Interesting, but in companies, it's difficult to encourage altruism when the management is selfish.
In our culture, the individual is considered superior to the group, but in Saudia for example, I was surprised to discover that the family was more important than its individuals (of course, people expect that their effort towards their family will be rewarded).
I said that he was wrong on the delay. I don't disagree, since we are saying the same thing, except that I explained how it works on a personal level;-)
If you do it for too long, two things happen (a) you start cutting into good performers (b) people will not collaborate to make others look good
You are wrong. As soon as stack-ranking is used (and not after "too long"), it shows that the individual performance is more important than the group's performance, so collaborating goes against your own interest. Once everybody is focused on his own agenda, the best performers are getting tired by the competition and thus quit their job to a better living place.
Coding is knowledge, but there are more useful knowledge than learning to code. For example, psychology's or negotiation's skills, which will always be useful anywhere.
Propose a cheap devkit so that small companies could develop cheap games. For example, they could propose a cross-platform game's library for that. Then track the best teams and offer them to develop larger games, with exclusivity on their platform. This way, you train new developers on your platform for free (out of 100 developers, one will be really great), and you embrace new creative concepts (which seem to be lacking at Nintendo).
Of course, Nintendo will never do that, since they want to keep control on "their" market.
1) read as much different books as you can, try to find books that you'll enjoy 2) forget everything you read
The second point is to let you understand that books may bring enjoyment and give some individual points of view, but they are just limited points of view.
Famo.us built a Javascript framework for rendering. They expected to sell their technology to Google. Their plan backfired, because nobody was interested into their product, and they had no interesting application. So they "open-sourced" their framework (since it's Javascript, it's already "open-source"), in the hope that some users will come up with a brilliant application, and that their product will have a real value (and so that the company will be saleable).
While their concept is interesting, I very much doubt that it will ever have a market value. It's an existing product searching for its market, instead of a product designed for an identified market.
The fastest supercomputer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2) runs at 33.86 petaflops, while Boinc currently runs at 8.26 petaflops (http://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/project/detail).
3 years ago, Google's computers were used to solve Rubik's cube: http://cube20.org/
We can suppose that combined Google servers are above 33Pflops.
It's obvious for me that the OP was kinda jealous about Carmack, but it appears to me that he's also pretty knowledgeable.
This guy was the major driving force for the FPS genre and the adoption of GPUs
I think you are giving Carmack too much credit. He's technologically obsessed, which was very useful for Doom and Quake. However, a game doesn't simply rely on engineering: it requires a strong gameplay and nice graphics. Games with excellent gameplay can overcome lack of engineering and graphics, but games with excellent engineering cannot overcome lack of gameplay.
Of course, it's more glamorous to design 3D engines than to design gameplay, but the real game comes from gameplay (and yes, I was a game programmer, and I love engineering).
In my opinion, ID's success is because of multiple lucky factors:
- technical obsession from Carmak (and Abrash)
- gameplay obsession from Romero
- they were also the first ones to combine such excellency in a single company (I'm pretty sure that they had also an excellent graphical team, which had to work with lots of graphical constraints)
- Quake 2 was released at a moment 3D cards needed games, so all 3D card providers pushed the game
Maybe 5 years for now you'll be raving about how good his VR headsets are.
I'm pretty sure that you are wrong, and here are my arguments:
- Carmack is a software guy. Unless he totally changed, he's still thinking in software terms, which can be quite useful if you need to think about software developments (like frameworks), but useless when you work on hardware
- there is absolutely no way to predict or force a success: look at how much nice products failed, while poor products succeeded. Success comes from circumstances and luck.
- Carmack was lucky once, and I doubt he'll be lucky twice
you'll be raving about how good his VR headsets are
I'm pretty disturbed by this sentence: do you imply that Carmack will design the VR headsets alone ? Frankly, this will be result of a team's work, and there is no guarantee of success even if you have a team of geniuses (think about the collision of egos).
1) this kind of ranking assumes that people's performance never varies. In fact, the performance varies along with motivation, because of the work becoming a routine, or personal problems.
2) stack ranking applied locally means that bad teams may survive because we only remove the N% useless. I remember a similar example, where the managers were ordered to reduce the cost of a device by 10% (the device costed more than 1000$). So they applied the 10% to all the components of the device. This was not a problem for the most expensive components, but a nasty problem appeared when they took 10% cheaper screws (perhaps 10 cents, reduced to 9 cents). The new screws were of so bad quality that they ruined the whole device.
3) you get what you measure. If you measure performance using any arbitrary system, you'll get a performance oriented towards this system, not towards reality. In fact, the real problem is that managers are unable to do their work, that is to manage people, so they use these methods as a way to avoid human contacts.
