Miss Tick sniffed. “You could say this advice is priceless,” she said, “Are you listening?” “Yes,” said Tiffany. ”Good. Now...if you trust in yourself...” ”Yes?” “...and believe in your dreams...” ”Yes?” “...and follow your star...” Miss Tick went on. ”Yes?” ”...you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye.”
And they’ll be beaten in turn by people who were in the right place at the right time, or won the genetic lottery. A little luck can make up for a lot of laziness, and working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.
There’s homage and there’s homage. And then there’s three guys spending over 500 hours to recreate the first two minutes and twenty seconds of Super Mario Land using more than 18 million Minecraft blocks. The movie, made by carpenter James Wright, Joe Ciappa and a gamer known as Tempusmori, had the guys running the classic monochrome platformer in an emulator and replicating it pixel-for-wool-block-pixel inside a giant Minecraft Game Boy. The team spent approximately four weeks, working six to seven hours a day with no days off...
And the worst thing is they don’t use a piston array! Making a scrolling wall of blocks is fairly easy within Minecraft and would’ve saved them the trouble of manually shifting all their blocks every single frame. That’s easily an order of magnitude less work, and can be re-used for other stop-motion movies.
Their excuse? “We dont have the smarts”(sic). Sigh.
Pistons can only push rows of 12 blocks; the Game Boy screen is much wider than that. I can imagine building a system to push groups of 12 separately without any exposed mechanism when idle, but I think that is likely to be impossible.
You could divide the screen into rows 12 blocks wide, each powered by an array, with a 2 block gap. You put the arrays one level below the display level and push the blocks up (via sticky pistons) each turn. You’d still have to manually fill in the gaps, but that’s only 22 out of 160 lines.
You can combine the arrays like a big stair and only have a 1 block gap, but that requires some manual working of the pistons each turn (because you can’t hide the wiring). Not sure if it’s worth it. I’m 30% confident it can be automated without exposed wiring.
I have been thinking about a gapless way on-and-off over the last 2 days. I don’t have one yet, but I’m 70% confident I can figure one out without the help of the r/redstone hivemind in less than 50 hours of thinking. I’ve put building a working implementation on my Minecraft todo list. There’s no way this is impossible.
… and I’ve build a working prototype. Took about 3 hours to figure it out, 2 hours to get the wiring to work (first big redstone project), another 1-2 hours for the array and timing. It’s trivial to scale and can be easily extended to push in both directions. The whole mechanism is hidden. I think there is a delay of ~8 seconds per 12 blocks, so scrolling the gameboy screen should take ~1.5 minutes. I’m sure you can get this below 1 minute if you try.
Volunteer tasks? I wasn’t aware you (I’m assuming that means Less Wrong or SIAI) had any; perhaps you have a visibility problem?
Or maybe they’re just not as engaging as an open-ended engineering environment with no arbitrary entry requirements and no visible resource constraints. . .
Ok, I understand that SIAI wants more visibility, and that it needs volunteers, but “Perform Search Engine Optimization” (as per http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities ) is not the way to get there. What next, Nigerian scams ?
Ok, I understand that SIAI wants more visibility, and that it needs volunteers, but “Perform Search Engine Optimization” (as per http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities ) is not the way to get there. What next, Nigerian scams ?
SEO is rudimentary marketing. The analogy is absurd.
Especially in our case—we do so little SEO that all the low-hanging fruit for us is white-hat SEO, SEO which genuinely helps people like adding references to Wikipedia and whatnot.
Eh. SEO has a bad reputation among the general population, but from a business perspective it’s generally recognized as a necessity, if a somewhat distasteful one. SEO doesn’t just include throwing together garbage pages to fool Google. (I haven’t actually read the guides linked on that page, so can’t comment on them specifically.)
Given that they’re searching for volunteers, it makes more sense to appeal to the general population than to business people, doesn’t it? (As a non-business-person, certain practices in SEO sound to me much like Dark Arts, though they exploit misfeatures of search engines’ (rather than human minds’) algorithms.)
I wouldn’t say so. For one thing, there’s a substantial overlap between “business people” and “the general population,” especially the portion of the general population that’s likely to take volunteering for SIAI seriously in the first place.
