OsrsNeedsF2P

Finally got around to it and been playing Godot for an hour. I've been following Brackey's How to make a Video Game - Godot Beginner Tutorial and I'm about ~40 minutes in.

First impressions:

• Jesus christ that downloaded fast
• Holy crap that opened fast
• I love right out the gate it let me pick what renderer I want to use (alongside the pros and cons)

UI:

• The UI is a little bit confusing. Having the Script and 2D window be something at the top, but to the right of your traditional window dropdowns - is very jarring
• Mousewheel is a weird default: Control-scroll moves up and down, while regular scroll zooms in and out. I believe this is the opposite of most programs
• Modifying the collision points on TileSets was weird - I would modify one, then any new tile I click would get the new collision points, so I kept accidentally overwriting the collision points on tiles when I just wanted to select. But then I also couldn't copy a previous collision point.. so I had to like carefully plan out which tiles would have the same collision points because I couldn't copy them... I didn't want to get too specific on something minor, but that was frustrating.
• Overall, the UI is still less cluttered than Unity, so despite being a bit unintuitive and having some frustrations, it's worse but not a showstopper

"Let me make a game!" vibe:

• For reference, my base point here is Flash, with ActionScript. The dead simplicity of that framework let developers pump out awesome games in under a week
• Godot seems to have better support for 2D games than Unity. 2D feels "first class", and I'm not getting weird collider issues on corners like Unity does
• When following a tutorial (that is only 4 months old), I already ran into cases of UI changes and deprecated features. That's a big issue with Unity, and not something I look forwards to in Godot
• As far as vibe check goes, this one is also on par or slightly better than Unity

Overall Rating: Good enough

My world has not been shaken - but I'll use Godot for my next game. First impressions have Godot's editor on-par with Unity, but the real win is it comes without the clown show that is Unity Technologies itself. For the first time in a while I'm excited to get back into making games, I just need to make the time 🙃

"You know what's the difference between like, IC8s, IC9s and other regular ICs?"

They get paid a lot more?

"Yea they make like- they make millio-- I don't even know how much they make a year. But it's a lot. But it's that they can write well. Like they'll be writing about a subject I don't even begin to understand, but by the time I read their post, I feel like everything is crystal clear"

Communication is everything. Politicians convince. Designers show. Engineers explain.

If the only difference between a "good" and "great" employee was their work output, you could find a output/cost function and just hire more "good" employees.

Parabola

  |    
O |  
u |              *
t |         *         *
p |      *   ^-- Optimal!
u |    *                   *
t |   *                     *
  + -----------------------------
        Cost for employee

But that's not what makes an employee great (and hiring x employees also doesn't scale). Employees bring three things to a company:

• Overhead
• Additive impact
• Multiplicative impact

Let's look at these individually. But first, a log function:

Log function

  |    
O |  
u |                         *
t |                *
p |          *
u |      *
t |   *
  + -----------------------------
             Employees

This log function is why consultancy companies are both very profitable but unscalable

Overhead is why big companies move slow. When you have one employee, the company is working at 1x output. When you add a second employee, you don't go to 2x output; that's because of overhead. You're closer to 1.8x. Third employee, 2.5x.

Additive impact is how much work an employee delivers. If you hire the best artist, your output might go up more than 1x for this employee.

But multiplicative impact is the multiplier an employee gives to their peers. Multiplicative impact is why CEOs make 1,000x more than juniors for the same level of effort. Multiplicative impact is the only way to fight overhead.

So why do companies like Meta pay their IC7s $1M/year, or their IC9s $3M+/year? Because Meta has 60,000 employees, and hiring anyone except those who bring multiplicative impact gives you the next Broadcom.

I need to write more posts.

"Exactly! That's why I want to get into blogging. I used to blog a lot but I don't as much anymore"

Every Friday. Let's do it!

And so, it begins. Before midnight every Friday, I'll be putting up something here, and I will do it as long as I can (and trust me, I can do streaks for a long time). Here goes! 🎓

Been trying to play Factorio with my gf and cousin, who both use ARM Macbooks. Via bitsearch I was able to find a couple Factorio torrents that include MacOS, but despite allegedly having seeders, I wasn't able to get the download to work (even with DHT enabled).

Does anyone know where I can find a working download link? To be clear, every torrent I found didn't actually have seeders when I put it into the torrent client. At least a few years ago, I was able to a cracked Factorio MacOS version.

