The Witness is, in my opinion, simply one of the best games ever made. There are many layers to the game, and moments of insight that the game leads you to, but also trusts for you to make the final connections.
However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits.
It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.
How do you compare it to the Portal games or the Talos principle? I find those superior in puzzle mechanics, sense of achievement and playing dynamics. They can be challenging but you never feel aimlessly going around without a purpose like the Witness. There is good review of the game on youtube by the title "The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play", it covers a lot and resonates well with my experience, the panels could've been a standalone mobile/tablet game. Everything else in the game is beautiful but frustrating.
The Witness would have been better if it was half as long definitely, but the problem was not that it was long, it was that it didn't have enough interesting content to fill the time. The puzzles are not mechanically interesting enough to enjoy repeating to the level the game forces you to and the variations are explored so slowly it's just tedious.
I think Blow achieved what he wanted, which I guess makes it a good game in a sense but also it wasn't an experience I enjoyed or can easily recommend to others.
I agree, though I think the real winner here is the customers. The New Glenn 9x4 has a higher targeted payload capacity that an expended Falcon Heavy. Mission design takes years, and payload mass is the most important constraining factor. So it'd now be fairly reasonable approach to start building now for 9x4's constraints, and then fly on it or Starship depending on readiness and price. If customers start doing this now, that also means a quicker pickup on using the increased launch capability.
On a funnier note, the 9 in Falcon 9 is the number of engines. So blue origin is somewhat picking up on their naming scheme. Or, by BO's scheme, it'd be the Falcon 9x1, or the Starship 33x6.
No law in relation to pennies has changed. The executive branch has simply took the law stating the mint should create as many pennies as necessary, and decided that the necessary amount is 0.
The practicalities of their illegality then comes down to enforcement. Given the current executive branch's behavior related to enforcement of laws, that can mean anything from "melt them all down", to "don't do it", to "if our friends start doing it, it'll be legal, if our enemies start doing it, we'll enforce".
I've managed to visualize a Klein bottle in 4d. I easily visualize 3d objects. However I can't really do color - I startled myself recently when I briefly saw red. On that aphantasia test with an apple, I can hold it's 3d shape, but no surface texture or color.
People seem to have surprisingly different internal experiences. I don't know how common 4d visualization is, and I suspect even those capable require exposure to the concepts and practice. However I do think it possible.
The blind French mathematician Bernard Morin is well-known for creating the first visualization of a sphere eversion, a method for turning a sphere inside out without creasing it. His work was based on Stephen Smale's 1958 proof of sphere eversion's existence and on ideas shared by Arnold Shapiro. Morin's method involved constructing a sequence of models, including his "Morin surface," to demonstrate the process.
Your hippocampus has several special clusters of neurons whose members activate and deactivate based on your body's understanding of your position and momentum in a 3D world.
The arrangement of these neurons physically corresponds to reality, and so things are pretty hardwired.
Repurposing these neurons might be possible with advanced training and nootropics, but I'm not sure. You might have better luck engaging other parts of your brain, for example using metaphor or abstraction such as mathematics.
For me, being able to visualize 4D would imply that I can picture four mutually perpendicular axes, something which I find completely impossible for me to do. And I thought it is impossible for any human brain. It would be fascinating if I am wrong.
1. It still took nearly 7 years to after JFK's speech in the 60s.
2. The institutional knowledge of working directly on the Apollo program has largely been lost in the US, and certainly isn't present in China.
Those are the unimportant pieces. The real reason is:
3. The US was actively at war with Russia. While it was a cold war (except for the proxy wars), the Apollo program had a wartime budget (spent nearly half a trillion in today's dollars), and a wartime risk tolerance (Neil Armstrong thought they had a 10% chance of not making it back).
2. Uh huh. The knowledge for 1960s tech is limited, agreed, but the tech is so much more superior now, and China as a nation has a high understanding. What does China not have that would be of any relevance?
3. Cool, China is in an economic Cold War with the USA.
Payload capacities to trans-lunar injection (source wikipedia):
SLS Block 1: >27,000 kg (59,500 lb)
SLS Block 1B: 42,000 kg (92,500 lb)
SlS Block 2: >46,000 kg (101,400 lb)
Vulcan Centaur: 12,100 kg (26,700 lb)
New Glenn: 7,000 kg (15,000 lb)
Orion crew module by itself weighs 10,400 kg (22,900 lb), the service module is 15,461 kg (34,085 lb).
Orion is a heavy spacecraft. SLS, like or not (I don't), it has a lot of lift. Unless you're sticking an Orion inside of a Starship (lol), Orion basically dies with SLS.
New Glenn at least claims to eventually be able to put 45,000kg to LEO. Once in orbit, refueling or docking boost stages can come into play. With Vulcan, I have mainly heard of proposals involving modifying Orion to dock the service module in orbit after separate launches.
SpaceX's lander bid was in large part so competitive because they were already planning on developing 90% of the technology anyways. Low earth orbit service was developed for NASA, but has found other paying customers. The moon has to have more people who would be interested in paying. Also the moon remains a good stepping stone for technological development for getting people to Mars, the stated main goal of the company. Also it's almost certainly not happening in the next few years anyways so they may only need to wait for the next administration.
> Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations.
It's not unheard of. Eg, Blender earns $261,360/month. (https://fund.blender.org/) Companies should more eagerly support open source projects they rely on with funding. It keeps their dependencies competitive with much more expensive commercial products, and a broad base of donations prevents a project from being dominated by specific large corporate interests which might run counter to their average user.
It's not an optimization. What gets evaluated via the lazy evaluation is well defined. Control flow which has a value defined at comptime will only evaluate the path taken. In the op example, the block is evaluated twice, once for each enum value, and the inner switch is followed at comptime so only one prong is evaluated.
The computer is a machine, and modern ones are complicated. When I am programming, I want to precisely control that machine. For me, simplicity is measured in how complicated it is to get the machine to do what I want it to do. So, eg, having several different operators for adding two integers sounds complicated. However there is simplicity in not having to reach far to actually get the correct behavior, and there is some simplicity in the process of being forced to make that choice as it irons about what behavior you actually want.
However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits.
It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.