Skyrim rendered in text - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@filiph/skyrim-rendered-in-text-1899548ab2c4 <comment><USER3> Perhaps the next project can be rendering Medium.com as text, so I can read it on mobile. As it is, when I zoom in, random parts of the page expand on top of the text for what can only be lazy/incompetent web developer reasons since even the large font and loads of whitespace fetishists would have a hard time justifying that.

<comment><USER4> I know your pain.. But are you talking about the Medium App? Or just viewed with a mobile browser?

<comment><USER5> You can zoom in app?

<comment><USER4> For images, yes. Don't think that you can zoom the text. At least I've not seen it yet. (Android App)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The game itself is here: [https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/](https://egamebook.com/vermin/v/latest/)

I just played a round while I was on the train - it's _really_ good! Not only the play, but even the presentation of "loading" the next part of the game below the current text, as if it were any other book, is perfect for playing on mobile.

I think this could really open up a whole new genre. Personally, I'd love to have a variant of this that I could interact with through my (in-home- corporate-surveillance-microphone-product-of-choice). I love interactive fiction, adventure games and DnD, so this really presses a lot of buttons for me, and if I could play a game with my voice rather than listening to podcasts while working all day, I think that'd be the sweetest spot of all.

Excellent work, OP!

<comment><USER7> It sounds like what you are looking for is something like Steve Jackon's Sorcery series, but adapted for a computer. If so, you're in luck! It's available for Android[1] and iOS[2]. If you do like it, there's a few sequels as well.

Edit: I see StavrosK beat me to it by a few hours...

1: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkle.sorc...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkle.sorcery1&hl=en)

2: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sorcery/id627879091?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sorcery/id627879091?mt=8)

<comment><USER8> Sorcery is mentioned in the article. And I agree, it's an excellent game series.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh that kind of text!

First I thought it would be about rendering with ascii characters, like text mode quake

[http://web.archive.org/web/19990219125446/http://webpages.mr...](http://web.archive.org/web/19990219125446/http://webpages.mr.net:80/bobz/ttyquake/)

Too bad this gem is gone from the internet now, so that's an archive link :(

<comment><USER10> For yet another kind of action game in text see Doom, the Roguelike [1], which I've found thoroughly enjoyable.

[1] [https://drl.chaosforge.org/](https://drl.chaosforge.org/)

<comment><USER11> A long time ago I wanted to port Quake 3 to a MUD. Like literally play Longest Yard or another map.

        "You enter a room. xxxSniperKid82xxx is in the room holding a railgun."

$ "Equip rocket launcher."

        "You equip the rocket launcher."

        "xxxSniperKid82xxx approaches you with a buzzsaw glove."

$ "Fire rocket launcher at xxxSniperKid82xxx"

        "You fire the rocket launcher at xxxSniperKid82xxx. It misses. You take splash damage."

</comment></comment></comment><comment> le-mark _And during that project, I realized that text stories are fractal. Unlinke in videogames (which need a steady update method), in text we don't actually need to stick to a single level of abstraction._

Very cool, this is one of the most original things I've read about this year. The example he gives is different levels of commands and details during combat. Zelda 2 (I think) had a similar thing going from map view to side view for combat. But this is for text adventures. Mind blowing really.

<comment><USER12> Thanks! Author here.

I think quite a few videogames have different levels. For example, I remember an old 1990s game called Wargasm where you could both be the general and the soldier. It was a lot of fun.

Most videogames don't go there, though, because it's more straightforward to use the game at a single "level". Even if they do have multiple levels, though, I don't think they ever go with more than 2 or 3. That would be just too confusing.

In text, though, this is natural. Even in non-interactive books, you have things like "Conan wants revenge > Conan is on his way to Stygia > Conan meets cobras > Conan is being attacked by the King Cobra > King Cobra's attack goes above Conan's head > Conan thrusts sword upward".

<comment><USER13> Scope variance is actually really common in mobile games as well as RPGs and simulation. All of them share the same kind of design goal of bending time to fit a certain play session or inner/outer game loop length. More "immersive" games ignore the logistical problems of extreme detail and offer tools like time compression, but designing for accessibility bends things the other way, towards providing a spliced-up timeline where events don't have to happen in any particular order apart from one that builds up a sensible narrative.

Hence you have the existence of things like equipment screens that can be popped up mid-battle, pausing everything to let you think about how to divide up loot. And the energy model in mobile F2P, which doesn't make a lick of sense but enforces limited session length and progression. You can take this even further when you think about power up items in pretty much any game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt this game to read the text adventure out loud and allow visually impaired kids to play it. The author here has done tremendous work into the mechanics of a text-based game, and I think it would be a relatively small task to port it to an "audio-based" game.

Every year I volunteer at as event at the University of North Carolina CS department called Maze Day. Students build games, which blind and handicapped children come and play on certain day. I think the children that visit in this event would LOVE a game like this, if it became accessible.

<comment><USER15> Blind dev here and I played through it. Might need a touch up here and there but it's moderately accessible as-is. Text-based games are great for VI people.

<comment><USER12> Author here. I'm surprised (and very happy!) you were able to play through. I know accessibility is one thing I haven't given enough attention to.

If you have specific suggestions for improvement, I'm all ears.

I'm getting feedback that as the game grows, it'll need a map. Are there any best practices for map navigation for blind people?

<comment><USER16> Not an expert in visual impairments but this discussion made me curious. It seems like 'tactile drawings' is a related phrase/concept.

Here was a cool guide for using gimp and photoshop to produce them. [https://wiki.vcu.edu/display/texturepalettehapticslab/Develo...](https://wiki.vcu.edu/display/texturepalettehapticslab/Developing+Tactile+Diagrams+with+Electronic+Drawing+Programs+Using+a+Validated+Texture+Palette)

<comment><USER17> I had never thought of the need to remove perspective. Interesting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _...procedural content is not for "lazy developers". It's not there to free you from creating content. It's there to let content react to the player. You still need a lot of it._

This is a very good lesson for game developers. Too many games rely on procedurally generated content, which can be boring to a player if it seems random instead of being a result of some interaction (see _No Man 's Sky_).

<comment><USER19> I really enjoy NMS but many aspects are boring. The generated landscapes are predicable, why is the climate on every planet uniform across the whole planet?

<comment><USER20> NMS is an example of bad procedural generation. Cellular automata, by nature, is a slow[1] algorithm, so it's hard to run automatas for every single planet you create. It's certainly possible, but as we've seen from NMS it's not straightforward to implement.

[1] Actually you can heavily optimize cellular automata for cache, but a K dimensional automata will be in O(N^(K+1)) so assuming a 2D world, it's O(N^3). So, it's not scalable. If you look at procedural world generations in big scale, like dwarffortress, you'll see that they're one time operations that take a very long time. NMS is tricky, since you need to keep doing this multiple times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I first thought the author used real-time CNN + RNN to generate descriptions of the rendered Skyrim scene and showing only that one to the player.

<comment><USER22> Exactly what I was thinking, which sounds like an interesting project in itself.

<comment><USER23> Similar, but I thought maybe they had just pulled the dialogue trees, locations, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There are still several hundred once prominent MMOs called MUDs that came about in the 1980s and are all text based. They deal with these sorts of problems in very diverse and creative ways. If you've never played one, I might suggest Duris, Land of Bloodlust.

It's old-school, beautiful, huge world and incredibly delicate, strategic and fun combat. It's a race wars, so RvR style full player killing and full player looting. Rough game :p but makes modern MMOs look like Fisher Price editions.

<comment><USER12> Author of the article (and the game) here. I didn't mention MUDs because I didn't want to scare away people with more concepts, but of course they are a huge part of what I consider interactive fiction.

I'm not sure if any MUD worked with something I'd call a "fractal story", though. The combat I remember was fun but it was always "you miss X. X hits you." I didn't play all MUDs, of course, so I'd love to know if there are any examples from that era.

