Do they increase the actual power emitted or just create interference? i.e. should one be concerned health-wise if many of those are used? (assuming one believes in RF in these frequencies being harmful).
If what you are doing can be done by a 13 year old, that is your reality.
What I do requires years and years of experience/study, and 90% of the 20 year olds cannot do it, and that is being very conservative.
Of course you are talking about the average developer. But your average health personnel aren't doctors, they are nurses or assistants. And there is nothing wrong with that.
> all which lead to greater value creation and self fulfillment superior to defeating some imaginary creature
That is 100% subjective.
For instance, I can easily argue that breaking kernels and writing drivers for obscure hardware does not add any real value for society as a whole.
However, playing and socializing with people does create value for society, specially in this day and age where people is evermore alone, if only in reduction of antidepressants ;)
Anyway, parent said obscure hardware, so hardly useful for most people. And it sounded more like a personal activity, it is not clear he/she did publishing or upstreaming or blogging about it.
By the way: actual drivers for complex hardware are nowadays mostly written or maintained by companies.
I almost agree with you, but the truth is even with almost minimum brightness, I still prefer that background color get slightly darker than pure white (and same in black backgrounds: the text should not be perfect white).
Sort of like the way HN implements it. Grey or something off white tends to be easier on the eyes than pure white.
Reflective media like paper behave a little differently than emissive media like an LCD. A normal sheet of paper under normal lighting conditions won't reach the same brightness as an LCD. An LCD is much bigger than any reasonable book and it emits light uniformly across it's entire area (close to impossible for any piece of paper unless it's affixed on a flat plate). Also most paper is not actually very white.
I'm a grad student in the US, I have more free time than this. I also had more free time when I was working (even more than I do now). I know very few people that have this little amount of time, and that generally is because they decide that they want to spend their time doing work.
Do you have children? If you have children, you can easily wind up with negative free hours per day.
If you averaged say, 4 parents and 4 non-parents free time, I could see how someone would easily arrive at a number where the "average American has just 4 hours of free time per week"
Yes, I do. One, and she is old enough now. Even when she was little, I had free time.
If you do not have enough free time for your child, maybe you should consider not having them. The same way you would if you did not have the finances right or anything else that may affect them...
> But once you do, you find that other subfields of CS are more interesting and useful. And you just get older. :)
It is true that some people, as they get older, claim to find games less interesting. In my opinion, some of them simply jaded a bit, and would be a good thing for them if they tried to find enjoyment again in the small things. I know, because I was there too. It depends a lot on the culture.
There are also others that start claiming games are useless, immature and that the world will end if youngsters keep playing them.
Entertainment has been useful even before civilization existed, and those that enjoy the time to entertain themselves, do; even if it is in the form of working on dream projects. Yes, that is playing too.
As for your other point, there are objectively very few (if any) topics as interesting as games for CS people, given the so many areas of CS (and non-CS) they encompass at the same time. Hardly any other area of work touches so many domains. Only operating systems, browsers and CAD apps (and maybe Emacs ;) are close as vast.
>It is true that some people, as they get older, claim to find games less interesting. In my opinion, some of them simply jaded a bit, and would be a good thing for them if they tried to find enjoyment again in the small things.
There are also people who still find enjoyment in small things, just not in games. It's not like computer games are that enticing beyond a certain point.
You can wonder around shooting aliens or casting spells, or exploring space colonies, in some commercial game that's basically the nth clone of 1000 others before it so many times before it loses interest...
It's like watching superhero movies for life. Yeah, people do it. But people also learn to appreciate more mature movie plots than "kid finds out they are unique, has responsibility to save world" or "millionaire with faults devotes time to fight supervillains", as their life experiences (e.g. kids, divorce, health scares, job trouble, mortality, love affairs, betrayal, etc) are not exactly the same as their brooding misunderstood teenager years when they wished they would "show everybody" anymore...
That is exactly what I was talking about! You are portraying games as "immature activities" like "superhero movies", rather than just "movies".
The same way there are more "mature" movie plots than those that you are (kind of) mocking, there are also more mature books than children stories, more varied music than pop summer songs and, indeed, more games than your "nth clone of shooting aliens".
By the way, I have had a nice daughter and health scares like anybody else, and no, that has nothing to do with maturity or with games becoming boring. There are many game genres and of course you like different ones when you are 15 vs. when you are 50. I literally thought like you in my early 30s, when I had literally zero free time and kept thinking "yeah I am past that, leave it to the young generation, I am responsible now".
>As for your other point, there are objectively very few (if any) topics as interesting as games for CS people, given the so many areas of CS (and non-CS) they encompass at the same time. Hardly any other area of work touches so many domains. Only operating systems, browsers and CAD apps (and maybe Emacs ;) are close as vast.
What is interesting is subjective, and I am not going to seriously tell anyone what is interesting or not. But there are certainly areas in CS with just as much or more breadth and depth than game development. As someone who works in AI now, I would say it covers even more areas of CS, and requires more math.
There is also computer security, which can be as high level as web app security, or as abstract as the number theory powering cryptography.
I love game development, and games, but it is a bit disingenuous to hold game development up as being the ultimate discipline in CS. It is certainly not.
If your definition of "interesting" is how much math it requires, I have bad news for you... :)
Anyway, neither AI nor security cover that much of CS (they are parts of CS, and there are many others). Games, however, heavily use both of them (and many other parts of CS).
