Ask HN: What projects are you going to work on if no need to work?

Marginalia Search: a non-profit amateur search engineer

What would you do with the fossils?

I think finding them has the most fun. I'll probably also collect some good trilobite fossils if I can find some. But I believe reading reports -> figuring out where the location is in modern map -> finding exactly the same spots -> finding some fossils mentioned in the reports is the best part.

I dont get it. projects that don't involve work? projects without need?

I'm keeping myself busy working on my BitGrid architecture, I aim to route around the 80 years of technical debt started by John von Neumann. One of his first casualties was ENIAC, which was slowed down by about 80% when it was "improved"[1]

BitGrid[2] is a green field approach, and I need an accountability buddy to keep me focused. Replacing everything is hard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC#Improvements

[2] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

if you don't need to work (professionally)

I think a better title would be "What would you do if money is not a concern for you"

projects which give an immediate return, and not the mediate return of the salary.

leisure/schole != lack of projects

(my project, like mikewarot's, is to greenfield Informatics as if we hadn't incurred the path-dependent legacy of [pragmatically driven by miniscule machines of the time] decisions made in the 1960s; unlike his I'm making a totally different likely-wrong set of other decisions :-)

EDIT: hnthrowaway0328, finding fossils (in the right strata) is nearly trivial. Challenge: find some Ediacaran fauna!

Challenge 2: if you haven't already, work through the Feynman Lectures: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

Teach physics to geology enthusiasts so i can land a government contract involving fossils..

(I dont need those contracts, i just desire them. Which gov is interested in fossils? The right gov)

Hopefully one of you will supersede von Neumann, in one mega Step

With a little luck I'll get ~3 decades more than JvN did, so I have a slim hope that schlep with chutzpah* can make up for lack of brilliance over time!

(that'd be ~8 startups/doctorate programs, so the goods are odd even if the odds are not good)

* to get SAK's long jumps in fitness space

If I did not need to work and was financially secured, I would dedicate my time to learn and master the craft of parsers, compiler design and implementation, and research new design patterns and algorithms for Garbage Collection.

I've got a backlog of games I want to make, both board and video games. Working on a couple smaller video games right now, but I'd be able to spend more time on them, and maybe even hire an artist and/or musician to make assets for them.

Also I might finally have the time to get back into making music and learning art that I could eventually make games with good enough art/music of my own that can actually attract people's attention, instead of just sometimes being serviceable enough that it doesn't look like a tiny step above programmer art (and the music isn't just kinda boring)... I've released games with both before, and I will again, but it'd be nice to have the time to actually make them kind of decent without resorting to a minimalist art style (flat textures and basic shapes and typography).

Besides that, I would love to have the time to start learning something a bit more academic, maybe climate or environmental science. Maybe I can figure contribute there in some tiny way.

The same ones I work on now, just without the need for a day job.

Thanks for sharing. Really interesting projects. I myself had some fascination about game dev but it's just too much of effort to create art assets. Nowadays it's a lot easier for artists to create games instead of programmers, unless I don't care about art, which makes it even harder.

Thanks, glad that you like what you are doing.

You can pay for art or team up with an artist, or just stick with minimal art styles and games that can get away with it (like puzzle games can often get away with it, although they also tend to make less money on average).

A pitfall with teaming up with an artist is there's no guarantee they're going to stay motivated to work on the project (it can happen for me too, I take long breaks sometimes, why I haven't really tried to team up with anyone lately even though I have years ago). I've had a couple games I've had to scrap because the artist lost interest or had things going on in their personal lives.

There's also paying for art, but that's a bit of a risk, especially with a lot of people either reselling the same art assets with slight tweaks to a bunch of people, using generative A.I., or just selling you art assets they took from elsewhere. So you need to do your due diligence and verify the work of an artist and their skills before you employ them. I have a couple friends that I know that I'm planning to hire to fill in some gaps of my art when I nail down the rest of two of the games I'm working on.

