That last point, yeah, I was thinking a status bar would be handy but now that I'm typing and thinking about it, maybe I'll just change the cursor color. That's enough of an indication and then no new ui elements need to be added.
The reason it's not a single key to toggle between vertical and horizontal is because I had imagined even more directions beyond those two, diagonal in all four ways etc... we'll see if I try those out xD
Regarding the center start position: that's a bit of a departure from a text editor. This demo is supposed to be like if notepad.exe magically grew another dimension. If the origin is the center then above and left if origin would be outside the document? It doesn't make sense to me.
Yeah I totally see what you're saying. For me if I built a tool like this I would think of it more like the equivalent of "tensors meets mind-mapping node tool" - so the idea of growing multidimensionally from a center point feels more conceptually on-point. :)
I woke up this morning with a dream to make a two-dimensional text editor that also componentized the Windows 98-style (codename: Memphis, don't you remember back then?) menu system I've been working on for a while.
So I've come up with this demo. The scrolling isn't 100% perfect on mobile, and the popup keyboard is miffed a bit but it's great on desktop.
Super fun way to put the brain into crossword/Scrabble mode and play around with thoughts interconnecting in new ways. Then rotate and see it from the other angle.
There's CSS rules in the stylesheet for dialogs too but the demo does not use them.
New game I've made over the last month, mobile/desktop windows 98 inspiration, make a terrain, plop some lemmings, put them in a forest, they'll build cities, fall in love, make babies, die... snorb.lol
Open source, gpl v3, fork it, give me prs, let's see what lemmings can get up to! Have some fun!!
Next task I'm imagining is to make the lemming houses more elaborate, so they gradually build them more baroque.
Paths can be used to restrict where lemmings move. Lemmings bounce off them just like they would cliffs
Also, if you have any ideas for features, let me know.
I was thinking that maybe there could be some dynamic where lemmings will build paths themselves but haven't figured out the mechanism why they would want to do that yet
Most fun I've had lately has been making a mountainous terrain and cleaving lemmings as they make progress getting across to see how far they can get. Thinking in that direction of ways to extend the game...
But like I said, forks are welcome, it's open ended what you do with your snorb
The houses need a better graphic. The cubes looks like glitches.
Paths are fences? Anyway, I can't use them as path or as fences.
It's difficult to imagine what they are thinking. I imagine something like "The Settlers / Serf City", but 100% automatic. In that game, one of the guys can go from the home to a lake, fish for a while and return to the home. So it's clear what the guy is doing. I don't expect you to create a very complicated economy like in that game.
My suggestion is to add a few visible task. Some ideas:
Perhaps trees can drop fruits from time to time, and when a Lemming collects one of them it grows or just stop starving.
From time to time there appear little crowns, when they pick one they get a permante crown graphic, and that increase their matting chance and after matting the crown disappears.
More colors, perhaps split them in a top and down color so I can identify them.
Add some random weight to their movement selection so they have "personalities". One of them likes to walk straight, another likes to move in circles, ones want to climb, another wants to go to the beach, ...
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll see what I can do a out incorporating them.
I fixed some bugs yesterday with the lemmings and sprites clipping into the ground.
Like I said, better cube houses are on my list. Please tell me more about your problem with the paths.
Thank you for engaging me with ideas! Obviously, my email is in the Help>About dialog.
The reason I've kept sprites generic is because with the url input field, it's designed so that players could input their own urls and have their maps look completely their own. The standard trees I've made are simply a suggestion. A player could make anything for the lemmings to consume/replant.
There already is randomness in when lemmings become diggers/trail blazers/dancers. I quite prefer following the style of the OG 90s lemmings game of them being little random walking dudes who sometimes take actions, but otherwise they're walking around aimlessly.
I do agree about the visible tasks. Like maybe there needs to be a way to place an exit portal and dangerous items so that it's a game about guiding these silly creatures to an end point. The entry area and exit portal could be fixed during the map generation. I don't know yet because that changes the open ended exploration part of the game that I really like. I don't want it to be the same play experience for everyone.
