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azspot · 5 years

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Other retailers, however, don’t share Ashley’s enthusiasm. When David Kahan became the chief executive of Birkenstock Americas, in 2013, he began to discover how thoroughly Amazon had changed his industry. Kahan had started his career as a shoe salesman at Macy’s; he went on to become a sales manager at Nike and, eventually, a top executive at Reebok. Birkenstocks have been made by hand, in Germany, for two hundred and forty-five years—thirty-two workers touch every pair. When Kahan became C.E.O., Amazon was among the company’s top three shoe sellers. “They sold millions of dollars’ worth of our shoes,” Kahan told me. “But during my first year I was sitting in my office, where I can hear the customer-service department, and we were getting a flood of people saying their shoes were falling apart, or they were defective, or they were clearly counterfeits, and, every time the rep asked where they had been purchased, the customer said Amazon.”

Kahan investigated, and found that numerous companies were selling counterfeit or unauthorized Birkenstocks on Amazon; many were using Fulfillment by Amazon to ship their products, which caused them to appear prominently in search results. “We would ask Amazon to take sellers down—or, at least, tell us who is counterfeiting—but they said they couldn’t divulge private information,” Kahan told me.

Kahan also discovered that Amazon had started buying enormous numbers of Birkenstocks to resell on the site. The company had amassed more than a year’s worth of inventory. “That was terrifying, because it meant we could totally lose control of our brand,” he said. “What if Amazon decides to start selling the shoes for ninety-nine cents, or to give them away with Prime membership, or do a buy-one-get-one-free campaign? It would completely destroy how people see our shoes, and our only power to prevent something like that is to cut off a retailer’s supply. But Amazon had a year’s worth of inventory. We were powerless.”

Kahan spent months trying to negotiate with Amazon executives in Seattle. At the Birkenstock Americas office, in Marin County, California, he and his deputies would spend hours preparing arguments about why stopping unauthorized sellers would help Amazon’s customers, and then they’d crowd around Kahan’s desk and turn on the speakerphone. Sometimes the Amazon executives would let them go on; other times, they’d cut them off midsentence. It wasn’t Amazon’s place to decide who could and couldn’t sell on the site, the executives explained, as long as simple guidelines were met. “They basically didn’t care,” Kahan said. “We’re just one company, and there’s millions of companies they deal with every day. But this is the biggest thing on earth for us. Amazon is the shopping mall now, and, normally, if you open a store in a shopping mall, you can expect certain things—like the mall operator will clean the hallways, and they’ll make sure Foot Locker isn’t right next door to Payless, and if someone sets up a kiosk in front of your store and starts selling fake Air Jordans, they’ll kick them off the property.” He continued, “But Amazon is the Wild West. There’s hardly any rules, except everyone has to pay Amazon a percentage, and you have to swallow what they give you and you can’t complain.”

#amazon

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flicky1984 · 5 years

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The Sega Arcade Revolution: A History in 62 Games

Flicky (September 1984)

Maze games were very popular during the first half of the 1980s. Hits like Pac-Man had made large sums of money for Sega’s rivals, and though the video arcade industry was no longer moving at the same speed it had during its early years, the genre was still popular enough that publishers kept up a steady rhythm of releases. Sega looked to its R&D division to come up with something that could keep pace with Namco and Bally/Midway. What it got was a little blue bird named Flicky.

Flicky’s development team was led by Youji Ishii, a Sega designer who would one day be responsible for the classic game Fantasy Zone. Having joined Sega in April 1978 after graduating with a degree in electrical engineering, Ishii was interested in creating games that were bright and colorful, and he believed that his works should be happy experiences for players. He started working on sound effects for games like Deep Scan and Zaxxon and got his first chance at design with 1983’s Up’n Down, a pseudo–3D arcade driving game. It sold enough for Sega to assign him to another title, one that was likely more important to Ishii’s career as it was to his employer’s bottom line. Sega meant for Flicky to be its response to Namco’s Mappy, emulating the time-based maze dynamic that was popular at the time. The visual style and gameplay Ishii had in mind would give Sega the competitor it wanted (Derboo, “Flicky”; “Fantasy Zone—2014”).

Flicky put players in the role of a blue sparrow who must rescue her chick friends, called Chirps (In Japan, they were called “Piopio,” a misspelling of the Japanese word “pyopyo” which means “baby bird”). The chicks had run amok inside an apartment building, and Flicky had to gather them all and guide them to the exit. Hungry cats called “Tiger” in the Western version and “Nyannyan” in Japanese actively chased the chicks, as did an iguana named Iggy (Choro in Japan). Touching the chicks put them in line behind Flicky, who had to avoid enemies while bringing all the chicks to the door. Items such as cups and trumpets were scattered throughout the stages, and Flicky could shoot these items at the cats and iguana to temporarily incapacitate them. The Nyannyan couldn’t hurt the baby birds, but they could kill Flicky with a single touch. The game lasted 48 stages before looping with a harder difficulty (Derboo, “Flicky”).

