100% agree. Box of blocks cannot be beat. My sister and I used the hell out of ours: we built towers, cantilevers, mazes, Rube Goldberg devices, houses for rodents, vehicles, elaborate locks, catapults, you name it. They're still in the same condition as day 1, ready for our children.
Bonus: You can roll a lot more down those long rubber racetracks than just cars.
That makes sense but my first thoughts were that panels wouldn't be oriented so that the majority of that flat surface was perpendicular to the radar but instead much closer to parallel, and that aviation radar would be higher up than a house roof to avoid ground clutter.
> If the algorithm "working as intended" consistently downranks stories that cast a bad light on YCombinator, the sorts of people y'all mingle with, or the tech industry in general...is that any better than putting your thumb on the scale?
That's the exact opposite of what Dan stated, what this thread (and your link) demonstrate, and my own lived experience here.
that's fair but the post was on page 3 for a while. glad to see it restored to the front page. (the charitable explanation is that non-moderators can flag stories, as opposed to an official policy to protect YC companies)
This thread required manual intervention to override the algorithm - intervention that it did not always have and not all stories benefit from.
My argument is that the algorithm, as well as the various gameified engagement mechanisms on this site, are badly conceived and gives too much censure and veto power to ordinary users.
> Seems like the objection is to the process, not the result.
Right. The game is not eligible for the award. This is not a comment on the quality of the game.
The Indie Game Awards require zero AI content. The devs fully intended to ship without AI content but made a mistake, disqualifying themselves for the award. This is simply how competition rules work. I have a friend who plays competitive trading card games, and one day he showed up to a national event with an extra card in his box after playing with some friends late at night. It was an honest mistake, and the judges were quite sympathetic, but he was still disqualified!
it's an (maybe the most) extreme example of something which is "gen AI" but not problematic
and as such a naive "rule" saying "no gen AI at all" is a pretty bad competition rule design
Reductio ad absurdum is a form of logic which takes an argument to its logical conclusion in order to demonstrate that it is absurd if it were to be taken on its face. Whether or not anyone applies it that way in reality is irrelevant.
I'd agree if this were about The Game Awards or similar, where indie devs are expected to compete against the AAA goliaths, but I've always understood the Indie Game Awards as being more about the craft then the end product.
From the FAQ:
> The ceremony is developer-focused, with game creators taking center stage to present awards, recognize their peers, and openly speak without the pressure of time constraints.
Regardless of AI's inevitability, I don't particularly care to celebrate it's use, and I think that's the most reasonable stance for a developer focused award to take.
That's a good point—this being the indie game awards. I still think it makes sense to have separate categories that allow for AI-generated content but "indie developed" (versus an "Indie Art Award" that absolutely prohibits AI-generated content).
We should be able to celebrate the creation, execution, concept of a game without letting AI assets nullify the rest.
Fair point, but I think it's a lot more true of functional ones.
The problem is pretty easy to see in a C-style for loop:
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
printf("%d\n", i);
if (i % 2 == 0) i++;
}
The index variable depends on it's value in previous versions of the loop and can be modified in the loop body! Can't parallelize that!
Side effects and mutation break many of the promises provided by functional constructs. Hybrid languages like Python can illustrate this:
# pure, parallelizable
[2 * item for item in items]
# side effect! order matters!
[print(item) for item in items]
# side effect! order matters!
[arr.append(item) for item in items]
A language like Haskell might be the other extreme. You're not allowed to use an `f` that breaks this:
Bonus: You can roll a lot more down those long rubber racetracks than just cars.
Bonus 2: Why did these go away? https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/chubs-baby-wipes-stac...
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