Nova Dasterin asks, with money:

How about usage of Lua for game development? Love2d etc. Also http://lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php which I recently heard about.

clarification: thoughts on Lua as a ‘good choice’, also Lua vs Python for that subject (gamedev)

There are a couple ways I can interpret this, so I’ll go with: all of them.

(edit: you may be interested in a subsequent post about the game I actually made for the PICO-8!)

Decimal sucks.

Ten is such an awkward number. Its only divisors are two and five. Two is nice, but five? Who cares about five? What about three and four?

I have a simple solution to all of these non-problems and more, which is: we should switch to base twelve.

Programmers sometimes like to compliment code as elegant, yet I can’t recall ever seeing a satisfying explanation of what “elegant code” is. Perhaps it’s telling that I see “elegant” used much less often by more experienced programmers, who opt for more concrete commentary.

Surely elegance is a quality to strive for, but how are we to strive for something we can’t define? “I know it when we see it” isn’t good enough.

I think about this from time to time. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

I love emoji. I love Unicode in general. I love seeing plain text become more expressive and more universal.

But, Internet, I’ve noticed a worrying trend. Both popular media and a lot of tech circles tend to assume that “emoji” de facto means Apple’s particular font.

I have some objections.

This month — March, okay, today is March 36th — Vladimir Costescu is sponsoring an exciting post about:

How about this: write about your very first computer (e.g. when you were a kid or whatever) and some notable things you did with it / enjoyed about it. If you’ve ever built your own computer from parts, feel free to talk about that too.

I’m having a really weird browser issue, where scripts on some pages just won’t run until about 20 seconds have passed.

Whatever you’re about to suggest, yes, I’ve thought of it, and no, it’s not the problem. I mention this not in the hope that someone will help me debug it, but because it’s made me acutely aware of a few… quirks… of frontend Web development.

(No, really, do not try to diagnose this problem from one sentence, I have heard and tried almost everything you could imagine.)

update 2016-03-19: I believe the account described below is run by a real human being, but for the sake of their privacy I’m not going to tell you why. I’m leaving this post up, though, because it’s an interesting story and also this was a hecka creepy thing to do.

@softfennec and @orezpraw brought to my attention the following tweet, which I have to reconstruct from memory for reasons that will be clear in a moment:

I like to think I’m okay at math, but then I stumble into Math SE and it’s Latin to me. http://math.stackexchange.com/q/1665383/58532

What a hilarious joke! I liked it so much that it turns out I’d already made it myself:

i like to think i’m ok at math but then i stumble into math.SE and it is basically lorem ipsum to me http://math.stackexchange.com/q/1665383/58532

— @eevee, Feb 21 at 10:49am

This month — which I will pretend is still February, because time zones or something — Vladimir Costescu has sponsored a post on:

OK, how about this: write a post on what you think about (the concept of) Valentine’s Day. Bonus points if you write a brief commentary on this video and work it into the post somehow.

I… I’m afraid I don’t know how to work death metal performed by vampires into a post about anything else.

But Valentine’s Day, I think I can do.

If you were not aware, I have a Patreon tier that’s essentially: I will work on whatever you want for a day, then write about it. I made the tier assuming that people would force me to do programming, e.g. actually work on veekun for once. So far it’s been about half that, and half “hey try this thing you haven’t really done before”.

Last month, @amazingant asked me to cook something, so I decided to try making pretzels, and half-seriously ended the post suggesting that he should have me make cheesecake next.

Well, guess what I had to do this month.

I mentioned recently, buried in a post about UI changes, that Twitter’s latest earnings report included this bombshell:

We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts, like the .@name syntax and @reply rules, that we know inhibit usage and drive people away

There’s an interesting problem here. UI is hard. You can’t just slap a button on the screen for every feature that could conceivably be used at any given time. Some features are only of interest to so-called “power users”, so they’re left subtle, spread by word-of-mouth. Some features you try to make invisible and heuristic. Some features are added just to solve one influential user’s problem. Some features are, ah, accidental.

A sufficiently mature, popular, and interesting product thus tends to accumulate a small pile of hidden features, sometimes not documented or even officially acknowledged. I’d say this is actually a good thing! Using something for a while should absolutely reward you with a new trick every so often — that below-the-surface knowledge makes you feel involved with the thing you’re using and makes it feel deeper overall.

The hard part is striking a balance. On one end of the spectrum you have tools like Notepad, where the only easter egg is that pressing F5 inserts the current time. On the other end you have tools like vim, which consist exclusively of easter eggs.

One of Twitter’s problems is that it’s tilted a little too far towards the vim end of the scale. It looks like a dead-simple service, but those humble 140 characters have been crammed full of features over the years, and the ways they interact aren’t always obvious. There are rules, and the rules generally make sense once you know them, but it’s also really easy to overlook them.

Here, then, is a list of all the non-obvious things about Twitter that I know. Consider it both a reference for people who aren’t up to their eyeballs in Twitter, and an example of how these hidden features can pile up. I’m also throwing in a couple notes on etiquette, because I think that’s strongly informed by the shape of the platform.

Stephen Fry has deleted his Twitter account after backlash from an incident I can only describe as very British. He vaguely explains:

…let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined.

There’s a bit of a semantic trick in his post, and it took me a couple reads to pick up on it.

A familiar story: company makes product, product becomes wildly popular, company royally fucks product up.

The most recent example of this is TimelineGate, but it’s something I’ve had on my mind for a while. Thus I present to you a list of complaints about personally-inconvenient UI changes, carefully disguised as a thoughtful essay.

This month Vladimir brings us:

Er, hmm, maybe do a piece on what your writing process is like (because yay meta).

Indeed. This could only be more meta if I described the process I used for writing this article specifically.

So here’s the process I used for writing this article specifically.

@amazingant has bought a day of my time, and requested that I spend it on:

Cook something! Don’t make one of those meal-in-a-box (or can) things (e.g. hamburger helper, “manwich” sandwiches, etc.), no frozen dinners, and heating something with the stove or oven must be involved.

Don’t worry, I do know what “cook” means! It includes baking, right? I’m going to say it includes baking.

Eevee grew to level 29! Like a week and a half ago.

Wow, what a year.

I was thinking about doing a problem for heteroglot — my quest to solve every Project Euler problem in a different programming language. (They’re adding new problems much more quickly than I’m solving them, so so far I’ve made negative progress.) Then I discovered I’d already done two, but never wrote about either of them. Oops! Here’s a twofer, then.

This post necessarily gives away the answers, so don’t read this if you’d like to solve the problems yourself.

As often happens when you say something controversial, there have been some very adventurous interpretations of the essay I just wrote about economic inequality. I thought it might help clarify matters for the undecided if I tried to write a version so simple that it leaves no room for misinterpretation.

“I wrote a LiveJournal post so preposterous that even Hacker News didn’t swallow it. I’m painting this as ‘controversial’, which only makes sense if you accept that I am roughly as important as the entire rest of the Internet. Rather than step back and wonder if I might be wrong, I wrote this patronizing Playskool edition, to give the unwashed masses a second chance at appreciating my brilliance. Please admire my generosity.”

No doubt even this version leaves some room. And in the unlikely event I left no holes, some will say I’m backpedalling or doing “damage control.” But anyone who wants to can test that claim by comparing this to the original.

“It is literally unthinkable that my ideas are bad.”