Admittedly I haven't used C# in a few years, but to my knowledge it is much more ergonomic than java and personally it's my preferred language. Only thing stopping me from using it more is it has a much smaller community than java/python etc. Wondering what you think is missing.
I worked for a publicly traded corporate elearning company that was written this way. Mainly sprocs with a light mapping framework. I agree this is better as long as you keep the sprocs for accessing data and not for implementing application logic.
ORMs are way more trouble than they’re worth because it’s almost easier to write the actual SQL and just map the resulting table result.
Is it true that it's bad for learning new skills? My gut tells me it's useful as long as I don't use it to cheat the learning process and I mainly use it for things like follow up questions.
It is, it can be an enormous learning accelerator for new skills, for both adults and genuinely curious kids. The gap between low and high performancer will explode. I can tell you that if I had LLMs I would've finished schooling at least 25% quicker, while learning much more. When I say this on HN some are quick to point out the fallibility of LLMs, ignoring that the huge majority of human teachers are many times more fallible. Now this is a privileged place where many have been taught by what is indeed the global top 0.1% of teachers and professors, so it makes more sense that people would respond this way. Another source of these responses is simply fear.
In e.g. the US, it's a huge net negative because kids aren't probably taught these values and the required discipline. So the overwhelming majority does use it to cheat the learning process.
I can't tell you if this is the same inside e.g. China. I'm fairly sure it's not nearly as bad though as kids there derive much less benefit from cheating on homework/the learning process, as they're more singularly judged on standardized tests where AI is not available.
I don't get this line of thinking. Never in my life have I heard the reasoning "replacing effort is the problem" when talking about children who are able to afford 24/7 brilliant private tutors. Having access to that has always been seen as an enormous privilege.
Having an actual human who is a "brilliant private tutor" is an enormous privilege. A chatbot is not a brilliant private tutor. It is a private tutor, yes, but if it were human it would be guilty of malpractice. It hands out answers but not questions. A tutor's job is to cause the child to learn, to be able to answer similar questions. A standard chatbot's job is to give the child the answer, thus removing the need to learn. Learning can still happen, but only if the child forces it themselves.
That's not to say that a chatbot couldn't emulate a tutor. I don't know how successful it would be, but it seems like a promising idea. In actual practice, that is not how students are using them today. (And I'd bet that if you did have a tutor chatbot, that most students would learn much more about jailbreaking them to divulge answers than they would about the subject matter.)
As for this idea that replacing effort not being a problem, I suggest you do some research because that is everywhere. Talk to a teacher. Or a psychologist, where they call it "depth of processing" (which is a primary determinant of how much of something is incorporated, alongside frequency of exposure). Or just go to a gym and see how many people are getting stronger by paying 24/7 brilliant private weightlifters to do the lifting for them.
Regarding your concerns about tutor emulation, your argument seems to be students use chatbots as a way to cheat rather than as a tutor.
My pushback is its very easy to tell a chatbot to give you hints that lead to the answer and to get deeper understanding by asking follow up questions if that's what you want. Cheating vs putting in work has always been something students have to choose between though and I don't think AI is going to change the amount of students making each choice (or if it does it won't be by a huge percentage). The gap in skills between the groups will grow, but there will still be a group of people that became skilled because they valued education and a group that cheated and didn't learn anything.
> A standard chatbot's job is to give the child the answer, thus removing the need to learn.
An LLM's job is not to give the child the answer (implying "the answer to some homework/exam question"), it's to answer the question that was asked. A huge difference. If you ask it to ask a question, it will do so. Over the next 24 hours as of today, December 5th 2025, hundreds of thousands of people will write a prompt that includes exactly that - "ask me questions".
> Learning can still happen, but only if the child forces it themselves.
This is literally what my original comment said, although "forcing" it is pure negative of a framing; rather "learning can still happen, if the child wants to". See this:
>In e.g. the US, it's a huge net negative because kids aren't probably taught these values and the required discipline. So the overwhelming majority does use it to cheat the learning process.
I never claimed that replacing effort isn't necessarily a problem either, just that such a downside has never been brought up in the context of access to a brilliant tutor, yet suddenly an impossible-to-overcome issue when it comes to LLMs.
I learnt the most from bad teachers#, but only when motivated. I was forced to go away and really understand things rather than get a sufficient understanding from the teacher. I had to put much more effort in. Teachers don't replace effort, and I see no reasons LLMs will change that. What they do though is reduced the time to finding the relevant content, but I expect at some poorly defined cost.
