This is a great lesson in accessibility and building the right product for a specific user. While you call it "awful" you ended up with something extremely accessible that made your user happy. This is an extreme example, but there is a lot to learn from this
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a big military contract for Hololens. Before that, they announced a Discord acquisition, before that finalized Bethesda acquisition, etc. You're right that it might be my bias (I work in games, game engine and XR, not web), but all of those were reported by tech media like The Verge and mainstream publications tech reporting, not gaming or niche VR sites.
I have the opposite problem where I get into a creative thinking mode and tune out the podcast Sometimes I'll stop a podcast during a walk and switch to music if I actually want to focus on it at a later time (many podcasts I listen to are kind of background noise for me though)
There are multiple issues with free speech no matter what, and some of them are the result of closed platforms that have too much power over communication channels, but ultimately need to moderate to avoid turning their platform into 8chan. I agree with you that many complaints about free speech on the internet have weird caveats like... You should have the right to say whatever you want without criticism or you should have the right to engage in rational debate or play devil's advocate on any topic even if another party doesn't want to. Like you said this might make the free speech proponent happier, but ends up limiting the speech of the person that doesn't want to engage in that way.
It's reasonable to expect someone who is new to the industry to make a small game, so a better analogy might be expecting someone to be a decent home cook before getting a good service job. I agree though when you start talking about game dev as a business. Although people start successful businesses from cooking in their home, it's highly unlikely that they'll get it off the ground, let alone be successful.
Blind is better for this than HN, but HN is pretty good, especially with the rise in throwaway accounts. I think this is because HN is more diverse, and Blind by it's nature is employees at your company and other big tech companies.
I thought this initially ("why is Alinea on HN?"). Name clashes are common in startups though (Robinhood Markets vs World Wide Robinhood Society and Clubhouse vs. Clubhouse Software), especially when it's a common word in an unrelated industry.
L7 is rare though, and most of them have more than 12 YOE (or maybe they have 12 YOE at the company). Levels.fyi seems to only have 38 data points for FB for example (https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...) and 47 for Google (https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...) vs. 490 and 457 L5 entries. It's probably safe to say if you get to L7 you're in the top 5% of engineers at the company and L8 is probably top 1%. So sure, $2M house isn't too expensive if you're both a good engineer and great at navigating company politics and selling\presenting yourself in a way that both gives you high value (to leadership) projects and peer recognition, but most employees won't get there. Going the EM route is generally considered to be an easier way to get to L7 comp.
Apple also use AR/VR engineer and almost no one else uses that phrase exactly. For example Unity uses "XR engineer" and VR game studios tend to use standard game industry titles (software engineer, graphics engineer, gameplay engineer, programmer, etc.)
Yeah $400K is high L5. Not uncommon, but slightly above average. It's possible that if you average all engineers you'd get something close to $400K, but L3 and L4 salaries would bring that value down. In surveys L5 makes up the majority of the engineering workforce in these companies, and L3\L4 have a bigger representation than L6+, so it's unlikely that the average TC is $400K.
The issue with this is if you don't know what a fighting game is, explaining the genre would take up a lot of space in an article targeted at gamers that know the genre. Sure they could have opened up with "A fighting game, like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat", but you might not know what those are either. This is like an article about React getting posted and complaining that you don't know what a UI or Javascript is. At some point Google is probably better at filling gaps in assumed information than the article itself.
For 2D art https://2dgameartguru.com/ might be good. It started as a set of tutorials for game programmers struggling with making art. It specifically focuses on vector art, and pixel art might be more suitable, for that https://lospec.com/ links to many tutorials.
For game design process Game Design Workshop and Challenges for Game Designers are good books that cover process comprehensively (TLDR is quick concept, prototype, play test, refine).
Google glass and some other products do this already. Although products like glass and Hololens (and Apples new headset, apparently) are all targeted at enterprise, not consumer, there's nothing stopping individuals from buying them
This is unlikely to happen on the official store, but will probably be available for Side quest at some point. Your best bet is probably still building it yourself
You do often win the game by being pedantic and pointing out small issues that didn't have anything to do with the original main testimony, so maybe parent is on to something after all :)
I think this is the main reason. Outside of math libraries (and maybe strings for concatenation?) operator overloading rarely makes sense. If you're working in a math heavy domain with custom types it's a godsend though. I wouldn't want to work in a language without operator overloading (I've done enough work with Processing and a Quake derived game engine to know that it sucks), but others might have seen it horribly abused
There was a rumor years ago that Samsung was the #1 potential buyer of Microsoft's XBOX division. Obviously that didn't happen. At this point building a brand and a first party game library that can compete in what already looks like a crowded market is probably not worth it. Technical differentiation is hard and as sibling comment said consoles sell at a loss
Voxels, as evidenced by the recent release Teardown. NERF is pretty amazing but isn't real-time like SDF raymarching. Tetrahedral meshes are interesting as well.
One of the best Siggraph papers from last year was Monte Carlo Geometry Processing http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/MonteCarloGeometryPr.... It doesn't introduce a new representation, but does introduce a new way to render various representations by sampling them in a unified way
Also remember "expensive" is relative. I think it added little over 1ms to total frame time per video, but in a 60fps console game that. Our budget was about 1ms or less for the entire UI during gameplay (including scripting, layout and rendering), so a video could more than double that. 4 simultaneous videos would be like 1/4 of the entire frame :).
Couldn't edit after I saw the replies but thank you for reminding me Rare was always 2nd party. So not quite the same but Nintendo could have acquired them like Monolith Soft or Next Level Games
Video used as textures, either in world on 3D meshes, or as part of UI (HUD) elements. It could be prohibitively expensive to play a single video in some scenes, and we didn't support multiple videos. Not because it wasn't possible or anything, mostly because performance, although there would have been an engineering cost to doing also (ie I would have had to add support to the engine)
I worked on COD:AW and we used video in game often. The lead UI artist would have used it significantly more if performance was better. Might be an exception but it's not uncommon, I've worked on multiple titles with full 3D and video playback at the same time
Nintendo did sell a business that didn't align with their primary markets, Rare. Rare generated hits for Nintendo (like Donkey Kong Country), but iirc, Miyamoto never liked them. From the DKC wikipedia entry:
In the years following the game's release, rumours spread that Miyamoto disliked Donkey Kong Country and found it amateurish, provoking him to create the hand-drawn art style of Yoshi's Island. He was allegedly quoted as telling Electronic Games magazine in 1995 that "Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good".
I believe that AI will accelerate creativity. This will have a side effect of devaluing some people's work (like you mentioned), but it will also increase the value of some types of art and, more importantly, make it possible to do things that were impossible before, or allow for small teams and individuals to produce content that were prohibitively expensive.