aaanotherhnfolk

I have only a layman's grasp of philosophy. Why doesn't this field challenge its definitions of consciousness more, and why is ethics treated as an axiom? These both seem like anthropocentric positions to me, limiting the discourse. Why can't trees have a conscious experience? And who cares about the morality of a storm cloud?

I'm hard on story-driven games as well, I don't think games are very good at telling narratives because the narrator's desire to control what happens next is at odds with the player's freedom to choose what happens next.

The ideal game is somewhere in the middle where the designer focuses on mechanics which combine to produce more than their sum, and then anchor it in handcrafted content meant to show the best angle of the mechanical emergence.

One way to split the hair would be to say the mechanics are procedural (I would rather reach for the programming metaphor of composition, however) while the environments are hand crafted.

Nintendo is the king of this, but I also mentioned multiplayer games because they intentionally focus the designer on the mechanics and the levels while leaving the challenge generation to the players (and a whole conversation about how best to matchmake them.)

I can't wait for the computer generated content trend to end. I understand why it's attractive to indies, because they can focus on the engine - and a game emerges from the effort on its own. But hand generated content is always superior. Turns out Shakespeare writes better stories than even a million monkeys.

There was an era of gaming where it was reasonable to think your game could become a hobby for tens of thousands of players, with all the requisite fame that comes from creating it. Spelunky opened the door here, and a lot of high profile indies like Vlambeer and Spryfox led the surge.

What I think actually happened is that so many games started coming out, that there's more content than any one player can consume. The hand generated stuff floats to the top and a new class of indies now sits the throne. Anyone distracted by procedural gen lost their spot.

For another parallel where players choose hand generated content over procedural, look to the prevalence of multiplayer where humans generate challenge for each other on the fly - versus AI baddies that can be cheesed by easily shared internet guides.

Gitlab might also be looking for where they can grow during the pandemic.

1.5% of 6m existing free tier users is 90k accounts who now need to reduce usage, pay Gitlab, or move to another platform. Only one of these options is fast!

I don't think this is the only reason they are doing this, but it does sweeten the pot.

Simplest compromise I've heard so far is for Apple's cut to scale with size of IAP/subscription.

30% cut starting at $0.99 purchases. As mentioned this barely covers processing fees.

20% cut starting at $9.99.

10% cut starting at $49.99.

Not only does this fix the Epic, Netflix, Hey, etc issue where high value or high volume txns get unfairly middlemanned by Apple. It also incentivizes developers away from the "race to the bottom" effect that made everything a crummy $0.99 microtransaction in the first place.

A calculation of effectiveness should contain not just an assessment of magnitude but also of scalability.

Most people can't become Bill Gates or Elon Musk. There's not enough births of the computing age, or births of online banking to go around. There's a lot of people seeking to do social good within the confines of capitalism.

So while most (all?) techniques may be less impactful than Gates and Musk, we shouldn't hold back people trying to find other strategies (dare I call them entrepreneurs) by confining them to being ruthless capitalists who later grow benevolent or build Wayne Industrieses.

It is a total hassle to keep up with Googlers changing everything constantly. It's not just GCP it's every platform they control. Try keeping a website on the right side of Chrome policies, a G Suite app up, a Chrome extension running.

Thousands of engineers chasing promotions by dropping support for live code. If it was their code they wouldn't do it. The org is broken. If you want to see what mature software support looks like, check out Microsoft. Win32 binaries I wrote in college still run on Win 10. Google looks unimpressive by comparison. But they all got promoted!

People watch over a thousand hours of TV per year so if time spent was sufficient criteria for addiction we would be a pretty afflicted population. Think of how addicted I'd be to showering! I do it every day!

I would encourage you to be less hard on yourself. Think of a good game like a hobby. People play hundreds of hours of golf too and still find the time to lead productive lives.

I've been on a team like this before with heavily separated feature and refactor pods and it doesn't really work.

The feature pods outpace the refactor pods. Feature pods can use a bad pattern 50 times in the time it takes refactor pods to fix 10 of them. Not every fix can be scripted. Some bad patterns restrict the ability for the codebase to stay up to date on dependencies, etc. Lots of reasons not to accumulate this stuff faster than you can strip it off.

