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by scubbo 1462 days ago
Less, but not zero. Personal projects can still suffer from obscure bugs or undocumented behaviour in dependencies, unattainable goals, costs, and other non-bureaucratic frustrations. A significant part of the satisfaction of Factorio for me comes from the knowledge that, if something isn't operating as I expect/hope it to, I can _just look at_ the surface-level representation of the system to diagnose it. This isn't possible in software projects without a huge amount of investment in observability - which is rarely fun or prioritized.
1 comments
ansible 1462 days ago
Yes.

The programming game TIS-100 gives you a view of the internal state of the machine far superior to what exists with most systems. The exception being that Commodore 64 emulator that shows _everything_ going on in memory in real time.

More often (in the embedded world) you are debugging things via JTAG and a serial port (if you are lucky) or a GPIO-driven LED (if you are not lucky or this is super-early in the boot process). And often the JTAG is less than 100% reliable.

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bstar77 1460 days ago
I absolutely loved playing TIS-100 despite having no clue what a real world counterpart would be. It was really nice understanding the limitations of the system and then trying to be creative to solve problems. I got through 3/4 of the game before I lost my save (on my GoG version). I just re-bought it on steam for the cloud saves. Same thing happened to my ExaPunks save.
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ansible 1458 days ago
The closest real-world thing would be something like The Connection Machine, which combined 64Ki processors in a hypercube. Individually, they had just a small amount of RAM for programs.

Today's GPUs are more about executing the exact same small program in a massively parallel way, and not individually programming each of the compute elements.

You know... it would be a fun project to make a TIS-100 in actual hardware on an FPGA or something. Actually, if you aren't the FPGA type, you could just write an emulator on an 8-bit microcontroller, and connect them all together. Bonus points for having each one with a display that shows its current execution state.

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