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Two of my blog posts were on the front page earlier this year, netting 56k unique visitors. The visits were spread over multiple days, and should cover different timezones somewhat well. The analytics are located at an endpoint which looks vital, and should bypass most adblockers.

35.1% United States

8.0% Germany

6.5% United Kingdom

5.4% Canada

3.1% Australia

3.0% France

2.7% Netherlands

2.6% India

2.4% Sweden

1.9% Poland

1.7% Switzerland

1.6% Spain

1.4% Japan

1.4% Belgium

1.3% Italy

1.1% Austria

1.1% Finland

1.0% Norway

1.0% Brazil

7.0% Other countries


No China or Russia? Strange…

HN is blocked in mainland China, so stats of visitors from China are likely to be low. HN is similarly blocked in Russia. Users from these locations would come via VPN.

Unfettered linking of the latest Rust AIs, sharing of random peoples' purchases of Framework laptops, heat over GPLv2 vs. AGPL vs. BSD, and discussion of whether nixOS's use of *nix was or was not prior to Unix's use or Shakespeare's use, is clearly too much for some censors.


> HN is similarly blocked in Russia.

Doesn't seem to be true, the domain doesn't seem to be in Roskomnadzor's blacklist and I can reach it through Globalping nodes (incl. residential nodes)


Maybe because of VPN usage?

No reason to get arrested because of viewing a picture of some massacre on a square in a large city or sent to the SMO because one reads some Ukraine news not approved by their government.


Still scrobbling since 2008. A lot of smaller artists used to upload their music to last.fm, and I found a lot of gems there (specifically in the swedish bitpop scene).


> add new towns, creatures, heroes, artifacts and spells without limits or conflicts

If the original game had these features, it would likely have gotten me into programming at an even earlier age!


In the Wake of Gods mod (aka HoMM 3.5) had ERM scripting and it was hella exciting for a kid! You could make your own artifacts, automate things on a map, make a dynamic story that reacts to your actions.


Very cool! I have one non-technical friend who occasionally wants to play HOMM, and she often has issues getting it working (specifically non-hd, non-hota on intel mac). This could be a remedy.


I love this... I haven't had the courage to "spend" my sticker collection on my current laptop, as they obviously don't last forever. A solution could be to photograph the old cover, and print it as a full-size sticker as a starting point for the next laptop!


Love it! I'll showcase my sticker collection on my laptop as soon as I come up with a way to make them reusable.


> Bottom line: fun is basically about making progress on prediction.

I'm having some trouble parsing this sentence. Does he mean that "player has fun if their predictions lead to progress"?


In simple, reductive terms:

Fun, among other things = remaining in the tight channel of flow, where your skills get challenged without ever reaching a point of frustration. Too little challenge = boredom.

Skills improve as they get challenged, i.e. when our prediction and pattern matching system receive enough feedback to improve upon our previous actions to get a more optimal outcome.

So, fun is (among other things) getting better at doing something, and as we get better, what was once a challenge turns easier, so a fun game needs to have a well-tuned difficulty progression to keep in pace with your improving skills.


Progress on predictions means both getting better at prediction (learning) and applying that.


Also a decent definition of intelligence


I think for both contexts its far too simplistic to be more than a generalization and certainly for fun its a very local definition to serve Raph's ideas about what constitutes a game rather than encompassing enough to define it fully.

For intelligence for example you could have a PID controller where there is automatic tuning which would fit the definition of learning and application. But I don't think we'd call it intelligent outside of marketing copy.


No, it's not a very local definition at all, it's actually a generalized definition for all forms of game and entertainment -- and art, even!

You seem to be assuming I have a reductive definition of game, when the definition given in the article is basically "anything people choose to play." See https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/16/playing-with-game/ which is linked in there.

I strongly disagree with lumping "intelligence" into the question though, so I am with you on that.


A PID doesn’t get better at learning and applying predictions. I’d argue that to do that essentially indefinitely requires intelligence.


Hence mentioning a PID controller that has autotuning. Drop it in a new environment and it'll adjust. Drop it in another and it'll reconfigure itself.


That is not getting better at learning. That’s repeatedly re-learning in the same way.


Ahh, sorry we’re talking past one another then because I hadn’t twigged you were talking about getting better at learning because that’s not what I meant with my initial post! Although I can see why you took that from it.

I do like that meta observation though that not only do people get better at prediction through learning they can also get better at the rate at which they improve their predictions.


It’s careless of me to say it’s a definition of intelligence, but I do think that property of being able to improve how you learn and how quickly you learn (especially in response to adversaries doing the same thing) is a clear indicator of intelligence and there’s a good argument that that’s why we developed intelligence. These aren’t my ideas either, I’m just parroting what I recently read in the book “What is Intelligence” by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.


I can get better by getting more experienced without getting more intelligent.


Why do you think that accumulating experience and applying it to be better isn’t a mark of intelligence?


True, but one definition of intelligence is the ability to deal with a novel situation. You can't get more experienced if you're "too stupid" to learn and adapt to the challenge.


Thanks for trying it! This is actually intentional, to make the game playable in the "end-game" where you level up ~every second :-)


It's a nice thought. If an idea could be encoded... that each persons idea of a concept, viewed in the right dimensionality, has a rough, similar outline. At least, that's my interpretation of your idea. :-) Your comment either triggered, or made me notice an ongoing shift in my worldview. Thank you!


IQ, along with shadertoy and hg_sdf are my learning resources for raymarching. A great way to get into demoscene production.


> hg_sdf

What is that?


A great library of Signed Distance Functions (SDF) by the unbelievably awesome demogroup Mercury



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