That's a two-edged sword. Too many coders are secretly engineers who want to do it in the perfect way, where very often you only want it "good enough" instead of "perfect". Striking a balance of that, is how you get things done.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg' to 'Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, inspiration, programming, coders, software' - edited by lucky760

They're totally right. Coders are geniuses and the most incredible specimens of awesomeness on Earth. Rockstars. Wizards. Super powers. Yep. Couldn't agree more.

Objectively speaking, of course.

"Great coders are today's rockstars. That's it."

I've done a fair bit of work in AI, mostly genetic programming and evolutionary computing. The popular conception that if we just had more processing power we could create a truly intelligent machine is, well, nonsense. The machine still needs some code to run. The problem for AI isn't one of computational power, it's a problem of representation. (The history of Deep Blue is an excellent example of this.)

I'm not suggesting that more computational power won't help - quite the opposite. But it doesn't solve anything on its own. As Michio notes, machines can already see and hear better than humans, but they have no understanding. That understanding can only occur with good information representation. I personally think evolutionary techniques are probably the quickest path to get there, but then, the coders will be no more aware of the machine's internal representations than neuroscientists are of humans' internal representations today. Whether that understanding is important is something of a philosophical question.

Your right but back then they were still constricted by programming and memory constraints since the average computer had maybe 128k of ram to work with. I remember programming in Basic when I was like 8yrs old. I remember having to do programs sometimes upwards of 500 lines or more that only ran once and couldn't be saved in anyway. And the finished product was some Pixel Art or maybe a song that played "Mary had a Little Lamb" through a PC Speaker. Granted Basic was a very limited programming language to begin with.

Then there was the gaming crash of 83' that pretty much destroyed those same bedroom coders your speaking of.
It wasn't really till the invention of Shareware which didn't become widely used till the late 80's that things started to get back on track and people had some of the freedoms we are enjoying now with indie games and crowd-funding. Though I see and acknowledge your point about things being cyclical. If games hadn't suffered such a major setback in the early 80's things would have been very different today.


>> ^spoco2:

>> ^Auger8:
A new age has dawned for games. The ideas of the common man can now be expressed to the world in a way that was never possible before. Free of the restrictions of publishers and corporate giants. Free of the expectation to make the next great cookie cutter FPS or RPG. We can now for the first time in history truly make the games that we WANT to make. We can innovate. We can push the boundaries of the old genres. We can create new genres and we can tell the stories that not only change the industry but change the hearts of the players we strive so hard to reach. This is the second Golden Age of Gaming and I for one couldn't be more excited to see it arrive!

Erm, hardly 'for the first time'.
The first games on home computers, back in the mid 80s, were largely one man jobs. A whole collection of bedroom coders made buckets of money back then creating games for computers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.
Yeah, it then became taken over by the giant media companies, and yes it's now becoming far more accessible for people to be able to code quality games with tiny teams, and have them reach people via the internet and delivery systems like Steam.
But it's a return to that, not a first time thing, it's all cyclic

>> ^Auger8:

A new age has dawned for games. The ideas of the common man can now be expressed to the world in a way that was never possible before. Free of the restrictions of publishers and corporate giants. Free of the expectation to make the next great cookie cutter FPS or RPG. We can now for the first time in history truly make the games that we WANT to make. We can innovate. We can push the boundaries of the old genres. We can create new genres and we can tell the stories that not only change the industry but change the hearts of the players we strive so hard to reach. This is the second Golden Age of Gaming and I for one couldn't be more excited to see it arrive!


Erm, hardly 'for the first time'.

The first games on home computers, back in the mid 80s, were largely one man jobs. A whole collection of bedroom coders made buckets of money back then creating games for computers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.

Yeah, it then became taken over by the giant media companies, and yes it's now becoming far more accessible for people to be able to code quality games with tiny teams, and have them reach people via the internet and delivery systems like Steam.

But it's a return to that, not a first time thing, it's all cyclic

>> ^Sagemind:

Old outdated & religious guy - Quote: Hey we're the majority, silent or otherwise. How come this little (Coder????) of people get control?
First of all, Old man douche say what! (what?)?
Second - I think he made that word up!

I thought the word he was using was "cadre".

As much as I like to diss Pat Bigotson and Co, my love for the English language obliges me to comment that coterie is indeed a word.

>> ^Sagemind:

Old outdated & religious guy - Quote: Hey we're the majority, silent or otherwise. How come this little (Coder????) of people get control?
First of all, Old man douche say what! (what?)?
Second - I think he made that word up!

Old outdated & religious guy - Quote: Hey we're the majority, silent or otherwise. How come this little (Coder????) of people get control?

First of all, Old man douche say what! (what?)?
Second - I think he made that word up!

>> ^Peroxide:

I would be fired.
You wanted me to post this didn't you.>> ^spoco2:
I pretty much only visit the sift while at work.
Being a coder I am always flipping between code and web pages etc. etc. for those moment when code is compiling or running or whatnot.
Too busy at home to actually surf the web much at all.



Yes... yes I did

I would be fired.

You wanted me to post this didn't you.>> ^spoco2:

I pretty much only visit the sift while at work.
Being a coder I am always flipping between code and web pages etc. etc. for those moment when code is compiling or running or whatnot.
Too busy at home to actually surf the web much at all.

I pretty much only visit the sift while at work.

Being a coder I am always flipping between code and web pages etc. etc. for those moment when code is compiling or running or whatnot.

Too busy at home to actually surf the web much at all.

This boy's mature enough to be a real coder now.
>> ^lucky760:

There were other technical reasons we initially designed the comment voting system to function the way it does. A few years programatically wiser and older enough to not give a shit any more, go ahead and down vote starred comments. See if I care.

>> ^L0cky:

>> ^spoco2:
It's that whole 'getting into the zone' thing with coding (yes, I'm a coder by trade).Same. I also try to get my procrastinating done in the first hour of the day; then it's on with the headphones. Unfortunately I'm a nicotine and caffeine addict which gets me when I'm between tasks.

Do you have a KARLSTAD two-seater leather sofa as well?


No leather sofa... and sadly no Aeron chair like in the heady dot com days... oh how I miss that chair!