<comment><USER25> I think most MUDs definitely fall under what you described as "kill bandit," (as do many graphical MMOs), but I do recall a few exceptions. I remember God Wars II, for example, as a game that had more complex and interactive combat: [http://www.godwars2.org](http://www.godwars2.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Good text cannot have too much repetition. Repetitive text is boring. Try > writing up everything that happens in the first five minutes of some Super > Mario gameplay with prose that is fun to read. It's impossible.

This is true. But I still smile when I think of the phrase: _" The Blue Yeek/Kobold/it/<other> dies in a fit of agony."_ (Originally encountered in Moria, now to be found in Moria/umoria/Angband).

Mildly relevant: [https://thebutterfly.deviantart.com/art/Moria-Filthy- Street-...](https://thebutterfly.deviantart.com/art/Moria-Filthy-Street- Urchin-109136974)

Relevant: apt install moria

[https://github.com/dungeons-of-moria/umoria](https://github.com/dungeons-of- moria/umoria)

(which actually looks rather interesting as they claim having ported the code forward and tidied up quite a bit)

[ed: I think there's another option for repetition: automatic success after a certain number of successes - similar to "auto-haggling" in shops in Moria - once you've haggled a certain number of times with a certain shop keeper, the game will "fast-forward" to settling the transaction without any interaction. This gives flavour (haggling in stores) _and_ avoids (too much) grinding (forcing the player to go through routine, static interactions)).

In the context of this post, it'd mean a low-level/young character would go through detailed actions to trap a rabbit, then automatically be able to trap a rabbit, but fight with an orc, then be able to "kill the orc", but need to detail the actions for fighting a _band_ of orcs, then struggle to kill a dragon, but being able to simply "take out the orc war band" (with a suitable description, based on the adapted play style, from the "micro-managed" fights: "You sneak around upwind of the band, and after setting out a dozen arrows in front of you - take rapid aim and let fly a precise volley and the orcs. The last warrior realize their scout has fallen to your first arrow, just as your last pierces his left throat - and all is quiet except for the wet death rattle of the final fallen." Or something equivalent involving a fireball or charge and sword dance.]

</comment><comment><USER27> > It's easy to come up with "You hit orc for 15 HP". It's much harder to come > up with many versions of "your blade misses the orc".

Dwarf Fortress has _epic_ fight descriptions. Weapons getting stuck, severed body parts, grabbing said severed body parts and bashing the opponent with them... it does verge on too much detail though. There's also no concept of HP, deaths occur through e.g. bleeding out, organ failure, etc.

I don't think it's too much of a problem to be somewhat repetitive with the miss; if you're missing enough that the repetitiveness is getting to you, you're probably doing something wrong. You can also borrow from the pen and paper games and have critical misses with adverse effects -- overbalance, enemy counters, etc.

<comment><USER28> The digital version of Sorcery! has the coolest text descriptions of combat short of Dwarf Fortress.

You "fight" by committing a certain amount of regenerating energy each round. If you commit no energy, you're actively defending. Mechanically, there's no such thing as a miss in the system (although when you lose a round, sometimes it might be described as a miss). There are combat description pools explicitly handling cases where both combatants defend, where one attacks and the other defends, and when both attack but one overpowers the other. And the description pools are unique for every fight since of course a manticore and an assassin fight differently.

The descriptions also are modified by the health of the combatants. In a fight with a manticore, the descriptions progressively showed the manticore becoming fearful as I started damaging it, then limping and struggling to fight as it got closer to death. Even though there was no mechanical difference, the descriptions really sold it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is so much better than I expected. I thought it was yet another person who put libcaca in front of a game but this. THIS! This is awesome!

I used to love playing on the MOO and other MUDs and this brings me right back there. Excellent!

<comment><USER30> Agreed. I was really pleasantly surprised about how wonderful this was.

It brings me back to my years as a teen playing Graphical MUD's like The Realm Online, basically a text adventure with some wonderful pixel art and a point- and-click adventure interface UI. Made by Sierra in the late 90's, sold to Codemasters, ruined by Codemasters, and then re-sold to a private family instead of a development studio. The game slowly died thanks to a lack of even a SINGLE programmer...until recently:

If you've never played The Realm Online, I highly recommend looking into the newly formed private servers, there are two of them (Sacred Temple / MistWalkers ) with a ton of changes since the people who own it have long since abandoned the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Back in the 90s, we use to run text-based adventure games called MUDs (e.g, PennMUD, TinyMUD, Islandia). Funny how it's circling back.

<comment><USER32> Programming areas in a TinyMUD instance was my first experience with pseudo OOP as a 14 year old. Unfortunately my ambitions were larger than my practical knowledge at the time, but I was lucky to have some laid-back adult admins who indulged my interest and gave me a little corner of the world to develop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If anyone is interested in the _Sorcery!_ series mentioned in the article, I highly recommend them. It's like a _Choose Your Own Adventure_ , but with a highly polished board game feel. Once you finish one, you can bring your character over into the next in the series. The devs (Inkle) also were the ones who made _80 days_ , which won some amount of awards.

[https://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/](https://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/)

</comment><comment><USER34> "...an arrow slams into the ground less than an inch from your knee."

Nice touch there :)

<comment><USER35> Context for those who haven't played Skyrim: [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the- knee](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> _> But let's face it, combat is a big part of what makes Skyrim fun. So "kill bandit, kill archer" doesn't quite cut it._

I beg to differ.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3J8FYKZ52w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3J8FYKZ52w)

<comment><USER37> Yea I had to mod the fuck out of Skyrim to make the combat fun, and even then... eeeh

I actually enjoyed stealth/archer as long as I didn't go too deep into the stealth tree, making me literally undetectable.

Mage got fun when I found a hotkey mod. Combined with Apocalypse spells, I could switch through a bunch of fun spells really quickly. Kind of felt like playing an Elementalist in Guild Wars 2 when I got it right.

Sword and board... never fun lol. Just running around lopping people's heads off gets old fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is very impressive, and left me longing for more!

I'm not sure this is the direction you want to take, but I'll throw the idea in anyway. The format seems perfect to allow for user-made extensions:

\- Content creation requires lots of work, but the kind of work that many are able to pull of, unlike videogame-like artwork.

\- Being web-based, it should be possible to just _link_ to new content: no need for downloads, plugins, etc.

Combining these two, you could pull off a kind of "wikipedia-like" game. I'm envisioning a game where there is a "known world" (where you enter initially). This would be your content. At the edges, you can venture into the uncharted parts of the world (link to people-contributed content/worlds/adventures). These outward links could be randomized among user-submitted worlds. If some of those worlds becomes so good you want to officially sanction it, you can then announce it as "charted" and incorporate it to the known world, with a permanent non-random entry point.

In my head, this would be very good because it would let you focus on the mechanic possibilities (which you seem to enjoy the most), freeing you from the content creation task while still building interesting game(s).

</comment><comment><USER28> OP, check out the Fabled Lands gamebook series (there's a fan-made Java app which has the six books currently published of the planned 12-book series, which also nicely handles all the bookkeeping). It doesn't solve your "interesting combat" problem, but it is the only case I know of where traditional IF (paper books, no less!) has done a truly open world RPG.

You can for instance become a sailing merchant just by buying a boat and trading at the various ports. Or you can pursue various quests. I ended up being a street ruffian because I found a loop that involved me getting jumped in an alley and beating my attackers which was surprisingly lucrative and repeatable.

There are also some quests which actually change the state of the world (this is done in a book by having you write a word on your character sheet and then directing you to different sections depending on the words you have on your sheet).

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder could to do this backwards?

Create a system knows the setting/contexts etc of a text adventure game and renders a scene?

edit: perhaps authors could add other tags/meta the user would not see but would add to the description

<comment><USER40> I did some experimentation there - coded a turn based combat sistem and bolted on a real time combat. It's a magnitude easier than what proposed here, because you can code statefulness on the combat turns and that'll render quite fine and coherently. The only glitch that I had was at target switch (it's a 4x space themed coffee breaker) where you can see the ship smapping to the new target and that's it - but the nature if the turn sytem means I can easily code in a turn skip on target chane and tween the rotation.

but if you want a prime example, the dwarf fortress visualizers take that concept to an incredible heights.

