braden-lk

I miss it.

this is difficult! :D

Just to +1 the sentiment here; AI in the gaming industry is absolutely a culture war front. Especially in the indie space, you will lose advertising deals with many sponsors & influencers, for example, if you appear to endorse AI. Probably won't be that way forever, but it's a hotbed right now.

As a small business owner, I look for people who can walk the line. Who understand that there's a bottom line, but also that we are not machine men with machine hearts.

I respect the candidates who stand for something and can pragmatically navigate the social space of work at the same time. I find that people who just want to shut up and lick boot don't end up being very creative problem solvers. It's easy to say for me as a small biz; different atmosphere in larger corps, but I can't subscribe to the reality presented by the cynical grandparent post here. I think we can be better than this.

And none of that avocado toast, am I right??

Purposefully obtuse.

One of my favorite games, and I recommend it to anyone who loves a good existential sci-fi horror. If you are not comfortable with stealth games, it also has a "Safe Mode" where enemies aren't a threat to you if you just want to experience the story.

Spoiler warning for those that havent played--

I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.

How dare you make a performant, accessible app that's easy to distribute, instead of spinning up a different eng. team to maintain a different codebase on a different deployment pipeline so 1% of your userbase can say it's a "real" desktop app instead of a silly "fake" desktop app. :P

Jokes aside, Figma's stack is super inspiring, and y'all's articles on sync engines heavily inspired my work on LegendKeeper. I appreciate the work you do!

As a consumer, how/why should I engage with the scorecard? What do I do with a list of a bunch of errors and linter warnings?

What's the ideal flow on the user-end? Scorecard seems great on the developer side.

Sorry, but there's not even a single hint of a visual relationship to Animal Crossing here. I believe this title is inaccurate.

The y-prosemirror rewrite is super exciting!

To speak on yjs: We use yjs over at LegendKeeper. We're not a huge app, but our users do worldbuilding for D&D, and have amassed over 30+ million collaborative documents, ranging from rich text to fantasy maps to fantasy timelines. Is yjs technically overkill when you have a central tie-breaker? Sure, but the DX is fantastic, and personally I love the idea of my application being truly local-first, even if our core value prop is not necessarily tied to being offline. It also gives me a legacy support plan for our users in case I ever get hit by a bus. :)

On the tech side, you save a lot of cognitive overhead when you can just do:

applyUpdate(docA, update1) applyUpdate(docB, update1)

and now docA and docB are in the same state, no matter what the context. For centralization, adding in a "well, they'll converge once we add a third party" absolutely increases the cognitive complexity of reasoning about your code, and limits your ability to write clean tests. Centralization buys you a lot, too. I don't think one is correct over the other.

There are tradeoffs. There's a memory and CPU cost, and yes, sometimes the "Technically merged state" of a yjs-prosemmirror document is not what's expected. Over seven years and 150,000+ users, we've never had a single person complain about it.

lols and unhinged predictions aside, why are there communities excited about a singularity? Doesn't it imply the extinction of humanity?

AI tools are indeed are a revolution of software engineering. That said, it's easy to be a fearless advocate for revolutionary tech when, no matter what happens, you are already set for life.

Do you see me petitioning the site to remove their comment? They are welcome to have bad taste and a bad attitude.

I'm glad to hear it; thank you! Reach out if you have any questions or recs. :D

These comments are rough. Some weird hostility to self-expression in here.

"Back in my day, laptops were about TECHNOLOGY! Where's the conservative stickers!?" Ok, put some "conservative stickers" on your laptop and submit a pic to the site-- no one's stopping you.

I was born in early 90s; all laptops in my memory have weird, silly stickers on them.

Nice! How did you go about finding a growth marketer that was a good fit with your business?

Totally; and big respect to the people who put in hundreds of hours of prep. I did leetcode, practice interviews, 4.0 gpa, all that. I think the big hang up for me was, no matter how many practice interviews I did, there were only 4 real ones, with long waiting periods between attempts. And honestly... 3/4 my FAANG interviewers were really rude/late/apathetic. I actually did make it to second round at Google on the third try, but at that point I was so exhausted with the process, I took an offer from a company that at least pretended to give a shit whether I joined them or not. Had a wonderful 3 years there building green-field B2C products.

Getting some work experience and then starting my own thing was a better fit for me.

There's been this vein of advice from the past decade that's in the realm of "just work at FAANG". Always rubbed me the wrong way; they make it sound so easy, lol. The couple of interviews I managed to get after hundreds of ghostings, I was absolutely demolished in the interviews. It seems like if you get nervous doing math problems in front of people who really don't want to be there (and tell you to your face), you don't get to work at FAANG.

Just started my own business instead.

Big obsidian fan, but I will say: notes being “just markdown” is not entirely true depending on how you use obsidian. If you are a plug-in heavy user, and those plugins introduce new syntax and lots of JavaScript functionality, you are accumulating a bespoke custom syntax that only works on your copy of obsidian with your set of plugins. Obsidian and those plugins are still free and are a huge benefit, but just something to keep in mind regarding data hygiene and longevity.

Very cool overview and a great article—it’s fascinating to see how far web components have come. Data passing, interactivity, and state management still seem pretty tedious in vanilla, though!

Alternatively, you can keep using React and have access to a huge pool of experienced react developers and libraries.

React DevTools have gotten quite good; it’s not hard to catch 99% of perf issues anymore. Inexperienced devs will write bad code in any language; have your experienced devs teach them, or just don’t hire juniors.

I agree that closures in React are annoying though.

Yeah, how can you honestly review something associated with the world’s most powerful person? Who’s also shown they’re willing to swing their weight against any normies that annoy them?

Would love to see profiling to show where the React approach was falling short.

I run all of LegendKeeper's infrastructure on Render, save for a few serverless functions. It's been convenient; I rarely think about infra at all anymore.

Unless they've changed it recently, the auto-save seems to only bother firing off every few hours. All three attempts I've made at the game have ended with losing progress to the save system.

This game is right up my alley but it’s so engrossing I always forget to save and lose hours of my progress.

Similar experience. I’ve never received much good advice, or found anything that feels like it “works”, just small, accumulating long-game actions that drive up traffic/conversions a hundredth of a percent at a time. Blog posts, paid ads, sponsorships, emails, affiliates, product improvements, etc. I’m B2C so most advice given to me by “thought leaders” is “stop doing B2c” which isn’t super helpful when I have a functioning, profitable B2C business.

If people constantly have to ask if your test is a measure of AGI, maybe it should be renamed to something else.

Design-first thinking with tokens is a game-changer for an org building a product that needs to adapt to multiple clients. It's still useful for a singularly-branded product just for separation-of-concerns reasons, but maybe less useful.

Design tokens aren't concerned with implementation. (CSS vars, constants, etc.). Design tokens are an abstraction for standardizing and communicating the values in your design system, regardless of where they show up. Yes, you might implement your design tokens as CSS variables, but not necessarily.