> There's gotta be some innate machine-focused "interest in things" that this is tapping. I've never taken apart or rebuilt a machine, but this gets me anyway.
fairly sad. Factorio is fun, but it's a pale shadow of the experience of making even relatively simple machines work better or differently. Even getting a 2-stroke motor that has a dirty filter running again is immensely satisfying.
I think they're different enough things to both be enjoyed for what they are. I've rebuilt dozens of engines, was a shipyard welder for a few years to boot. Genuinely enjoyed the physical aspects of working on machinery, but Factorio scratches 80% of the itch with 10% of the effort. You get to fun-build while never breaking a tap, busting a knuckle, or wondering where in the ever-loving hell your 10mm socket teleported to when you looked away for just one damn second.
Ahem.
By analogy I'd say it's similar to games like Guitar Hero, where you get a reasonable fraction of the satisfaction of being able to play an instrument for only a small amount of the work.
I find just the opposite, myself. It is not satisfying to clean a gunked up carb or change a dirty filter or spark plug. To me it feels like irritating drudgery I am forced to undertake because of the physical limitations of reality that cause these problems. Abstract "machines" and systems built from them like factories in factorio or software do not degrade, they do not get dirty, they do not wear. I can focus entirely on creating solutions to problems rather than constantly going back and doing boring routine maintenance on something I already had working.
Kinda. But then you don't have the right o-ring and the store is closed until Monday. And you mixed up the BSF and UNC threads on your carbs. And the cloth wiring is intermittently shorting out. Computers are nice in some ways.
“The reason is that, in other fields, people have to deal with the perversity of matter. You are designing circuits or cars or chemicals, you have to face the fact that these physical substances will do what they do, not what they are supposed to do. We in software don't have that problem, and that makes it tremendously easier. We are designing a collection of idealized mathematical parts which have definitions. They do exactly what they are defined to do.
And so there are many problems we don't have. For instance, if we put an if statement inside of a while statement, we don't have to worry about whether the if statement can get enough power to run at the speed it's going to run. We don't have to worry about whether it will run at a speed that generates radio frequency interference and induces wrong values in some other parts of the data. We don't have to worry about whether it will loop at a speed that causes a resonance and eventually the if statement will vibrate against the while statement and one of them will crack. We don't have to worry that chemicals in the environment will get into the boundary between the if statement and the while statement and corrode them, and cause a bad connection. We don't have to worry that other chemicals will get on them and cause a short-circuit. We don't have to worry about whether the heat can be dissipated from this if statement through the surrounding while statement. We don't have to worry about whether the while statement would cause so much voltage drop that the if statement won't function correctly. When you look at the value of a variable you don't have to worry about whether you've referenced that variable so many times that you exceed the fan-out limit. You don't have to worry about how much capacitance there is in a certain variable and how much time it will take to store the value in it.
All these things are defined a way, the system is defined to function in a certain way, and it always does. The physical computer might malfunction, but that's not the program's fault. So, because of all these problems we don't have to deal with, our field is tremendously easier.”
> There's gotta be some innate machine-focused "interest in things" that this is tapping. I've never taken apart or rebuilt a machine, but this gets me anyway.
fairly sad. Factorio is fun, but it's a pale shadow of the experience of making even relatively simple machines work better or differently. Even getting a 2-stroke motor that has a dirty filter running again is immensely satisfying.