Oh wow. I thought this was just a fun little tribute to wolf3d. After two days and six hours of playing I now understand how wrong I was. After a few levels it turns out to be so much more, and just keeps getting better.

I just gave this a go not expecting much. Man is it fun! And works great on the deck too! Playing with a controller makes it extra hard, but then again the originals were hard too and had even worse controls, so it fits well.

You can probably just use any handlebar mount that uses a flexible band instead of a rigid fixture. I’ve personally used this, but anything similar would do.

It sounds it’s just that: a cleaner two stroke. It fixes the issue of requiring oil mixed in the charge with some reasonable extra complexity compared to a regular (turbo-)supercharged two stroke. But on the other hand it’s hard to believe it could match a four stroke when it comes to emissions and durability.

The design as presented here has a longer compression stroke compared to exhaust stroke which means there will be extra pumping losses compared to a regular four stroke, and is the exact opposite of what high efficiency 4 stroke cycles tend to do (eg. miller cycle). As mentioned in the YouTube comments, ensuring sufficient lubrication for the upper piston rings will probably present a design challenge. Especially given that piston rings and honing patterns are difficult enough to get right even in current engines.

So I guess it may be a better design when compared to a high revving supercharged two stroke (like for example some snowmobiles have) assuming that emission regulations keep getting even stricter. But it’s not that much simpler than a four stroke, and most likely has much higher development costs given the relative novelty of the design. So I’m not really sure If there’s a business case for this, given that four strokes are slowly replacing the current two strokes in pretty much every application, and smaller recreational vehicles will probably go all electric anyway. But as far as novel ICE designs go, this one at least seems like it’s simple enough to be cost effective if ever produced.

Switching back to Windows shouldn’t be an issue. Going in the first time is horrible. Whatever the many papercuts of a given os are, you won’t even notice them if you’re used to working around them.

As for the kids, they’ll get their first experience sooner or later, depending on The curriculum of your country. But he same principle applies no matter wether it happens in university or elementary school.

My hill is that whatever os you’re already familiar with, will always feel easiest. Everything that does something differently, will feel more difficult no matter which one is easier for someone who has no prior experience of either one.

I could tell you how painfull it was when I had to start using windows at work knowing pretty much only Linux beforehand, but that too would be just an useless anecdote.

I think the most effective approach to increasing Linux userbase would be to adopt the same strategy Microsoft is using: Push for using Linux in schools, so that it would be the familiar OS for new generations.

Isn’t writing tests with AI like a really bad idea? I mean, the whole point of writing separate tests is hoping that you won’t make the same mistakes twice, and therefore catch any behavior in the code that does not match your intent. But If you use an LLM to write a test using said code as context (instead of the original intent you would use yourself), there’s a risk that it’ll just write a test case that makes sure the code contains the wrong behavior.

Okay, it might still be okay for regression testing, but you’re still missing most of the benefit you’d get by writing the tests manually. Unless you only care about closing tickets, that is.

I have to agree. I guess the only reasonable application for graphical languages is domain specific languages, and even then they need to provide a significant benefit over any text based alternative to outweight the tooling incompatibilities you mentioned.

Except there’s Simulink, which has been around since the 80’s, and is anything but a failure. For a few specific usecases, like modeling complex physical systems and developing control algorithms for them, it’s far better than any traditional text based language. Especially when it comes to maintainability of that code.

Though I have to admit that if you try to use it as a general programming language, you’ll learn that while that’s possible, it’s also very painfull. And even while implementing said control algorithms you’ll occasionally run on to some bits of logic that prove to be annoyingly difficult to implement with it compared to any text based language.

NandGame is a browser puzzle game, where you start of by building basic logic gates from relays and progress from there all the way trough processor design to compiling high-level languages. It does not hold your hand too much, but the invidual puzzles progress so incrementally, it feels almost magical how easily you learn to build computers and compilers.