I'm glad that pieces like this exist, encouraging people to go and see it, and I look forward to reading more of (1) once I've seen it.

That's because the film is easily spoiled, and the impact comes from watching it. Writing a film review without spoiling a film like this is hard.

Compared to if you run a cloud storage company, a corrupted file might annoy a user that pays $1m every month, to store data that they themselves make money on, etc.

The stakes for a game save are a lot lower.

I'm personally less concerned. Partly because I attribute Blow's social opinions to naivety and ignorance rather than malice – e.g. I think he holds misogynistic views not because he is trying to be misogynistic, but because he's naive about the systemic bias in society, a criticism that can be levelled at many people.

But otherwise, I'm less concerned about Order of the Sinking Star because he has said in interviews that the story is supposed to be interesting to a wide audience and not intended to be based on his world view in any way. The Witness also wasn't some right wing think piece, it was just pretentious.

I get why a journalist would be concerned, but I think they're being overly cautious.

Just a guess based on the way he's spoken about it, but I'd expect an open beta in December-February. I'm not expecting that to be open source though (maybe the engine will be but not the language, unclear).

However Order of the Sinking Star is also made in a custom programming language and custom engine. This is not at all normal for game development. There also doesn't appear to be a scripting system. Normally you have an engine built in C++ or something fast, and then a scripting system where you write a higher level language to script how the game runs. Engine development is more separate from scripting development. With Order of the Sinking Star, the game engine appears to be much more just like a library, and the same codebase runs the engine and game logic, with no scripting layer, as far as I can figure out from public hints.

I'm 20 hours in and starting to see examples of mechanics being generalised in a way I wasn't expecting, i.e. an early games thing turns out works in a way more general way that elevates the mechanic in complexity and feels like a very satisfying moment.

I have a suspicion about another that would completely change my perception of the game if it turns out to be true, so... meta puzzles? Not sure, but certainly there's something more than just the 4 initial rulesets colliding.

However, so far I can't point to anything substantial that should have been skipped. Almost every level is teaching me something, and those things keep coming up later.

Ultimately, Order of the Sinking Star applies the same formula as The Witness (although hopefully with a little more story, but probably not a lot more), and dials it up to 11. I loved The Witness, so really it's exactly what I asked for, and I think the feeling of the distance left to go is an artifact of a desire for instant gratification.

I think the game is deeply rewarding and fantastic, as long as you understand you're signing up for a slow burn. That's not for everyone, and that's ok.

My setup is optimised for being quiet and low power, and part of that means bulk HDD storage that is mostly spun down. Seeding a large long tail of data would probably mean a lot more disk activity.

The 1000s of applications folks are doing on the SWE subreddits are mostly juniors (or over titled seniors) with not much experience.

Maybe this guy is in that latter category, but it seems unlikely. I think this is just an issue of remote jobs being scarce.

> I know I can work remotely effectively because I did it for the last 6 years.

6 years means that Ryan started right around COVID. Looking back I don't think COVID was the remote renaissance that it appeared at the time, I think it was a temporary blip. That sucks, I'd much rather it was permanent, and some things have changed for the long run, but unfortunately I think this is likely a much bigger factor. Remote jobs have always been few and far between, and super competitive.

Claude is the author on the commits.

Reinforcement learning selects for models that appear to complete tasks, on the basis that appearing to complete a task is correlated with completing a task.

Both have problems. The latter is probably a better correlation, but by no means flawless. If we just take at face value that RL is training models to complete tasks, we're not engaging deeply enough with the process enough to see where it falls short.