# The truly good teachers were primarily motivation agents, providing enough content, but doing so in a way that meant I fully engaged.
I think what it comes down to, and where many people get confused, is separating the technology itself from how we use it. The technology itself is incredible for learning new skills, but at the same time it incentivizes people to not learn. Just because you have an LLM doesn't mean you can skip the hard parts of doing textbook exercises and thinking hard about what you are learning. It's a bit similar to passively watching youtube videos. You'd think that having all these amazing university lectures available on youtube makes people learn much faster, but in reality in makes people lazy because they believe they can passively sit there, watch a video, do nothing else, and expect that to replace a classroom education. That's not how humans learn. But it's not because youtube videos or LLMs are bad learning tools, it's because people use them as mental shortcut where they shouldn't.
I fully agree, but to be fair these chatbots hack our reward systems. They present a cost/benefit ratio where for much less effort than doing it ourselves we get a much better result than doing it ourselves (assuming this is a skill not yet learned). I think the analogy to calculators is a good one if you're careful with what you're considering: calculators did indeed make people worse at mental math, yet mental math can indeed be replaced with calculators for most people with no great loss. Chatbots are indeed making people worse at mental... well, everything. Thinking in general. I do not believe that thinking can be replaced with AI for most people with no great loss.
I found it useful for learning to write prose. There's nothing quite like instantaneous feedback when learning. The downside was that I hit the limit of the LLM's capabilities really quickly. They're just not that good at writing prose (overly flowery and often nonsensical).
LLMs were great for getting started though. If you've never tried writing before, then learning a few patterns goes a long way. ("He verbed, verbing a noun.")
Agree but at the same time talking about leaving the rat race and glorifying the simple life is old hat for anyone over the age of 25. It gets annoying reading trite advice written by someone that sees it as profound insight.
I read the main problem with hiring chip factory workers in Arizona was the factory just didnt pay enough for the long hours demanded. I looked up the median salary and its only 50k so I'm assuming it's not crazy skilled labor (e.g. brain drain). Taiwanese workers just seem more willing to do it.
I spoke to a Taiwanese person and apparently the salaries there are actually quite good, even by western standards (normal ones; not SF). The downside is they have very very long hours (996, barely any holiday, etc.).
It's also highly-skilled, yet very boring work. The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
US PhDs typically have other options and would consider this sort of work a waste of their time.
I know several people working as customer engineers in a fab based in America. They are very much not PhD‘s or even mechanical engineers.
They are each assigned one tool to maintain as you said. They each make around 100K and 3 12hr days per week.
They were working in the automotive industry before these jobs. Sounds pretty damn good to me, but I suppose that’s one reason American companies cannot compete with TSMC.
> every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong
This works in Taiwan. It doesn’t in America. The Taiwanese workers will help transfer knowledge to American workers; it will be the joint responsibility of them both to come up with how those processes are adapted for American preferences. (Probably more automation, rotation between machines or possibly even not being under TSMC.)
I mean, that was exactly the way the job was described when I interviewed at Intel for a process engineer, and everyone doing the same job was at the time a PhD according to the interviewer. Did it change?
Being on call 24/7 to troubleshoot million dollar pieces of equipment sounded like a poor life choice, so I didn't take it. But Intel also hasn't exactly done great since then...
> was exactly the way the job was described when I interviewed at Intel for a process engineer, and everyone doing the same job was at the time a PhD according to the interviewer. Did it change?
Not sure. What has changed in recent years is the quality of industrial automation, particularly in semiconductors.
I'm unconvinced the only way to make these chips is for highly-trained engineers to caramelise onions on the stove. (At the very least, they could be allowed time to conduct experiments into new production methods, et cetera. Similar to how universities let professors do research in exchange for putting in teaching hours.)
> The way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it...
did they mean that literally or just that an expert was assigned to it? What kind of PhD would even be relevant to maintaining machinery on an assembly line? Perhaps a PhD on the operations of that specific machine but even then, the person's knowledge would be so focused on whatever physics/chemistry/science is being used that i find it hard to believe a PhD would know what to do when something broke without tons of specific training on the hardware.
A PhD is really just a project in an academic setting.
There’s likely little real world difference in capability between someone with first class honours and a year in industry, than first class honours plus a PhD.
