
Five Year Mission - guiambros
http://simblob.blogspot.com/2016/12/five-year-mission.html
======
rl3
This is incredible work. Bret Victor's as well.

Somehow I'd never seen Amit's work before, and Bret's only very
recently—despite being inadvertently bitten by the same bug as both of them a
couple years back. Granted, a conservative estimate puts either of them as
being about five hundred times more productive than myself.

Bret's work in particular is humbling. The "explorable explanations" concept
was something I'd given a lot of thought to, and it turns out Bret had
dedicated an entire article to elucidating it back in 2011, years prior.

Perhaps the greatest irony of being obsessed with accelerated learning is that
while you're trying to build the tools or technology to enable it, you find
yourself wanting the very thing you're building. _e.g._ "I could build my
magic learning computer much more quickly if only I had a magic learning
computer!" While this is frustrating, it at least serves as constant
validation, as you try to force yourself to pay attention to some dry, overly-
verbose reference on a particular subject.

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bagrow
This guy's stuff is phenomenal. I regularly consulted his hexagonal grid guide
when doing certain simulations. Hope he doesn't give up completely.

~~~
the_af
Amit is indeed phenomenal. It seems like I've been reading his stuff since
forever. To me he's one of the guys who made the internet interesting and
useful. And it seems to me that everyone at least mildly interested in
creating games must have read his hexagonal grid articles!

~~~
dublinclontarf
I used it for a GPS coordinates game grid.

Couldn't have done it in the timespan available otherwise.

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forrestthewoods
In confused. Is the blog Amit's full-time job? I thought Red Blob Games
shipped games and this was something they did on the side.

I love the blog. I love every time a new post comes out. But this reads as of
2016 was a total failure where nothing was produced and no goals achieved.

How did Amit live over the past 5 years? Did he have no income? Did he do non-
developer work making Red Blob Games just a part time endeavor?

I'm confused. :(

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obstinate
This stuff is very impressive, but why is there nothing in here about revenue?
I would be really worried if I spent five years on something(s) that didn't
significantly improve my financial security. I'm sure not everyone shares my
priorities, but I'd guess this one is fairly common. Maybe this individual is
already set on that front and I'm simply not aware of the context, but his
concerns about the stability of the gaming market suggest that this is not the
case.

~~~
dnr
Amit was a very very early employee at Google.

~~~
rl3
Do you have any sources for this?

[http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/](http://www-cs-
students.stanford.edu/~amitp/)

There's no mention of Google at all there. While the seventh employee at
Google was indeed someone named Amit Patel, I'm having a very hard time
linking the identities together.

~~~
rl3
Update: I wasn't able to associate any online identity information with the
Amit Patel that was Google employee #7. Best I could find was references to a
venture a few years back called Sunfire. Pretty sure he isn't the Amit Patel
of Red Blob Games and Stanford fame. The latter probably threw off a lot of
people, since Stanford CS and Google often go hand-in-hand.

There's even another Amit Patel that currently works at Google, but he's a
supply chain guy.

As another thread confirms, it must be a quite common name:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13319232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13319232)

~~~
dnr
Can I email you instead of posting publicly?

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mathattack
Keep it up, and get a new mission! :-)