It also impacted team cohesion, as refactor pods started to resent the poor quality of feature pods' deliverables. Since refactorers are peers, it got weird when they exerted refactor pressure on feature devs who got wedged between their peers and their managers.

Ultimately I think this article is a little too black and white. The "just do the ticket" dev is as undesirable a teammate as the "refactors to excess" dev. It's better if devs are a little of both and the team culture helps everyone keep a healthy balance.

Analogies may be less about equivalency and more to do with bridging ideas. They can help the analogiser draw someone closer in thought, like a shout in the dark to help your friend find you

I know this was just written as content marketing, but a more accurate insight wouldn't involve the conversion to uniques at all. On one side you'd have count of unique IPs from the access logs at your web server. And on the other side you'd have count of unique IPs seen by the tracking tools you use.

And even then you wouldn't be able to map this quotient to human behavior. But you would have an upper bound on how inaccurate your analytics tools are.

I've worked on some rules for this in my similarly motivated extension Disengaged[0].

Another thing it does which I think helps a lot is automatically collapses subreplies.

[0] https://github.com/a13o/disengaged

Reminds me of the whole "you're holding it wrong" antenna event. Where Apple's design failed and they tried to blame it on the users.

The desired user experience is peace of mind from a physical barrier; no amount of LED bulb hidden behind the flush surface is going to solve for that.

It's also like the keyboard keys. User experience has taken a back seat to Apple's product design goals as they pertain to their bottom line. Products users love are expensive to build and maintain, so Apple won't make them. When you can't grow profits selling more devices, you start to cut corners on the ones you _are_ selling.

I had used it back when it was an Adobe Air program. Maybe the death of Flash contributed to the decision to build a web version instead; but I also think the Google Docs metaphor is a much better fit for the tool commercially. I hope they do well.

There's a much much more advanced version of this tool used for systems design in game design called Machinations. You can model really complex economies with it.

Now that I've left the games industry I still think about this tool often and how it might be useful for modeling load on a backend. Kind of waiting for an opportunity to try it out.

https://machinations.io/

Before Kickstarter existed I had read Brian Tinsman's The Game Inventor's Guidebook which explains how to navigate the business side of board game publishing. There's a lot of surprising hurdles a board game must pass, chief among them getting a publisher to agree to print and market your game. Kickstarter helped create an alternative path to publishing but didn't address other key takeaways from the book.

For example: the book talks about the economics of printing game components, warehousing product, and buyer price sensitivity. These all combine to create narrow bands of acceptability for game materials. Kickstarter doesn't change anything about these economics. But now there is no central publisher to steer you away from these predictable issues.

My point then, is that even fancier game components don't make good stretch goals. The high price a game can command on Kickstarter from enthusiasts won't translate to the avg shopper who sees it on a store shelf. And if you print a standard and deluxe edition of your game, you are not effectively capitalizing on Kickstarter preorders to de-risk printing, warehousing, and shipping costs.

It's best to make one game that meets the exacting demands of the Target store shelf if you want to maximize success. Exploding Kittens is probably the best example to date. And that game is not well received by the BoardGameGeek scene (for valid reasons) which highlights the disconnect between the social validation designers crave and market success.

I stopped kickstarting games too because I've had like a 10% hit rate.

One clear signal to me now is if they offer additional game mechanics as a stretch goal. It's hard enough balancing the base game and making it compelling. If a designer thinks they can do this not once but twice, and in a modular way no less, I question their design sensibilities in the first place.

It's possible that this is a flaw of kickstarting board games in general. The platform incentivizes stretch goals and they don't map well onto most board games.

A variant of this is that both ppl are answering the same question but on different time scales. So one is pro (on a generational timeline) and the other is con (on a 4-year timeline).

Both might be right, for their respective time scales, which is why it's so hard for either one to back down.

Many many ways to talk past one another. We need a small book on techniques to short circuit these situations and salvage conversations.

A small (~4qt) water boiler for the kitchen. Having on-demand hot water makes tea as available as a glass of water.

First benefit: tea is a beverage hobby with some stunning depth (think wine, beer, scotch, etc).

Second benefit: Lots of flavor diversity means you won't have to reach for sugary or alcoholic drinks as often to fight off boredom.

Only other optimization I would add to this is that you don't need to use the same 'consumer' value for all parts of your game loop. Collision detection you probably want to be tight so that fast moving objects don't warp thru thin objects like walls. But enemy ai may be more tolerant to larger chunks.