Ishii’s adorable character designs were brought to life by the talented hand of Yoshiki Kawasaki, a young artist who had joined the company because it was the closest job offer to his home. He had been a big fan of pinball and driving games, playing in the dark arcades of Hibiya, Japan, so the chance to join Sega was an exciting opportunity for him. Kawasaki was hired at Sega in 1976 as a designer. Though he was an artist, he started out in the purchasing department, and he spent many an hour playing Head-On. His work soon came to the attention of Hideki Sato, who recognized his talent and moved him over to the visual design division of Sega’s research and development department. His first assignment was the SG-1000 version of Golgo 13. After working on the laserdisc game Albegas and another release called Sinbad Mystery, Kawasaki began to long for something more interesting. He got his chance when he was handed the proposal for Flicky from the game’s lead designer. Kawasaki would finally have his big chance to put his programming abilities to greater use (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

When Kawasaki was assigned to Flicky, all that existed was a simple four-page proposal. There was to be a labyrinth and a simple game character. The concept was just a derivation of Namco’s Pac-Man, where players would collect dots in the maze. Ishii liked maze games, and he knew he wanted the game to follow that motif. He was certain of one thing: Flicky would not penalize players for falling through the floors as Mappy did. This was the starting design premise for the game and the reason why a bird was chosen as the main character (“Fantasy Zone—2014”). The problem was that nothing was detailed; there wasn’t even a description of the game’s background. The character profiles were also incredibly vague, reading “since the maze can be simple lines, the characters can look simple too. You can leave the background black.” Kawasaki based the main character, Flicky, on a lyric from a popular 1977 song called “Densen Ondo,” which referred to three sparrows on an electric line. Kawasaki wondered why birds would move on electric lines when they could simply fly. He figured that perhaps they jumped, so he decided to have Flicky jump (or “heroically jump,” as he put it) instead of fly. The Chirps were an evolution of the dots in the maze. Kawasaki revealed how he developed the little birds in an interview for Sega of Japan’s website:

The dots were originally really just dots. When you collected one it would disappear. But then, I thought it would be interesting if the dots didn’t disappear but instead line up. So, I made the dots line up behind Flicky. That’s when I really started fleshing things out. I asked if I could make the dots 8 × 8 pixels big, but in the end, I couldn’t do anything with 8 × 8 pixels. Then I thought: If they were little birds, I could do it [“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”].

At first, he simply had the Chirps follow their bird friend back to the exit door. That was too simple, so he had them scatter when touched by a cat. When it proved too easy to gather up all the Chirps, Kawasaki spiced things up by having some of them race off in different directions. He gave these “Bad Chirps” sunglasses so that players would be able to recognize them (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

Creating those cute little chicks with attitude wasn’t very easy; none of the character models were. Kawasaki had to use a rudimentary tool that was similar to Sega’s TV Oekaki, a tablet-like device that came with a light pen. It plugged directly into televisions and was made available commercially for Sega’s SG-1000 in 1985. Using such a simple tool was problematic, particularly getting it to draw single pixels. It would often draw three or four at once (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

Kawasaki’s original level design had horizontal lines on the screen that resembled power lines. These lines were to act as the maze walls; however, once Flicky’s characters were completed, Kawasaki found the lines to be dull and unengaging. It was only after gazing out the window at an apartment building across the street from his third-floor window in Sega’s R&D annex building that Kawasaki found the perfect setting. Why not have the action take place in an apartment building? The residential setting let Kawasaki insert household items, like cups and baby bottles—things that would be found in a home with children. They would also help Flicky fight off Tiger and Iggy (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

Flicky played differently than most games of its type, most notably in the way the main character jumped. The control was very floaty and heavy with inertia. Players had to time their jumps correctly, particularly when coming down from the top of the screen. Ishii believed this was the product of the hardware limitations of the System 1 arcade board. These restrictions also influenced the design of the labyrinth stages, which did a decent job of creating the illusion of size. Ishii commented about this challenge in a 2014 interview with STG Gameside. “With Flicky, we challenged ourselves to make the stages feel like wide, expansive spaces despite the tiny memory available” (“Fantasy Zone–2014”).

Ishii was also able to make Flicky seem larger than it really was using free-scrolling stages. Players could move either left or right almost indefinitely, giving the stages a larger sense of scale. The inspiration for this design came from two sources: Williams Electronics’ 1981 smash Defender and a far-lesser known Commodore 64 title named Drol, which involved a flying and shooting robot. “Basically,” Ishii explained to Shooting Gameside in 2014, “I just like that style. I like how you can rush forward, then turn around really quick and retreat if you need to.” Ishii would revisit this design for his 1986 hit, Fantasy Zone (“Fantasy Zone—2014; Ishii).

The stages themselves weren’t random scenery. There was an overall theme to them that was very close to the team, particularly Kawasaki. As the gameplay centered on the concept of saving children, Kawasaki’s group wanted this objective to be Flicky’s driving theme. It wasn’t just about bringing some birds to a door for points; there was more to it than that. Kawasaki wanted players to feel the maternal instinct of protecting defenseless children from predators. He felt they could sympathize, even though the chicks were merely game characters on a screen. After all, Flicky was a sparrow, not a chicken, and while she was only the chicks’ friend and not their mother (despite being labeled as such in the SG-1000 port of the game) she could still want to protect them. “Children face a variety of dangers when they go outside,” he commented in a 2016 interview, “and the feeling of ‘wanting to return them safely to the nest’ is something that I think is experienced 80 The Sega Arcade Revolution by not just parents, but anyone who is around children. And it’s that emotion that drives Flicky, a sparrow, to protect the chicks, even though their parents are actually chickens.” Examples of this design are present throughout the game. The bicycle and balloons (which symbolize dreams) on the title screen, the apartment resident in the bonus stage windows—all were meant to drive the point home that the chicks were children who were in mortal danger. The later stages developed this narrative. For example, the outer space background represented the future, one that would be cut short if Tiger and Iggy got their way. Such themes were not uncommon to games made by Kawasaki. None of his games featured characters dying, and he preferred to make friendlier and cuter games to counteract the bad reputation arcades had in Japan at the time (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”; Szczepaniak).