<comment><USER41> Diablo started out as a turn-based game and to change it to real time it seems like they basically just made the turns advance automatically via a game state tick call (20 times a second or whatever) and tweaked how long actions took so it looked like the player and world were acting simultaneously.

[https://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/how-diablo-evolved- fr...](https://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/how-diablo-evolved-from-turn- based-to-real-time)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have long been puzzled by the "combat doesn't work in interactive fiction" conclusion that is common in the IF community.

Combat in Skyrim is of the "simulated presence in a cyberspace" form, but there are many successful video games with turn-based combat (ex. Hyperdimension Neptunia, Atelier Rorona, etc.) that could be mapped directly to a text-based interface.

</comment><comment><USER43> Back in the early 2000's there was this driver/library to output any graphics in ASCII instead of framebuffer or whatever.

A colleague had a Linux box at home with a TV Tuner PCI card. We would SSH from the University's lab and watch TV-on-ASCII-over-SSH to the amusement of the people around us.

Sounds so simple and silly today, but it was a fun way to learn back in the day :)

<comment><USER44> That would have been interesting, if a bit rehashy.

This is a guy blurfing at length about text game design. The "Skyrim" is just thrown in there as a callback to something recognizable but has almost zero to do with Bethesda's game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm actually excited to see how this project turns out. I used to play these little text RPGs on my dad's Blackberry, and this kind of reminds me of those. I'd love to see a full game of this.

</comment><comment><USER46> How important do you think illustrations are to this kind of text game? I would think omitting illustrations would free up a lot more time for expanding and improving the prose.

<comment><USER47> I kinda liked them, personally.

They were used sparingly, and only at clear "milestones", which made me take a step back instead of scrolling from action to action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Working on a very similar problem, although multiplayer. Really really cool to follow someone's trial and error at this level of detail, with thought process and everything.

Very excited for the "next generation" of Interactive Fiction games, and the actual game is very well polished in every regard. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER49> Already wondering if you could port a text game this procedurally sophisticated to a 1980s platform like Apple ][.

</comment><comment><USER50> When I clicked this article, I was expecting to see that someone had gotten Skyrim working with AAlib.

</comment><comment><USER51> I only saw screenshots but looks great! A Fallout version would be incredible.

</comment><comment><USER52> ... Why not just Dwarf Fortress?

</comment><comment><USER53> Its time to stop!

</comment><comment><USER54> How old is the author I wonder? Did he not play Wizardry or any other similar game back in the 80s/90s, which implemented exactly this kind of gameplay? Wizardry 7 had so much - good quality - text in it (probably enough to fill a book) that it significantly accelerated my English learning at the time as a non-native English speaker. And the fighting system was very similar to what the author arrived at in the end.

I for one would be very happy to see the return of this style of gaming - <USER2> haven't played computer games for so long, mostly because they are just all the same, 3D action and no substance. I would gladly read / interact with fantasy fiction like this though.

<comment><USER55> > I haven't played computer games for so long, mostly because they are just > all the same, 3D action and no substance

If that's your opinion of them then I don't think you've investigated them much, and are just jumping to conclusions.

<comment><USER56> I still play all the time and there's some truth to them all being the same. They get more and more polished on a UI level, and more realistic looking, but remain static mechanically.

For example, Skyrim doesn't do much mechanically that Ultima Underworld didn't. Ultima proper did all of that from a different perspective for a long while before that, too. The Witcher 3 is my absolute favorite RPG at least since Skyrim and probably supercedes it, but again, it's just super polished, it doesn't do much that's really new, that I haven't seen before in an RPG or other game. You pick speech options from dialogue trees, loot dead things, and fetch quest items, but you're in a cardboard world. The monsters just wait for you to come slaughter them, they're set-pieces whose purpose is to sit there until you arrive, then bite you. The world reacts largely in a single specific way: you win.

Actually, I thing modern RPGs have regressed, Ultima VI's keyword-based dialogue was better than our modern dialogue trees. You could speak in natural language about a variety of topics, some of which were hinted at by the NPC with highlighted words, and others you had to figure out for yourself. (you could just type "troll" or you could type "What can you tell me about the troll?" or "I have seen a troll, and need advice, can you help?", it was more fun and interactive)

I'm hyped for Underworld Ascendant, because just maybe they'll break some new ground for a change. "A living ecosystem", but with people who can (and have) backed up that claim. I don't see much else on the horizon -- the indies are our only hopes! AAA can't afford to lose now, so it's all cookie cutter sequels there, only the indies can afford the risk.

I think a huge, huge part of the problem is that games cost so much and carry so much risk now. Ultima Underworld got a full sequel _ELEVEN MONTHS LATER_. You could move faster and try more then, because art didn't cost so much, there was no motion capture, no voice acting, it was cheap to make a game. If a sequel flops now you can't just try again, you lost $75,000,000 dollars and are now bankrupt.

Anyway, here's a link to a _free_ , breathtakingly good book on the history of CRPGs from the 70s through today: [https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/](https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER57> > it doesn't do much that's really new, that I haven't seen before in an RPG > or other game.

You might like the game Prey. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2017_video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_\(2017_video_game\)) It does a few new things. Not too much, but has some original ideas. And the sci-fi story is quite good.

<comment><USER56> I will try it eventually and have heard good things, I'm just disappointed they didn't let Human Head finish it -- I really like their original 2006 Prey, and Rune when that was new, too.

Oh my. I just looked up Human Head on wikipedia, and while they got Prey taken off them, they're working on a Rune sequel. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Head_Studios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Head_Studios) My day has just been made.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Stark Nuclear Warning - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/07/14/a-stark-nuclear-warning/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Nuclear%20warning%20DAFs%20photography&utm_content=NYR%20Nuclear%20warning%20DAFs%20photography+CID_cdcb323379751927b97848003ede3e76&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=A%20Stark%20Nuclear%20Warning <comment><USER2> From Cuban crisis: "First, Perry writes, the Soviet ships approaching the blockade imposed by the US had submarine escorts that were armed with nuclear torpedoes. Because of the difficulty with communications, Moscow had authorized the submarine commanders to fire without further authorization. When an American destroyer tried to force a submarine to surface, both its captain and the political officer decided to fire a nuclear torpedo at the destroyer. A nuclear confrontation was avoided only because Vasili Arkhipov, the overall commander of the fleet, was also present on the submarine. He countermanded the order to launch, thereby preventing what might have started a nuclear war."

Another one of these 'almost nuclear' stories. There's only so many times humanity can roll the dice and come out clean. Scary stuff.

<comment><USER3> A nuclear torpedo to take out a destroyer? Seems like the proverbial swatting a fly with a sledgehammer? And what of the submarine? Torpedos are fairly close-range weapons, at least in those days. Would it have survived the blast?

<comment><USER4> I may be wrong here, but a surface detonation is unlikely to damage a submarine that is deep underwater. That is the reason why a fleet of nuclear submarines are the best nuclear deterrent: hard to take out since they can be anywhere undersea, mobile and ready to counterattack at a moments notice.

<comment><USER5> > hard to take out since they can be anywhere undersea, mobile and ready to > counterattack at a moments notice.

When I was working in that stuff, the usual point about the SSBNs (the US long range missile firing submarines) was that they were darned difficult to find. Also, it was standard to assume that they moved in some variation on Brownian motion so that, even if did get some data on their location, it was not very useful for extrapolation.

So, a major point about the design and operation of the SSBNs was that they be darned difficult to find -- via passive sonar, magnetic anomaly detection, active sonar, or anything else. Also, a big deployment of search resources that might be more able to find an SSBN would be regarded as _provocative_.

Then there was the point: If the Soviets did find a US SSBN, now what? If they track it for very long, then that is provocative. If they don't track it, then they will soon lose it again. If they sink it, then there are all the other US SSBNs ready to fire back.