Another perk of remote worker villages is their potential for upsetting gerrymandered districts in the US.

My favorite in this space has always been Paint.net, but it is Windows only. I tried Krita a couple years back and it was too buggy to become my OSX alternative. But reading in this announcement that they've spent a year focusing on bugfixes warrants giving them another try.

Apple forces Hey's app in front of unsuspecting users with App Store promotions. If the app doesn't provide any value to a random person who comes across it in the App Store, that doesn't mean it should be banned from the App Store. That means it should be banned from promotion in the App Store.

Hey should still be able to link its users directly to the App Store entry and otherwise make it unlisted in the App Store.

Apple can find a creative way to tax this if they wanted, but what is the yearly developer fee for if not a fee for distribution and security/compliance certifications?

Apple needs to stop conflating distribution on their platform with promotion on their platform. Not every app needs both. 30% cut only makes sense in a publishing deal where Apple promotes the product in the storefront.

Sorry things in your country are worse.

Few issues with the straightforward narrative you present.

Cops will slowly corral protestors as curfew draws near by setting up blockades or raising drawbridges. Peaceful protestors want to go home but can't. They're confused, and then curfew hits and police begin loading them into wagons. It's not as simple as get home by curfew.

Cops will infiltrate and instigate protests using a variety of tactics, the goal being to escalate tension, and justify the amount of force the cops wish to use.

Similar to your stated preference, they can't wait to be able to justify beating citizens with an overwhelming show of force. It's the fastest way back to status quo. A status quo you admit is broken, but worth using violence to return to. There's a catch-22 in your reasoning here you might be able to poke at.

Body cams and other forms of accountability do not work because the disciplinary board is not independent and not impartial.

Perhaps our countries aren't so different.

All AAA games need to be cross platform to maximize revenue with a long tail, so they target the lowest common denominator for hardware requirements.

No one is going to design gameplay for a special hardware constraint unless the gameplay can degrade to lowest common denominator. Which of course, makes needing the special hardware optional.

There are few exceptions to this rule. Some platforms pay for exclusivity, effectively covering lost revenue from other platform streams. And Nintendo alone makes a profit on hardware, so they can produce platform exclusives to drive addtl revenue from hardware sales.

Special SSD pipelines, while PC gamers are still using 7200rpm HDDs, are about as appetizing to game devs as waggle controls or Kinect sensor games.

The new consoles include these SSDs not to make something possible now, but to remain relevant in ten years time when PCs may have caught up.

This is the game industry's equivalent of supporting IE 11.

This setup is going to lose its sheen really quickly when every attempt at writing a blog post also accompanies three hours of npm package bumps

GDPR devalued PII-stores, and companies tried really hard to only let the value drop on the European portion of their data. Requiring ID is a way to discourage and even deny deletion requests in other countries.

These constraints are walked back almost immediately in practice, once companies learn that requiring a human touch for a deletion flow is not worth the hassle.

I think "legal" here meant what's the bare minimum to respect the letter of GDPR law, while not actually implementing a useful delete flow.

My optimistic side hopes that this is so they can do some investigative journalism into surveillance capitalism without being hypocrites.

I'm the person at $dayjob who has to chart a course through the recent chrome web store changes and this is honestly my conclusion too.

These extensions don't make any money at all for Google, in fact some of them lose money for Google (privacy oriented extensions, ironically.)

They are a security nightmare for Google, capable of side channel browser attacks or direct abuse via a permission (all_urls permission can read your emails to grandma.)

Google doesn't want extensions to exist, and they also can't outright kill them without creating a new foothold for their competitors in the browser wars. So we get this intentionally masochistic process change. Jump this high or we'll ban you. Now jump higher but with your eyes closed. Okay, now backflip or you're banned. The extension developers have absolutely no power to fight back.

I got the uncanny valley sense from the footage and had to watch it a few times to understand why. As you say, there are still subsystems whose fidelity don't meet the quality bar that the texture and lighting set.

Little things like the player model's hands interacting with an invisible flat surface above the incredibly intricate rock textures.

Yes, nits. With the player model acting as a locus for these uncanny interactions, I wonder if there will be a wave of first person games that can take full advantage of the photorealism.