In development for a year, Flicky could have been much larger than it finally was. The design team had around 100 stages done but few backgrounds, and there was very little memory space left. Kawasaki opted to keep only four backgrounds, differentiating them by color, and the stages were reduced to a total of 40. After playtesting the game, the team added a monster that would appear in windows and breathe fire. Iggy was also conceived at this point, primarily to keep players from standing still in a stage. He ran throughout the level, making it unsafe to remain too long in a single spot. Kawasaki wasn’t too fond of the lizard because he was added at the end of development. He had wanted Iggy to be an insect, but his lack of motivation for the character made the design look more reptilian. During Flicky’s development, Kawasaki developed something of a reputation for taking such shortcuts, a behavior that earned him the humorous nickname “Sabori Kawasaki,” or “Slacker Kawasaki” (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”)

Flicky changed names twice during development. The original title of Busty was switched to Flippy due to a trademark issue in the U.S. (Bally/Midway also noted that “busty” was American slang for women with large breasts). The next choice, Flippy, was eventually deemed to sound too much like Mappy, so the title was changed again (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”; Szczepaniak). The game—with its final title of Flicky—was released in Japan in May 1984 and worldwide that September. A decent seller, it would sadly never receive a sequel. Ports of Flicky were released on multiple home consoles and later in compilations, and Flicky herself has made several cameos in other Sega games but has otherwise been forgotten as a character. The closest she’s come to fame has been in Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog series as one of the animals released when Sonic defeated Eggman and cleared a zone. All the bird friends that Sonic rescues are called “flickies” and resemble her (“Flicky”).

While it’s unfortunate that Flicky has not been given a second chance, the original game remains an important step for both Ishii and Sega. Much of what Ishii learned from making Flicky would manifest itself in a major way in his masterpiece Fantasy Zone only two years later. His experience with Flicky would also be influential in his later work on other platformers like Teddy Boy Blues (both arcade and Master System versions) and Ristar (Genesis). Sega, on the other hand, got a solid maze-chase game that provided valuable experience to someone who would become one of its most talented and prolific producers. Ishii was part of a major pool of talent that would explode over the next few years, soaring to incredible heights on the wings of a little blue bird.

#history #interview #flicky #sega #arcade

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sadhikamalladi-blog · 6 years

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Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk

Introduction

As a kid, I would devour books. I used to read a book every few days, and I spent so long refreshing the NYT Bestsellers List that I decided to just set it as my home page. This habit continued through high school. Any genre, any length, I wanted to read and learn everything there was to know. I loved how books moved at a pace that the author and I negotiated, instead of the wholly intractable speed of film. Sometimes, I'd spend hours rereading a line, relishing the image and rhythm the words and their pronunciations formed in my head. I wondered if the author intended for me to come back to that line, or if they simply wrote it while reaching blindly for a cup of coffee.

One of the first authors to pull me into their world, depraved and demented as it was, was Chuck Palahniuk. I read Fight Club, and I walked through life for months wondering if there was a fight club out there, literally or metaphorically, and if I would glean joy from joining. Through Palahniuk, I learned how to take an objective lens to everything, instead of arbitrarily assigning value and designating things or people as "good" and "bad." I read and reread all of Palahniuk's books, shaken as Seth turned into Manus and Tyler morphed into the narrator I had come to rely on and maybe even respect. Palahniuk let me be self-righteous only so he could dismantle me.

The truth is, Palahniuk's game has always been the same. He throws uneasy situations at you and lets them blossom into colossal shitstorms that you somehow find yourself at the eye of. His work is known for the employment of an unreliable narrator, one who's often equal parts bored and boring for the majority of the novel. So, I was especially surprised to find out his latest work, Adjustment Day, was a decentralized narrative.

Why I Hate Decentralized Narratives

Another book I read this summer was Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. Much like Palahniuk, Hawkins is known for unreliable narrators. Her previous book, Girl on the Train, captured my attention and twisted my judgments against me in the most Palahniuk-esque way I could've imagined. And she did it all without the gore and sheer shock value that accompanies Palahniuk's language. I had high hopes for Hawkins' novel, which ultimately left me unsatisfied because of its decentralized narrative.

Decentralized narratives are ones in which there are many narrators (at least 11, in Hawkins' case) of varying credibility. It's meant to provide us with the immersive experience of investigating the mystery as though we were living it -- through a series of short vignettes that inevitably reference context we don't have access to. And as readers, we're meant to wade through this mess and attempt to form loyalties and suspicions that are inevitably incorrect.

All of this is fine with me in theory. I love a good puzzle, and putting together conflicting narratives from ulteriorly motivated characters is an exciting prospect. Unfortunately, it's very hard to deliver this kind of novel.