So, the Soviets would have to find AND sink ALL the US SSBNs at the same time. Finding all of the SSBNs at the same time without being provocative was regarded as essentially impossible.

So, maybe somehow there could be a nuke war but limited to sea. Then could pick off each SSBN as it was found one at a time. Then how long would the SSBNs last? Once I was asked to answer that! So, I derived some math, wrote some software, submitted my results, and the next day my wife and I went for a vacation in Shenandoah! Later my work was sold to a leading US intel group. I could tell you which one, but then I'd have to ...!

Ah, the math wasn't either artificial intelligence or machine learning!

<comment><USER6> You do seem to have a distaste for the term machine learning.

It is applied math, anybody who claims otherwise could not be more wrong. It is applied probability theory and computer science with lot more focus on algorithms than is expected of a statistician, and yes without a fetish for asymptotic normality. Usually, but not always, with a stronger focus on prediction accuracy rather than on accuracy of parameter estimates. In that sense its closer to (non-parametric) decision theory than to run of the mill stats.

<comment><USER5> Yup. I got all that from Leo Breiman, not his earlier work as an "academic probabilist" but his later work in classification and regression trees (CART), random forests, etc.

Yup, if look carefully, in many common cases can do well on prediction accuracy even when parameter accuracy is not so good. E.g., can even do well on prediction accuracy when parameter accuracy is zilch, e.g., some, but not all, cases of _over fitting_.

You are right about the applied math: _Machine learning_ has a lot that is good and new, however the good is mostly not new and the new, not very good. E.g., I watched a Prof Ng lecture on the gradient descent unconstrained minimization involved in their fitting, and it seemed that either their minimization problem is awfully easy or Prof Ng didn't know much about the applied math of such minimization going way back.

So, machine learning stole a lot from some now quite classic applied math, assigned some new names, e.g., _learning_ and another anthropomorphic name they dreamed up for iteration step size, and claimed something new. That's called academic theft, plagiarism, or some such, right?

Then there's the hype. So, just from _machine learning_ , the pop culture press is extrapolating to the _Terminator_ movies. Absurd.

Then, bigger, there's the implicit assumption, if only from just playing with the words, that the main path to _smarter machines_ is _machine learning_. Well, if the effort is limited to Breiman's piecewise linear curve fitting, that path is absurdly limited. Much better for making machines _smarter_ , i.e., do more, work better, is just to start with lots of now classic pure/applied math, get out a clean sheet of paper, and derive what need for the problem at hand. As much as I like Breiman, both his early work and his last work, there're oceans more good work in applied math that is nothing like Breiman's last work, e.g., with high irony, his earlier work!

Uh, here's another case where it looks like a machine has _learned_ \-- stochastic optimal control. In some cases, it can look darned _smart_. Another place -- game theory, to be more specific, the von Neumann-Morgenstern work. Then the Nash generalization. But such things are far from the current _machine learning_.

<comment><USER6> As I have mentioned several times to you start with vapnik. That's where modern ml begins. Brieman is great but he got a few things wrong, for example he thought boosting and bagging are fundamentally the same, that is they are just variance minimization methods. In fact boosting us what gives random forest its power. BTW less well known trick, use random rotation not just random selection of features or datapoints. Their's lot more to ml than decision trees. One of its fundamental framework is convergence of empirical processes, which is essentially glivenko cantelli on steroids. Vapnik and Chervonenkis provided the first modern breakthrough result but a lot has happened since then.

I would say screw the hype just read what it is. I think your disdain for the name 'machine learning' is getting in your way.

I strongly disagree with your allegation of academic dishonesty though. Optimization has been a fundamental part of ml from the very start and with a strong overlap in the community. I am sure nemirovskii will ring a bell. In any case how can ml steal from applied math when it is applied math. The lingo differs here and there: estimating parameters become learning parameters etc.

Andrew NGO's course is not for you. Go directly to the books and then conference and journal papers.

Focus varies but info theory, stats, signal processing, approximation theory are pretty much the same thing, so are their open problems.

Btw you could not be more wrong about stochastic optimal control or repeated games being far from current ml. Oh and another major major tool in ml is geometry of function spaces. You are reading the wrong sources, probably the populist ones. Get to the real stuff given what i know of your taste in math i think you will enjoy it.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, I'll keep that.

"glivenko cantelli on steroids", good. Sounds like they actually did something.

Yes, I'm torqued by the new _learning_ labels on old bottles of pure/applied math, but that is not in my way.

> The lingo differs here and there: estimating parameters become learning > parameters etc.

Rubs my fur the wrong way.

If they have some stuff beyond borrowing from Breiman, okay.

What's "in my way" now is my startup: I've got the math derived and typed into TeX and the 80,000 lines of typing for the code, with the code running, intended for production, and in alpha test, so just for now I no longer have any pressing math problems to solve.

But, in time, I may return to my math and tweak it a little to try to get some variance reduction. Maybe some of the better _machine learning_ literature would help, or maybe I'll just derive it myself again.

 _Function space geometry_ is about where much of my core math is.

Thanks.

<comment><USER6> Heh! indeed, its all geometry :)

Happy to hear back from you. I am actually gladdened that your anomaly detection work is getting some interest on HN lately. Hope something comes out of it. I am now slowly coming to the conclusion that pushing better methods on an existing stack would be really hard. Too much friction, too much politics. Perhaps the way is to create your own better cloud of servers, but that's really big league stuff. Not sure I have the stomach for that.

Curious if you have given any thought to the choice of the metric space where you define your statistics. That might play an important role from what I have seen. There might be an interesting manifold story there.

Big spoilsports are non-stationarities and even bigger are those fat tails. If only everything had a moment generating function.

I see that you have been pointed to Abu-Mostafa he is definitely a good source. Not that Andrew Ng is unaware of the stuff, far from it, he is fighting a different battle: to make parts of ML a commodity.

If you have time then you can browse the proceedings of COLT (conference on learning theory) and ICML.

> or maybe I'll just derive it myself again.

You almost always have to derive it yourself anyway even after you have seen the derivation by somebody else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What concerns me the most about nuclear weapons is that the technical barriers to building them are getting lower all the time. They're currently within reach of despotic states of below average scientific capacity. All that's required is the will to defy the world (e.g. North Korea). Given how North Korea and Iraq have been treated lately, what despot _wouldn 't_ pursue nuclear weapons if he thought he could succeed in building them fast enough to avoid being invaded?

In the future, the barrier will be even lower. Nuclear weapons will likely fall within reach of motivated and capable terrorist movements such as ISIL, although I'd be more worried about organizations that haven't carved out territory that's easy to attack. Once that happens, things could get very ugly. There is no such thing as MAD with a distributed terrorist organization.

Missile defense systems offer no real answers. They don't work against state of the art missiles (such as Russia has), nor do they work against smuggled bombs or bombs built within the borders of their target nation. The kind of surveillance that would be required to adequately secure a nation against such weapons is the stuff Orwell never even dreamed of. It would require utterly pervasive, invasive, and constant surveillance.

<comment><USER8> Conventional weapons are destructive enough, not to mention chemical and bio agents. What concerns me is the most is the last part of your comment.

>The kind of surveillance that would be required to adequately secure a nation against such weapons is the stuff Orwell never even dreamed of. It would require utterly pervasive, invasive, and constant surveillance.

1\. AFAIK mass surveillance is not very effective in preventing bad actors (e.g. terrorist communicating via sms) yet it is promoted so much we are ready to accept that reasoning right away.

2\. It is a symptomatic treatment, however we can go much further in prevention and deescalation to swing those actors a better way. I don't think certain people are born evil.

<comment><USER9> "Conventional weapons are destructive enough"

No, they really aren't. Israel has been peppered with hundreds of rockets on the time frame of days or weeks, and at the national scale, they were basically an inconvenience. One nuke, by contrast, can take out an entire city. North Korea currently has at best the capacity to really badly hurt South Korea before they were rendered militarily ineffective, and even then, for all the death and destruction they could cause, most of Seoul would still be there afterwards. If they have nukes, though, most of Seoul could be destroyed in one fell swoop. Or most of anything they can reach, which also includes an awful lot of China.