A lot of “white hat” SEO is just a matter of making the connection between search engine algorithms and what’s actually being looked for. Appropriately tagging pages to associated them with relevant subjects, asking people who are genuinely fans of your site to link to it on their site, making yourself visible on the social web, etc. . .
I think there’s a difference between a). telling all your friends about a website, and linking to it from your Facebook page, and b). methodically visiting random blogs and social media sites, and inserting a link to the target website into every comment thread. Given that SIAI is asking for volunteers, I assume they mean the latter. Even if it’s an accepted business practice, doesn’t mean that it’s honest or fair. In fact, just recently I saw a bot doing the same thing on Less Wrong, and it’s gone now, so I assume it got banned...
I’ll repeat myself: There is a middle ground between those two extremes. Posting links at random is not an acceptable practice anywhere credible!
What is acceptable is setting up linking networks between associates and cooperating organizations, among other things. If you think SIAI is worth paying attention to, you can get a lot more done by mentioning it on your blog than by just bringing it up in conversations with your close friends occasionally.
Some exposed mechanism seems okay; it works for LCD displays (and some older ones had a pronounced screen-door effect). You could scale it up, but it is an unfortunate fact about Minecraft that mechanisms far away have no effect.
And then there’s three guys spending over 500 hours to recreate the first two minutes and twenty seconds of Super Mario Land using more than 18 million Minecraft blocks.
I suspect it can be done programmatically, by wiring MC server to emulator, in less than 50 hours.
Thankfully for Mr. Pratchett, you can’t influence the genetic lottery or the luck fairy, so his is still valid advice. In fact, one could see “trust in yourself” et al. as invitations to “do or do not, there is no try”, whereas “work hard, learn hard and don’t be lazy” supports the virtue of scholarship as well as that of “know when to give up”. Miss Tick is being eminently practical, and “do or do not”, while also an important virtue, requires way more explanation before the student can understand it.
Yeah. “Do or do not” / “believe in yourself” should either be administered on a case-by-case basis by a discerning mentor, or packaged with the full instruction manual.
-- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
And they’ll be beaten in turn by people who were in the right place at the right time, or won the genetic lottery. A little luck can make up for a lot of laziness, and working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/geeks-lose-minds-recreate-first-level-of-super-mario-land-with/
And the worst thing is they don’t use a piston array! Making a scrolling wall of blocks is fairly easy within Minecraft and would’ve saved them the trouble of manually shifting all their blocks every single frame. That’s easily an order of magnitude less work, and can be re-used for other stop-motion movies.
Their excuse? “We dont have the smarts”(sic). Sigh.
Pistons can only push rows of 12 blocks; the Game Boy screen is much wider than that. I can imagine building a system to push groups of 12 separately without any exposed mechanism when idle, but I think that is likely to be impossible.
You could divide the screen into rows 12 blocks wide, each powered by an array, with a 2 block gap. You put the arrays one level below the display level and push the blocks up (via sticky pistons) each turn. You’d still have to manually fill in the gaps, but that’s only 22 out of 160 lines.
You can combine the arrays like a big stair and only have a 1 block gap, but that requires some manual working of the pistons each turn (because you can’t hide the wiring). Not sure if it’s worth it. I’m 30% confident it can be automated without exposed wiring.
I have been thinking about a gapless way on-and-off over the last 2 days. I don’t have one yet, but I’m 70% confident I can figure one out without the help of the r/redstone hivemind in less than 50 hours of thinking. I’ve put building a working implementation on my Minecraft todo list. There’s no way this is impossible.
… and I’ve build a working prototype. Took about 3 hours to figure it out, 2 hours to get the wiring to work (first big redstone project), another 1-2 hours for the array and timing. It’s trivial to scale and can be easily extended to push in both directions. The whole mechanism is hidden. I think there is a delay of ~8 seconds per 12 blocks, so scrolling the gameboy screen should take ~1.5 minutes. I’m sure you can get this below 1 minute if you try.
Here’s the video. Here’s the save. Here’s a bunch of screenshots instead of a blueprint or explanation.
