I had a client who thought I was a miracle worker for changing the color of every link on the site in under an hour.
Then he got mad because it took me three days to add one field to a form.
Most people cannot begin to comprehend that just having the field on the form doesn’t magically make it do anything. Like, yeah, I can add a field to the form in five minutes, but if you want it to actually work, it’ll take time.
a { color: pink; }And then you realize that the previous programmer abused the anchors to build all of the buttons.
Should take you an hour of just testing.
To be fair to the client, I, as a programmer, often struggle to estimate tasks with accuracy, and am very often at a loss at even explaining to co-workers why some things are easy and others impossible.
I once just asked how long if would take them to swap the chair and the table, and how long it would take to swap the window and that pillar. After all, it’s just moving stuff around. They understood after that.
I like that metaphor. I’m gonna use it next time I have to talk to a non-technical.
Careful, that table is critical for getting airflow over that server in the corner. If you move the table it will overheat and cause a cascade of failures and bankrupt the entire company.
And that’s a load bearing chair.
I’ve never felt more called out.
He was okay when I explained that the custom Magento plugin was written in Bulgarian and I had to translate it before attempting to understand the convoluted mess I’d been given.
I’m sad that the relevant xkcd is kinda obsolete now (because it’s been long enough for that research team to finish doing its thing).
What would be a “nearly impossible” task in this post-AI world? Short of the provably impossible tasks like the busy beaver problem (and even then, you would be able to make an algorithm that covers a subset of the problem space), I really can’t think of anything.
Deterministic answers from AI
Do you have a link explaining what deterministic means in the context of AI? Preferably for noobs
Don’t forget the magnificent scarf in Shinobi (PS2)
I appreciate the joke, but the rules are exactly why they go “oof”. The scarf has higher requirements for precision and a more constant overhead than a one-off giant summon.
You could make them go “oof” on the summon if you added a requirement that the lava properly flow along the ground and interact with all characters near the event.
The scarf has higher requirements for precision and a more constant overhead than a one-off giant summon.
I mean, there’s a scarf.
And then there’s a scarf
You could make them go “oof” on the summon if you added a requirement that the lava properly flow along the ground and interact with all characters near the event.
I think the better question is “How many polygons do you want and what do you want them to do?”
Real time simulation of fabrics is a ongoing field of study. It has years of research behind it.
The last two-minute-papers video on the subject makes it look like a solved problem, until you notice the stats in the corner are measuring “minutes per frame”
Generally simulated fabrics look good as long as it is flapping in the wind like a flag and has no chance of interacting with any other objects, such as the person wearing a scarf.
Exactly, the first request is so vague that you can just implement it in a way that doesn’t require any complicated programming magic, but a scarf has the implicit expectation to swing around and not intersect with the player or itself. Or worse, expect the player to summon a demon wearing a scarf!
(Still a good joke though)
Or you could go the JRPG way and make the scarf clip through everything including on cut scenes where the devs had 100% of control over the position of everything.
Now try a classy giant demon with a scarf