You can do a minimalist art style too, but that doesn't always grab people's atention, so it's a risk. You can make things look more interesting with a lot of movement and animation 'juice' though, instead of making everything static. Two of the games I'm working on use a pretty minimalist art style. One is a modern refresh of a game I released 20 years ago that got millions of plays as a Flash game that I released with (frankly not great) art, so it's possible to make games people will enjoy without amazing art.

But you're really not wrong at all that artists seem to have better luck learning just enough code to use a modern game engine like RenPy or something than vice-versa nowadays, and seem to enjoy a lot more success. Or they can just make beautiful board games, which don't require coding at all and gamers are even more drawn to great art than they are in video games, imo.

Sounds very interesting, it reminds of an NPU. Any visualization of how it works?

Citation for SAK? (Im getting hints that the keyphrase is “Big Step (vs Small Step) semantics)

Case study here of phoneboothknifefight elevated to a streetside assassination attempt? Positively Getting holyroman here…

You may be familiar with the following characters :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135916

CH should be optimally hilly for the Odding in the next 3 decades :)

(More frank/brian herbert refs TK)

Should be somewhere in The Origins of Order (as if that narrows anything down!) — keep in mind that I may not even have the original vocab correct, just the basic idea that recombination keeps a population from getting stuck in local minima. (Combined in my head with bacterial taxis: tumble while you're in a food-rich environment, pick a direction if not, and keep straight while gradient is increasing)

BTW I'm innocent of Dune except for hearsay*; given the XXI vibe being what it is, maybe I should remedy that.

As with W40K, I guess I have a "gentleman's knowledge" of the Herbertiverse?

And on the optimal hills: at least we haven't been notified to clear out wine and skis and stock up yet — I was impressed by how efficiently my wife laid up 2 weeks' rations in the "cave" when the italian tourists first brought us Covid, and she asked, what, don't americans learn how to stock their shelter in elementary school too?

Any TP shortages in your locality 2020-2022?

Nothing deep required .

Just the general ecodoomer vibe, plus awareness of the intended message behind the Golden Path/the Weirding Way

Nope, no shortages with the possible exception of N95 masks, briefly:

a) we gave our army the task to procure PPE, as they are the sole national entity which is both in the habit of buying things for millions of people at once, and could negotiate a cash&carry discount in china by sending cargo planes and logistics people to pick them up.

b) a local company bought a chinese mask-making machine with some public support for the gamble; that turned out to have been an out-of-the-money option, but had we needed the capacity, I'm sure that equipment would have been even more thoroughly reverse-engineered than it had been by the time of installation.

c) in between all of this, a few too "enterprising" people were charged for buying up N95 stocks and attempting to scalp them online.

Oh, and there was also a bit of a shortage of morals, as a few people tried to take advantage of various public support programs for enterprises; as far as I can tell although money was helicoptered pretty quickly to where it was needed, the forensic accountants were only a year or two behind to ferret out those marginal cases when it had gone places where it had not actually been needed. (like with no-personnel stores, this is one of the times where a high trust society pays off)

The description of the Weirding Way reminded me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74OBuMA2qEk#t=120s

(I was once watching the semifinals of the women's epée nat'l championships, and a former Olympian told me that "B always does the right thing, and that's why she won't win: A knows how to do the wrong thing at the right moment, and that's why she's a champion")

wrt to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42216196 : my impression of non-human violence is that they are better than we at avoiding violence when the power balance is clear; it's mostly with young animals or moments where the status quo threatens to have been merely a stasis quo that application of violence becomes necessary. (compare Cherryh, Foreigner)

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic02W1bWeFU

That's why I make sure to keep the karma low (but the TP backup outrageous-- ok, pls reserve judgement before I've completely figured out the Miswak or equiv logistics). JK

Keeping the karma low is similar to the peaceful anabaptists' way of being able to up sticks at (nearly) a moment's notice: without contractual ties it's possible to deconflict from a safe distance.

Shorter Herbert? https://read.gov/aesop/048.html