I mean, it's a long, specialized project. It really depends on the specialization. a new grad with a PhD in some LLM tech would be grabbed up much faster than a hobbyist with 5+ years in general SWE with maybe some pet projects made with AI tech.
> he way it was described to me is that every major piece of equipment has a PhD assigned to it and their job is basically to babysit the machine and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
Yes.
"It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman"
Not just long hours right? Speaking to Taiwanese friends involved in semiconductor work (not TSMC employees though) it's the shift work that's really hard to manage in the US.
50k is/was recently a decent salary (not SF). In the last 5 years, not so much anywhere outside the absolute lowest CoL areas.
But yes, most Americans do not want to work on a death march. And employers don't want to pay it. I doubt they can argue 50k as exempt so that's a lot of overtime. They may as well be salaried 6 figures at that point.
Why would they require these hours? In the U.S. I think they would need to pay time and a half for anything north of 40-hours. Seems like it would be cheaper to hire more workers and not force the overtime. Then they might be able to increase the salary some. Everyone wins except the people who are willing to sacrifice the time for time and a half pay.
This is only accurate inasmuch as most salaried employees are overtime exempt for other reasons (e.g. because they are executive or administrative professionals). Paying employees a salary, on its own, does not make them overtime exempt.
One that comes to mind is an on-site caretaker position (e.g. on a remote property), where the employee is effectively being paid to be available, not to do a certain number of hours of work.
50k is just a step above McDonalds these days in a lot of areas. Sure minimum wage might be $15k, but realistically nobody pays that little except in very rural areas (if you need a small number of low skilled employees a small rural town is a perfect spot to build - but if you need more than a small number they can't provide more at any price - you will pay more in the city but there are a lot more people around if you need more)
AZ minimum wage is 14.70. If it was 996 and you somehow only got straight time for working 72h a week, it would pay 55000. Assuming there's no overtime exemption it would be $67000. I'm pretty sure it's not a 996 in AZ.
By how much? Where I live in IA McDonalds is starting at $17/hour, which is not that much behind California. (and both states are large enough to expect some variation depending on where you live)
That's why manufacturing offshored in the first place, companies feel they're receiving better value for money on wages elsewhere for this kind of work (and these days not to mention more & larger facilities, proximity to component sources, and a strong ecosystem of supporting and complimentary facilities).
I think that's obviously a major part of it but it ignores other stuff like lax environmental and safety standards.
It would be interesting to see how much of the economic advantage of off-shoring is due to lower wages due intrinsic to lower cost of living vs stuff like ignoring/bribing foreign officials or non-existent environmenta/safety standards that objectively should exist.
Personally I won't mind paying more to buy manufactured goods. My mom told me that a pair of sneakers before the offshoring back in the late 80s usually cost more than $300 in today's dollars. Yes, it was expensive, but I would just buy fewer and use the one for longer time. The reason is that in the long run the manufacturing cost would get lower due to increased efficiency, and loss of supply chain is detrimental to the entire country - and our living expenses will increase overall. Case in point, how much tax do we have to pay and how much inflation do we have to suffer in order to build those super expensive weapons? Part of the reasons that we had $20K toilet and $100 screws is that we simply don't have large enough supply chain to offset the cost of customized manufacturing.
Besides, the US loses know-how on manufacturing, eliminating potentially hundreds of thousands of high-paying engineering jobs - it will also be a pipe dream that we can keep the so-called high-end jobs by sitting in an office drawing boxes all day. Sooner or later, those who work with the actual manufacturing processes on the factor floor will out compete us and grab our the cushy "design" jobs.
you can feel free to buy american, i don’t care so i would prefer if it were not mandated and you get your individual choice to pay more for your goods if you want
Easy to get better value on wages when you get to pay under the minimum wage of your home country. And/or aren't required to offer benefits, vacation. And are able to work them twice as long without overtime pay. And don't need to care about child labor laws.
More so in the Chinese-speaking world and South Korea because the industrialization/urbanization is more recent, so there's rising demand in the urban areas with high population growth, resulting in high prices.
Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing.
The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on owning land that can be passed down the generations (the alternative was often quasi-servile farm labour that locks families in poverty). Property purchases are usually multi-generational efforts, so families can generally take the brunt of overinflated prices.
2 is pretty infamous unless something big happened recently (a lot of big things in JP happened recently, so I could have legitmately missed something).
1 is 50/50. Urbanization is growing because the small town life is shrinking.it's wrong at face value, but there is a cost to this in the overall economy, since the country overall isn't growing.
