Links #15

I’ve been on a posting spree recently and I’m excited to get out some of these links I’ve been sitting on for a bit. Lots of fun ones here—enjoy!

Print Gallery of an Artist

A little platforming game that takes place inside recursive spaces. As a player, I found it beautiful, trippy, and satisfying to figure out. As a software developer, my mind reeled, wondering how the creator made it. In the description, he credits a 3Blue1Brown video, which spends a fascinating 45 minutes describing in rich detail how to represent an MC Escher painting on a mathematical plane.

The whole thing feels amazing to me. When I take a step back and think about how this was built, I see this chain of innovators, each sharing their work and inspiring the next person. Escher, who used his intuition of spatial reasoning to twist reality. The Dutch mathematicians, who found a way to describe it mathematically. Grant Sanderson, who broke it down visually, so anyone with a high-school math education could understand. And Daniel Linssen, who thought, “what if I made the mathematically-warped grid into a playable game environment.” I can only imagine that Escher would have loved to see the worlds he imagined constructed into environments that he could walk through and explore. I loved how the game silently teaches you how to exploit the unique properties of those environments, to help achieve a goal.¹ As a player, you get to discover the properties of visual recursion, almost as if you were the next link in the chain of innovators. It all builds up to an experience that only a video-game can deliver.

Fifty TIC-80 Carts

I’m a big fan of doing something exhaustively (“every possible way”) as a way to get in the reps to learn something, and this is a great example of that. Each of these demos was so visual that it was fun to browse through them all. I’m way impressed that blinry built them all in one weekend (pre-AI, too).

How to Lose Time and Money

People don’t destroy fortunes with frivolous spending and consumption—they do it with bad investments. It’s the same with time, our life’s currency. For diligent people, we’re much more likely to waste it doing fake work, than being lazy. An important reminder!

Taco Bell funeral

A local Seattle artist holds a funeral for a closed down Taco Bell. I learned about this from my brother (who attended in person)! The video took a turn when he documented flying to China to make bronze statues but it actually ended up being one of my favorite parts. Such an interesting window into another world.

1D Chess

It’s more of a puzzle than a game. It’s a little tricky but you don’t have to be a chess-person to solve it, and it’s satisfying once you do.

.gitignore Isn’t the Only Way To Ignore Files in Git

I expected this to be an impractical exploration of some esoteric git features (git has a lot of those), but I was pleasantly surprised. I have been looking for a consistent place to put AI plans without checking them into git (across multiple repos), and this gave me several good options.

Essential until it wasn’t

Kyle Mathews discusses how AI changes the job of programmers, not as an unprecedented event, but as one in a series of historical advances that has changed the job of programmers approximately every 20 years. I like this framing, and it aligns with what I’ve always told myself about this industry: It’s always changing, so you need to be constantly learning. Yes, it takes effort, but it’s always interesting and you’ll never be bored.