I know I read several posts like these every day, but I've been thinking more and more that I should stick to the chat window and having AI guide me instead of doing the work for me. Great tool for showing me what to do when I don't know and offering me guidance, and rubber ducking of course, but I definitely lose the context and understanding when I just let it rip and write everything for me.
I've always understood why they do this. Its data collection, its a really weak lock-in to their ecosystem, it gets users embedded into Windows more. Its just not very compelling, just another hoop to jump through. Also I don't really see Microsoft accounts as a major SSO offering on many sites, its usually Google/Apple/Facebook and maybe some other related sites. Seems logical to call this one done and just focus on making a more enjoyable experience in Windows.
This is a fun read, its one of my favorite games growing up by far, countless hours sunk into it. I didn't need this write-up to know that Chris Sawyer was god among men and that the open source version is a huge labor of love, but its a good reminder :) I will need to give OpenRCT a try some time, I've tried a little OpenTTD and really enjoy it, but RCT was always my jam.
For the lesson here, I think re-contextualizing the product design in order to ease development should be a core tenant of modern software engineering (or really any form of engineering). This is why we are usually saying that we need to shift left on problems, discussing the constraints up-front lets us inform designers how we might be able to tweak a few designs early in order to save big time on the calendar. All of the projects that I loved being a part of in my career did this well, all of the slogs were ones that employed a leadership-driven approach that amounted to waterfall.
Personally I was at a prime age watching a lot of Conan O'Brien's Late Night show and one of his best skits was the Walker Texas Ranger Lever. They would pick the most ridiculous clips from the show and just run them out of context. IIRC Chuck Norris even showed up on the show one time to give him a "stern talking to".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpIEyn9G6_8
Had go to go a branch a couple times in the last year at a local credit union. Largely seems like tellers are getting busy work. There are not a lot of tellers present, and they appear to be doing other things on their workstation. So they get up to go to the teller window and help me out with my request, which usually involves them playing around with some archaic bank app on the teller machine and fiddling with the copier for a bit. A supervisor is always around who knows more of the business use cases and always seems to get involved either out of boredom or because they're the only ones who know how to do something.
The smartest thing they did with the US version of The Office after season 1 was to make Michael highly competent in sales and its longterm relationships. S1 and the UK version of the show viewed the boss as incompetent at every level, it was much more cynical. Making Michael marginally competent gives him an empathetic leg to stand on for the audience. Had they kept Michael exactly like David Brent it probably would have still been hilarious but flamed out around season 2 or 3.
They quite publicly fired an official related to reporting these numbers, and they also decided not to publish numbers during the government shutdown nor backfill them. I have zero trust the administration isn’t fudging things.
Interesting...I've been thinking for a while that doing instructions and logs through my obsidian notes would be really helpful and a great way to do more agentic work. I've paid for obsidian sync as a way to support their team for the last 3 years, but color me impressed that there are some more tangible benefits to it!
Everyone in the administration is completely drunk on power, they truly believe the government should be allowed to do whatever they please, despite being vehemently against previous governments telling their constituents what to do. Such nonsense, they hold no values, they only want complete power.
I don't know how the business leadership community could watch this whole affair and still be in support of them AT ALL. This is well past getting a crappy twitter rant from Trump on the weekend that maybe one could ignore until the next rant.
Around this age I went to a water park and was similarly inspired. I had the idea for making an entire water park dedicated to making sure people would get wet and jump onto rides from beginning to end. I called it "Totally Wet People", drew up an elaborate concept art for water slides, sprinklers, pools, tubes, etc. My mom thought it was hilarious and brought it to work (alas, she worked for the Navy at the time, not Disney). I got a lot of second-hand compliments from everyone at her work and it made me feel awesome for at least a couple weeks. Wish I had the forethought to send it to Six Flags or Disney!
Well, people legitimately hated banner ads and pop-ups. When I get linked to some small news publisher I'm often reading the article between these giant ads, sometimes I don't realize there's actually more content to an article because the ads take up so much space! I typically close those sites out and try to find what I'm looking for elsewhere.
For my side projects I have a dev log and every day that I work on them I've gotten into the habit of writing "What I want to accomplish", "What I did", and "What's next", which all seems to capture my thoughts pretty well. I don't get super detailed on them, but I can look back at previous days to see what I should work on next and it helps me goal set better. Also helps me when I need to pause on my work for the day so I can pick it up later.
I'm not a parent but where I live in Portland a big trend has been bike buses. A couple of parents ride with a group of kids to school, I see them often. That time before class started was always an awesome time where we'd talk about video games and trading cards and stuff, I'd be really disappointed not to see that.
Might be missing that the whole idea of parenting is a rather new and novel one. Modern parenting starts roughly when baby boomers started their own families.
It's crazy! I don't think anyone in my sphere is some hardcore fan of a niche game. But then I stumble on them in the marketplace or watching some GDC talk and it's like, wow this solo dev has been making this obscure series of games for 20 years and they live comfortably (but not extravagantly) with their family. Good on them!
I'm really just describing the long tail at this point. Gives me hope that maybe I can find that product before getting to retirement age.
Every now and then I stumble on video game developers who have been chugging along for many years, even decades with a handful of dedicated fans. They make obscure niche games that play so well into that niche that they can sustain themselves. Honestly this is something I'd aspire to get to eventually, building a niche product that I love and that just enough people love that I could live sustainably on it, not trying to please anyone but a little collective of people who all agree on what the product should be.
Can I tangent on your question here and ask what others think of Civ 7 now? When I learned about it I thought it was a day 1 game purchase for me for sure, but I held off when I saw a stream of bad reviews. I figured I'd come back when they ironed the problems out (as they've done in every major Civ release to my memory). Haven't taken the plunge yet.
I've worked in SaaS for most of my career, only recently working at a big corp who is largely the buyer and user of SaaS tools to meet their objectives. From the perspective of the corp business buyer, they want something that works for their needs and they want to buy something instead of build it because the support costs are gnarly. They already have engineers dedicated to the tools they've purchased. Much better to put the risk on someone else they can yell at. And the permissions and access to these tools, reports, data, is usually its own special problem to manage. Building a lot of one-off tools is going to just give IT a huge headache and they will push the org to buy before vibe coding a solution.
JIRA especially, and I'm always shaking my fist at Atlassian that simple APIs or workflows or reports aren't already included in the tool. I have to pay some other company $10/user/month to get this dumb report your tool should already be able to do?? Insane.
Peacocks with their giant tail feathers are my favorite example. They make flying really difficult, but they make attracting female mates much easier. The reproduction need wins.
If someone has a design out there where this works and you can launch it economically on a rocket today, I wanna see that. And then I wanna compare it to the cost of setting up some data centers on earth (which BTW, you can service in real time, it sounds like these will be one-and-done launches).