(Windows version via Wine works on Linux, but not MacOS (even via Whisky). Installing Asahi is not an option, but an idea I entertained).

My main motivation was that it's the same director for Crash Landing on You, which is a drama that sits on a pedestal way ahead of 2nd or 3rd place.

Pros:

• Like Flower of Evil, you're forced to root for the bad guy
• Some strong heart-string pulling scenes
• Strong personality on the actors

Cons:

• Not depressing enough (Still cried, but it's not Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo)
• OST has a lot of English lyrics
• Can we have a good drama that's not about Chaebols?

Neutral:

• Plot was decent; not as good as Flower of Evil, but fun to follow along. The "seeds" in the plot were seldom deeply rooted, and often just seeding for one episode in advance at a time

Verdict: If you like KDramas, I would recommend it. If you're not into KDramas and just want something to watch, in case its unclear, I'm a shill for Crash Landing on You

I used to spend every day doing open source development. Then my friend, who never contributed to FOSS in his life, got a 160k offer from Mozilla. Mozilla, I thought. The open source browser company. Back then, I was doing it wrong. Today, I work at Meta.

Random QA

(Because I know your attention span is short)

• You never get better at reading other people's solutions
• I still cannot do binary search without getting off-by-1 errors
• I've never implemented Quick Sort, or memorized any algorithms (like Djikstra)
  • You "get a feel" for most algos and can make something that works on the fly
  • Data structures are different; I have practiced implementing heaps, queues, union find, etc
• Contests are depressing
• Leetcode does not make you a better software engineer. (More on that below)
  • System Design on the other hand (shoutout SDFC) is amazing

Getting good at Leetcode is a hard grind - If you're looking for a schedule, start with DSA fundamentals, then do Neetcode 150.

The Journey

After attempting Blind75 (Neetcode 150 wasn't a thing back then), I was mentally broken. Asking myself "When will I use this?", or "How did other people solve this?" was pure demotivation. I calmed myself knowing each LC problem solved was worth a couple thousand dollars. So for months, I grinded through it.

I started doing the Leetcode contests. If you think Blind75 gets you depressed, wait until you score 1/4 in a contest.

I decided to go for a 30 day streak on the Daily Questions. I knew FAANG+ wouldn't be interested in me since I only had ~1 year of experience back then, but I figured if I learned how to study Leetcode, I could grind it when the time came.

Those 30 days were some of the most mentally challenging in my life. I probably had a headache 25/30 of them. About 5 days in, a Leetcode hard that took me over 6 hours to complete. I knew that if I didn't give up then, I could make it until the end. After a surprisingly small sense of accomplishment, my said "Why not go for 60?". Thinking of them salaries, I reluctantly agreed.

It didn't matter what else happened in my day, my Leetcode got done. I Leetcoded before work. If I couldn't finish it in time, I Leetcoded after work. I Leetcoded when I was camping. I Leetcoded at parties. I Leetcoded when I was sick and when I was on vacation. I Leetcoded on the bus or on the subway - I even did Leetcode on a chairlift. Multiple times. I Leetcoded on my phone, on my girlfriend's tablet, and at gaming cafes - almost like an alcoholic, using everything around me.

On a trip in Busan with my friends, at a small cafe (on land that, for those who don't know the history, tens of thousands of refugees suffered at), I was looking over the water and cracking a Leetcode hard. Something about the stark contrast between what I was doing and what is "important" made that solve memorable. Smelling the ocean salt while my friends ate breakfast , I finished just in time not to hold them back.

God, Leetcode is stupid.

Why Do Companies Interview with Leetcode?

The reason Mozilla hires people who can Leetcode instead of people who contribute to open source is because the question "Can the candidate solve Number of Islands in 15 minutes?" is a binary answer that scales across all your interviewers.

Leetcode is great because it became the "industry standard". It doesn't matter if you're front-end, infra, or ops: We all learn Leetcode, and can all interview others in it. Leetcode is a "rite of passage" that shows you put in the wor--

Nah just kidding. Leetcode is BS. I have a vested interested in keeping it around since I'm "good at it", but it's the lazy way out for companies to have a "bar" and do "unbiased interviewing". If you're a startup and you're asking Leetcode questions, you're getting table scraps. The most effective interviews I've found are unique so you grab the talent most other companies pass out on, but that's a story for another time.