The excitement of the style is also its downfall. The author has to maintain a careful balance across characters, placing red herrings and minor storylines with as much importance as the main plot. We're meant to have no indication from the writing alone who did what. And if we judge a character based on their past, we're bound to be wrong. However, the sad truth is that if we don't judge characters then we have very little incentive to remember who's who in the story. We also require some sense of coherence in order to follow a character's story.

About fifteen pages into Hawkins' Into the Water, I found myself pulling out a piece of paper and a pen, jotting names and bullet points down. Several hundreds of pages later, I was extremely displeased. Sure, there was a cohesive network of small tidbits that added up to a bigger story. But there were also loose ends galore -- to the extend that I found myself wondering if The Room was easier to follow (it wasn't).

I haven't seen a decentralized narrative executed properly. It does feel like the next natural step in literary evolution, from a single unreliable narrator to many.

Novel Overview

So, Palahniuk's Adjustment Day. I have to say, the novel brought up some exciting themes but ultimately fell a little flat for me, mostly due to issues with relating to characters. The ending left me especially dissatisfied, wondering why Palahniuk teed up situations primed for sharp and incisive social commentary and then didn't follow through. It really isn't his style to back off.

Parts of the novel felt clichéd, but I guess that's to be expected. We are consuming such a massive amount of criticism of different social phenomena that nothing really strikes me as surprising anymore. I've read stories about how Trump has planned his coup for decades and stories about how if only a few tiny things were different we would be in a vastly different social climate right now. Regardless, Palahniuk does his usual work of harnessing fiction to raise deeper questions about what's happening around us.

Youth Bulge

Every Palahniuk story is anchored by a simple social circumstance. Women feeling self-conscious about their appearances, men feeling inferior in comparison to their evolutionary ancestors' raw athleticism, etc. In Adjustment Day, it's all about the youth bulge, a phenomenon in developing countries where infant mortality rates plummet but fertility rates continue to skyrocket, resulting in a large number of youth.

Palahniuk focuses on male youth. He paints them with broad strokes, characterizing them as an aggressive, war-mongering group. He describes world governments in collusion with one another to construct aimless wars simply to expend these youth and occupy them. If they're not occupied, Palahniuk seems to claim, they'll run rampant and seek increasingly self-destructive ways to express masculinity.

The messiah-like Talbott character recognizes this trend and decides to harness the power of these young men. He spouts off various platitudes throughout the novel, many of which carry the ring of deep wisdom but lack nuance. The young men, proud to be part of some kind of covert movement, hang on his every word and seek to bring about Adjustment Day.

Adjustment Day

Adjustment Day is a largely circular idea. Basically, the idea is to divide the nation into three subnations: Blacktopia, Caucasia, and Gaysia. Through some increasingly contrived set of requirements, people are delegated mercilessly through these nations. As Talbott puts it, minorities only rebel when there's a majority to subvert. By placing the gays in one nation, the blacks in another, and the whites in a third, the new order will ensure that everyone exists solely in homogeneous communities and thus in eternal harmony.

But the first problem is that people are not willingly going to go into these subnations. What about interracial couples? What about young gay children being separated from their heterosexual parents? Talbott sees these as collateral damage.

To set the gears in motion, he establishes a new currency by which people can wield power in the new order. A humble list starts on the internet -- "America's Least Wanted." People nominate anonymously, and others can up- or down-vote names. As a name gained traction, the bounty on their head increased. Well, it's not literally their head -- the job is actually to slice off the person's left ear.

Preparation and Execution

The first half of the novel focuses on the preparation for this fateful day. Talbott recruits people who seek redemption -- addicts, disgruntled veterans, etc. -- and lets them start a lineage. They can recruit another man who can recruit another one and so on. The pride of the youth bulge ensures that no one recruits someone who will spill the beans too early.

Police officers and politicians are brought in on the deal, effectively making it hard to organize the state in response. The day of, the bloodbath occurs surprisingly quickly. People are slaughtered en masse, their ears sliced off and taken as tokens to establish influence in the new world order.

The Aftermath

We follow a few characters throughout the novel, seeing how they act before, during, and after Adjustment Day. In the aftermath, Palahniuk describes people forcing themselves to fit in just to maintain a semblance of their old life. An interracial couple pretends to be gay so they won't get separated into Blacktopia and Caucasia. A gay teenager enrolls himself in a glorified internment camp as he waits transfer to Gaysia.

Misfits scattered across the nations eventually stumble onto each other in some unspecified location and start anew.

What Worked

Palahniuk's language was as sharp as ever. He describes the justification for a temporary type of cash (the paper loses value in a few weeks).

Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the nation rots.

He so clearly cuts down to the core of our greatest fears about society -- that the effort we put toward a communal welfare may not ever benefit someone we care about.

Imagine there is no God. There is no Heaven or Hell. There is only your son and his son and his son, and the world you leave for them.

Palahniuk wrote about the desires of the youth bulge with passion that felt extremely familiar:

He was tired of learning history. He wanted to be it. Charlie wanted the history of the future to be him.

What Didn't Work

The decentralized narrative again made it hard to care about any of the individual characters. And although I felt some concern for the overall fate of the new order, I never really cared much about its ramifications on particular individuals. Arguably, that was where the punch of this entire story was hidden. If I could see the goodness of the overall arch but the badness on an individual level, we'd have another Fight Club situation. But I couldn't.