> So, for instance, you know, I’ve made this example before: a child lying in a crib and a hummingbird comes into the room and the child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention, it’s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But, then, mother or nanny or someone comes in and says, “It’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird!” And, this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile, and o- places it over the miracle, and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum, and, from now on, the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And, by the time a child is four or five or six, there- no light shines through. They're- they have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.
that language prevents a child from learning nuance? sounds like nonsense to me. a child first learns broad categories. for example some children as they learn to speak think every male person is dad. then they recognize everyone with a beard is dad, because dad has a beard. and only later they learn to differentiate that dad is only one particular person. same goes for the bird. first we learn hat everything with wings is a bird, and later we learn the specific names for each bird. this quote makes an absurd claim.
Wittgenstein famously said "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
Alan Watts suggests people like Wittgenstein should occasionally try to let go of this way of thinking. Apologies if it is sentimental but I hope you'll give him a chance, it's quite short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=heksROdDgEk
In reflection of all of this, I think that the quote you're responding to only meant to say that experiencing the world through language means building an abstraction over its richness. (I somewhat agree with you, though, that the quote seems a little dramatic. Maybe that's just my taste.)
One more thought.
I think there's a reason why various forms of meditation teach us to stop thinking. Maybe they are telling us to sometimes stop dealing with our abstractions, powerful though they might be, and experience the real thing once in a while.
the way i read the quote it felt less like building an abstraction and more like destroying the richness.
but abstractions are mere shortcuts. but everything is an abstraction. to counter wittgenstein, language is not actually limited. we can describe everything to the finest detail. it's just not practical to do so every time.
physics, chemistry, we could describe a table as an amount of atoms arranged in a certain way. but then even atom is an abstraction over electrons, protons and neutrons. and those are abstractions over quarks. it's abstractions all the way down, or up.
language is abstractions. and that fits well with your meditation example. stop thinking -> remove the language -> remove the abstractions.
How can you know that we have language to describe everything in the finest detail? That suggests that we are omnipotent.
There's lots out there we don't know. And it seems to me that the further afield we go from the known, the more likely we are to enter territory where we simply do not have the words.
Can't speak to it personally, but I have heard from a number of people and read countless descriptions of psychedelic experiences being ineffable. Lol, actually, as I type, the mere fact that the word ineffable exists makes a very strong case for there being experience beyond words.
ok, fair point. what i am trying to say is that when we see/experience something that we can not describe we can create new words for it. we see something, we can name it. this directly contradicts the idea that language is the limit and that we can't talk about things that we don't have words for. that claim just doesn't make sense.
the problem then is that these new words don't make any sense to anyone who doesn't see/experience the same, so it only works for things that multiple people can see or experience. psychedelic experiences will probably never be shared, so they will remain undescribable. quite like dreams, which can also be be undescribable.
Agreed, we can and will always come up with new words that attempt to approximate the experience, but, imo, they will always come up short. The abstracting inevitably leaves fidelity on the floor.
It's necessary based on the way we're wired, struggle to think of a paradigm that would allow for the tribalism and connectedness that fostered human progress without shared verbal language initially, and written word later. Nothing inherently wrong with it, but, language will always abstract away part of the fidelity of the experience imo.
yes of course, language is by nature an abstraction, so by definition it will never describe the whole world perfectly, but it can describe it as well as we understand it. and the point that matters, once we have a shared experience we can name that experience, and between us it will then describe the full experience, whereas to bystanders it will be an abstraction.
language doesn't replace the actual experience. it isn't meant to. me living in china, and me telling you about my life in china are not the same thing, no matter how detailed my description. but that does not limit my experience. and if you lived in china too, then my description will refer your experience, and in that case the description will feel much more detailed.
the way i understand wittgensteins claim it not only suggests that language can't describe everything, which is only partly true, because it implies that language can not expand. it also means that i can not even experience what i can not describe, which makes even less sense. i can't feel cold because i have no word for it? huh?
(i feel like my argumentation jumps around or goes in circles, it doesn't feel well thought through. i hope it makes sense anyways. apologies for that.)
