You can backflip in mid-air which is useful to go a little higher or cancel the direction you’re moving in. I don’t remember the exact control for it, but I think it was double tapping after jumping.

Absolutely, it’s a great game.

The fun part of this game is hearing such differing opinions, I had someone explain that Block Koala was their favorite. I personally didn’t gel with Planet Zoldath, it’s conceptually neat but I found it very tedious. Glad you enjoy it though!

inexperienced big brain developer see nested loop and often say “O(n^2)? Not on my watch!”

complexity demon spirit smile

This hits too close to home.

Compiling to bash seems awesome, but on the other hand I don’t think anyone other than the person who wrote it in amber will run a bash file that looks like machine-generated gibberish on their machine.

“Merge pull request #8 from [branch name]”

Not the most exciting but hey, someone has to do it.

It’s a two part story:

1. The mobile market mostly targets kids and boomers and their resistance to microtransactions has been basically non-existent, making the market quickly become predatory and full of spam

2. Modern app stores have become abysmal, making it impossible for smaller games to see the light of day. 99% of google play is a dumpster fire, and the 1% that is decent isn’t published by a multi-billion dollar company so you’re unlikely to ever see it. There are good games out there, but the way the algorithms and ads work makes them constantly pushed down in the list. This isn’t “a problem” to a company like Google because they’re making bank off of all these ad spaces.

Anyways, most good games are paid, but here’s a list of stuff I’ve enjoyed playing on mobile:

• Fancy Pants Adventures

• Bloons TD 6

• Dicey Dungeons

• Dead Cells

• Slay the Spire (but the mobile port is rough on small screens)

• Knights of Pen and Paper +1

• The Enchanted Cave 2

• Let’s Create! Pottery

• BAIKOH

• Data Wing

Probably a lot more I forgot. Have at it.

Has it ever been better?

Actually, yes, by a big margin. Back in ~2011 mobile games were actually trying to be great. Games like Edge Extended, World of Goo, Bounce Boing Voyage, Zenonia 2 & 3, etc.

I remember early Humble Bundles being full of exciting games for mobile, now you’ll be lucky to find just one of them that isn’t filled to the brim with MTX or ads.

Be sure to check where the trackpad is. Centralized is better. My new one is more to the left and my wrist hits it when playing tf2 and I do occasionally get some movement from my wrist in game, but not much.

There should be an option in your OS to disable the trackpad while using the keyboard. My laptop also has a trackpad to the left and I often have my hand over it when playing but never had this issue.

Make sure you get a laptop with a modern Ryzen processor since the battery life (and performance on battery) is often a lot better than Intel. There are a lot out there that fit the bill like Lenovo’s yoga/ideapad lineup. Just be weary of two things:

• Some 14" laptops may have soldered RAM or SSDs making them impossible to upgrade
• Don’t go off of processor names, they’re often pretty misleading. For example a Ryzen 7 7730U is significantly worse than a Ryzen 7 7840U.

This is really cool. It seems to be getting hugged to death though, I’m getting a lot of server errors when I attempt to open most apps.

It saddens me deeply that consumers (gamers) just don’t give a flying fuck about this and continues to pay a premium for Nvidia cards.

It doesn’t help that AMD isn’t competing that much price-wise. Their only saving grace is higher VRAM, and while that is nice, raw performance is becoming less relevant. FSR also does not compete with DLSS, it’s strictly worse in every way. They also barely exist in the laptop market, I was just considering buying a new gaming laptop and my options are an RTX 4060 or paying more for the one laptop with a weaker AMD GPU.

I would argue Intel is shaping up to be the real competitor to Nvidia. They had a rough start but their GPUs are very price-competitive. Their newer integrated GPUs are also the best currently, they’re good for gen AI, their raytracing performance trumps AMD, and XeSS is a lot better than FSR. If I were in the market for a new GPU I’d probably grab the Intel A770. I’m looking forward to their next generation of cards.

That just because I’m a programmer that must mean I’m a master of anything technology related and can totally help out with their niche problems.

“Hey computer guy, how do I search for new channels on my receiver?”

“Hey computer guy, my excel spreadsheet is acting weird”

“My mobile data isn’t working. Fix this.”

My friend was a programmer and served in the army, people ordered him to go fix a sattelite. He said he has no idea how but they made him try anyways. It didn’t work and everyone was disappointed.

I still can’t understand why Google keeps hyping up Bard and then releasing it at a poor state just to ruin their reputation. First, we had:

• Bard 1, which was hyped up to be the ChatGPT successor. It turned out to be really bad.

• Bard 2.0, a massive update that was hyped up to make Bard so much better. It turned out to still be pretty bad (but in fairness it was a minor improvement).

• Google Gemini, their massive response to GPT 4 that was, on paper, the best LLM in the world. They finally integrated it into Bard last month and… It’s still not great. I could not tell an immediate difference between this and the old Bard. Oh, and the videos they used to advertise Gemini Ultra were fake.

I’m not going to armchair analyze a hugely successful company, but from my point of view it really shows how mismanaged Google has been in the past decade. Failed projects upon cancelled projects upon increasingly frustrated employees.

/rant. Anyways, you should consider using Perplexity if you want something with search capabilities, I’ve had decent success there. Claude is also significantly better than Bard, but they made free usage very limited lately. Might be a good option if you’re willing to pay.

Total missed opportunity to write this in Emojicode, but I love it nonetheless.

I can only speak from my own experience but the remote gamedev market seems harsh right now. Constant layoffs means the market is flooded with talent and juniors are struggling to break into the field. When I was still in college I’d see a couple of internship opportunities and junior job posts but they seem to be disappearing. Why hire a newbie when there are 50 seniors desperate for a job?

Investors are still trying to make web3 happen. Maybe about half the remote job posts utilizing Godot seem to be for some NFT/crypto game. That may just be because few people are applying, though.

I would hope things get better but nobody really knows where the trend is going. For now, I’m getting pretty comfy with freelancing and just working on a contract basis.

Competitions where individuals or teams try to solve complex programming problems as fast as possible. Websites like Codeforces even have weekly online competitions and leaderboards. It’s great for learning problem solving.

I’ve reached a point where I avoid these types of updates. An update post like that either means nothing important changed or they’re up to something.

A while ago I saw that style of patch notes, updated an app, and suddenly I can’t use it anymore because it got limited to a maximum of 2 devices. Another time I updated an app putting a harmless “we improved the user experience” message, they put dark mode behind a paywall. This isn’t counting the number of times an app got redesigned to make the user experience worse for no reason. Maybe they wanted to justify hiring 5 UI/UX interns in that quarter or something.

The patch notes look harmless, but my god, they are usually up to something.

Nushell is fantastic, I’ve been using it on all my systems. Aside from the advanced features and scripting language, it’s just a convenient shell to use with great quality of life.

I’ve heard this a lot and I get it, but I feel like there’s a breaking point where most juniors just won’t put up with it and there will be a drought of genuinely good talent in the industry. Personally the vast majority of people I know have given up on working whatever they wanted to work in (Embedded systems, cybersecurity, gaming, etc) and just became web developers or settle for whatever “easy” jobs they could find. Ironically you catch companies that don’t hire juniors say things like “It’s so hard to find anyone that cares” or recruiters saying hiring for one spot takes months because they can’t find the perfect candidate. Something has to change imo, the path should become clearer than telling everyone to get 5 years of experience then come back when they’re ready.

This isn’t mentioning how recruiters now rely on AI to scan a CV and filter people. It doesn’t even matter how good you are most of the time or what amazing projects you could make, you’ll get filtered if you don’t have that arbitrary thing they’re asking for.