It turns out that if you plot the destructive radius of even very large nuclear bombs, many cities are actually substantially larger than just one. But, still, between fallout concerns and the fact that there is now a total hole in your city's infrastructure, one nuke is still probably enough to kill an entire city, if not necessarily every person in it. There aren't any conventional weapons we can say that about.

There also aren't any chemical weapons we can say that about. Their effects are very mean and very nasty and very hideous, but they're also a great deal more limited than the common conception of them. For instance, one of the characteristics that makes mustard gas appealing is that it's heavier than air, which means that it tends to collect in below-ground-level fortifications, forcing the enemy out. This same characteristic renders it useless for destroying a city.

As for biological weapons, well, we do tend to speak of them in the same breath as nuclear weapons. However, their big problem is that it's difficult to create a really effective one that is also guaranteed not to kill the user. You've basically got the choice of things like smallpox, which are effective and contagious but you won't be able to stop hitting you (if nothing else, your enemy may well consider medieval warfare a source of inspiration and just start dropping infected bodies on you), or you have things like anthrax which are effective, but being not particularly contagious means that it's actually quite difficult to get them into people at scale.

Even now, nukes are a problem.

<comment><USER8> To my knowledge rockets fired at Israel are very basic, while Israel has the Iron Dome in place, thus it is a bit of cherry picking. Conventional bombs can surely destroy cities. Nevertheless, an argument can be made nuclear bombs are more cost effective, I don't know about that.

Chemical weapons are certainly WMDs and very potent, as seen in the Syria attacks.

There are many ways you can hurt your enemy, depending on one's goals. E.g. as far as I remember the central element of Mr. Robot is an attack on world economy, which might cause more disruption and suffering than killing civilians.

Reflecting back on history, we don't even have many nuclear incidents. On the other hand it shows if we are serious about hurting others we will find a way.

Also, just for thoughts, if we leave the western centric pov, every other nation could be concerned with the west having nuclear capabilities while they are denied.

<comment><USER10> > To my knowledge rockets fired at Israel are very basic, while Israel has the > Iron Dome in place, thus it is a bit of cherry picking.

My understanding is that most of the rockets fired at Israel are not loaded with explosives, and that most of the damage comes from whatever fuel is left when they impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Despite three major armed conflicts fought between nuclear powers by proxy, none thankfully have resulted in nuclear war. Deterrence works. What doesn't work, and a flaw that is growing exponentially with nuclear proliferation is failures in design, command and control. The incredible and incredibly frightening book "Command and Control" (see link at bottom), highlights several near catastrophic misses in the US nuclear arsenal. Now multiply by all nuclear states, the risks of accident are terrifying. The world would do well to open source safeguards so that even rogue states (eg. North Korea) can benefit from control and process that mitigate risk of unintended nuclear detonation.

[https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident- Ill...](https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident- Illusion/dp/0143125788)

<comment><USER12>
      > so that even rogue states can benefit

Dude, human factors like personality and mood quickly render safeguards moot, within the atmosphere of a despotic dictatorship.

Open source any amount of safety protocals, and pray that they get used, and you'll acquaint yourself with disappointment.

People who concoct nuclear programs are toying with suicide, and their level of interest in safety can be understood by their decision to weaponize such a thing to begin with.

Meanwhile, cap such a program with a lone psychotic emperor, prone to fits of cruel and unusual punishment, and see what he does on a bad day, as his body ages, and he grows crankier with every waking morning. Now surround him with an echo-chamber of eager-to-please, hawkish, testosterone-fueled military upstarts.

Sounds like a pretty cool video game plot.

<comment><USER11> Quite the opposite. Firstly, despotic regimes are by their nature control driven, one common characteristic of which is an inability to act without central directives from leadership. Iraq is a classic case. Despotic regimes persist for the purposes of preserving and enriching the despot, where even the intent to use nuclear arms in an age of deterrence is extremely counter- productive to that goal. North Korea, Russia and other nations demonstrate the futility of preventing proliferation. But there has been some success in educating fledgling nuclear states on safeguards (reportedly Pakistan). If you can't eliminate it, mitigate it as best you can and manage the risks.

<comment><USER12> I am dubious. Mostly, because preserving and enriching a despot means catering to their whims.

A despot's pet nuclear project is likely to have an authentic red button (provided in any variety of interfaces, telephone, mechanical lock and key, fingerprint authenticated, whatever). If one imagines themselves as a despot, the ego almost demands it.

Between the despot, The Button, and the operational weapons, there are many layers of human factors. Maybe the red button is a placebo, and the underlings, being less suicidal than their singular leader, would never permit the button to perform its dreaded task, but is that assured?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a review of the book "My Journey at the Nuclear Brink", by William Perry, US Secretary of Defense in the the Clinton administration. The reviewer is Jerry Brown, Governor of California.

<comment><USER14> The gushing flattery of Perry in this review is gross.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. It actually forced me out three paragraphs in. I do now realise how ineffectual, grating even, fawning deference to authority has become, to me at least.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand this sentiment at all. It seems like Perry's advice is most rational and reasonable and seems to be ignored by most of the Establishment and the general Public.

I'm all against hero worship, but giving credit where credit is due - to a man who has lived through WW2 right up to the end of the cold war, seems reasonable.

<comment><USER15> You misunderstand. My beef is not with Perry. It's with the author's writing style. I'm not going to forgive poor writing because I happen to agree with the writer. Its not what he is saying, its how its being said.

<comment><USER16> Meh. Writing isn't his day job, and it's really not all that badly written. There are many brilliant people out there who aren't brilliant writers, who are worth listening to none the less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree that the nuclear threat may be bigger today than in cold war times. More nations now have nuclear weapons and the possibility that one will be used one day is > 0.

When I grew up in Germany in the 80s, there was a real sense that nuclear war could start any time. Unfortunately, we haven't used the short widow of opportunity after the cold war to get rid of all nuclear weapons. Now I wonder what, if anything, can happen to convince us as a species to get rid of them.

<comment><USER18> I think part of the threat increase is also that when nuclear weapons were new, people were more afraid of them. Now the fear seems to be wearing off.

<comment><USER3> We also have bona-fide lunatics in the ME and NK that are gaining access to nukes.

<comment><USER19> ME?

<comment><USER20> Middle East, probably

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Even though the risks are enormous, any world power using nuclear weapons would probably need to be exceedingly irrational. World leaders want to stay in power, and continue to rule over their subjects. I don't see it happening, except by: 1) misunderstanding/miscommunication 2) incompetence 3) desperation 4) particularly bloodthirsty individual

Should we be confident? #1 was witnessed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (mokusatsu incident) #2 Incompetence is pervasive in government (i.e. when the Stratfor leaks came, their internal wiki said of the FBI "good at breaking up used car rings. Confused by anything more complicated." Even corporations with close ties to government disparage the powerful 3-letter agencies without counter argument.) #3 yet to be seen #4 I hope it is out of the cards

<comment><USER22> >any world power using nuclear weapons would probably need to be exceedingly irrational.

Leaders are exceedingly irrational. Stalin and Hitler literally killed millions.

Considering that many generals in the German army considered WWII unwinnable before Hitler started it, WWII may have been one of the world's longest and bloodiest suicide notes.

Combine that with a literal death cult, laced with bizarre fantasies about blood, iron, and the holy homeland, and you can see just how irrational world powers can get.

Japan wasn't much better off. The bombs were a horror, but at least they cauterised imperialism out of the Japanese psyche for at least a few generations - at a huge cost.

The US isn't much better off now. The reasons for war are more religious than personal - the pursuit of profit - but the millions who have died since WWII in US direct and proxy campaigns are no less dead for it.

Russia? China? Let's see.

It's clear that the only reason we've avoided nuclear suicide so far is blind luck - often the blind luck that put a relatively sane individual in a position where they, not presidents, emperors, kings, and politicians, could choose the fate of the world.

