STUNTS abstraction

A lot of time ago there was a game called S.T.U.N.T.S. which was one of the only two racing games i ever liked (the other being Carmageddon, which was not a racing game at all). And it was cool mostly not for racing but for it was the first time i ever had encountered a level editor. And level editors are coolness.

Anyways, S.T.U.N.T.S. had a strange bug that if you made a square course with slanted curve corners (so that you never had to take your finger out of gas!!!) and used the fastest car available at some point the car would go crazy. It was like the car had become an abstract moving body instead of a car.

we are violence

§ We are violence.

§ We are born of violence and we are born as violence.

§ All that we call good is violence and augmentation of violence.

UI as programming

My sister believes that computers break on their own, that one moment they are working and the next they aren’t, and that nothing she did had anything at all to do with the change. My computers go boink all the time, also, but i generally have some notion of how that has come to be.

Computers are remarkably good at NOT DOING anything they have not been programmed to. This is what common sense translates as “computers are actually dumb”, but i would argue that this is a very very good trait.

abstraction levels and the cost of incorrectness

Computer programming these days is full of abstraction levels. We have high-level languages being translated into bytecode, we have libraries depending on libraries depending on libraries, we have virtual machines, we have OSs that need graphs so that you can understand how many “levels” they have. If you insist in mapping those levels and start with the bare metal… well…

Generally speaking, more levels means things get easier. That is, actually, the whole point of “leveling”. But those levels also carry a subtle dilemma: extra levels enhance the cost of uncorrectness!