You’re welcome. Was a fun memory to wander into again. Makes you think what is the “Killer Shark” or “Breakout” of today, eh kids? I guess Minecraft and GTA might fill that spot, some day, in some future VR utopia ..
I’ve been following you on X since your account was randomly shown to me. Your story is really cool, but also is your product. I’m working on my own LLM context problem as a side project (in a completely different space), but this could really fill voids I’m finding when doing it myself.
I’m going to try this today. Best of luck with this!
Are you still building this yourself (and Claude)?
I actually grew up in Ohio and know the cities there well. They’re just too small and public transit leaves a lot to be desired.
To me, there’s just something different about the cities that got big before cars that the southern cities, Ohio cities, etc can’t capture. It’s hard to explain if you’re not that type of person.
I think we will consider Chicago though (if I can sell my wife on the weather)
I lived in NYC and understand what you mean. I now live in a walkable Southern city and don't own a car.
The quality and ease of life are so much better here, I wouldn't go back to NYC if you paid me $50k per year.
Ymmv of course, but I've found the "extras" of ultra-urban cities are fun when you're young and a huge source of friction when you're just trying to survive a day of work + parenting.
I lived in Raleigh and then Charlotte about a decade ago and can’t picture living in those places without a car. That said, I may be out of date on what it’s like there now.
Would you mind sharing what city you live in? If not, no worries, I understand wanting to keep anonymity.
I completely get what you’re saying about friction though. In my friend circles the only parents raising kids in cities are Philly and London, the latter of which is so big at some point you’re basically in a different town anyway.
Thanks, I appreciate your responses here. It’s been a weird realization knowing I hate where I live but not having an exact answer to where we should live that also is best for the kids.
I'll probably get doxxed by AI at some point in the future, but since you can never delete HN posts, I'd prefer to stay anonymous if I can. Send me an email at this temporary address and I'd be happy to chat: quiet.hay0076@fastmail.com
I currently work at a company who is primarily writing in Scala. I really like Scala but assume my next role won’t be in that. Are my two best options Rust and Java if I want to keep some of the typing, functional style, and pattern matching while also moving to a more popular language?
Seconding the sibling comment re: Kotlin. I haven't worked much with it personally, but I've heard from plenty of people that it strikes a good balance between Java being... Java and Scala's floundering.
Rust also checks your feature boxes, but staying in the JVM-verse is almost certainly the safer bet unless you end up really needing fast native binaries that aren't a chore to code.
Kotlin is gaining steam in the Java world. We're moving to make it our default server-side language at my company instead of Java. Given its great Java interop, you can basically think of it as a modern, more functional Java that doesn't have multiple decades of baggage associated with it. I highly recommend considering it in any place you'd consider Java.
Where are Java properties, so people can stop writing the silly getter setter nonsense?
Where are default parameters and named parameter calls?
Where is the null friendly field access operator ?. ?
Where is the convenient list and hashmap literal syntax?
Why is the stream API so verbose? Why not offer a third generation collections API?
Where are the sane ORMs?
Now here is some JVM hate:
How do I make sure that my application starts up quickly and isn't slow the first time you're accessing a web page after a restart?
How do I make sure that I don't need a 2GB RAM server for a simple web app? Cloud providers are stingy with RAM, so this adds up, even though RAM costs are an insignificant part of overall server costs.
How do I write a CLI app with the JVM? You don't.
So yeah, Java is in this uncanny valley where it is either obsoleted language wise by JVM languages from 2009 and runtime obsoleted by languages like Rust, where you trade off a bit of convenience, which Java by the way does not have either, for a bit of performance.
I spent 10 years or so mostly writing Scala and now am entirely using Rust. I found the transition really easy. Where I work now has historically been a Scala shop and is moving more and more towards Rust as the default. In my experience engineers who are seasoned Scala devs pick it up very quickly
I use NeoVim but you can use any editor. It was a bit of a pain to get dotnet going on arch linux but I got it working after some tinkering.
To get started, one can install SMAPI, then unpack the game assets. Then, you can open game maps and assets in the Tiled level editor. I also use Aseprite to make the pixel art tilesets for the maps (LibreSprite would also work). I use a mix of my own tiles and tiles from the game itself for my maps. Music and sound can also be added or patched with ContentPatcher. I make all sound related stuff with Ableton Live. I haven't done much with C# yet but SMAPI provides a pretty nice API so it should be pleasant to use.
I can’t believe I’ve been reading these now for 8 years. Best of luck with the book!
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