It's just an obvious nonsense. Housing cost is dependent variable of local economic activities. People gather and property prices soar. Taiwan is jam packed so land prices would be higher relative to GDP per capita.
I think GP is finding concept of land scarcity non-intuitive for some reason.
> Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.
This only happens when the government becomes captured by land owners to constrain the supply, since otherwise you can build up. But governments getting captured by land owners happens a lot.
Being productive doesn’t consume my entire life but if i’m going to do two things that feel the same I may as well do the one that has other substantial benefits to myself and others. I spend enough time developing that side of myself at work. My free time should go to making myself more well rounded.
The article mentions one of the main appeals of factorio is you get to think like a programmer without bosses/overhead from actual work but it’s always been hard to get into games for that reason because I could just work on a side project with the same result. I really don’t understand the appeal.
I remember when Guitar Hero came out I didn't understand why anybody would play that instead of just buying a guitar. The point is the videogame itself is designed to be fun and remove plenty of other elements from the real life equivalent that focuses more on enjoyment and less on grinding it out. If you're thinking about "what have I accomplished?" instead of "I'm having so much fun!" then it might not be for you.
The other aspect is there are plenty of people that like to think like programmers, but have no experience programming and the barrier to entry for a videogame is substantially lower than even figuring out a "hello world!" program for someone who wouldn't even know how to pick a programming language.
Your comparison hits home for me. I have been playing guitar on-and-off for over a decade (OK, maybe more like trying to play guitar) and I still really enjoy Guitar Hero.
It's instant gratification: I don't have as much fun practicing at .75x speed with a metronome to learn the hard part of a piece. Instead a video game tells me how great I am at "guitar" by being able to push buttons and strum on the beat, not to mention that I hear the sounds of my favorite songs come out when I do it.
For a similar reason, I like Rocksmith (guitar hero but with a real guitar), but the gratification is not quite so instant. They gamify the practicing part but I still need to do it, otherwise the part I'm playing actually sounds bad. And sight-reading is so much harder when there are more than 5 buttons.
As someone that plays music professionally and who enjoyed Rock Band, I think that the issue is a lot of folks find satisfaction in matering skills and checking off boxes that other folks design for them.
Designing a satisfying skill progression takes a lot of work. I know what I will have to do if I, say, take up mandolin again seriously, and it's daunting- and worse, maybe it won't even lead to a satisfying or useful end... I will still do that at some point. I had the same feeling about cello or pedal steel guitar, and they all turned out okay.
At the same time I totally understand why following simple tutorials, running a preset course, climbing an established route, riding already-cleared bike trails, or playing a video game with few possible outcomes can be satisfying.
I can't stand Guitar Hero because it's nothing like playing a real guitar and I'm therefore no good at it. At least the Rock Band drums vaguely approximate playing a cheap e-kit and the vocal part has proper pitch detection... unfortunately a real guitar is hard to replicate with cheap plastic hardware. There's also the fact that memorizing a real song is easier than memorizing colored buttons because you can build a mental model of the song around your knowledge of music theory.
On the topic of complex games a la Factorio: I've been playing a lot of Age of Empires II with my friends lately and have come to enjoy it. I previously shied away from RTSes because I was terrified of the meta but I've gotten decent enough to consistently beat the CPU on Moderate. I have no shot of ever commanding an army of trebuchets and knights in real life so doing it on my ThinkPad via Proton is the next best thing :-D
Ha, I was watching a SOTL video earlier today to learn how to better plan my military build. I was a Fast Castle -> Boom adherent until a week or two ago because I kept getting got by the CPU rushing me during Feudal without having my defenses built... these days I basically do Dark Age the same every time then adjust my strategy based on the map, enemy civs, etc.
On the other hand, video games enable a wide breadth of intellectual experiences.
Being a simulated guitar hero and simulated pro skater is more enriching than the likely baseline of having zero experience with either.
And, video games can help in discovering real world passions — the number of guitarists who found their inspirational spark through Guitar Hero is likely significant. Same for Factorio or Minecraft -> programming.
If I could have got a steady hand with tweezers, I could easily have been a surgeon. Real patients probably don’t have noses that light up, which reduces distractions too!