Hold on a minute. I'm pretty sure you're making a big assumption there. What is "stronger"? Do you mean, "better able to work for a living"? Or do you mean, "more likely to have successful family lives"? Or do you mean, "conforming to societal norms". There are simply too many unknowns in the term "reality" and the term "strong".
I meant: able to accept reality as it is. Drinking or taking "recreational drugs" allow to momentarily hide problems by reducing the amount of thoughts, but when the relaxed state vanishes, the problems appear more acute and one feels even more miserable.
You have a construct inside your mind that you call "reality", but it's only as real as the consensus.
I agree with you.
Let's say that "reality" is the world perceived by our own senses. It's our mind that makes it either hell or heaven.
I don't believe that society needs to place artificial strictures on intoxicating substances
While I don't have any moral objection against intoxicants (since I believe that everybody should build their own experience), I disagree with your idea.
Firstly, alcoholism and addiction are mental illnesses, and a small percentage of people are concerned. It may be 5% or more, so it directly impacts society. Also, mentally ill people may tend to use more intoxicants than "normal" people (though I never met a "normal" guy), who knows ?
Secondly, I believe that society should protect people from themselves, because a lot of them are lacking in common sense. For example, children or people who practice binge drinking.
Thirdly, all these substances are means to escape reality. Escaping reality never makes people stronger.
There are plenty of other cognitive problems with money compensation.
For example, if you are paid to fix a bug, and there are a lot of bugs, you'll probably fix them as fast as possible to get the money. When you concentrate on the result, the quality always lowers. The quality is not a problem for a few jobs, but definitely not on computers !
To my knowledge, the new surgical techniques were invented to reduce operation's side-effects (less invasive surgery, less anesthetics, less hospital recovery). It also reduces the cost of an operation.
I found no relation with Jehovah witnesses, so I'm curious to listen where you heard about this ?
I totally agree with your point, because we learn a lot more from failure (pain) than from success (pleasure). I'm still baffled why people avoid failure, when failure provides so much lessons (of course, small failures are preferred to big failures).
But my point was about happiness, not about pain/pleasure. Why talking about happiness, when in reality the author talks about pleasure ?
From the article: >And yet on the other hand, many people today would report that they have a fundamental sense of feeling stressed and pressured and disconnected from other people, longing for closeness that they don’t have, frustrated, driven, etc. Why is that? I think one reason is that we’re simply wasting the positive experiences that we’re having, in part due to modernity, because we’re not taking into account that design bug in the Stone Age brain that it doesn’t learn very well.
And this is wrong ! Positive experiences leave less traces than negative experiences in the brain, learning has nothing to do here, it's just memorization (and our brains are so buggy that some event may trigger some new fear or some superstition).
Stress is simply a mental state, where the brain gets very agitated. Stress is the opposite of happiness.
This is why so much people take drugs or drink, it artificially stops the brain's agitation. In modern society, we praise mental agitation: you never have to let your brain take a rest. Do you think that watching TV rests your brain ?
>For me, by repeatedly taking in the good to grow inner strength, you become much more able to deal with the bad. For me, taking in the good is motivated by the recognition that there’s a lot about life is hard.
And this won't work ! Why ? Simply because you are still categorizing "good" and "bad". What happens when everything is bad, no matter how you see it ? How can you see some good when your whole family dies before your eyes ? The psychopath will say: I'll inherit !
Also, the most miserable people are the ones who try to force themselves to be joyful, by smiling.
How could you force yourself to be something that you are not ?
The author is unable to differentiate happiness and pleasure !
Pleasure comes when I have a good experience. Pain comes when I have a bad experience.
Happiness is totally different ! Happiness appears mostly after pleasure. For example, if I make love with my beloved partner, and I have an orgasm, I'll experience pleasure. After the orgasm, I feel happy, because I feel at peace with my partner.
Happiness is simply a state of mind: I become happy when I'm in peace. Pleasure is external (or related to external stimuli), and happiness is internal. For example, when I meditate (=when I stop all my thoughts), I experience happiness. Happiness is so easy to reach that in fact nobody really wants happiness, because it's so boring: nothing happens.
Everybody seeks pleasure, and pleasure always comes with pain.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you: the paradigm can change very quickly.
The problem is that in order to succeed, you need teams.
How could you encourage teams when you use stack ranking ?
Interesting, but in companies, it's difficult to encourage altruism when the management is selfish.
In our culture, the individual is considered superior to the group, but in Saudia for example, I was surprised to discover that the family was more important than its individuals (of course, people expect that their effort towards their family will be rewarded).
I said that he was wrong on the delay. ;-)
I don't disagree, since we are saying the same thing, except that I explained how it works on a personal level
If you do it for too long, two things happen (a) you start cutting into good performers (b) people will not collaborate to make others look good
You are wrong.