Ultimately you can't win at Russian Roulette. You can only _not lose_ \- for a limited time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why was China not mentioned as a third, major participant in the next arms race?

Why were all the lesser proliferants not mentioned? Isn't it far more likely that somebody on a holy mission buys or steals something they shouldn't have in the near future than a full conflict among the big three later?

<comment><USER24> China's nuclear doctrine is based on "minimum deterrence", which is why their arsenal is considerably smaller than that of the big two.

<comment><USER23> China alone has ICBM's to deliver anywhere they like. So they're on par with the big two. It really doesn't matter how many they have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article was concerned that NATO expanded its membership too much, that is, added too many countries too close to Russia. Presumably the concern here is that Russia will, then, feel more threatened by an attack from NATO.

Uh, gee, guys, that concern seems not to understand maybe the more important role of NATO! Sure, first cut, it appears that the purpose of NATO is to have the European countries ban together better to defend themselves against an attack from Russia. Hmm ....

But maybe a more important reason for NATO is to take all of the military forces in Europe, especially those closest to Russia, and put them under central command and control, with a big role for the US. Why? To stop another case like started WWI -- some terrorist in the long boiling Balkans shot a prince of Austria or some such. That is, the purpose of NATO is to keep a lid on the instabilities of 22 or so countries west of Russia and, thus, avoid war, protect Russia, etc. Sure, this is a joke but only partly.

Or, in history, how often has Russia gone charging to the west trying to take over Sweden, Germany, or France? Or was the real threat Napoleon charging east, Germany charging east, etc.?

Or, we can expect instabilities in Europe. So, we need to keep a lid on that pot. Thus, NATO!

Russia? A good lid on that unstable European pot, e.g., the long boiling Balkans, is very much in Russia's interests.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is IMO one of the most important things that next to nobody pays attention to. People toss around "use a nuke" or "because we have nukes" as though they're like any other conventional weapon. I'd venture to guess that none of those people have been around a large conventional weapon exploding, which pales in comparison to even a small nuclear warhead.

<comment><USER26> This reminds me of the irony of when the US invaded Iraq, because "Saddam has Weapons of Mass Destruction"[1]... while bragging that the US was going to use the MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs, the largest conventional bomb ever. The US has always had trouble with the internal consistency of it's propaganda :)

[1] Which weren't nuclear, and required a redefinition of the phrase to suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _Why is fear of a nuclear catastrophe far from the minds of most Americans?_

Because there's nothing they/we can do about it? There's no much point in worrying about things you have no control over.

</comment><comment><USER28> I completely agree that the danger now is much more than it was 40 years ago. Having said that, there's plenty of blame to go around for everybody, and I'm not sure there is much to be done about it.

The underlying problem is that technology is making smaller and smaller actors capable of more and more destructive actions. It's not just nukes. It's not inconceivable that one hacker somewhere could take down the U.S. electric grid. That's insane.

We're living in an extremely asymmetric world. Reducing nuclear stockpiles needs to be done. It eliminates the ability to create worldwide nuclear catastrophic damage with a push of a button. But if things got serious between major powers? They'd just build more nukes. You've taken what might have happened in 60 minutes and turned it into a 2-week affair. It's a move in the right direction, but I don't think it fixes anything. It's just better.

I am probably wrong, but my gut tells me the nuke threat may be overblown, at least in terms of a complete, species-ending event for mankind. We're like cockroaches, and I tend to believe some of us would struggle through somehow. I hope we never find out. But as to the larger issue of small groups holding enormous destructive power, I not so optimistic. I could easily see a situation where multiple catastrophic attacks in various sectors occur simultaneously. I am not so sanguine about our chances then. And I don't see any sort of policy change or treaty changing any of that.

Scary times to be living in.

</comment><comment><USER29> So _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ is still relevant. Chilling. :(

</comment><comment><USER30> BTW, people jumping from government to industry and back is usually seen as corruption in liberal HN crowd — but I don't see any complains here.

</comment><comment><USER31> > Perry tells us that parity is "old thinking" because nuclear weapons can't > actually be used—the risk of uncontrollable and catastrophic escalation is > too high. They are only good for threatening the enemy with nuclear > retaliation.

This is an important point, which I believe is not necessarily subscribed to by all those in the military. In particular, I am greatly concerned that the use of tactical nuclear weapons—even very small ones on the scale of just 100t TNT or so—is far more likely to occur than a full scale strategic nuclear exchange, and that this could lead to escalation with tactical nuclear weapons of ever greater size, eventually leading to a far higher probability that strategic weapons are eventually used.

I believe that if you looked at the Top Secret plans produced by the Pentagon and the Russian General Staff you would find many that call for "limited" use of tactical nuclear weapons in response to an overwhelming attack by conventional forces. In addition there are proposals such as the "nuclear bunker buster" that was floated a few years back during the invasion of Afghanistan.

The great problem is that once the use of nuclear weapons of any sort becomes at all normalised, there is no upper limit to their destructive capability. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, Tsar Bomba, was a three stage thermonuclear device and had a yield of about 50 Mt TNT, but such a weapon could be easily scaled up simply by adding additional thermonuclear stages. Once nuclear weapons become actively used in any capacity the destructive capability of a nuclear-armed state is limited only by its restraint.

Consider the Allies' strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan in WWII. The goal was to destroy the enemy's ability to make war and to force them to surrender; this involved killing civilians and military personnel, and destroying infrastructure and production capability. Note that killing civilans served to advance the principal goal of winning the war but was not an end in itself. If the war could be won with everything exactly the same except for fewer enemy casualties, I believe any sane commander with ethics remotely similar to my own would take that choice. In other words, inflicting enemy casualties has positive instrumental value but negative intrinsic value. In contrast, Hitler saw killing Jews and other populations as having positive intrinsic value, as a goal worth pursuing in and of itself.

If I had complete authority over a nation's nuclear weapons I would never, under any circumstances, actually use them. In all respects I would act as though I would respond to a nuclear attack in kind without hesitation, but that would be a lie. If I were faced with an overwhelming strategic attack and had the opportunity to respond with an attack of equal magnitude, I would not. Such an act would not change the outcome of my own nation, it would merely inflict the same on my enemy, which since I am not a psycopath has negative utility. At that point the war is already lost, the best one could do is minimise the destruction inflicted on humanity as a whole.

So I believe Perry assertion "nuclear weapons can't actually be used" is literally correct in the logical extreme. The problem is that deterrence requires the appearance of being ready to use them, and that is very difficult to fake. I think this underscores the importance of control mechanisms. Historically such mechanisms were opposed because they might put the weapons out of action when they need to be used, for example the Minuteman ICBM codes were set to all zeroes until 1977 and even today the captain of a British Vanguard-class submarine has the capability to launch without a code being transmitted from headquarters. This lends credence to the idea that these militaries intend to actually use such weapons in the event, not just appear to be prepared to use them. If you wanted to just fake the appearance of being prepared to use them it would be sufficient to plan not to distribute the right codes: the deterrence effect would not be lessened at all as the enemy would never risk you not being able to distribute the correct codes in the event.

<comment><USER32> >If I had complete authority over a nation's nuclear weapons I would never, under any circumstances, actually use them. In all respects I would act as though I would respond to a nuclear attack in kind without hesitation, but that would be a lie. If I were faced with an overwhelming strategic attack and had the opportunity to respond with an attack of equal magnitude, I would not. Such an act would not change the outcome of my own nation, it would merely inflict the same on my enemy, which since I am not a psycopath has negative utility. At that point the war is already lost, the best one could do is minimise the destruction inflicted on humanity as a whole.

part of me wants to hope that the individuals involved in the creation and deployment of nuclear warheads have actually agreed to silently sabotage them all, rendering them inoperable even if there were an attempt to use them

it would make a good storyline, at any rate

<comment><USER33> Have there been nuclear tests where they just pulled a weapon off the proverbial shelf and blew it up without any more preparation than it would get in a real war? I wonder if such a scheme would ever have been detected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Seeing this title, I thought: "(Nuclear) Winter is Coming."

