Maths and “the theoretical” is generally the part I hate about computer science. This stuff is something that I spend a lot of time on last year, but still got a crap TOC mark anyway. If I can’t picture what I’m doing, I don’t understand concepts well at all, but I think the worst part is that even from where I’m standing, the applications are still too far away.

So Formal Methods… I’m just taking this class because I have to. I can’t see myself being good enough to use any of this in real software development (I’ll be slower and it’ll probably be just as buggy). Right now, it’s so low on my priority list that I left the 12.5% grade homework until the very last minute, handing in something embarrassingly unfinished — you can tell - I didn’t even use a pathing tool for my arrows.

Something [lecturer] said about her dream being that software engineering would become a real engineering field has stuck with me: programs all being verified and bug free… real standards for coding… EULAs that didn’t absolve all responsibility… I get that, but I don’t think it’ll happen any time soon. Numericals, probabilities and “good enough” (ie, the 3x safety margin) work fine for those other engineering fields… and this shit is really hard.

My next post will be better.

I don’t like Marauders. Conceptually, it doesn’t make sense to me how Terran were suddenly able to outfit armour which was twice as strong and just as mobile as regular Marine armour. It means there’s no reason why they couldn’t strap Hellfire missiles to the same chassis to make an insane anti-air infantry. Concussive Shells make them really obnoxious to go up against — I don’t like how risky it makes poking. Remember when it used to slow down Archons… those hovering, spell-resistant embodiments of pure rage? That’s basically why I thought they were dumb.

Maybe if it was an active spell (perhaps single use?) that worked more like an actual anti-gravity grenade and dragged units together/backwards? I like the idea that it would only be effective in the hands of skilled/attentive Terrans, even if the snare effect was worse, or it destroyed Force Fields.

My favourite unit, by contrast, is the Immortal. If fulfills the anti-Roach role in the same way, but the idea of the old Dragoons being outfitted with better AI, a heavy weapon and extra shields, and having Stalkers act as a lighter skirmisher just seems more plausible to me.

I know that lore should always take second place to gameplay, but that’s just how I feel about them. In-game, they’re both just dull units that you mix in response to Armored units. I probably overmake both regardless, especially after the realisation that Immortals are as cheap as two Stalkers. (That and the range buff.)

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Muoy.

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And while the top five university cities to find love are:

1. Oxford (35%)
2. York (29%)
3. Durham (25%)
4. Liverpool (23%)
5. Manchester (21%)

I don’t know if that’s counteracted by computer science being the least likely to lead to love. Tried to find the actual source or numbers which meant anything, but gave up after about 10 minutes. I’d make a shit journalist.

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The heap allocation exercise is essentially what I love about computer science here. Essentially, it’s a contest to see who can build the best allocator in terms of speed and memory efficiency. On committing code, the server runs your allocator on a set of test programs and your results go up on the homepage for everyone to see. It’s a big effort for the instructor and TAs to maintain, but goddamn, it really pays off.

This is the kind of thing that I’d love to see at York. I guess it works better with the American system - being graded on a curve and the general informalness of assessments - but I can’t see why more classes don’t incorporate some form of competition. I think competition is one of the only things that drives me, but I guess it might have the opposite effect on anyone that’s not on top of things. I can’t agree that it’s unfair in any way, though.

I don’t really want to go into the peculiarities of memory management, especially since my allocator is really slow and not that efficient, (but I bet it’d perform better in a real life situations because of the way it’s suited for ephemeral garbage collection, though). I probably could’ve cheated and designed my program to just demolish the benchmarks, or just copied the libc implementation, but that goes against my principles (but evidently not my peers).

I’m pretty stubborn as a programmer. I think I probably could’ve won this thing if instead of trying to tweak variables all night, I’d just sat down and rewritten it to use segregated sizes or whatever. Recently, I handed in some code with a really awkward array implementation that is probably going to be hell to debug later. Lazy… that’s what it is.

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I told her I thought it was important that you could get lost in conversation
Chatting shit, sitting in oblivion with that person who’s your special one

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*algenpfleger:

A while back, when I started doing art, not only were my skills really bad, but also my ability to see the world. Practice not only changes what you can put into reality, but also what you can get out of it. Everyone of you who knows something about painting will know what I’m talking about - after a while you learn to see. And that alone is worth the time you put in, you’ll be rewarded twice - not only with growing skill, but also with a gift that’s worth maybe even more - the ability to see beauty in everything, to take in and understand the world, and also to see through bullshit, haha. This is what people who paint over photos don’t get - yes there’s actually people to whom it’s blatantly obvious. All it takes is to know things about painting to understand what makes a painting look like a painting, and what makes a photo look like a photo.

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But you guys…

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