...why we can get people to do this but not our open volunteer tasks...
Volunteer tasks? I wasn’t aware you (I’m assuming that means Less Wrong or SIAI) had any; perhaps you have a visibility problem?
Or maybe they’re just not as engaging as an open-ended engineering environment with no arbitrary entry requirements and no visible resource constraints. . .
http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities Less engaging and visible, yes. I was going to quote http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_western/ back at Eliezer, but I don’t think he’s actually surprised, just lamenting the phenomenon.
Ok, I understand that SIAI wants more visibility, and that it needs volunteers, but “Perform Search Engine Optimization” (as per http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities ) is not the way to get there. What next, Nigerian scams ?
SEO is rudimentary marketing. The analogy is absurd.
Especially in our case—we do so little SEO that all the low-hanging fruit for us is white-hat SEO, SEO which genuinely helps people like adding references to Wikipedia and whatnot.
Eh. SEO has a bad reputation among the general population, but from a business perspective it’s generally recognized as a necessity, if a somewhat distasteful one. SEO doesn’t just include throwing together garbage pages to fool Google. (I haven’t actually read the guides linked on that page, so can’t comment on them specifically.)
Given that they’re searching for volunteers, it makes more sense to appeal to the general population than to business people, doesn’t it? (As a non-business-person, certain practices in SEO sound to me much like Dark Arts, though they exploit misfeatures of search engines’ (rather than human minds’) algorithms.)
I wouldn’t say so. For one thing, there’s a substantial overlap between “business people” and “the general population,” especially the portion of the general population that’s likely to take volunteering for SIAI seriously in the first place.
A lot of “white hat” SEO is just a matter of making the connection between search engine algorithms and what’s actually being looked for. Appropriately tagging pages to associated them with relevant subjects, asking people who are genuinely fans of your site to link to it on their site, making yourself visible on the social web, etc. . .
I think there’s a difference between a). telling all your friends about a website, and linking to it from your Facebook page, and b). methodically visiting random blogs and social media sites, and inserting a link to the target website into every comment thread. Given that SIAI is asking for volunteers, I assume they mean the latter. Even if it’s an accepted business practice, doesn’t mean that it’s honest or fair. In fact, just recently I saw a bot doing the same thing on Less Wrong, and it’s gone now, so I assume it got banned...
I’ll repeat myself: There is a middle ground between those two extremes. Posting links at random is not an acceptable practice anywhere credible!
What is acceptable is setting up linking networks between associates and cooperating organizations, among other things. If you think SIAI is worth paying attention to, you can get a lot more done by mentioning it on your blog than by just bringing it up in conversations with your close friends occasionally.
What effort have you applied to making your volunteer tasks this catchy and rewarding?
You didn’t get muflax to do this, he did it of his own accord.
Some exposed mechanism seems okay; it works for LCD displays (and some older ones had a pronounced screen-door effect). You could scale it up, but it is an unfortunate fact about Minecraft that mechanisms far away have no effect.
So it is a fail in both effectiveness and efficiency. http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_smash_fear_learn_anything.html
Its almost a new type of super-stimulus, where rather than being extraordinarily entertaining its extraordinarily difficult.
Wow. That’s absolutely bonkers. And impressive. XKCD almost seems realistic now!
I suspect it can be done programmatically, by wiring MC server to emulator, in less than 50 hours.
What? They didn’t implement the gameboy in minecraft? The bums!
That would have been far more efficient after all. Do that and then copy out a game cartridge and you have a video of the entire game!
Thankfully for Mr. Pratchett, you can’t influence the genetic lottery or the luck fairy, so his is still valid advice. In fact, one could see “trust in yourself” et al. as invitations to “do or do not, there is no try”, whereas “work hard, learn hard and don’t be lazy” supports the virtue of scholarship as well as that of “know when to give up”. Miss Tick is being eminently practical, and “do or do not”, while also an important virtue, requires way more explanation before the student can understand it.
Yeah. “Do or do not” / “believe in yourself” should either be administered on a case-by-case basis by a discerning mentor, or packaged with the full instruction manual.