The problem with side projects is that they do not have a well defined goal. Or they do, in which case something like Factorio won't have any appeal because you can just work on something more meaningful instead. Factorio is for people who want to keep programming but are too frustrated or cynical about the real world to do it there. If the real world was better, they would do it there. If the real world could be fixed with programming, they would do it there. Many have tried, only to discover that what they thought were technical problems are really people problems.
i find tech hobbies fun because so may of the hard skills are transferable so i'm never starting from scratch, aka the hardest parts of a new hobby.
however, this is the trap i always fall into - i have these vague targets like "learn vue" and spend the whole weekend trying to figure out how to install node on a windows machine and run a basic test
Making Bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions is a terrible example because you absolutely cannot just tackle that by yourself. Not because it's technically hard, but because it's actually a people problem in disguise!
If you just walk up to the mailing list with the complete designs, documents, experimental results, schematics, trade offs, feasibility studies, you know what you're going to get? People saying "whoa, hey, great work but let's talk about this. I see here you've made assumption X about implementation area Y and that actually conflicts with the direction that we had in mind for the upcoming release, so let's talk more. To start, we'd like to see if we can explore option Z, thoughts?"
That ain't fun. It's rewarding but it ain't fun. Not like sitting down and messing with Legos in your own house is fun, or building a silly factory in Factorio is fun.
> Making Bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions is a terrible example because you absolutely cannot just tackle that by yourself. Not because it's technically hard, but because it's actually a people problem in disguise!
I know a person who 2x'ed BTLE transfer speeds by herself by coming up with a new protocol to talk to iPhones w/o the need for one of Apple's security chips.
Well of course it would take a literal super genius to actually accomplish successfully this via individual submission.
Nobody is going to believe anyone short of that bar would have even fully understood the bluetooth specification. So even a regular genius, 99.9th percentile HN user, would have a starting credibility of roughly zero.
But there are likely infinitely many waiting for that 99.9999th percentile HN reader to come along.
No one is waiting for super geniuses. They are just trying to use groups of people to solve hard problems instead of relying on individuals. It's amazing what people can accomplish by working together.
This isn’t a feasible pathway outside of a lifetime commitment, because it takes several decades to build up enough credibility to reliably advance proposals in such committee work. (Or be very lucky )
Same here. Also Factorio AFAIK has no good copilot. Sadly the best LLMs are not fine-tuned on Factorio so my productivity takes a massive hit when moving from side projects to Factorio.
Also, are there video games with ML-powered opponents or NPCs that'll act more like humans instead of the old-fashioned decision tree AIs? Seems about time. I know there are research projects that tried this for things like Starcraft 2.
Also saw Facebook's experimental Diplomacy AI. Wish that were usable the time we lost a player.
I'm looking over the sentences in the comment you replied to and I can't figure out where you would have gotten lost, can you quote the partial sentence that confused you?
It starts out as a typical programmer rant these days about AI assistants and LLM fine tuning and then goes on to complain how sadly, they don't work for this game yet. So he's forced to play it manually. How old fashioned.
Oh well if you thought someone was going to say they dislike LLMs failures so they want fewer LLMs, and instead they say they dislike LLM failures so they want LLMs to be trained more, that's not a garden path. You don't have to back up and re-process the previous words. And in particular a garden path sentence does it grammatically. You suddenly realize you were getting parts of speech wrong.
I do get the appeal of games, it is one of my long-time passions, but indeed that's the issue with games like Factorio specifically, they feel too much like work, so might as well do work.
This, long ago a roomate got into Factorio and after figuring out the basics ended up admitting that it felt way too much like work. This has been my reason to stay out of Factorio even though plenty of people have recommended it to me. I did a short collaborative run of Mindustry and I feel I don't need to play Factorio, plus, Counter-Strike chugs all my playing time, to me it's a bit like cocaine made a game and except for griding aim, it scratches all the right spots in my (smooth?) brain.
It's the trucking game for truckers in my mind, only a madman would play it after work.
Exactly yes, I wouldn't say it's only for engineers, it is perfect for smart people who chose a different path in life and need to feed this part of their brain with a fun simplified simulation of what it's like to be an engineer.
Of course, engineers would love this game, but we already engage in this type of activity all day much more intensely precisely because we love it, we already know how to do more interesting and valuable things with the same effort.
Similarly, I really lost the appetite for hard decision-making strategy games when I founded my startup. I was already having to take plenty of hard decisions, thank you very much, the real thing is much more interesting and more than enough.
Re: "hard decision-making strategy games", are there any that you'd recommend in hindsight to future founders? To get a feel for the mental lived reality of decision-making in a startup?
