> Contrary to the claim attributed to Henk Rogers there were no "straightforward business arrangement" between Pajitnov and myself. In the Soviet Union, where private business was outlawed and the concept of intellectual property was not defined, people could not make private business arrangements of this kind. The Computer Center of Academy of Sciences owned everything we made. Several years later the situation in the Soviet Union changed, but this was a different story. When I worked on Tetris, even a government organization could not formally hire me because I was underage. I worked on Tetris just for fun. I don't remember Pajitnov ever paying me for anything related to Tetris either. Pajitnov started fixing the business aspects of the situation a few years later when he and Henk Rogers participated in negotiations with Elorg (the only government organization in the USSR that could sell software abroad). Pajitnov stopped by my home and asked me to urgently sign a paper "to get lots of money for us from game companies". He didn't leave me a copy of the paper. As far as I remember the paper was saying that I agree to only claim porting Tetris to the PC, agree to give Pajitnov the right to handle all business arrangements, and refuse any rewards related to Tetris. I did not entirely agree with the content, but I trusted Alexey and signed the paper anyway. In a few months my name disappeared from all newly released versions of Tetris and all Tetris-related documents. Alexey registered a US copyright (R/N PA-412-170) referencing the free PC version of Tetris (original version 3.12) we developed together.
Oh sure, I don’t necessarily disagree at all. I was mostly hoping for more detail in why - was the original court’s decision that the game’s production as work material or work hours wasn’t valid because it was in Soviet Union and that was either no longer in existence, or perhaps there was some other line of reasoning. I also think there’s been a tendency to create a bit of a narrative out of the whole situation, and I appreciate another view. I have heard of Gerasimov, you might like this short article (Edit: also linked below and quoted as I was typing this up, sorry) he wrote from I don’t remember how long ago, but I think I’ve read it before. For his part, he seems to feel here that pajitnov cut him out unfairly.
It's worth your time reading and comparing the earliest version of Garasimov's account, as it has been edited over the years under pressure from the other parties involved.
Most notably, when The Tetris Company decided to change the year of creation of Tetris, they requested Garasimov change it on his page, which he confirmed by email to somebody who asked about the reason.
I'd agree if we are talking about personal interactions. Few hundreds people that we personally know and interact with is the scale we are wired for by evolution, isn't it?
What civilization enabled and continuously rely on, however, is the type of deindividualization of actions and bucketing of people, which, in turn, enables pretty horrible things at scale (from the weapons of mass destruction to objectively psychopathic profit-maximizing corporations). One can even say that not facing the consequences of one's actions is a feature and not a bug of the system.
Yeah the bureaucracy like eu is almost a perfect setup to deflect responsibility. "Apparently the measures taken by our predecessors were not ideal in hindsight but the need to protect our children remains of utmost importance. With the lessons learned we will now take steps to ensure the bright future for us all!" lol
Maybe people would have a better understanding of percentages if 20-sided dice were used more. "This has a 95% chance to succeed" -> roll a d20, anything but 1 is a success
Meanwhile 6-sided dice don't map to nice numbers, and having two dice makes the maths even harder to intuit
But (assuming two dice rolled at the same time) 2/36 is something like "roll a five and a six" or "roll either a pair of sixes or a pair of fives". Neither of which is quite as intuitive or commonly used in game design as "using one d20, roll a natural 20"
And yet they struggle with the abstract concept. They'll wonder why the candidate with a projected 20% chance of winning won. They won't know what to do with the information of a 70% chance of rain tomorrow. "Either it will rain or it won't, which is it!" Perhaps it's the frequentist approach that comes more natural than the Bayesian approach, who knows.
The idea is quite similar to Chekhov's "Rules for Aspiring Authors":
Any newborn baby should be thoroughly bathed and, after giving him a rest from his first impressions, severely whipped and told: “Don’t write! Don’t write! Don’t be a writer!” If, in spite of this punishment, the baby will show writing tendencies, a caress should be tried. If a caress doesn’t help, give up on the baby – he is as good as lost1. The writing itch is incurable.
The path of the writer from start to finish is paved with thorns, nails and nettle, and therefore any sensible person must remove himself from writing by any means ... (eventually gets to actual advice)
No, I don't think K-pop is a government initiative. It is an actual fact.
> In the late '90s, when Asia went through a huge financial crisis, South Korea's leaders decided to use music to improve its image and build its cultural influence. So the country's government poured millions of dollars into forming a Ministry of Culture with a specific department devoted to K-pop.
> if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.
At the outskirts of one's knowledge this is inevitably the case. My impression it is still useful to know that a certain implication is possible - and one can look up the exact conditions.
This is why I said operationalizing: you need to memorize enough to either be able to know what to look up, or know it outright if you need to be fast(er).
I’m a big fan of Polars. It’s really fast and memory efficient. With the lazy streaming functionality, I’ve been able to easily process 1 Tb+ data on a single machine (you do have to be careful to not do any operation that would cause the whole DF to materialize in that case).
It’s certainly miles better than Pandas, which has a terrible API in addition to being comically inefficient. In my group, we generally use it for any new work, and have also swapped out pandas for polars in critical spots of our existing code - the latter giving a huge benefit relative to the amount of work it took.
I largely agree with you on SQL being the common denominator, but there are some things that are just awkward in SQL, and much easier to do in Python or other general purpose language.
Yes, I agree with both of those statements. If you read the original statement before the "tut tut" response, you will note that I was only suggesting the A pillars introduce dangerous blind spots. I understand how that could be confused on other platforms, but I expected folks on HN to extend the benefit of the doubt that posters are not generally oblivious to the law. So the conversation derailed.
You led with "people just hop right out onto zebra crossings expecting the right-of-way to be yielded to them." I think framing it this way was a mistake and the cause of your frustration. People in zebra crossings do have the right of way, regardless of whether they hopped there or what there expectations are, full stop.
Your point about modern A pillars is right on the money.
Yes, that's right. The folks in this thread just got really worked up thinking that I disagreed with that point, which distracted from my message which was about the A pillar.
And the copyright on tetris pieces is just ridiculous given the Colomb's publication and probably others.
I personally appreciated the write-up as it presents an alternative to the glossed up candy narrative that I have read and seen more than once.
Didn't know about Gerasimov either (who single-handedly coded up the DOS version it seems).
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