After Coursera/Udacity/EdX discontinued courses that I wanted to take, or removed access to ones I only partially completed, I switched to buying classes on Udemy. I completed only a handful of many purchases, and the quality level was okay-to-mediocre but better than nothing, so I got more value out of Udemy than Coursera.
I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.
The MOOCs had some pretty cool/interesting university classes that don't exist anywhere else. It's a shame those videos weren't preserved where we can access/purchase them without attending the college.
I agree, some of the worst employees I've seen were hired that way.
I haven't hired anyone recently but btwn 10-20 years ago I did hire a lot. Of course we reached out via our network of connections but that gets tapped out fast, so you have to rely on job postings. It was always hundreds of applicants per opening. Back then it wasn't 1000's but it might as well have been because I didn't have enough time to sift through them all. That's ok, you can just approach it like "the dowry problem" (also known as the secretary problem [1]).
But the job market and hiring is way worse now, and it's pretty horrible for job seekers atm.
As mentioned elsewhere here, Ocaml and the ML family are often cited as easy to implement other languages, due to pattern matching, enum variants, sum types, etc. Since newer languages like Rust and Swift copied those features, you might be more interested in them since they're more popular than older ones like Ocaml and Haskell. Personally I like the syntax sugar in Swift.
> In the absence of Western tools like ChatGPT and Claude, many Chinese universities have begun deploying local versions of DeepSeek on campus servers to support students. Many top universities have deployed their own locally hosted versions of Deepseek. *These campus-specific AI systems–often referred to as the “full-blood version” of Deepseek—offer longer context windows, unlimited dialogue rounds and broader functionality than public-facing free versions.*
This makes so much sense. Are there any U.S. universities doing this?
A caipirinha with vodka is called a caipiroska. I name my computers after caipirinha varieties. Once at the office my laptop screensaver was showing "caipiroska" and a Russian guy exclaimed, "what's that?!?" Apparently "piroska" has a certain connotation in Russian that's nsfw.
More context at:
"Moonshot's Kimi K2 uses a 1T-parameter MoE architecture with 32B active parameters and outperforms models like GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-V3 on key benchmarks"
<https://www.techmeme.com/250712/p11#a250712p11>
I've been in too many conversations where this topic comes up, and it's very disheartening to me. Gamers insist there are plenty of great narrative games, and every example they give is basically a branching story with bunch of flags that gate which branches can be taken. If I give the Holodeck as a counter-example, well that's just too pie-in-the-sky.
These conversations remind me a lot of Paul Graham's Blub Paradox: "Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub." Current SotA narrative games are good enough for most gamers, because all they've played are branching story games.
The complex emergent narratives people love in Dwarf Fortress or Caves of Qud aren’t branching stories though?
If the argument is “let’s build games that tell character stories as complex as Last of Us with the world building techniques of Dwarf Fortress”, it might be worth considering why 1) it wouldn’t be feasible and/or 2) it wouldn’t lead to a game that’s as fun/compelling as a more narratively linear counterpart.
The narrative in Last of Us is compelling because it’s tight and focused and authored by the authors to be told in a very specific way.
The “emergent narrative out of raw world simulation” argument sounds like filming thousands of hours of security camera footage and expecting Citizen Kane to come out of it.
I mean again, I would be pretty receptive to a “this game had the right idea, we should push it further” argument, but the “I’m a visionary game designer who hasn’t shipped a game that embodies my vision AND the thousands of other game designers are clueless, but everyone will see how clever I was in 3 centuries” argument rings pretty hollow.
For what it’s worth, Chris Crawford’s tool (http://storytron.com/) is a branching story editor, and one that seems much less powerful than what is used in the industry (eg articy).
You haven’t played dwarf fortress or caves of qud and it shows. Great example of armchair designers insisting they know better than all the gamers and game creators immersed in the art.
Chris Crawford's tools for interactive storytelling may have failed, but he was a huge inspiration for me in my game dev career, and I still harbor aspirations in "interactive storytelling" due to his influence.
I first attended CGDC in 1994. It was two years after his Dragon Speech (which I knew nothing about), but the highlight of the conference was his talk about the challenges of story-based games. The part I remember is how he modeled stories as branching trees with fan-out, foldback, tree-of-death, etc (he covers this in the "Architecture" chapter of this book "The Art of Interactive Design"). I didn't really follow Crawford's work on Erasmatron or later, but by the late 90's it sounded like his story model had changed from a tree to a graph network structure, like a finite state machine. While it was an improvement, I was a bit skeptical that this model was enough. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem. You see, he'd already infected me with his dream of interactive storytelling.
By the time I moved to California and took a job at EA/Maxis on The Sims 2.0 team, I had decided that true interactive storytelling (as I saw it) was not possible until game AI was sophisticated enough to enable autonomous NPC chatbots. So I put that dream aside while I pursued a career in software development.
Here we are, over a quarter of a century later, and that AI technology is here now. For those of us who have been waiting for this moment, it is almost miraculous. It might be the end of an era for Chris Crawford, but it is just the beginning of the AI-based interactive storytelling era.
In many ways Chris is ending things just as his dream is about to come to fruition. His vision was just 40 years ahead of the technology. If only he could stay engaged another 10 years. The best times are ahead of us
A few months ago someone here reported on making text adventures with language models. If I remember correctly, a problem is that it is not trivial to control the AI in a way that players can't cheat on puzzles.
I also found that Youtube videos are just as informative as Udemy classes, but they're not always as well structured.
The MOOCs had some pretty cool/interesting university classes that don't exist anywhere else. It's a shame those videos weren't preserved where we can access/purchase them without attending the college.
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