Wow that is a great side-project, and a great README to boot. I've been meaning on working through Nand to Tetris after playing around some with Ben Eater's 6502 Computer (https://eater.net/)
A few nand2tetris fanatics have actually done this! And by a few, I mean quite a lot of people. Here's one such hardware project of nand2tetris: https://gitlab.com/x653/nand2tetris-fpga/
I kind of want something midway between the FPGA version and the all-transistor version, something that just uses 7400 series chips (or, presumably there’s a 26-pin equivalent with 6 gates instead of three). Heck, I think even something that goes ahead and uses the full panoply of basic logic chips available could be kind of cool to see.
It's been a few years since I studied it (I even built the clock module, registers and the ALU), but from what I remember the biggest departing point from what you want is that the control logic (from instruction decoding to deciding which sub-units to activate for each instruction) is done with an EEPROM instead of individual logic gates, as described here: https://eater.net/8bit/control
Very curious how governments will approach taxing these as gas tax revenues shrink. I know in some places your registration is higher but after talking with a coworker who pays more to register his EV, he admits it's negligible compared to the amount he'd pay in gas taxes with an ICE---just not an "invisible" tax like gas is. Doesn't seem as clean (ha) as Fed gas taxes, state, etc. Federal level car registration sounds a bit nightmarish, though I guess a registry is probably already being managed given the EV tax credits. Anyway, just thoughts.
I work in the industry and ad blockers are not a significant concern. It's a cat and mouse game for sure, but the vast vast majority of traffic is doing nothing to block ads.
I guess an immeasurable userbase's potential spend is hard to measure against total realized ad spend, but in my corner of the world traffic, users, and revenue are only increasing YoY.
Interesting, could be my particular market. I work mostly in the video space, not display. I imagine the media matters too--I'm involved with higher quality media owners.
Can you explain why YouTube ads seem so scammy and low quality? Or why I can watch two hours of Peacock and see the same car insurance commercial 10 times for the company I already use for my car insurance?
These are two examples of an unhealthy industry that, as you say, still seems content to burn money.
YouTube I am not so sure, I have a feeling it has to do with how little sway the content owners have in the ads that play on their videos. If you are a big channel you may have enough of an audience that more traditional brands would like to reach but for most I imagine you take what you can get. Though I really am not sure how YouTube does things--they are one of the "walled gardens."
The same commercial 10 times in a row is an awful experience and most media owners try to avoid it, but depending on the content it could be the only ad bidding against you as a viewer. Generally there are frequency limits in place to avoid this from happening. On more mature platforms this tends to be the case. Sometimes it can't be avoided due to glitches, poor ad tech stack integrations, or greed, the owners would rather prioritize the cash over UX.
It's impressive the amount of effort the Runescape community puts into these projects. It's amazing how many people have abandoned the game at one point in youth, yet come back and contribute as an adult. It makes me wonder what current games will still exist in 20+ years.
I've never played another game like runescape. It's pretty insane.
1. Tons of free content. I didn't get a membership for a long time. When I did it was something like 5 dollars a month, which I could scrape up as a kid.
2. Massive world. You could wander around for hours and find new stuff. Even just little things like some cool empty building, all of it was so fun to explore. Staying up late and exploring the wild with a friend was legitimately thrilling - and horrifying when you'd see a little yellow dot show up on the minimap.
3. Tons of quests and content, new content came out all the time.
Whoever pushed RS3 greatly misunderstood all of this. Graphics improvements were appreciated but not super necessary - otherwise, the game was basically ruined by having tons of random shit and an extremely cluttered UI. Really bad mobile game vibes.
I played against a year or two ago, just for a week or two, and it was still super fun. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a time sink, and I just can't spend time on it anymore. But it was a hell of a lot of fun.
RS3 is terrible, but they released "Old School RuneScape" (OSRS) which is a wonderful re-release of the old RS2 '07 version. They still update it regularly with new content!
I got back into it a year ago and it's nostalgic and fun - but yes, definitely a time-sink. I'll often have it in a spare window though doing some AFK skill such as fishing or woodcutting - helps keep me sane when I need to do some more mundane work tasks, lol.
Yeah didnt have a lot of money growing up but runescape ran fine/well IN BROWSER on our old terrible computer on rural wifi. Brother and I were also able to $5 a month together for members.
We probably would have played WoW if we could afford it and our computer could run it but for a lot of folks like us that just want realistic.
Right. We were running it on the lowest settings possible. Pretty blobby haha. But the great part about RS at the time was even at high graphic settings its wasnt that much better.
the wilderness was truly thrilling, PKing eventually became the main draw of the game to me. I will never, ever forget waking up one day to learn that Jagex had essentially removed the wilderness and PvP mechanics to combat Real World Trading. PVP was dead and I was legitimately depressed.
Honestly I come back every 2 years for about a month and then realize I'm spending hours cutting virtual trees and leave again. But for that month... man it's so much fun & nostalgic!
I always come back to runescape every couple years and the things i do in game speaks volumes to my mindset.
Back when i first started playing I never really did much of anything really... explored around, tried quests and never thought of looking up a guide, talked to alot of people standing in the bank, played alot of minigames etc. etc.
Years go by and I come back and i was hooked on efficiency. What wierd methods were there for getting insane xp per hour like sitting in lunar island, cannoning the trolls, while woodcutting the trees and high alching the logs.
skip to my early 20's when i first started programming for my day job and i would come home and write runescape bots for all sorts of stuff. One of my favorites that i wrote would have around 20 bots with gmauls sit in multi-wildy and hive mind spec poor souls who walked by.
I haven't touched RS in years, but funnily enough last weekend I found out the OS buddy and the runescape Wiki post grand exchange data. Was spending some time learning rust and decided to build a grand exchange analysis tool that looked across a number of factors (Volume, stability, beta) to determine the best items to flip.
Don't really want to post it on github cause it'd probably fuck with the economy but if anyones interested, hit me up at rhoades.lorenzo@gmail.com
You could put it as a SaaS API or behind a paywall as a web app - you genuinely could get paying users and wouldn’t have to break the economy while you do it!
Cool, interesting bit about how it actually simulated the flight characteristics that I didn't know before:
> To match the descent rate and drag profile of the real Shuttle at 37,000 feet (11,300 m), the main landing gear of the C-11A was lowered (the nose gear stayed retracted due to wind load constraints) and engine thrust was reversed. Its flaps could deflect upwards to decrease lift as well as downwards to increase lift.
In my experience noncompetes aren't enforced, unless you are very high up in the company and even then C-level folks usually get nice incentives to stay away from their competitors.