As soon as stack-ranking is used (and not after "too long"), it shows that the individual performance is more important than the group's performance, so collaborating goes against your own interest.
Once everybody is focused on his own agenda, the best performers are getting tired by the competition and thus quit their job to a better living place.
Basically, stack-ranking encourages selfishness.
Slashdot needs a rewrite, a clean new technical foundation powering a new front-end design.
Let's rewrite it in Ruby On Rails, yay !
Coding is knowledge, but there are more useful knowledge than learning to code.
For example, psychology's or negotiation's skills, which will always be useful anywhere.
But but but ... who's adding value to your browsing data then?
FTFY
It's easy:
open an online app store.
Propose a cheap devkit so that small companies could develop cheap games. For example, they could propose a cross-platform game's library for that.
Then track the best teams and offer them to develop larger games, with exclusivity on their platform.
This way, you train new developers on your platform for free (out of 100 developers, one will be really great), and you embrace new creative concepts (which seem to be lacking at Nintendo).
Of course, Nintendo will never do that, since they want to keep control on "their" market.
It's very easy:
From Accenture's managerial point of view, it will be a huge success.
From the government's point of view, it will be a massive failure.
And the real losers are the american citizens.
I recommend the following approach:
1) read as much different books as you can, try to find books that you'll enjoy
2) forget everything you read
The second point is to let you understand that books may bring enjoyment and give some individual points of view, but they are just limited points of view.
Using radioactive weapons is probably more lethal, but it won't shock people as much as a suicide-bombing, with all the cameras around here.
Terrorists would prefer to kill people in a cheaper and flashier way.
Let me translate the article:
Famo.us built a Javascript framework for rendering.
They expected to sell their technology to Google.
Their plan backfired, because nobody was interested into their product, and they had no interesting application.
So they "open-sourced" their framework (since it's Javascript, it's already "open-source"), in the hope that some users will come up with a brilliant application, and that their product will have a real value (and so that the company will be saleable).
While their concept is interesting, I very much doubt that it will ever have a market value.
It's an existing product searching for its market, instead of a product designed for an identified market.
The fastest supercomputer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2) runs at 33.86 petaflops, while Boinc currently runs at 8.26 petaflops (http://boincstats.com/en/stats/-1/project/detail).
3 years ago, Google's computers were used to solve Rubik's cube:
http://cube20.org/
We can suppose that combined Google servers are above 33Pflops.
My understanding is that they never explicitly 'slowed down' AMD systems
You are wrong:
"Overview of CPU dispatching in Intel software"
http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#121
It's obvious for me that the OP was kinda jealous about Carmack, but it appears to me that he's also pretty knowledgeable.
This guy was the major driving force for the FPS genre and the adoption of GPUs
I think you are giving Carmack too much credit.
He's technologically obsessed, which was very useful for Doom and Quake.
However, a game doesn't simply rely on engineering: it requires a strong gameplay and nice graphics.
Games with excellent gameplay can overcome lack of engineering and graphics, but games with excellent engineering cannot overcome lack of gameplay.
Of course, it's more glamorous to design 3D engines than to design gameplay, but the real game comes from gameplay (and yes, I was a game programmer, and I love engineering).
In my opinion, ID's success is because of multiple lucky factors:
Maybe 5 years for now you'll be raving about how good his VR headsets are.
I'm pretty sure that you are wrong, and here are my arguments:
you'll be raving about how good his VR headsets are
I'm pretty disturbed by this sentence: do you imply that Carmack will design the VR headsets alone ?
Frankly, this will be result of a team's work, and there is no guarantee of success even if you have a team of geniuses (think about the collision of egos).
You forgot a few other cases:
1) this kind of ranking assumes that people's performance never varies.
In fact, the performance varies along with motivation, because of the work becoming a routine, or personal problems.
2) stack ranking applied locally means that bad teams may survive because we only remove the N% useless.
I remember a similar example, where the managers were ordered to reduce the cost of a device by 10% (the device costed more than 1000$).
So they applied the 10% to all the components of the device.
This was not a problem for the most expensive components, but a nasty problem appeared when they took 10% cheaper screws (perhaps 10 cents, reduced to 9 cents).
The new screws were of so bad quality that they ruined the whole device.
3) you get what you measure.
If you measure performance using any arbitrary system, you'll get a performance oriented towards this system, not towards reality.
In fact, the real problem is that managers are unable to do their work, that is to manage people, so they use these methods as a way to avoid human contacts.
