The screen knows what color it displays at all times. It knows this because it knows what it doesn't. By subtracting what it does from what it doesn’t, or what it doesn’t from what it does (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The controller board uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the display from a state where it does not display black to a state where it does, and arriving at a state where it displays black, it now doesn't display anything.
Each of the pixels is actually a little shining eye which watches your every move. When the pixel’s eyelid closes, that pixel turns black. That’s why they call it putting a display “to sleep.”
I like your explanation, but to be fair, it depends.
Some displays are implemented with dual-eyelid technology for the blackest of blacks. Naturally, like all genius engineering, we see this in nature: cats.
It depends afaict. OLED screens have a per-pixel light, and they turn off pixels to make black. LCDs have a single large backlight and pixels that the light shines through and they can change color (but not turn off) so in that case they turn as opaque as possible, but don't completely block the light.
Love the use of Playwright for the contest intel...I am currently using Playwright to redo some prior scraping projects and seeing real world examples such as these is a big help.
You attack the problem like blackjack card-counter would. You assess the rules, make mathematical odds projections when possible and logical ones when not, and keep a keen eye on what you are up against as to judge how to best attack the money.
Thanks for the smart write-up...its been a big inspiration for me.
ohhh I love your use of UNION to create a polymorphic-type ENTITY data structure. Nice work and design.
I still love futzing around in C...It was the original langauge I learned and God did I struggle with it for years. Like the OP mentioned, C is awesome because its such a concise language but you can go as deep as you like with it.
Thanks for all your efforts and the writeup...the game has a throwback Commander Keen-type vibe to it and I loved that franchise for a minute back in Carmack's pre-3D days.
You wouldn't believe the amount of crap I take whenever I introduce very basic version control at the various 3 to 6 man shops I find work at these days.
I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.
> I'm 100% sure that once I left that the devs went back to remote server crash and burn FTP development...they couldn't be bothered with the "hassle" and unneeded headaches of git.
Have you considered introducing Mercurial or even Subversion?
While Git may be a kind of an industry 'standard', if you're starting from zero, some of its concepts may be a bit mind-bending for folks, and it has often been commented that Hg seems to have a more beginner-friendly interface.
And if branching isn't going to be used (a large strength of git/hg), then Subversion may have an even simpler mental model (svn of course does branching, but the others are more optimized for it).
If folks are doing FTP-push deployment, then moving to 'just' SVN-push (commit) deployment can be an improvement.
There was a new hire who was told to make a small change in a piece of server software, found the repo, read the docs, made the change, ran it in testing, and pushed to prod. Cue the 'senior engineer' screaming bloody blue murder because he'd been directly monkeypatching the servers for 3 years with no vc and no backups.
This could have been written and 2014 and 2004 (hi, it's me). There will always be people who don't use it and others who won't remember a time when they hadn't used it :P
Hello, fellow old person. I was just remembering PVCS (Polytron Version Control System) since it was the first I worked with back in the 80s. Now I see that it's still out there, with the latest release in 2021. Which is insane.
No...the REAL wildest part of this is that I am old enough to have sat in a Radio Shack window display and using a TRS-80 and TANDY-BASIC I believe it was (?), and actually saved and loaded my attempts at writing games using a off-the-shelf Radio Shack cassette drive and a funky interface cord
OMG the crazy headaches that setup gave me...of course if you didn't actually press PLAY on the unit at the right moment after you typed LOAD in BASIC, the thing would hang...and to be honest...it loaded so slow that it often seemed like it hung when it didnt, thereby AT LEAST quadrupling the fun (not).
One thing good did come of it...I never once cursed at 5 1/4 floppies as they were a godsend compared to the cassette drive days
...and while your at it, get THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!
Same here, though with a TI-99/4A. I never had a drive on that thing, so it was always on tape, complete with handwritten odometer counts on the insert card for reference.
I started learning python about 6 months ago and this game is absolutely the most perfect codebase/project i've seen to help me "level-up" my coding game within this particular language, plus the game is an absolute gem so thank you from a 60yo out-of-work developer.
I have been looking for some sort of project to help pass the days and scratch my just build something dummy!-itch that had developed now that no one will hire me and I can work on anything that floats my boat.
This looks just perfect as far as 1] how cool the final output is 2] how complex the code is and 3] potential access to the original dev (well, we will see won't we? lol).
I already have a couple of ideas for some PICO-8 level games so I'm really excited about getting started...thank you very much for posting this!
With all the overt and hidden biases that us flawed humans live with daily, the idea that you will be able to pick really skilled devs consistently is laughable unless your doing some sort of blind interviews like symphony orchestras do nowadays.
It's so blatantly obvious that interviewers are basically trying to hire themselves, and will almost always select candidates whom they share the most personality traits with.
Also, I see the hiring process as similar to wanting to be a politician ie anyone who really wants to be one and is just really good at it should never be given the job.
The people who impress you the most almost surely have simply put a ton more effort into gaming the process with long leetcode sessions, live interview practices, and other bullshit tricks to convince you that they are the best person to hire.
With so much as stake, why wouldn't young devs spend tons of time working on interviewing skills and not really giving a damn about developing the real skills needed to be a goto resource at Big Software?
It's very much like taking steroids in professional sports...well no shit your taking PEDs when your career paths are either making generational wealth fucking with a ball or working selling Jordans at the local shoe store.