By far the best decision-making game I have played, incredible writing, world building and character development too.
It’s about being president but surprisingly similar to being a founder. No matter the scale, there is always a small inner circle and it’s just as much about the people as the technical aspects, which is also always similar: estimating outcomes based on evidence, logic, experience and advice.
I feel the same about another pretty chill game, Dave the Diver. It has a great feedback loop, at the beginning
Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Dave the Diver just turns into a slog is all. It's fantastic at the start when everything is novel, and all the systems hold promise. But the systems themselves turn out to not have good gameplay loops, so right around the underwater village it starts to kinda suck, which ironically is right around when all the systems are mature enough that to play well you have a giant list of "todo" items across a variety of systems, many of which you may find boring, but are obliged to interact with anyway, sort of like real life.
The advantage a game like factorio has over DtD is that you can kind of abandon huge sections and "start fresh" while still collecting rent from the work you did earlier to fund your new excursions. I guess DtD does this to a degree, but there's a lot less freedom of intellectual movement.
This is why I like Against the Storm. It is a novel (if familiar) challenge every time, and every time you "beat the odds" the game forces you to move on to the next harder challenge, "you beat this puzzle, you need a harder on."
just looked up Against the Storm, looks like the board game Agricola, where the goal is to build and farm and survive the winter. I always found Agricola ironic, in that is masquarades as a PvP game, where your survival outcome is then compared to the other players, but its very stressful as there are not enough resources on the board for your family.
so thats what made it too much like real life for me, because you're like struggling but then pretending like you are flexing (look at the size of my house! my farm!), but really everyone barely made it at all
maybe Against the Storm as a single player journey makes more sense
I've played both, I absolutely love both, but they don't have that much to do with each other.
Against the Storm is all about setting up complex production chains, not necessarily linking them explicitly like in Factorio, but more about balancing resource availability and assigning workers. It's a lot like other resource-focused city builders like Anno, but it is very well designed to impose a constant pressure on the player, always on a rush to meet goals before the whole thing crumbles, constantly putting out fires in the system (sometimes literal fires).
The name is perfect, in that you build this complex machine, and it is constantly stress-tested by periodic hazards. It's an awesome rush to "hold-fast", scramble to desperately fix things, constantly on the edge, hoping that the storm will end soon because the whole thing is about to crumble, while rushing to fulfil the objectives so you can get out of there before it gets too bad.
Frospunk evokes this feeling really well too. I suppose Factorio is kinda similar with the alien attacks. Come to think of it, the pressure to feed the family and the final scramble for points in Agricola are not so dissimilar either.
> Once I get successful in it, I'm like "but I should be making money in the real world, not this world" as I do have side projects. the game does turn into a slog, if you approach it that way
Life is a slog if approached that way. Spending your time chasing more money instead of enjoying life is the quickest way to have a miserable existence.
I find the game motivational after a very profitable shift, in game.
But I wasn’t looking for devil’s advocate or solutions, us guys need to affirm each other’s experiences more often.
I also do enjoy very profitable sessions in life, the pursuit of money itself is fulfilling for me as it already is a massive multiplayer game pvp. Additionally, I would usually prefer to be doing entertainment options exclusive to the level of profits that have been manifested. But I love the existence that allows me to play video games with no consequence.
Mindusry scratches the same itch, but in perhaps a slightly more appealing way for me at least. Rather than the entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building or whatever, there are many different levels each where you’re just playing classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys. It’s casual and FOSS.
I think Factorio, Mindustry and Satisfactory is a "choose one" trio for any gamer to like. They share similar goals (factory building), but approaches are quite different.
the expansion adds separate planets and multiple space-platforms. So it moves away from the monolith and towards multiple smaller factories. (In the end-game you probably and up with a massive monolith again, but until then you will have multiple medium-sized factories).
> ... classic tower defense and using the layout of the map to your advantage to extract resources and kill bad guys
Each new area add some unique defense-need, e.g. in space you have to shoot at incoming asteroids, and on the lava-planet, you have to build temporary mining-outposts, that get eaten by worms after a couple of minutes. (The other planes probably add something like that too, but I haven't played so far yet)
hopefully not a spoiler given the name, but the space mod that was released on Monday opens new planets to explore, after you manage to build the rocket to space on the first level, so it's no longer an "entire game being dedicated to creating one massive monolith dedicated to the one goal of rocket building"
The stakes (there are none except ones you set for yourself)
The timeline (quick returns, but a long scale of challenges you can build up to. Lots of side projects out there with 0 users.)
