I think a lot of the non-professionals start with parsing and do not get exposed to backend. I have read two books about interpreters/compilers and they don't touch the backend very much.

Maybe this is introductory for backend?

That's part of it. I think another part is that it seems like the students are asked to read the papers behind a lot of the concepts, and academic literature is not generally very accessible to undergrads. (Not that they can't read it, but without someone guiding you through at least the first few papers, it can be a frustrating experience for many.)

The root of the problem is that ordinary people don't make enough noises for any problems they see in life, so they are essentially cattles.

Do you care about cattle's opinions? I guess a few of us do, but most of us don't.

Would humans change their treatment of cattle if the cattle made louder noises? That seems doubtful.

A very large and powerful government puts an awful lot of effort into making sure people don't reference a particular time their military vehicle made contact with a person standing still decades ago.

They even design AI models around that!

Maybe -- I think that's the reasoning behind government-enforced bans on photography and recording inside of slaughterhouses.

That's not the "root", you can go at least one step further:

The wealthy CEOs and boardmembers found a way to make even more money, but know that it will make the people who are aware of it angry. So they, as a class, find other issues that they can enflame (or manufacture wholesale), through the manipulation of social media algorithms and legacy media, both of which they own and control. They would much rather have "ordinary people" angry about trans athletes or immigrants, than about the surveillance state they profit from, or stealing our data they profit from, etc...

Unfortunately, we humans are very easy to manipulate by making us angry. If "ordinary people don't make enough noises for any problems they see in life", its hardly our fault if we're too busy surviving in the current economy, and the elites are spending billions to make us angry about anything except the elites.

There's a limit to how much angry people can be. Dilute it on irrelevancies, the anger directed at the real problems goes down.

the root of the problem is that we have no data privacy laws.

I recall that Diablo 1 (and 2) has a lot of enemies that are essentially the same sprite but different palette. Is it the same trick?

it used to be a hardware thing, so if your pixels were represented by a nibble, and the definition of the color for each of the 16 possible value is in table the hardware references, you just update that table (on a vsync, or even an hsync) and you could get cool animations effects (for the time)

random example from the Atari 800xl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPjLZ4MVKCc (you can see how slow it is to draw a scene, but the animation effect due to pallete rotation is really fast).

Thanks for the tip!

I find the most interesting things are the internal tools -- like the Python script to generate the gib animation, or the other Python script to generate 2D spritesheet from Blender. OP is definitely a 10x engineer who can also do good arts. This is very rare IMO. I'm very surprised to find that OP has consistent art direction.

It seemed, as a fan of the genre in the 90s, like these Renaissance Engineers were behind every major hit. I remember some of their names, they are true artists.

I have no idea the names of nearly anyone but a CEO or lead Director in the games industry of the past 15 years.

As a side note, I checked OP's other projects, and looks like he/she was already OK with arts from earlier on:

https://staniks.github.io/articles/inferno/

https://staniks.github.io/articles/worship/

It's too late for me, as I'm already in the prison of family and kids, but you probably still can!

Is there any extensive interviews with Japanese Console programmers? I feel all these interviews focus on the writing/design side, which make sense for popularity, but I do hope there are extensive interviews with programmers.

There are plenty of interviews with EU/US console programmers.

I wrote my side projects with as little AI as possible. You can still do it in VSCode AFAIK. But this is just for fun.

I intuitively agree. Some of my good ideas come from sprint walking...and sitting on the toilet.

This is so annoying. I tried to see what passkey is, and tried to sign in, and MSFT always tried to ask me to use authenticator, and when I clicked other ways to sign in, somehow it went to "Reset password", and I clicked cancel, and now I can't sign in any more.

The whole fucking security thing has nothing fucking to do with my security, but with their apps and control. I had enough with this. gonna delete everything MSFT from my world. Fuck them.

Passkey is not unique to Microsoft, Apple supports it with their Password manager built-in to iOS and macOS, I can authenticate with my passkey on my Macs and on my iPhone with ease. BitWarden supports it as well, but I rather not use BitWarden if I can just use my phone or laptop.

Google, Microsoft, Apple etc everyone supports Passkey its a known spec that was drafted and implemented a while ago. Point being you don't need any special Microsoft to use Passkey, I would be shocked if Android doesn't have it baked in.

Just in case you/others reading this didn't know, yoh don't have to use Microsoft Authenticator. They hide the option away, but there is a button to click to use your own authenticator app and it gives you the QC code/numbers to input into Bitwarden/KeePass/etc.

I actually agree with him, but maybe they will lower the salary further because of that, to make US workers more "competitive".