</comment><comment><USER35> Winter is coming?</comment>


An elegy for handwriting? - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/hands-off-handwriting-calligraphy/ <comment><USER2> On a personal note, I really despise handwriting documents. Writing for an extended period inevitably results in uncomfortable cramps in my hands. Thus, I typeset whenever possible (markdown -> pandoc -> LaTeX -> pdf). However, for taking notes in ad hoc situations, handwriting is so much easier. I recently got the 10.5" iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil and I _love_ it for writing notes for classes especially. I also keep a stack of engineering paper around for doodling out problems I'm working on. At least for me, handwriting is still an integral part of my workflow even if it's not my favorite.

<comment><USER3> > On a personal note, I really despise handwriting documents. Writing for an > extended period inevitably results in uncomfortable cramps in my hands

You want a fountain pen! And for anyone else interested in handwriting more, I recommend taking up fountain pens as a hobby. It's fairly inexpensive to get into, as hobbies go (though of course you can spend unhealthy sums at the top end), and I have done a lot more handwriting since I took it up, to generally positive results.

The main reason they are so nice is that, compared to a pencil or especially a ballpoint pen, a good fountain pen requires very little pressure to write with, and so results in much less pain and cramping in the hands. I can write multiple A5 pages with a fountain pen and not even notice, whereas with a ballpoint pen my hand starts to hurt after about ten sentences.

<comment><USER2> I actually have two Lamy Al star pens, though I haven't really used them as much as I'd like. Thanks for the reminder!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lovely review, thanks for posting. Reminds me of this beautiful, longer essay on the death of handwriting (written by the obituaries editor of the economist): [https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/ann- wroe/handwrit...](https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/ann- wroe/handwriting-elegy)

</comment><comment><USER5> "when no one need be judged by the quality of their script"

The reviewer mentions Thomas Aquinas, whose writing was notoriously illegible. She might have mentioned Napoleon as well, or quoted from _Middlemarch_

"At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath a gentleman to write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk. Fred wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line--in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means."

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm late to this post but a couple of years ago I visited the National Archives in Washington DC. It was my favorite stop and I was surprised at the effect on me of seeing the Declaration of Independence. It occurred to me at that moment that if any such monumental document were created today, it would be electronic and everyone would have one. With all the good things about that, something powerful is lost at the same time.</comment>


Pachter To Overworked Devs: 'Find Another Profession' - <AUTHOR> http://www.industrygamers.com/news/pachter-to-overworked-devs-find-another-profession/ <comment><USER2> _He cites the fact that Infinity Ward had a profit pool of $84 million to be paid to around 100 employees._

... which they avoided paying out by firing the relevant employees before the bonuses were due.

<comment><USER3> While that's despicable, if true, it's also partially up to employees to ensure that their work agreements don't do that. Unfortunately, human nature is to see bonuses as part of expected comp rather than upside to expected comp. If you're going to do that, you'd better make sure you've papered things up to protect yourself and get paid for the work you did. (And trust me, I've paid dearly to learn that lesson.)

<comment> brown9-2 Almost all professional employment in the US is characterized as at-will. How can someone get ensure their work agreement accounts for this prior to starting a job at one of these companies? Ask for a "you will not fire me prior to paying me a bonus" clause?

It seems to me that if a company in this situation wants to screw the employee, they will find a way.

<comment><USER4> Possibly: ownership of the IP only transfers upon final payment.

<comment><USER5> No, IP ownership transfers when your contract says it does. If you're a consultant and your contract says you transfer IP upon payment, then sure, that's the case. But if you're a salaried employee, then most likely you've signed something that stipulates that your product is a work-for-hire, and it becomes owned by your employer the moment you type it out.

<comment><USER4> So I suggested one kind of contract to write which would ensure payment of that sort, rather than the usual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I can't think of anything more ridiculous in the world of professional software development than planned crunch-time for video game development.

The concept is a bit boggling. _Planned_ periods of "oh shit we need to work 14 hours today or we'll miss the deadline!"

<comment><USER6> In a way, it does make sense. Once software/game is made, the developers are no longer needed. So it gives a little incentive to force the completion of software. This should give an idea that the investors care more of money.

Which is quite silly as the game needs to be patched. Booting burnt out developers and even not acknowledging them would lower the morale of the others and ruin future attempts to make sequels (Investors puzzled: Why was it so lack lustre?). eg LA Noir credit omissions.

<comment><USER7> And the next game that you want to produce? Now you have to find another team of developers, from a smaller pool (since word gets around). Seems incredibly short sighted to me - why throw away all the effort of staffing, training and tools?

<comment><USER6> Hence my point that investors are more concerned about money than the product. I meant short-term profit though.

<comment><USER7> Even short term profit is likely to be put at risk. I've found that the places which are weaselly enough to screw you long term will normally screw you in little bits and pieces first. After you've been through the cycle a few times, you generally know what to look for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Crunch is the unavoidable result of poor project management. Project management in software development is notoriously bad, and in game development we're even behind that curve.

Schedules are built on hopes and dreams instead of historical data. Impossible promises are made to publishers in order to secure funding or keep from being cancelled.

Most harmful, is the belief that crunching actually increases productivity. If you look at the research on the subject the most you can hope to gain is about a 2 week boost before you backslide and become less productive.

If you could reliably deliver (fun) games on time and on budget you would have a serious competitive advantage in this field.

<comment><USER9> Without being a game industry insider, it would seem like the best way would be to use distribution and advertising methods that allow you release a game _when it's done_. That is to say, distribution methods like Steam or the App Store and advertising methods like dev blogs, teaser/sneak peak videos, frequent articles on game review sites, playable demos at Comic-Con, etc.

Bioware seems to be taking a really good approach to this with Star Wars: The Old Republic, but they might be able to get away with it because it's Star Wars.

I think the problem is a lot of companies rely on big box retailers and traditional media for their blockbusters, which means long lead times on print materials, DVD pressing, magazine advertising. Big projects always go longer than you intend, and if you make all of these big feature promises and deadlines in advance you basically are forcing yourself into extended crunch time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a lot of the problem is that Games Developers themselves don't do enough to prevent this. This certainly doesn't excuse the managers who take advantage this way, but if more developers were confident enough to take a stand, they'd have more success changing this.

Pachter said. "I've never heard a developer say 'I don't work overtime and I don't work weekends'. Well, at my last industry job, that was me. I never worked weekends, and I only worked evenings if I had fallen behind myself on what I planned to get done. I made it clear to my managers (in a non- confrontational way) that overtime was not to be 'expected', and that I would only work extra hours in extreme circumstances if we had immediate (read: in the next 1-2 days) deadlines that my planned work was not going to be ready for.

My managers were pretty ok with that actually - I was still a good programmer and put plenty of effort in during my normal work hours, and it meant that people had an accurate idea of how much work I could normally get done in a work week.

<comment><USER11> I recommend to devs to take this a little bit farther. If a dev is willing to work overtime "if we have immediate deadlines", management will increase the frequency and urgency of deadlines.

Rather commit to working overtime if the company/team will miss a deadline that you committed to for a reason that you are responsible for. That closes temptation to create deadlines that you never committed to.

An example: Manager: Dev, we need you to stay extra because we've got to get Facebook Connect integrated by tomorrow!

Dev: I wish we'd talked about if that was a reasonable expectation given the other development priorities we have for this week. Next time we have a feature with a deadline, ask me in advance and I can tell you the earliest date I can guarantee it can be finished by.

Then be reasonable, with a good buffer, about future deadline commitments. If you make a commitment, keep it. If you have a deadline commitment, and a new "urgent" request comes in, you can then ask the manager if they'd rather you delay the new request to honor the first deadline, or if they'd like to push back the deadline of the original request.

Using this I never worked evenings or weekends when I was an employee

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Three to six months is an acceptable period of 'crunch time'? That's just shitty planning.

<comment><USER13> I agree with this.

