I've got Shenzhen I/O recently and the game is amazing, though It's a bit tougher than real life assembly programming for the constraints it imposes on you in order to pass the level.
Same applies to a lot of security oriented tools, most notably metasploit which had these same accusations when it came out long ago, nowadays it's no big deal as exploitation frameworks are now more accessible.
same applies to a lot of niche technologies that can be misused.
I'm sure this is late, but OP might like zola, It's a SSG that's contained in one binary (written in rust), It's lightweight and more barebones than most SSGs imo.
These little quality of life scripts are life savers, I've made a script which I'm really proud of and still use to this day, in my university they usually release assignments every now and then and I had to check each course's page manually for any new deadline, so I made a python script that scraped the website and would print any new assignments since the last run of the script. I would later make a little telegram integration where new assignments were sent on a group chat for my class mates to get notified too and left the script running in crontab on some vps I had around.
https://github.com/hegzploit/lazy-chicken
Which is fine and dandy if calculation is your goal.
If "understanding the nature of reality" is your goal then engaging with various interpretations of QM is unavoidable.
(which is not to say it will be fruitful. This stuff might be genuinely beyond the reach of science. We might be hitting the brick wall of the unknowable. But that's not an excuse to stop trying. Some current formulations of the question are probably meaningless or based on false premises but philosophy, theoretical physics and experimental physics creep forward hand in hand)
There's a new bio of von Neumann "The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann" coming out in February in the US. [0] If you're impatient you can order a copy from Amazon's UK site where it's been available since October.
> Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe could not comprehend von Neumann's incredible intellect: "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man."
There are plenty of smart humans, but John von Neumann was something else entirely. Like the author of the article concludes about Shannon, I wonder if we will ever see another "human" mind like that again.
>There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician.
—Hans Bethe
Seems like Bethe hung out with some elevated company.
I was chatting about him with a friend and pointing out all the things in the room influenced by him. Of course he led a pretty normal life, so no one is going to make a "Beautiful Mind" type movie about him. Other than playing his record player too loud in his office and having wild martini happy hours with his wife and friends, I can't find anything controversial about him.
Driving around while reading the newspaper and getting into frequent crashes, and advocating for the immediate nuclear annihilation of Russia, are at least 2 other controversial pastimes.