The horrifying descent into chaos was unsalvageable. If Palahniuk had just ended the book with Adjustment Day, I might have had a different perspective. But he continues on with this murky Reconstruction-esque tale that is neither interesting nor easy to follow. As NPR describes, Palahniuk tried to build the appeal of Fight Club into a bigger, more global movement but ultimately failed [1].

Conclusion

I still love Palahniuk. And I still let phrases from Adjustment Day roll around in my head. They don't have as much power to me though, because I can't contextualize them in any wonderfully meaningful way.

[1]: NPR article

#chuck palahniuk #adjustment day

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because-its-important · 6 years

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what’s the most annoying question to ask a nun* in 1967?

tl;dr - In 1967, a very long survey was administered to nearly 140,000 American women in Catholic ministry. I wrote this script, which makes the survey data work-ready and satisfies a very silly initial inquiry: Which survey question did the sisters find most annoying?

* The study participants are never referred to as nuns, so I kind of suspect that not all sisters are nuns, but I couldn't find a definitive answer about this during a brief search. 'Nun' seemed like an efficient shorthand for purposes of an already long title, but if this is wrong please holler at me!

During my first week at Recurse I made a quick game using a new language and a new toolset. Making a game on my own had been a long-running item on my list of arbitrary-but-personally-meaningful goals, so being able to cross it off felt pretty good!

Another such goal I’ve had for a while goes something like this: “Develop the skills to be able to find a compelling data set, ask some questions, and share the results.” As such, I spent last week familiarizing myself with Python 🐍, selecting a fun dataset, prepping it for analysis, and indulging my curiosity.

the process

On recommendation from Robert Schuessler, another Recurser in my batch, I read through the first ten chapters in Python Crash Course and did the data analysis project. This section takes you through comparing time series data using weather reports for two different locations, then through plotting country populations on a world map.

During data analysis study group, Robert suggested that we find a few datasets and write scripts to get them ready to work with as a sample starter-pack for the group. Jeremy Singer-Vines’ collection of esoteric datasets, Data Is Plural, came to mind immediately. I was super excited to finally have an excuse to pour through it and eagerly set about picking a real mixed bag of 6 different data sets.

One of those datasets was The Sister Survey, a huge, one-of-its-kind collection of data on the opinions of American Catholic sisters about religious life. When I read the first question, I was hooked.

“It seems to me that all our concepts of God and His activity are to some degree historically and culturally conditioned, and therefore we must always be open to new ways of approaching Him.”

I decided I wanted to start with this survey and spend enough time with it to answer at least one easy question. A quick skim of the Questions and Responses file showed that of the multiple choice answer options, a recurring one was: “The statement is so annoying to me that I cannot answer.”

I thought this was a pretty funny option, especially given that participants were already tolerant enough to take such an enormous survey! How many questions can one answer before any question is too annoying to answer? 🤔 I decided it’d be fairly simple to find the most annoying question, so I started there.

I discovered pretty quickly that while the survey responses are in a large yet blessedly simple csv, the file with the question and answers key is just a big ole plain text. My solution was to regex through every line in the txt file and build out a survey_key dict that holds the question text and another dict of the set of possible answers for each question. This works pretty well, though I’ve spotted at least one instance where the txt file is inconsistently formatted and therefore breaks answer retrieval.

Next, I ran over each question in the survey, counted how many responses include the phrase “so annoying” and selected the question with the highest count of matching responses.

the most annoying question

Turns out it’s this one! The survey asks participants to indicate whether they agree or disagree with the following statement:

“Christian virginity goes all the way along a road on which marriage stops half way.”

3702 sisters (3%) responded that they found the statement too annoying to answer. The most popular answer was No at 56% of respondents.

I’m not really sure how to interpret this question! So far I have two running theories about the responses:

The survey participants were also confused and boy, being confused is annoying!

The sisters generally weren’t down for claiming superiority over other women on the basis of their marital-sexual status.

Both of these interpretations align suspiciously well with my own opinions on the matter, though, so, ymmv.

9x speed improvement in one lil refactor

The first time I ran a working version of the full script it took around 27 minutes.

I didn’t (still don’t) have the experience to know if this is fast or slow for the size of the dataset, but I did figure that it was worth making at least one attempt to speed up. Half an hour is a long time to wait for a punchline!

As you can see in this commit, I originally had a function called unify that rewrote the answers in the survey from the floats which they'd initially been stored as, to plain text returned from the survey_key. I figured that it made sense to build a dataframe with the complete info, then perform my queries against that dataframe alone.

However, the script was spending over 80% of its time in this function, which I knew from aggressively outputting the script’s progress and timing it. I also knew that I didn’t strictly need to be doing any answer rewriting at all. So, I spent a little while refactoring find_the_most_annoying_question to use a new function, get_answer_text, which returns the descriptive answer text when passed the answer key and its question. This shaved 9 lines (roughly 12%) off my entire script.

Upon running the script post-refactor, I knew right away that this approach was much, much faster - but I still wasn’t prepared when it finished after only 3 minutes! And since I knew between one and two of those minutes were spent downloading the initial csv alone, that meant I’d effectively neutralized the most egregious time hog in the script. 👍

I still don’t know exactly why this is so much more efficient. The best explanation I have right now is “welp, writing data must be much more expensive than comparing it!” Perhaps this Nand2Tetris course I’ll be starting this week will help me better articulate these sorts of things.

flourishes 💚💛💜

Working on a script that takes forever to run foments at least two desires:

to know what the script is doing Right Now

to spruce the place up a bit

I added an otherwise unnecessary index while running over all the questions in the survey so that I could use it to cycle through a small set of characters. Last week I wrote in my mini-RC blog, "Find out wtf modulo is good for." Well, well, well.

