C could just be a blank and you have to bit blit the arrow on yourself.

I don’t know why, but I still can’t open a core file without going I’m in. I don’t do QA, though, and so tinkering with final breath of my program frozen in time maintains some novelty.

My two cents, after years of Markdown (and md to PDF solutions) and LaTeX and a full two years of trying to commit to bashing my head against Word for work purposes, I’m really enjoying Typst. It didn’t take long to convert my themes, having docs I can import which are basically just variables to share across documents in a folder has been really helpful. Haven’t gone too deep into it but I’m excited to give it a deeper test run over the next little bit.

I sit somewhere tangential on this - I think Bret Victor’s thoughts are valid here, or my interpretation of them - that we need to start revisiting our tooling. Our IDEs should be doing a lot more heavy lifting to suit our needs and reduce the amount of cognitive load that’s better suited for the computer anyways. I get it’s not as valid here as other use cases, but there’s some room for improvements.

Having it in separate functions is more testable and maintainable and more readable when we’re thinking about control flow. Sometimes we want to look at a function and understand the nuts and bolts and sometimes we just want to know the overall flow. Why can’t we swap between views and inline the functions in our IDE when we want to see the full flow? In fact, why can’t we see the function inline but with the parameter variables replaced by passed values to get a feel for how the function will flow and compute what can be easily computed (assuming no global state)?

I could be completely off base, but more and more recently - especially after years of teaching introductory programming - I’m leaning more toward the idea that our IDEs should be doubling down on taking advantage of language features, live computation, and co-operating with our coding style… and not just OOP. I’d love to hear some places that I might be overlooking. Maybe this is all a moot point, but I think code design and tooling should go hand in hand.

Yeah, I knew freelance folks who provided long term support with such complicated setups. The base daily rate plus hourly with a monthly retainer and weekly on call fees. Wild.

Or, hourly = extremely high paid contract work.

Soap. 100%.

I know this post and comment might sound shilly but switching to more expensive microfibre underwear actually made a big impact on my life and motivated me to start buying better fitting and better material clothes.

I’d always bought cheap and thought anything else was silly. I was wrong. So much more comfortable, I haven’t had a single pair even begin to wear down a little bit, less sweating and feel cleaner, fit better, and haven’t been scrunchy or uncomfortable once compared to the daily issues of that cheap FotL life. This led to more expensive and longer lasting socks with textures I like better, better fitting shoes that survive more than one season.

It was spawned by some severe weight loss and a need to restock my wardrobe. My old underwear stuck around as backups to tell me I needed to do laundry, but going back to the old ones was bad enough that I stopped postponing laundry.

Basically, I really didn’t appreciate how much I absolutely hated so many textures I was constantly in contact with until I tried alternative underwear and realized you don’t have to just deal with that all the time.

It depends what “From Scratch” means to you, as I don’t know your level of programming or interests, because you could be talking about making a game from beginning to end, and you could be talking about…

• Using a general purpose game engine (Unity, Godot, Unreal) and pre-made assets (e.g., Unity Asset Store, Epic Marketplace)?
• Using a general purpose game engine almost purely as a rendering+input engine with a nice user interface and building your own engine overtop of that
• Using frameworks for user input and rendering images, but not necessarily ones built for games, so they’re more general purpose and you’ll need to write a lot of game code to put it all together into your own engine before you even starting “Making the game”, but offer extreme control over every piece so that you can make something very strange and experimental, but lots of technical overhead before you get started
• Writing your own frameworks for handling user input and rendering images… that same as previous, but you’ll spend 99% of your time trying to rewrite the wheel and get it to go as fast as any off the shelf replacement

If you’re new to programming and just want to make a game, consider Godot with GDScript - here’s a guide created in Godot to learn GDScript interactively with no programming experience. GDScript is like Python, a very widely used language outside of games, but it is exclusive to Godot so you’ll need to transfer it. You can also use C# in Godot, but it’s a bigger learning curve, though it is very general and used in a lot of games.

I’m a big Godot fan, but Unity and Unreal Engine are solid. Unreal might have a steeper learning curve, Godot is a free and open-source project with a nice community but it doesn’t have the extensive userbase and forum repository of Unity and Unreal, Unity is so widely used there’s lots of info out there.

If you did want to go really from scratch, you can try using something like Pygame in Python or Processing in Java, which are entirely code-created (no user interface) but offer lots of helpful functionality for making games purely from code. Very flexible. That said, they’ll often run slow, they’ll take more time to get started on a project, and you’ll very quickly hit a ceiling for how much you can realistically do in them before anything practical.

If you want to go a bit lower, C++ with SDL2, learning OpenGL, and learning about how games are rendered and all that is great - it will be fast, and you’ll learn the skills to modify Godot, Unreal, etc. to do anything you’d like, but similar caveats to previous; there’s likely a low ceiling for the quality you’ll be able to put out and high overhead to get started on a project.

Getting really speculative, but maybe Infinite Scrolling and similar UX design patterns. I think we learned it was dangerous pretty early in, but I have a feeling there isn’t currently a widespread understanding of just how badly things like infinite scrolling shortcircuit parts of the brain and cause issues with attention and time regulation in large populations.

If I was more researched on it, I might include infinite short-form content feeds of almost any type to be honest, which may just be another way of saying social media.

Conversely, if smart watches with accurate health monitoring become cheap and commonplace it might drastically improve health outcomes by motivating people to see doctor’s when needed for subtle heart issues that would otherwise go unchecked.