You can play with friends
You can also pay 1/4 attention until you need to design something complex in the game. I find it fun, I can turn my brain off for a bit but then re/engage for the fun complex stuff.
I stopped playing as much myself because I wanted to either work on professional development (side projects, learning more) or actually make things with my hands (woodworking, chair making, fixing an old truck) that were real breaks from software engineering, and easier to share with my kids.
I feel guilty every time I turn on Factorio and basically no longer play it because I know I could have just as much enjoyment building something for the real world.
I've yet to find something I can do in the real world that's as enjoyable, accessible, affordable, and easy to pick up and put down as Factorio, or similar games (that scratch a "builder" itch). What sort of things do you have in mind?
Well the reason I enjoy Factorio in the first place is because I love automating things, not necessarily the building part. There's an endless amount of things I can automate in my life or for others, and the effort I put into building those automatons, whether is personal or professional, continues to provide value after I'm finished. I have 1k hours in Factorio, while those hours did provide value to me, that value is pretty finite. That's my logic at least, I just feel guilty playing it looking at it through that lense. I got like 50 private repositories that aren't finished, or are interesting and fun that could provide just as much satisfaction and possibly continue to provide value in my life even after I'm finished with them. Right now I'm working on a little project to buzz myself into the front door of my building via an app on my phone that triggers the buzzer in my apartment that is a weird analog system that's 60 + years old (but funnily enough is called Auth Master). Not complicated or intense, but fun and interesting and will provide a standard of living improvement for me for years to come (assuming I don't move) after I finish!
For me it's me PhD thesis. It's a drug, and there's always something to do either on the code or writing or reading. I'm even a bit disappointed by Space Age.
There's an in-between experience with the likes of the Natural Number Game or Project Euler -- it feels like there should be so much more of that kind of thing to substitute for so much of legacy education. Most "learning games" afaik are too "schooley".
I haven't played Factorio so far; for those who haven't programmed, do you think you're learning something new and somewhat transferable?
I play Cities Skylines for that reason I have to debug the traffic but mostly have fun building the city the way I want. Like once I feel like building a lot of tram lines, other time building train lines.
I also build side projects - but from the game I get instant gratification as I can build decent city with goal I have in one evening whereas side project to have anything I can say is pleasing takes much more time than one evening.
Games don't have annoying blockers like trying to use some new library, cities I build also did not work first times I was playing because I was noob - but even libraries frameworks I use on daily basis always have some kinks I have to figure out so it takes multiple evening anyway.
In a similar way I think more people should change a flat tire or change the oil in their car. I think it will make them more aware, but they don't have to become a mechanic.
[1] A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society.
Sometimes you just want to expend energy in a direction that doesn't have consequences. I hold the opposite opinion from you in that people ought to be able to turn off the "any non-productive minute of my life is wasted" mindset.
Games are much easier than real work and provide more consistent dopamine hits with their graphics, sound effects and feeling of progression. Factorio while fun is a long way from real work.
That’s funny! I play because I don’t code in my job so this scratches my itch with instant feedback. Now if only I was good at coding…i probably should do a side project
Factorio is more fun than any side project. While it hits a similar area of the brain as programming does (the problem solving zone), it's definitely not the same.
That is debatable. I get more satisfaction from working on a side project that I know matters in the real life, outside of the gaming scene, and it is fun working on it myself, and the same thing applies here: no bosses, deadlines, etc.
Most "side projects" have no users, other than maybe their creator, and therefore provide zero value to society. Furthermore, there's no intrinsic value in "contributing to society" — a term that is completely arbitrary, anyway. If the idea that you can improve society with your projects provides you joy, more power to you, but that's all it should boil down to: doing what you enjoy the most.
I agree that "contributing to society" has no intrinsic value. It is my own.
I feel like I waste my time when I play video games, but this is recent. I used to play a lot till age 24 or something. This feeling stops me from playing, but even if I do end up playing, I feel guilty afterwards that my time went to something that ultimately "does not matter". That said, playing something for fun is entertainment, it should matter, but I still get those feelings nevertheless. I hope this makes sense. I am not trying to argue that "fun" does not matter, I suppose I am just not so fun anymore. :P
It depends though, if I play a video game with my girlfriend it is alright.
