise! Coming to a crash near you in 4 years."

Interesting thing to highlight.

Wk210
My hero is Matthew McConaughey from 10 years in the future. That Matthew McConaughey's hero is another Matthew McConaughey 10 years further in the future, who's hero is 10 years further still. It's infinite recursive Matthew McConaughey to the end of time.

What I'm trying to say is my only hope is to crash this simulation and end my depressing non-McConaughey existence.

Real camera simulation:
I know how to simulate the optics part given the camera calibration model and parameters.
I would like to know how to characterize the grey level values given X amount of light, which I assume is more the CCD part.
Suggestions?

oftentimes I believe we are in simulation because of the unique fingerprints. It's like a uuid. Or a PK.

If one of these fucking deformable object simulations would actually do contact and collision right, that'd be greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeat.
😐

How am I supposed to grab the shit with a robot gripper, if shit doesn't do contact friction right? Gah!

Random thought:- if world is just a simulation.....

What type of hardware is running this simulation?

1. Run all the unittest and have a full green
2. Run a simulation
3. Run a simulation and all works properly
4. git push

Are we to the point in technology that we can simulate entire: economic, governmental, social, medical, etc systems with accuracy?

I am fascinated by video games that do this. I play Avorion and it has attempted to simulate economic systems in game. So you can profit from making things that are not in high supply. I am also fascinated by the idea of world simulation to weight pros and cons of governmental structures.

Where does one start when researching models that attempt this?

We are living in a simulation. If you don't believe it, I can't do anything mate.

Edge cases are the best, some physical IPhone has an issue on the site. Browserstack simulation tells me everything works just splendid.
FML.

(insight: for organisational and modularity purposes we tend to cut each object (which are usually chemical reactors or unitary a operations for plants ) into classes and subclasses and such, also to provide a common guided framework to insert a new objext to expand our simulation program).

Me: should we just use a middle parent class for these objects or leave them like this. Also I believe we could do X the Y way instead of X but requires updating the user guide. I could do that as well though. Up to you.

Professor: Yes *too bad it does not comply expected answers* Also mmh can you provide me a paper for tommorow morning to explain our project and why it should be better than what other universities do need to show some friends

Me: *looks at the watch, it's 9 pm, reflects upon the fact he has to get 2 hours of travel to even get home* well it's a bit hard for tomorrow morning, can you leave me 2 days?

I rise my head and realised my professor took his things and went home in that split second of me checking the time.

Friend and me from the university need to write a program to parse Value-Change-Dumps from different files, and merge them together in a new file to easily compare them. This project last for the whole semester. The program was for one of the professors and we need to meet with him and give him an introduction how to use the program (was cli & gui based)

Long story short: enter office, give him the link to git repo. He clones it. Clicks on it and boom. Python error. Some Tkinter Error. OK ok after a few minutes we solved the issue by installing some additional packages and our program starts. But it doesn't work. About 80% of the buttons did nothing. WTF!??

Oh. We used git flow for fun and haven't moved the development branch to master and he cloned outdated code. We need nearly 30 minutes to solve this. 🤔And I'm just happy that this professor was just a calm guy . He was also happy because now he does not need to run multiple instances of GtkWave to compare his simulation results.

Some wait for their codebto compile, others wait for their simulation to run... and then there's me... who just waits for an answer on his forum question....

When you realize you are blocked ........

Background:
A simulation I am working on stopped working due to some linking errors again. I looked it up online and followed some suggestions. Deleting the project from work space and reimporting it. I also created a new workspace and compared binary files with another similar class. The makefile seems to be detecting it. It just doesn’t agree with he file syntax although it’s correct. Oh no ....

Me: “You gotta be kidding! I just want to code .....!”

Simulation games like bus/train simulators or e.g. transport fever can be used so easy to just calm down and relax for some time just driving or building an awesome world. The way it should be.

You people ever heard of the BeamNG game? The detailed vehicle physics simulation...

The question that has been bothering me lately is: why the hell are BeamNG videos so addictive 🤔 I get those videos sometimes in my YouTube feed; and once I start watching those, I usually cannot stop.

Like, the car with parts stripped from it over time. Or the truck carrying an ever-increasing number of rocks uphill. And the crashes, of course

But the question is: what do I find so fascinating about those videos? Why is it so hard to stop? On the surface, it is nothing special. Just some silly experiments involving vehicle physics

Weird; so weird... ☁️

I wanna start a game studio. Develop a GTA like game environment based on my locality, but unlike gta, this game is gonna be a driving simulation game.

We have to use this shit service desk simulation software that runs on javascript and a classmate legit just went java == javascript. almost jumped him

But for things this system is so shit i rather work at a service desk for a day than use this shit for half a hour

I can clean my apartment between a simulation and the other, I guess?

Anyone with experience in developing matlan simulations for magnetic localization?

wk89 the first game I played was a fighter plane simulation game. 3D, very realistic at that time. Maybe around 2006. I just don't know the name of the game since I was a kid. The aircraft might be F-22. Anyone knows the name of the game?

Going to be a Senior next semester and ill be taking a software testing course as an elective. From a student perspective, it sounds pretty important. Nevertheless Im excited to jump in to a simulation of real world application of what Ive learned so far in college.

Actual screenshot of TensorFlow getting started section. Nicely done, Google.

I have an idea I need to get out of my head but am not sure where to start. I want to figure out a good way to learn about real-time water simulation. I’m looking at either OpenGL, or Openframeworks, or Cinder. I have basic experience with c++ and a bit less with OpenGL but am not worried about learning. Could someone point me in the right direction? Andy good resources to learn or just general advice would be greatly appreciated.

Made a !rant about me making a market economy simulation.

It kinda works. It works way too good. Way too stable prices. Something will explode for sure and I can't fricking find out where or what!

most complicated code till now must be the universe......
.....if you know what i mean

I want to run a simulation like rolling a dice N times and find out what's the distribution/probability of getting certain SUMs after the rolls.

However the dice is more likely to land on a lower number, and/or depends on what the number it landed on previously.

Stats wise I think ideally I want to be able to just input the avg, standard deviation, and skewness into a Random class constructor, and then ask it for N "random" numbers.

Traffic controller simulation program in c

Do you have some recommendations on server providers with hour based billing?

I wanr to run some simulations which need appr. 8 cores and 32gb of ram for one or two days and I don't want to rent a server a hole month or year for this.