TypeScript types can run DOOM [video]

This happened to me once. It was like attaining enlightenment. My company worked with a F100 that had, as a core piece of their business, a piece of software they'd commissioned in the 80s that they still used in the 2010s to make billion dollar decisions. But no one knew how it made the calculations they relied on. This was before attorneys knew to include source code in procurement, the original devs at a third party code shop was long gone.

We were already working on something for them, and on a whim, one of their VPs asked my company if we could take a look at it.

So that's how the mathematician at the company (me) ended up waking up, sitting in front of a whiteboard, and losing all concept of time until my wife got home from work at night, not eating, not sleeping, staring at decompiled assembly and stepping through line by line for weeks. (I don't want to say months because I'm sure someone will come roast my ass for taking too long, but "months" is honestly more accurate; in fairness, I was learning every technique used on the fly)

It was a prolonged, repeated flow state that I've only ever experienced during really competitive tennis as a high schooler. Losing all concept of time and space, hyper focused on one task that has completely spread to all parts of your consciousness.

I think both of you are correct:

1. I've also been it a hyper-focused state where I was so intent on what I was working on I would spend basically all my time on that project without burning out. Like you, I haven't hit that focus state for a long time.

2. "18+ hour days", consecutively, is almost certainly an exaggeration, and this is where I agree with the parent commenter. For some reasons Americans (I am American) love talking about how much time they work and how little sleep they get. Realistically, very few people (except a small percentage of genetic outliers) can get by on sub-6 hours of sleep for long.

I never said it was only in American speech, just that it's very, very common, to the point where a lot of what Americans said made less sense to me until I realised it.

Different cultures express things differently. Overstating, understating, etc etc. If you want to understand, and be understood, it's important to know.

So much hyperbole that I thought the entire video was a spoof on the practice of making a Doom proof until about a minute in, where I asked aloud to an empty room, "Wait, this is real?"

Also, he forgot to credit the video itself, which has a really high production value! Kudos all around!

not with the youtube types. who say: I spent 670 hours trying to defeat this boss and died 555 times.

Living is cheap if you don't live.

Not to detract from the achievement, that's amazing. Mostly useless, but amazing nonetheless.

The amount of “why would somebody waste their time with this” comments is pretty surprising.

This guy is a legend now. Every developer slack channel at my company is buzzing about it

It's happened in the last couple of months, a clear uptick in aggressive comments. I'd hazard a guess at people using HN as an outlet for feeling angry and helpless about the US political situation.

I’m close to one of these types and I get taken advantage of a lot and desperately wish I could turn it off. It presents in weird ways that are hard to navigate politically - often I will end up on a team and be outputting a large majority of the work, people/egos get hurt or threatened, still inevitably make the same anyway. It's never really led to any kind of career or financial success I'd have thought it would have years ago.

I was accidentally one of these once.

I fixed a long standing bug that was a companies top priority for several months and no one had been able to fix it. They were talking about re-writing an entire app to resolve it, at a cost of 100's of thousands of dollar, dragging the vendor over the coals etc.

I was relatively new and thought I'd take a look, ignoring all the mystique surrounding the problem. It turned out to be a simple one line fix, just a dumb oversight that anyone who bothered to understand and step through the code would have caught.

Things got a little weird after that haha. The director who had been responsible for that department started ignoring me, while I started to get pulled into look at all sorts of other peoples urgent issues, with zero context, often with a team of other people I didn't know on the call.

It was fun while it lasted, but man, I'm glad I'm no Doogie Howser MD, that shit would go to your head!

> society create the überman myth to keep the working class down, thinking they will never be the top of their game

What? The distribution of talent and grit being what it is, ubermen do exist. Some people are naturally tall, good-looking, able to recite pi to the 50th digit, solve challenging analytical problems, put in long hours when necessary, and get along with the in-laws.

Of course, the ones doing the hiring probably know that such people won't stay in the position for long. But it's not a myth, and certainly not one to keep anyone down.

That's also how the Doom demos worked right? :D

"A lot" is an understatement, rendering the screen at ~320p took 12 days.

Or more specifically, everything that is Turing complete can run DOOM, but most languages are only Turing complete under certain assumptions which are not met in practice

> not everything that is Turing complete can run DOOM

Beware with such blanket statements, you might inspire someone to do 18-hour days for a year to prove you wrong.

Not having infinite tape is true for all computers though. And probably also not infinite time as well.

Is there a mainstream language where this still holds true?

From what I've seen most languages don't want to have a Turing complete type system, but end up with one anyway. It doesn't take much, so it's easy to end up with it accidentally and/or by adding conveniences that don't seem programmable, e.g. associated types and type equality.

Can you give an example of such a language that is type safe (which removes C)

If it holds does that confirm that I’m his bitch?

both this and parent comment are right! once you have the first frame, it's probably just a few hundred more megabytes to get the second one - although I won't be the one to find out! 1 is enough for for me!

What you've accomplished demonstrates a very important skill you have, persistence. Kudos and don't give up.

About those rejections, did they effect your confidence in yourself and your skills? How did they make you feel?

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