Here’s what my script looks like when it’s iterating over each question in the survey:

I justified my vanity with the (true!) fact that it is easier to work in a friendly-feeling environment.

Plus, this was good excuse to play with constructing emojis dynamically. I thought I’d find a rainbow of hearts with sequential unicode ids, but it turns out that ❤️ 💙 and 🖤 all have very different values. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the data set

One of the central joys of working with this dataset has been having cause to learn some history that I’d otherwise never be exposed to. Here’s a rundown of some interesting things I learned:

This dataset was only made accessible in October this year. The effort to digitize and publicly release The Sister Survey was spearheaded by Helen Hockx-Yu, Notre Dame’s Program Manager for Digital Product Access and Dissemination, and Charles Lamb, a senior archivist at Notre Dame. After attending one of her forums on digital preservation, Lamb approached Hockx-Yu with a dataset he thought “would generate enormous scholarly interest but was not publicly accessible.”

Previously, the data had been stored on “21 magnetic tapes dating from 1966 to 1990” (Ibid) and an enormous amount of work went into making it usable. This included both transferring the raw data from the tapes, but also deciphering it once it’d been translated into a digital form.

The timing of the original survey in 1967 was not arbitrary: it was a response to the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). Vatican II was a Big Deal! Half a century later, it remains the most recent Catholic council of its magnitude. For example, before Vatican II, mass was delivered in Latin by a priest who faced away from his congregation and Catholics were forbidden from attending Protestant services or reading from a Protestant Bible. Vatican II decreed that mass should be more participatory and conducted in the vernacular, that women should be allowed into roles as “readers, lectors, and Eucharistic ministers,” and that the Jewish people should be considered as “brothers and sisters under the same God” (Ibid).

The survey’s author, Marie Augusta Neal, SND, dedicated her life of scholarship towards studying the “sources of values and attitudes towards change” (Ibid) among religious figures. A primary criticism of the survey was that Neal’s questions were leading, and in particular, leading respondents towards greater political activation. ✊

As someone with next to zero conception of religious history, working with this dataset was a way to expand my knowledge in a few directons all at once. Pretty pumped to keep developing my working-with-data skills.

#recurse center #data analysis #religion #data #python #pydata #programming #silliness

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tariqk · 4 years

Video

youtube

Transcript and commentary under the cut.

Transcript

Hey everybody, in today’s video, I want to discuss the recent developments in sticky pistons not dropping blocks issue. And I also want to talk in general about why the technical community is often so misunderstood and why changes to redstone or redstone mechanics are often implemented against the wishes of the redstone community.

So the good news first, Grum commented on the bug tracker, and he said these changes which caused to get this bug to get fixed are changed, so this feature is no longer affected. So it seems like the old behavior is reinstated, where a piston would immediately retract again and in the case of a sticky piston the block is directly placed in the position that it’s pushed to.

This issue is super important for the technical minecraft community because sticky pistons dropping blocks was essential for almost any sophisticated piston contraption and also the accommodating logic often use this feature. For example, this is a very simple T flip-flop which is often used in the wiring of contraptions, and also simple flying machines, like this one here, would be broken… basically any sophisticated flying machine uses this behavior.

I also read every single comment on yesterday’s video regarding this issue, and the overwhelming majority of, I would say between 95 to 98 percent of the players agreed with me that the removal of this feature would be devastating.

So why does this happen so often that changes that are implemented are against the wishes of technical Minecrafters? I’ve also seen a lot of speculation regarding this topic in yesterday’s video’s comments, and a lot of people are suggesting that Microsoft is to blame, because they have monetary motives to change behavior and catering towards casual players more.

So from what I’d have heard, this is also speculation, Microsoft doesn’t have that much influence and the piston changes, or something like that, falls within the competence of Mojang directly. So Microsoft probably has no say in this. And I also doubt that changing piston mechanics would earn a Microsoft a single dollar more. I would actually think that the opposite is the case — it would alienate a passionate community like the technical community — by all those changes they would lose money in the long run.

I’ve also seen some commenters speculating that the developers hated the technical Minecraft community and don’t care about our issues or concerns at all. I also don’t think that’s the case… I’ve never seen any sign of hatred towards any fan group and, also this would be highly unprofessional. I also don’t think they don’t care about our issues — Grum was working on this at 10 PM yesterday evening, um, so yeah works that late, in order to fix those issues. So they definitely care about that, and they’re also highly motivated to work on the concerns that we have.

So why does this happen so often that the changes implemented would be detrimental for the redstoners and the technical Minecrafters? So my opinion, it’s just a matter of ignorance and lack of knowledge regarding those concerns by the developers.

I’ve spent hundreds of, even thousands of hours working on Minecraft pistons and other redstone components and over the years, you realize, that the current redstone system has incredible depth and is really rewarding in the long run. And a lot of the depth and complexity comes from behavior that is not directly intentional.

