Isn't Mincecraft basically that? I've never played it, so would be curious to hear from someone who's played both. From the outside both look very dull/soulless and yet people spend hours playing Minecraft building things - just engaging with their imaginations
I think one thing that Minecraft does very well is that it does not push the player towards any of its game systems, which allows the player to make up their own fun. No Man's Sky on the other hand throws a lot of different game systems at you. Just having points of interests pushes the player into just going from one to the other instead of them exploring what might make the game fun for them.
Even vanilla minecraft is a far superior experience to NMS. Minecraft's approach to procedural generation poduces more meaningful exploration because its terrain, resources, structures, and building system interact far more deeply with the gameplay than NMS linear number-go-up grind.
Of course, introducing mods makes Minecraft the most compelling entry in the genre by a huge margin, but not necessarily a fair comparison since the combined human effort involved in the minecraft mod ecosystem vastly eclipses what the NMS team could do on their own.
Building in Minecraft is a very different beast than building in NMS though. The prebuilt cabins and machines of NMS aren't the rabbit hole of redstone engineering that Minecraft has.
Maybe my expectations were too high given all the online praise, but I've been working through it for the past two weeks and I've been underwhelmed:
- The language is often very vague and imprecise, so it's more difficult than it feels it should be
- Concepts are sometimes introduced "at random" in ways that only really make sense in hindsight. So as you're reading you're left scratching your head as to why something was brought up.
- There are constant philosophical and historical digressions that seem to hold deeper meaning, but maybe once you know the topic already.
- Similarly, constantly talking about people that take issue with the method. People not liking the method is a constant theme (they seem really butthurt about this?). But the craziest part is this all done before you even really understand what the method is!!
- The editor must have placed some strict requirement of saying "Bayesian" at least five times per page.
- No index. Useless table of context. But lots of end-notes you feel compelled to flip to constantly
Overall it feels like a textbook written to impress other statistics professors - and as an outlet for the author to air some frustrations with how people do statistics (which may be completely valid!)
The overall structure and objectives seem solid for the most part. It's just a lot of the details aren't great. The problems (so far) have been good. The examples in the text are fun and compelling, but you have to do your own legwork to actually pick through all the prose and tie the pieces together - to figure how it fits together mathematically. Fortunately AI helps as a tutor
Rethinking is indeed written for people who have some or even a lot of existing proficiency in statistics, but for whom it never really clicked. If that’s not your background, I can understand that it might feel disjointed.
I really don't know much about this stuff, but I'm very curious!
How does one communicate with the device? Is it over the network or it's a device with a driver (and a C library?).
Fundamentally this seems like a very fancy gimbal+camera - of which there are opensource variants (like the reCamera from Seedstudio). I guess the cmaera stuff has standard interfaced (V4L), but I don't know about gimbals
Asciidoc is a nice middle ground between the full suit of tools you get in Orgmode and bare Markdown.
To me Orgmode (after years of using it) feels like .docx. A weird poorly specified format that is only fully editable from one editor. Granted you ran read it from anywhere, but you won't want to edit it from anywhere other than Emacs. That feels like it defeats the point of using markup - which is supposed to be editable/usable from anywhere, even Notepad.
.adoc is usually sufficient (the only part I miss is tangle). Lots of options to specify at the top of a document like the images directory, or the CSS file to use, line SVG on HTML export etc. (which Markdown lacks). But the asciidoc converter runs from the command line or from code ( I write .adocs and convert them in Clojure). So you're less married to your editor.
Ideally there'd be some markup that's specified with a regex of PEGs or something that you could easily make a parse for in any context. I thought djot would be that, but it looks like making a grammar is secondary for them. I hope some day one could navigate to markup file in the browser and they'd automatically render with your own specified CSS.
> A weird poorly specified format that is only fully editable from one editor.
While this has been true historically, the Org maintainers are moving away from that approach.
The example that comes to mind is that parsing and interpretation of formatting markup such as *bold* and /italics/ used to be controllable by Emacs Lisp variables that dictate things like which neighbouring characters cancel the interpretation of the markup as markup, or the maximum allowed distance between delimiters for them to count as a pair. Such things have been moved into standardised parsing routines now, with no variables for customising it.
In my experience the Chinese very much think this as well. Though it can be framed in a more derogatory way as "derivative" or "they just copied us"
I'd argue its difficult to find major aspects of Japanese culture that don't trace back to ancient China (maybe the language, eating raw food and sumo)
Sushi is exceedingly modern. It's "derived" from a fish preservation method... which relies on salting and fermenting, so not really "raw" (more like sauerkraut than shredded cabbage).
I had no idea! Very interesting. Even though it's so central to people's regional identity and general culture, a lot of Chinese food also has surprisingly recent origins. It's especially surprising b/c people generally are quite orthodox about their cooking and are rarely "experimental" (as in the west) - like the high brow seriousness surrounding sushi with it's standards and traditions. So it gives it a sense of historical gravity that's not actually there
I think the core thesis - that videos aren't the full package - makes a lot of sense. But I don't see why Khanmigo couldn't in theory fill in some of the other pieces.
I'm reminded o A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age - and how LLMs haven't been able to achieve anything similar. With the correct supervising AI agents that have their own goals - I don't see why you couldn't have an LLM try to motivate you, or gamify education tailored to your interests and targeted at the areas you are struggling with. Somehow weaving in their own education videos seems way too difficult though - it feels like it should be an entirely different thing
Maybe Khanmigo just kinda sucks? Having a ton of funding doesn't mean its the best possible solution. I've never used it, so it's hard for me to judge.