Finally, I'd like to point an interesting article explaining similar things:
http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/11/04/get-shit-done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever/
Hold on a minute. I'm pretty sure you're making a big assumption there. What is "stronger"? Do you mean, "better able to work for a living"? Or do you mean, "more likely to have successful family lives"? Or do you mean, "conforming to societal norms". There are simply too many unknowns in the term "reality" and the term "strong".
I meant: able to accept reality as it is.
Drinking or taking "recreational drugs" allow to momentarily hide problems by reducing the amount of thoughts, but when the relaxed state vanishes, the problems appear more acute and one feels even more miserable.
You have a construct inside your mind that you call "reality", but it's only as real as the consensus.
I agree with you.
Let's say that "reality" is the world perceived by our own senses.
It's our mind that makes it either hell or heaven.
I don't believe that society needs to place artificial strictures on intoxicating substances
While I don't have any moral objection against intoxicants (since I believe that everybody should build their own experience), I disagree with your idea.
Firstly, alcoholism and addiction are mental illnesses, and a small percentage of people are concerned.
It may be 5% or more, so it directly impacts society.
Also, mentally ill people may tend to use more intoxicants than "normal" people (though I never met a "normal" guy), who knows ?
Secondly, I believe that society should protect people from themselves, because a lot of them are lacking in common sense.
For example, children or people who practice binge drinking.
Thirdly, all these substances are means to escape reality.
Escaping reality never makes people stronger.
There are plenty of other cognitive problems with money compensation.
For example, if you are paid to fix a bug, and there are a lot of bugs, you'll probably fix them as fast as possible to get the money.
When you concentrate on the result, the quality always lowers.
The quality is not a problem for a few jobs, but definitely not on computers !
Here is a nice article about other motivational problems:
http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/11/04/get-shit-done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever/
Thanks ! That was an interesting link, why didn't you mention it in your post ?
Citation needed !
To my knowledge, the new surgical techniques were invented to reduce operation's side-effects (less invasive surgery, less anesthetics, less hospital recovery).
It also reduces the cost of an operation.
I found no relation with Jehovah witnesses, so I'm curious to listen where you heard about this ?
It's 1<<31, of course !
Slashdot removes the unescaped <
Nice, but one of the proposed solutions is incorrect:
mid = ((unsigned int)low + (unsigned int)high)) >> 1;
if low and high are equal or greater than 2^30, then it overflows.
For example, low=131, high=131, then you get mid=0 instead of mid=131.
I totally agree with your point, because we learn a lot more from failure (pain) than from success (pleasure).
I'm still baffled why people avoid failure, when failure provides so much lessons (of course, small failures are preferred to big failures).
But my point was about happiness, not about pain/pleasure.
Why talking about happiness, when in reality the author talks about pleasure ?
From the article:
>And yet on the other hand, many people today would report that they have a fundamental sense of feeling stressed and pressured and disconnected from other people, longing for closeness that they don’t have, frustrated, driven, etc. Why is that? I think one reason is that we’re simply wasting the positive experiences that we’re having, in part due to modernity, because we’re not taking into account that design bug in the Stone Age brain that it doesn’t learn very well.
And this is wrong !
Positive experiences leave less traces than negative experiences in the brain, learning has nothing to do here, it's just memorization (and our brains are so buggy that some event may trigger some new fear or some superstition).
Stress is simply a mental state, where the brain gets very agitated.
Stress is the opposite of happiness.
This is why so much people take drugs or drink, it artificially stops the brain's agitation.
In modern society, we praise mental agitation: you never have to let your brain take a rest.
Do you think that watching TV rests your brain ?
>For me, by repeatedly taking in the good to grow inner strength, you become much more able to deal with the bad. For me, taking in the good is motivated by the recognition that there’s a lot about life is hard.
And this won't work !
Why ? Simply because you are still categorizing "good" and "bad".
What happens when everything is bad, no matter how you see it ?
How can you see some good when your whole family dies before your eyes ?
The psychopath will say: I'll inherit !
Also, the most miserable people are the ones who try to force themselves to be joyful, by smiling.
How could you force yourself to be something that you are not ?
The author is unable to differentiate happiness and pleasure !
Pleasure comes when I have a good experience. Pain comes when I have a bad experience.
Happiness is totally different !
Happiness appears mostly after pleasure.
For example, if I make love with my beloved partner, and I have an orgasm, I'll experience pleasure.
After the orgasm, I feel happy, because I feel at peace with my partner.
Happiness is simply a state of mind: I become happy when I'm in peace.
Pleasure is external (or related to external stimuli), and happiness is internal.
For example, when I meditate (=when I stop all my thoughts), I experience happiness.
Happiness is so easy to reach that in fact nobody really wants happiness, because it's so boring: nothing happens.
Everybody seeks pleasure, and pleasure always comes with pain.