The games industry has conditioned itself to believe it is unique in software development, and that as a special snowflake, it is able to define whatever is reasonable for itself. Whatever is reasonable is what's come before, and what's come before has been a terrible mess. Google can launch products with a much better work/life balance than most games studios, and their engineers make a lot more money for it too.

The only people that stay are the people who can survive it. Those that survive are those that don't know any better (fresh-faced grads), grizzled and bitter vets that perpetuate the cycle of violence, or those people who really can't imagine anything more awesome than making games, personal life be damned.

Pachter is being blunt here, but he's right. The industry won't change, and in my interactions with it, it doesn't seem to want to.

<comment><USER14> The gaming industry ended up being invaded by the media industry, which is notorious for chewing up people and spitting them out. Luckily digital distribution is putting all the bargaining chips back in to the hands of the content creators instead of the content distributors, and hopefully a lot of the absurd conditions will die away.

<comment><USER15> God yes. I have friends who work in TV. For them, there is no such thing as "crunch time" - just 14+ hour days 7 days a week. And they get paid and treated like shit.

I don't quite understand the glamour of the business. When I hear stories from my friends it just makes me angry that million dollar salaries are subsidized by such shitty working conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This employer behavior is nothing new, its usually eventually solved with unions. Organised strikes tend to be the next step in most other industries.

Also its terrible blame shifting. It sounds like they are trying to create games with insufficient timing and budgets, and the people are to blame are the workers not the money men.

I'd have walked as soon as I realized I only get paid my due wage if the product succeeds. The onus shouldn't be on me to make sure I get paid making someone else product work.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Pachter noted that developers are well compensated in the form of bonuses, and as such, overtime is not a factor. He cites the fact that Infinity Ward had a profit pool of $84 million to be paid to around 100 employees."

I wonder how much of that goes to those below executive level.

<comment><USER18> At game studios that even have a bonus/profit sharing structure (it's actually very rare, despite what Pachter says), it's typically paid out based on a combination of tenure and your salary. So the new hires who are working their asses off during crunch to avoid getting fired when the inevitable cuts come are going to get the least out of any bonuses that do get paid out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just finished reading The Clean Coder and it puts into words what I always knew how to do instinctively I think.

I've never worked in the game industry where there may be strong political reasons to submit to such working conditions. I've rarely had to work over- time (mainly writing web applications and servers) and when I did it was usually of my own volition. The problem with doing is that you burn out a lot faster than you think. Being frustrated and unhappy can interfere with doing your job as a programmer. We're paid to think and good thinking can only happen when you have a clear, healthy state of mind.

If I've ever done "crunch time" against my will it's usually because some manager or sales person went above my head and made promises without clearing it with me. That's very unprofessional IMO. It's also unprofessional to avoid taking the initiative to righting that sort of wrong. It's like watching someone walk backwards into traffic and not doing anything to stop them. If you're part of the team, you're going to be hurting yourself too. (And I think it took me a few tries to realize this).

So I dunno... there are probably a lot of pressures in the game industry that help this nasty practice persist... but if it's not worth it, Pachter is right: move on. Life's too short and there's better work to be had.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't see why dev's don't ask for more money during crunchtime. I mean, if the studio's dependent on you to finish their $millions budgeted game, then it seems like you should have quite a lot of leverage over the company, since hiring someone else to finish the game would only make it take longer.

</comment><comment><USER21> His position is bizarre because on one hand he says, "I think there's a legitimate complaint if crunch time is never-ending." but he defends Bondi even though there seems to be a wealth of information out that there shows that the conditions at Bondi (and Rockstar for both this project and Rockstar San Diego) were very much in line with "never-ending."

Perhaps there will be some sort of bonus for those who stayed on (especially after this negative publicity) but what about everyone else who left over the years during this massively delayed project?

<comment><USER5> And I'd consider his 3-6 months of crunch time as "never-ending". Two weeks, tops.

At my last company we spent over a year in crunch time. Never again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In all of the times I've hired employees or freelancers, I've only asked them to work overtime once, and that was three weeks before Christmas when we were behind schedule, based on their own timelines.

In the end, it still caused friction, and we weren't able to keep that team on long-term.

I don't regret that we had to do that (I was working overtime too), but I also don't understand why employers treat developers like garbage. IMO, developers are gold.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's Valve's (well, Gabe Newell's) take on it - 'Crunch Mode', about halfway down:

[http://www.develop-online.net/features/1184/The-Valve- manife...](http://www.develop-online.net/features/1184/The-Valve-manifesto)

(Though they unfortunately seem to have hotlinked the images, which are all broken :P )

</comment><comment><USER23> That's pretty easy for some alpha male security analyst to say. Setting clear goals and boundaries requires discipline on the part of both developers and managers. It's not slacking off or lack of commitment unless you're hiring unmotivated hacks and leftovers. But even then, maybe you're overpaying for low quality and could hire more for less. Either way overtime is mostly avoidable. Sure, sometimes the deadline takes on a life of it's own and you need to set your foot down and say "we promised, so we will deliver. Let's do a post-mortem to ensure it doesn't happen again, but right now we need to ship".

</comment><comment><USER24> I know that in Ontario (Canada), the labor code is pretty specific about overtime. There's a very long list of professions which are NOT required to be paid overtime. Nurses, teachers...and yes, programmers.

These groups are still protected by other rules - how long someone can work without breaks, or rest periods, and general health and safety rules. But, and again I only know about Ontario, unless your contract says otherwise, overtime isn't paid and you can be fired for not working it (provided it doesn't violate some other rule).

</comment><comment><USER25> Yeah, game programmers have it tough. I hear you're treated just like a male porn star, they use you all up until you burn out and then toss you in the trash as another young stud walks in the door willing to accept lower wages and willing to burn himself out just the same. Some luckier ones make it into management though. Others just stay away and either make indie games or program something else entirely.

</comment><comment><USER26> Game development shops are well known for this because of the cyclical nature of the sales cycle. So he's right, sort of, in that if you can't handle the Christmas season crunch you need to get into another industry. But there's no reason to find another profession - there are plenty of corporate development jobs with 9-5 work schedules.

<comment><USER27> It isn't the cyclical nature of the games business. It's that the people "managing" are absolute rank amateurs, shamelessly greedy businessmen, or both.

Couple this with the fact that there's an endless amount of fresh meat (I want to make games when I grow up!) and except for an enlightened few there's no real reason to change.

<comment><USER26> >It isn't the cyclical nature of the games business. It's that the people "managing" are absolute rank amateurs, shamelessly greedy businessmen, or both.

 _Every_ industry is loaded with managers who are rank amateurs, shamelessly greedy, or both. The difference is game companies tend to go out of business if the product isn't shipped in time for the Christmas season.

>Couple this with the fact that there's an endless amount of fresh meat (I want to make games when I grow up!) and except for an enlightened few there's no real reason to change.

There's a lot of truth to this. I wouldn't work in a game industry for the same reason I wouldn't open a surfboard shop or a used book store: I don't want to be competing with people who are willing to devote all their time to the job and don't care how much money they make. Eventually game developers burn out and move on, but like you say, there is an endless amount of recent grads to take their place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Many of the good devs I knew have taken exactly that step over the last year. Sure, there are many great people left - but there has been quite an exodus over the last year.

There are non-gaming companies that are great to work for and value developers _way_ more - why _would_ you stay?</comment>


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Deep Learning Twitter Loop - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/5jjzny/d_deep_learning_twitter_loop/ <comment><USER2> Good resource! We're interested to see how all of this Deep Learning evolves and becomes more tangible in the future.</comment>


Show HN: Voiceplace – want multiple convos at the same time in video calls? - <AUTHOR> https://joinvoiceplace.com <comment><AUTHOR> One of the biggest frustrations with online voice calls is that only one person can talk at a time. In a conference setting, that is fine, however when you want conversations to be spontaneous there is no good solution on the market.

Still exploring the concept :) Feedback greatly appreciated! [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/voiceplace](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/voiceplace)</comment>