> Tempest AI is a reinforcement learning system that learns to play Atari's Tempest (1981) by watching the game run inside the MAME arcade emulator. A Lua script reads the game's memory every frame, a Python application trains a neural network on the GPU, and the network's decisions are fed back to the game controls — all in real time, at thousands of frames per second.
> This README explains the architecture for programmers who may not be deep-learning specialists. No prior RL knowledge is assumed.
It's really quite easy to keep your fingers on the home row and avoid bending your wrists. I've done it for decades without any wrist problems.
It's even easier than the bent wrist position. Take a look at your hands. What is the shortest finger? Your pinky.
The straight wrist position lets you put your pinkies on the home row without the unnatural stretching that the bent wrist requires.
Try it: Keep your wrists straight and start by placing your index fingers and pinkies on the home row. Then let your middle and ring fingers settle into place.
You may notice that your middle and ring fingers arch higher than the index fingers and pinkies. That's fine!
Then start typing. If you're used to the bent wrists, the keys above and below the home row may not be where your muscle memory is used to. Keep at for a while and your fingers will re-learn where the keys are. Just don't let yourself slip back into the bent wrist position, and you will be back up to speed in no time.
Here's a comment from years ago with some crude ASCII art illustrating the difference:
Lately I've been fascinated by Yakutsk, the coldest large city on Earth.
About 350,000 people live there, and winter temperatures can drop to –64°C (−83°F).
And regardless of the temperature or time of year, they have shopping malls, restaurants, and everything else you might expect to find in any big city.
The outdoor market in that 24 hours video really got me. These women are just out here, selling very, very frozen fish, for hours at a time. Like... they didn't want to move that market inside?
Last year a company reached out to me about an interesting job on their Developer Experience team. What the company is building is super interesting, and DevEx is something I love and am good at.
In our second conversation, the hiring manager mentioned that they all work ten hours a day, five days a week, in the office. I guess you could call it a 975 schedule.
I don't think of myself as "old", but that kind of in-office schedule sounded grueling. So I declined continuing with further interviews.
A 996 schedule sounds like a great way to say, "older developers need not apply."
I'll second this. An external recruiter was under the (incorrect) impression that we are a 996 company. We found out because she said that no senior people she talked to were willing to work those hours.
Ultimately you can make a lot of short-term progress with 23-year-olds who are willing to live 5 minutes away from the office, have no life outside of work, and work 72 hour weeks. But you also end up with a product that was built by people who have no idea what they're doing.
> Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them.
My late wife had a safe deposit box in the Almaden Valley (San Jose) branch of US Bank. Her key to the box was nowhere to be found. So I had to get the box drilled open.
This would normally require a hefty fee. But the branch was moving to a new location, so they invited customers to make an appointment to show up a Saturday with proper ID for a lock drilling party.
I showed my ID and the death certificate, and we went into the safe to have the lock drilled.
But there was no real drilling involved. The locksmith had a little handheld gadget that she pushed into the lock, gave it a little twist, and the door came right open.
The ironic part? All that was in there were a few pieces of costume jewelry, worth maybe $50 in total.
She was paying more than that per year for the box rental, and if I'd had to pay for the "drilling" it would probably be more than that.
Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.
They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
I got an HR meeting a couple of years back where they selected me to be laid off because I wasn't closing as many tickets off as the rest of the team. Every single ticket had been through another engineer first and they had failed to resolve it.
I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.
I knew a person like you, two decades ago, in a laptop repair facility (my boss).
He was hired full-time (at like 4x my hourly rate) simply because he was the last person working there familiar with how the DOS-only headless terminals were installed (simple, but vital infrastructure). I didn't even understand what he was doing, but knew if I learned it I would have a lifetime solid-six-figure tech support job (two decades ago).
Bossman mostly just sat around and played WoW (seriously, half his hours "on the clock," waiting for next disaster)... but whenever a smug new vendor came in pedaling latest & greatest... he was often the saver of many times his salary. Nobody really liked him (I did — we'd smoke weed together and attend irregular heavy metal shows), but everybody knew he was important technically (e.g. no purchase orders could go through without his machine upkeep — multimillion dollar budgets).