So just for example, at some point we found out that comparators always update after repeaters. So this setup here would power a piston and the block in the same tick, but since the repeater updates the piston last, the iron block here is just powered for a short moment which is enough to power this piston here. So this is utilized for a simple zero-tick pulse generator which would cause the stick piston to drop the block and this is not directly intentional.

So, at no point did somebody at Mojang decided that this was the way it should be, it’s just the way things work. So the system was implemented in a way like this, and now, the redstone used there, because it’s super useful in a lot of instances.

For example, in Bedrock Edition, the update order would be random, so in some cases the piston would be activated and in some cases are not, and that’s also why a lot of redstoners avoid the Bedrock Edition, since all the little unintentional and not intended behavior adds just so much to the game. I would say that all the not directly intentional behavior in redstone would be removed you’d be left with 20 percent of the content, and, you know, we’d have all been bored with doing redstone.

So while the technical players are obsessing over pistons and other redstone components, developers spend their time on other things. So they’re busy developing a game, they don’t spend the hours in learning every little detail that could be utilized to improve a machine, so they don’t know about the little things that bring us joy and make redstone a great experience overall.

So I want to give two examples to prove my point, that the developers don’t have this deeper knowledge that the redstoners have, and sometimes they assess the situation incorrectly. So I had a recent discussion with Grum on Reddit, about quasi-connectivity where he claimed that you can’t pull certain contraptions because of quasi-connectivity. So it was easily debunked — he gave an example afterwards that you can’t extend a single piston in a wall of pistons because of quasi-connectivity.

Just a reminder, the quasi-connectivity is the behavior, if you power up a block above a piston— it doesn’t have to be a block, so it’s just important that the block of a piston would be powered, then the piston is also powered, so, like here. Block above the piston is powered which powers the piston directly.

And here you can see a setup that would extend the single piston insde of a wall of pistons, so you want just extend the piston with the wool block in front, and this is possible by using this setup here. So only the wool block gets pushed out.

So the second example I wanted to give was actually regarding the sticky pistons dropping block issue, so Grum actually suggested as a replacement for this behavior that if we need to drop a block, push a glazed terracota, you can only push the block and not pull it. So he suggested that as a replacement. But obviously this is completely missing the point, just think about it, here with the T flip-flop, this wouldn’t be a replacement at all. I mean, it’s exactly what we want to do, we want to push away a block and then use the sticky piston behavior to pull it back in. So it wouldn’t be a replacement at all. And if you just want to push the block away I could just use a normal piston, I don’t have to start a— have terracota anyways, this doesn’t make much sense, it suggests— think about the flying machine, to replace the slime blocks with terracotta blocks instead, how would that help? So, yeah, this suggestion wouldn’t help at all.

In my opinion, the people at Mojang that are currently in charge of dealing with those redstone issues are just completely overburdened by the whole situation. They lack the knowledge and experience to deal with those problems. They’re mostly interested in fixing so-called bugs, but not in developing any meaningful game design that would be satisfying for the technical players. It’s a bit frustrating for technical players that our beloved redstone system gets simplified for the sake of fixing bugs. Also, in the past, we’ve provided fixes for issues that really concern us, for example laggy redstone dust, ghost blocks from flying machines, but those fixes have been mostly ignored. In the end, it’s up to Mojang… I just think that alienating or neglecting a loyal player-base will never be good, financially, in the end.

Thanks a lot for watching, have a nice day. Bye bye!

Commentary

I’ve been watching a lot of videos from people who play Minecraft, and ilmango has been one of the more interesting commenters, especially with his SciCraft server and the kind of discoveries the technical community makes with regards to what redstone can do, and what kinds of bugs you can exploit to build some really, really massive constructions that could, I don’t know, blow the hell out of a Minecraft world and harvest all the blocks for other purposes and then use the smoking remains as a map for a subway system that might actually let you travel faster than the speed of sound in what amounts to the Hell Dimension of Minecraft? Yeah, that shit’s terrifying and honestly a little inspirational.

But I’ve really got to challenge ilmango on his assertion that Mojang and Microsoft are personally ignorant about the redstone system, because… well, they own the code, not the technical community. It’s theirs to use as they see fit, and it’s not as if Mojang owe technical Minecrafters a damn thing. It’s not as if existing Minecraft players pay Mojang and Microsoft any more, so in that sense anyone who owns Minecraft as-is doesn’t have leverage.

You can’t threaten to withdraw subscriptions when the product was bought once, and paid once. You could make that argument for subscription services like Minecraft Realms, but the SciCraft server isn’t hosted on Minecraft Realms, for one. You roll your own servers and host them yourselves, and neither Mojang nor Microsoft make money from that.

It’s possible that streamers and let’s players serve as a source of direct (licensing from video views on YouTube) or indirect (free advertising for their game) revenue for Mojang.

So in that sense, that’s the leverage that technical Minecrafters have over Mojang, but how much of that matters? On a cold, capitalistic cost-benefit analysis, you need to calculate how much money the developers and publishers could make from appeasing fans with updates, versus how much money they make from pulling down new players with simpler, more deterministic and easily-learned redstone.

I mean, part of the reason why you don’t have new game mechanics is because devs like Grum need to chase bugs first. You can’t implement new mechanics without having these existing “unintended consequences of mechanics” colliding with your new mechanics.

Think about it from the side of people who do own the code — a quirk about a particular subsystem isn’t some cool feature that you could exploit, it’s a thing that might cause grief for you in the future when you do want to implement shit that you do intend.

