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Search - "superstition"
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Developer superstition, never say something is easy, fast or straightfoward.
It will take weeks to develop, months to test and debug and you will consider change jobs just to stay away of that code8 -
Many hotels dont have floor #13 due to superstitious reasons... do you think the digital age would threaten the future of rooms 404?5
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Fuck brand builders, or, how I learned to start giving a shit and love devrant.
Brand builders are people who generally have very little experience and are attempting to obfuscate their dearth of ability behind a wall of non-academic content generation. Subscribe, like, build a following and everyone will happily overlook the fact that your primary contribution to society is spreading facile content that further obfuscates the need for fundamentals. Their carefully crafted presence is designed promote themselves and their success while chipping away at the apparent value of professional ability. At one point, I thought medium would be the bottom of the barrel; a glorified blog that provides people with scant knowledge, little experience and routinely low integrity a platform to build an echo chamber of replayed or copied content, techno-mysticism and best-practice-superstition they mistake for a brand in an environment where there's little chance of peer review. I thought it couldn't get any worse.
Then I found dev.to
Dev.to is what happens when all the absence of ability and skills insecurity on the internet gets together to form a censorship mob to ensure that no criticism, reality or peer review will ever filter into the ramblings of people intent on forever remaining at the peak of the dunning-kreuger curve. It's the long tail of YMCA trophy culture.
Take for example this article:
https://dev.to/davidepacilio/...
It's a shit post listicle by someone claiming to be "senior," who confidently states that "you are only as good as the tools you use." Meanwhile all the great minds of history are giving him the side-eye because they understand tools are just a magnifier of ability. If you're an amazing carpenter, power tools will help you produce at an exponential rate. If you're a shitty carpenter, your work will still be shit, there will just be more of it. The actual phrase that's being butchered here is "you're only as good as the tools you create." There's no moral superiority to be had in being dependent on a tool, that's just a crutch. A true expert or professional is someone who can create tools to aid in their craft. Being a professional is having a thorough enough understanding of the thing you are doing so as to be able to craft force multipliers that make your work easier, not just someone who uses them.
Ok, so what?
I'm sure he's a plenty fine human to grab drinks with, no ill will to him as a human. That said, were you to comment something to that effect on dev.to, you'd be reported by all the hangers-on pretty much immediately, regardless of how much complimentary padding and passive, welcoming language you wrap your message in. The problem with a bunch of weak people ganging up on the voice of reason and deciding they don't want things like constructive criticism, peer review, academic process or the scientific method is, after you remove all of that, you're just left with a formless sea of ideas and thoughts with no categorization, no order. You find a lot of opinions and nothing to challenge them and thereby are left with no mechanism for strong ideas to rise to the top. In that system, the "correct" ideas are by default those posited by the strongest personality.
We all need some degree of positive reinforcement. We also need to be smacked upside the head when we're totally off in the weeds. It's all about balance. The forums of ancient Greece weren't filled with people fervently agreeing with one another and shouting down new ideas en masse. We need discourse, not demagoguery.
Dev.to, medium, etc are all the fast fashion of the tech industry. Personally, I'd prefer something designed to last a little longer.30 -
At my last gig, part of our business process was to generate a unique human-readable ID that could tie an individual to our product and service. Well, we had a few rather superstitious, paranoid and vocal customers who felt 'uneasy' when they received their unique ID with 666 in it.
So after having a good laugh and roll on the floor, I got to write an exorciseUniqueId() method that compelled the evil numbers to stop possessing those innocent IDs!4 -
Friday 13th. Superstition.
0655, got WFH laptop going. 0700, VPN'ed in. Bluescreen, first in ages. Yes, Windows, the hatred is mutual. Rebooted. Windows claimed memory fault, offered check, 40 minutes. Noped out. Started machine. VPN'ed in. Some strange script error that I'd never seen before. Rebooted. Script error again. Shut down machine, then rebooted, same problem. 0715, fuck, still wearing sweaters, my e-scooter not charged, and an important Teams call at 0800.
Got dressed, stuffed laptop into backpack, hurried up by foot. Took the bus. Fuck, the next connection on the change station just had gone off. Took a taxi to make it. Arrived at the company, plugged in the laptop, started with no issues. Had the important call.