People would literally turn away from him in the hallways so-as to not attract his comicbookguy inquisitions — particularly if you were a network troublemaker / idiot.
I miss his expertise / guidance / wisdom. Favorite bossman ever.
so they kept you aroumd then, eh? sounds like someone in HR with half a brain actually looked at the cost per ticket. those type of escalation tickets are ~3x more costly to resolve than non escalations. sounds like the total $$ per day of your tickets was higher than all your teammates.
Great story, and I feel it! A lot of companies, when they hire a senior person, say they want you to be a "force multiplier" but when you actually go and multiply your team's force, they turn around and say "bbbbuut, wait--your individual performance...."
This is why data driven decision making is a trap. Even if the data is correct, which it's usually not, its still not complete just by definition. It's instinctually a dumbed down, distilled, and one-dimensional view of the real world, of meat space, and you gotta treat it like that.
Here's what is scary. I have been looking at many job descriptions for a Developer Experience Engineer or similar positions. About half of them ask for experience with automated tools to measure developer productivity!
It is sad when the people who are in charge can't recognize such an important role. I'm so sorry this happened to you, and if you can, keep mentoring. At a time when juniors are struggling more than in the past you could be the one to really help.
The #1 skill good devs need to develop is self-marketing. Would that all managers could recognize talent by output alone but alas we all know that's not the case.
Technologies: Python, Ruby, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Flask, SQL, PostGIS, Shapely, Unity, Unreal Engine, multiple assembly/machine languages, Windows user code and kernel drivers, Google Maps and other map APIs, geographic and airspace data
Hi, I'm Michael Geary. I've programmed in many languages and environments over the years. Some of my current interests are:
• Developer experience. I love helping my fellow developers solve problems, and building tools to make their jobs easier and more enjoyable.
• Aviation and geographic data. For example, airspace and obstacle data importers for Wing; election results and voter information maps for Google; many interactive maps for other companies.
• Hardware interfacing. In a way, I am a "full stack" developer, but my stack may involve a front end to a piece of hardware rather than the cloud. I first got into programming via ham radio, so RF hardware remains an interest.
• Designing and building APIs. Too often an API is designed by exposing the internals of whatever system provides the API. My philosophy is the opposite: start with the apps. I like to build a series of sample apps before starting on the API. This way I can imagine what API will make those apps and others like them easy to build.
• Talk with users! I don't like to sit in a back room cranking out code. I want to make sure it's the right code for what my users need, and that it's easy to maintain and improve as we learn more about what they want.
> Unfortunately, this might become something like the em-dash—where artists start tweaking their work to look less like the AI’s that are copying them.
So true! (And yes—I see what you did there.)
It's even happening to photos now. A few months ago I posted a "Bot alert!" on Nextdoor warning people about the latest scambot.
One person replied "It's funny to see a bot reporting a bot."
I asked how they discovered I was a bot.
"It's your profile photo. The facial expression is too good, and the smoothness of the background is too perfect. Has to be AI."
For the curious, it's the same photo as on my LinkedIn:
What they didn't know was how I took that selfie. I set up my Micro Four Thirds camera on a tripod in the front yard, with the world's best portrait lens: the Olympus 75mm f/1.8. I stood some 10-15 feet from it (this lens is equivalent to a 150mm lens on a full frame camera, i.e. a moderate telephoto) and used the remote control to take a few dozen shots as I let my face relax into various expressions.
I picked out 4-5 favorites and asked a friend about them. She said "This one. It has gravitas."
I don't even think it's that great a photo. But I suppose the "gravitas" makes it look like AI.
For a photo that really shows off what that 75mm lens can do, check out this one of our late dog Brownie, titled Pumpkin Brownie:
> Tempest AI is a reinforcement learning system that learns to play Atari's Tempest (1981) by watching the game run inside the MAME arcade emulator. A Lua script reads the game's memory every frame, a Python application trains a neural network on the GPU, and the network's decisions are fed back to the game controls — all in real time, at thousands of frames per second.
> This README explains the architecture for programmers who may not be deep-learning specialists. No prior RL knowledge is assumed.
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