The existence of the technical community in Minecraft, I feel, from the short time I’ve observed, is literally dependent on these bugs and exploiting them despite the fact that the designers and developers didn’t intend for these things to happen, from quasi-connectivity to zero-tick to sticky piston disconnects.

And yeah, when they do fix these problems, things like flying machines and world eaters and the like will go away, because they weren’t meant to be there in the first place. Yes, even flying machines — the engine literally struggles to render those damn things properly, so of course they’re not meant to be there.

They’re bugs because the owners of the code — Mojang and Microsoft — say they’re bugs, because the owners are the ones driving the direction of the product, not you.

And yeah, while they see the value of keeping loyal customers who have purchased their product, the issue is, fundamentally, your value to them is, fundamentally, a depreceable asset.

At the point where your value to the owners of that code goes below the potential value (and most importantly, cash, because that’s the thing that companies need to literally survive) of attracting new customers, especially children and folks who don’t have the 5 years or more experience to “really get redstone”?

Their concern for your needs will be gone.

Mojang AB and their owners have targets to reach, and those targets will cascade down to goals, and those goals will cascade down to their technical roadmap, which will cascade down to the reasonings that they’ll use for fixing which bugs and implementing which features.

Technical Minecrafters get shafted because fundamentally the amount of influence they have on these goals are not only miniscule, what they want and what Mojang wants will be, at times, at opposition.

#Minecraft #kkkapitalizm #I really am sorry if it sounds like a bummer #but that's how the relationship goes #what Mojang cares about isn't that you'll stay on playing #what they want is what every corporation needs: you to keep on paying #it's depressing as hell and it's honestly why I don't like dealing with non-F/LOSS software providers if I can help it #because that's how the power balance is arranged #I mean F/LOSS also has a deep fundamental issue as well #and a lot of it is related to how capital interacts with software #since software is basically realized interactions between people #tech adventures #honestly all the stuff I write about Minecraft basically sounds so lefty and anti-capitalist lmao

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duo-log · 6 years

Text

Be Curious Not Judgmental

��you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that will make the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller

Last night our friend dropped by, and we spent a glorious hour chatting about random people and things from the 90s. The reminiscing was melodious and satisfying with a lot of laughter, hi-fives and moments of pure joy. At this moment I am not sure what triggered the specific discussion about being rigid in one’s ways, but I believe it involved Sushmita Sen and Rahul Gandhi. So anyhow my friend left soon after leaving dear husband and me talking about the gravity of what he said. He said that we could not be rigid about our beliefs without being thrown off the tide. Not in those exact words but I think I surmised it well enough. Like a surfer who has to adjust his posture, surfboard and his foothold according to the tides to not be engulfed in the waves but instead rides them, the beliefs of humanity need to adjust to the changing reality to survive the change. History is riddled with stories about those that went obsolete because they thought they were too big to change or be affected by the change.

Meritocracy is one such example. It has often been asked if employers should be privy to the GPA of the students during college placements. For a very long time, employers have seeked out students with high GPAs over others because it is a convenient way of filtering IQ. Back in business school, we had employers who had minimum GPA requirements, and some were ridiculously high to be a minimum. But to be fair to them, they have the creme de la creme knocking at their door for a job so why would they need to consider anyone with average GPA? But does a high GPA guarantee a great workforce? Sometimes yes and well sometimes it doesn’t. Merit is only one aspect of a person, and there are others like will, demeanour, outlook, people skills, extracurricular etc., Today, we see employers looking for a more 360-degree personality as they realise good people skills matter more than good merit. This realisation has changed the dynamics of employment and interviews and for the better for there is one thing we can all agree on; five fingers make a hand, and all five are unique.

There is an Indian language film released a decade ago about a dyslexic kid who was shunned by his friends, school, society and even his father. They did not understand his troubles or what bothered him; only that he was stupid, unruly and a menace. The boy did not fit into the belief system of scoring 101% in every subject. The fact that the boy could paint like Van Gogh was trivial, irrelevant even. Then enters a teacher who believes in thinking out of the box, exploring one’s imagination and understanding that mesmerising painting requires an IQ just as much or higher as scoring a cent per cent in a math test. He investigates why a boy who could paint like a pro fail to do a simple elementary math operation. He decided to lay aside the ordinary teaching methods and sought to teach the boy by using the sense of touch and sound. Writing in sand, moulding dough to form letters, audio to understand phonetics taught the kid what repetitions and examinations could not. This style of teaching has now become the new standard and sought by most or all parents.

It is essential to keep one’s mind open to boundless possibilities, accepting that there are other ways to a solution to a problem that is different than one’s own, acknowledging that every individual’s brain functions differently and that doesn’t make it wrong. If someone doesn’t lead the life as you do, doesn’t believe in things you do, doesn’t hold the superstitions you do, doesn’t eat, drink or dress just like you, it doesn’t mean that that person is wrong; it just says that they are human, have a brain of their own and think differently than you do. After all, there is more than one way to get to Rome.

Read the other part of this Duolog(ue).

Homogeneity isn’t the Goal

Last week’s question was how strongly do we hold on to our beliefs before those very ones become the reason for our fall; before irrelevance makes us the dinosaur we as a race are trying hard not to become.

#judgemental #beleifs #differnt #gpa #chats #discussion #children #iq #difference #change

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