Took the laptop to IT. Tested it with external network connection and VPN. Worked with no script error. Had it checked for RAM issues. No issue. WTF had happened in the morning?!6 -
The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
Dev superstition:
Before installing anything I still cd to the root directory.
Like it even matters 🙄2 -
When ever I look at any programming language, scripting language, or any technology... It seems soo difficult... Knowing this language will increase my value....
After knowing and working with that language for several months... Its like I know nothing... I m useless...
I m fed up of that feeling....
Everything i know is just a superstition...9 -
My boss is a very smart man, but sometimes he's superstitious as hell. He cannot trust context.list.find() in c# to accept null values, despite that being a thing forever. He's certain that it will break in a future entity framework update, so we have all these duplicate if statements all over our site.
If(blah == null){ //stuff}
Thing thing = context.things.find(blah);
If(thing == null){//stuff}
It kills me a little each time, but I guess he could be worse. I'm glad that he's finally trusting the null conditional operator, because it's a fucking lifesaver for duplicate code!3 -
a lion in captivity forgets to hunt. a man loosing everyday forget about winning.
I am feeling so sad and worthless right now. Like, so worthless that if I am walking down the street tomorrow and if some car hits me and i die, i wouldn't mind.
I find it questionable about what I am living for? why am i selling myself in front of keyboard till 12 am every day to earn some bucks when all this money is being / will be used to give happiness to a bunch of people that don't give 2 shits about me.
why can't i get some love? why can't i get some respect? i feel like a disabled 5 year old boy trapped in an abled 25 year old body. I can feel my legs, but I don't have the permission to use them. its like i am tied by ropes. and this rope has been on me for so long, that i can feel my legs, but i can also feel that those are having cuts so deep that i won't be able to use them even once the rope is taken out.
being a single child, loneliness has always been my shadow at home. and The middle class poor income, fighting parents, sickness and lack of culture ensured that loneliness remained my friend in school, college and other areas too.
the only goal of becoming an ideal son has shadowed every other thing in life. I can't drink, i can't go outside after 10pm, I can't take a jobbin different city. I can't fucking have female friends or think about relatiion-shits with people. i can't drive the car that was bought by my salary money. the list goes on and on.. i think every Indian (girls more than boys ig) have gone through at least 1 such restrictions at some point of their life. but me? a GUY in his fucking 25 , is going through ALL OF THEM, from day 1.
Plus i haven't started to discuss the weird eccentricities that i have to deal with, which are not so common. we follow a special religion where they have lots of philosophy and additional rules ( like no onion garlic mushroom in foods, mediation + pray for 1 hour twice a day ,... etc)
But i didn't complain, until now. I got sadder and sadder with time, but I cooperated. Whome else to live for , if not for the folks who made you in their womb amd sack? yeah I will fucking stay celibate until you find some willing "cultured" girl from your "religion" and arrange a lifelong existence. yes, i will fucking keep paying the car emis and see it in the parking lot everyday , while traveling via a metro. yes i will stay in your house in front of you all the times and never learn to exist independently coz fuck maturity. yes i will be a static atm machine waiting to die as you please.
but i am still not your ideal son? I say one little thing, and you start shouting at me for being selfish? why is religious superstition and those crime storemies so much deep into your head that you folks are micro managing and criticising every single thing in my life?
why is there a need for repetitive arguments, fights and shouting before evry action? why can't we just be happy for once!
I am shattered looking for happiness. I can't live like this anymore. There are no more than 2 people in my life that i care about and if those 2 are always having an upside down , angered face the what is the point of waking up every day?
wish i could just leave them. But can they live without me? or even can i live without them? and no , not talking about emotionally. I am very strong at the emotional side and i can throw word daggers to even 10+ years of companionships and ruin them. this will be just another long term relationship that i will sour.
BUT I CAN'T LITERALLY LIVE WITHOUT THEM. i am a useless guy who don't have any social intelligence outside his computer screen. i don't know how to live alone, and exist, or what my goals will be. I never saw a future without thinking about securing their future first, and them being in my future at all times.
aagh fuck. another painful night to survive and exist until i rise again to live like a corpse coz i can't do anything about it6