Na, your argument makes sense. Loving this discussion.
Ok, so I don't agree that it implies language cannot expand. I believe it's a bit more nuanced than that, I believe what he's trying to say is that it cannot expand sufficiently to truly capture the experience. We will inevitably dumb it down or lose fidelity or whatever. The 'unsayables' as he called them, I believe he felt he was trying to protect their integrity by saying we should not attempt to distill them down to words.
As for the I cannot experience what I cannot describe... I agree with this statement deeply. Well, I think it's a function of ego or whatever you want to call it. We go through life and are shaped by our experiences. As we continue to experience life, we have more and more beliefs bouncing around in our head as a function of more experience. Ahhh, this just happened, it's like when I did X, etc etc. As we get older we get more and more bogged down by these limiting beliefs until everything we experience is going through our personal interpretive filter rather than just being experienced for what it is.
It's the Buddhist idea of the finger pointing at the moon. Don't mistake the finger(thoughts, words, etc) for the moon (the direct experience).
Well, that's been my personal experience, until I started looking inside and poking around at my belief structure, I had noooo idea how much my interpretation of the world had been shaped by prior lived experience, personally, and societally.
In your cold example... If you had no word for it, I believe most people would end up using the closest approximation out of the words they do know effectively blinding themselves to the reality of this new/unique experience for them. How though, would someone know, ahh there is no word for this, lets expand the language.
Gotta embrace not knowing/the beginners mind, and in my personal experience this is a process of subtraction rather than addition.
I had noooo idea how much my interpretation of the world had been shaped by prior lived experience
this is an interesting point. it's very true of course. there is probably some philosophical or biological explanation for this, something about optimization, because interpreting every situation from first principles takes to much effort. living in a different culture is one way to teach you to look at things differently.
but i think it is an issue independent of language. the problem is not lack of ability to describe the experience, but mistakenly using an already familiar abstraction to describe a new experience. but that's not the end of it, because repeatedly making that experience eventually helps you realize that the description you used is wrong, and you adjust to create a better description.
actually a better example than cold is the word umami. in our languages we have terms for sweet, sour, salty and bitter. turns out our body has dedicated receptors for umami, but we were not aware of that, and we never named it. even today it still feels like a foreign concept, but we have evidence that it is a real biological experience and not just a cultural idea.
the thing, is we certainly experienced umami in some way, but we could not talk about it, we were not consciously aware of it. and we still are not. i can tell very sweet from somewhat sweet to not sweet at all, but what's very umami or not umami? how does that even work? there is a whole dimension of language that our culture is missing. but, it's a cultural problem, not a linguistic one. because now we do have a word for it. and still, at least i struggle with the concept.
interestingly i think this example shows how humans learn from context. our (western) culture is missing the context for umami. we need to build up that context to allow others to learn about it.
I think about this often. I've really come to appreciate over the past year the ways language can limit and warp our perception of reality. I think we under appreciate preverbal thought, as it seems to me that verbal thought by it's very nature has passed through our egoic filter, and our perception tends to be biased by our previous lived experience.
Socrates, Einstein, Nietzsche, Mozart.... So many of the greats described some of their most brilliant flashes of inspiration as just having come to them. Einstein's line about pure logical thinking not yielding knowledge of the emperical world, I really think these guys were good at daydreaming and able to tap into some part of themselves where intuition and preverbal thought could take the wheel, from which inspiration would strike.
With how much LLMs do nowadays, I'm waiting for the time when specifying types is unnecessary. Like, it if can write code, shouldn't we also be able to have an AI type checker?
Also missed that double clicking the icon in the top left of the title bar closes the window. It does not toggle maximization like clicking the rest of the title bar does.
The reason it's not a single key to toggle between vertical and horizontal is because I had imagined even more directions beyond those two, diagonal in all four ways etc... we'll see if I try those out xD
Regarding the center start position: that's a bit of a departure from a text editor. This demo is supposed to be like if notepad.exe magically grew another dimension. If the origin is the center then above and left if origin would be outside the document? It doesn't make sense to me.
Thank you for your awesome feedback!!!!
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