capncleaver

Awww I am sorry your piratey romance didn’t work out, people can definitely turn out to be different from their pirates, but I hope Puzzle Pirates (my game) was overall a positive experience for you. It’s nice to see it mentioned on HN. It’s still online today with a crew of quite salty pirates ;)

The aside about mailing lists is well made: with the exception of SMS, email is the one method of customer contact not mediated by big tech networks (save arguably Gmail) and portable across service providers. In games it’s the best way to keep in touch with players, much better than discord where the dots accumulate and most members ignore most server updates and notifs.

Bring back site specific forums, too ;) But most businesses’ customers don’t have enough to talk about for a forum.

The bot 'inhabits' a Reachy Lite Mini and uses a mix of local and frontier models.

github: https://github.com/algal/sparky

Not whom you are replying to, nor a rocket hobbyist myself, but yes, they do build and launch rockets for fun, eg VC Steve Jurvetson out at black rock: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/54815036982/

Surely! Too perfect to be accidental.

Context: Charles Stross 2005 book Accelerando features simulated Lobsters that achieve consciousness and, with the help of the central character, escape their Russian servers for the cosmos.

This is common practice in gambling and now games, too: Zynga has 'VIP' teams for high-spending free to play game customers, they would talk on the phone at length, get to know them, fly them to Vegas for jaunts, etc. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-does-zynga-hunt-for-whales...

> "We've done so much experimenting at Zynga with VIP. We know what's the frequency of contact. We know what call types work. We know what times to call. We know exactly who to call and when. We know who has a higher propensity to be more susceptible to our call."

This redistribution of revenues from new to old has also taken place in games: ~90% of time in games on PC is spent in games older than a year, ~50% in games 5+ years old like Fortnite, CoD, Roblox etc. Around half of revenues are 'free to play' [1]

This is why making a new game is probably a terrible idea... but hey, world is casino!

[1] https://newzoo.com/resources/trend-reports/the-pc-console-ga... and widely reported e.g. [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1je98mm/pc_gamers...

This is my earliest memory. When I was two, and did not yet know how to swim, I was visiting with family who had a place right on the river Thames near Henley. I was running around with my seven cousins, but I was the youngest and at some point found myself alone. I wandered out onto the towpath beside the river, where they had a small jetty.

Earlier an older cousin had been out in the canoe and it looked easy enough. I put one foot in and realised my error immediately, toppling into the water. I remember clearly the water bubbles going by and thinking 'Oh dear, my mum is going to be so angry about this.' I came back up and saw a couple now running up along the path -- they had seen me go in.

I don't remember anything else. I'm told the man fished me out and then there was a great kerfuffle as I was hung upside-down and coughed a bit. My cousins got a massive earful from my mother, who was furious with the eldest in particular for losing track of me. My father taught me to swim.

The man was thanked profusely, but we don't know his name. I hope he had a wonderful life and I'm grateful for mine.

Yes. See 'Thinking in Bets' by Annie Duke for a good summary of why Poker is interesting / useful. World is Casino!

Blood on the Clocktower is great! My 15yo son is always trying to get a group of 8+ together for a game.

Came here to recommend Skull, a quick and easy to learn bluffing game, of which the designer said he was aiming for 'the feelings of poker without the money or luck' and I would say succeeded.

If you have not, do read Cory Doctorow's 'The Lost Cause': it features a rebuild like this (no robots tho iirc.) You might like his mid-singularity novel Walkaway, too :)

This looks like a great tool and sort of makes me wish I was starting a new game rather than hand-knitting more cruft into our homemade backend. Kudos for open-sourcing it with a proper license.

This is a short seller trying to profit by shouting 'fire': https://twitter.com/Seonicx/status/1634804400567746560

Bank runs are a tragedy of the commons, trampling people in panic and naked greed, burning down the system of the world on the way out. Don't believe the hype.

My lad has been learning Python in Replit. It looks like they are trying to introduce community feedback loops.

For making games, Roblox is perhaps a good choice. You can post a modded example game and get your friends playing it very quickly, then iterate rapidly.

The choice between mandatory ‘more than half time’ in the office and completely remote (‘with on/offsites!’) is interesting.

Swooping through the office for meetings is discouraged. What a challenge for management!

Leaving aside whether debt is 'fair' (is it fair that productive assets like land are in the hands of a hereditary plutocracy?), there is some evidence that debt forgiveness can work -- indeed, it might have been a critical release valve in the development of early civilization.

I can highly recommend David Graeber's book 'Debt: the first five thousand years' on this topic. He proposes modern 'Debt Jubilees' similar to these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)

There's nothing to say that such a jubilee couldn't have means-testing or other 'fair' aspects incorporated into the design, it doesn't have to be blanket forgiveness. In Graeber's examples of ancient jubilees 'business' debts were, iirc, usually extempt.

I agree it would be very disruptive to the existing order.

With a scrap of paper holding the PSS codes and login info I was introduced to MUD by 'Innocence the Witch', school computer lab admin by day. I played from 1982-84, usually ~5am-7am on weekdays and 2-7am through on the weekends. It was enchanting being in this imaginary world with other people. The PvP was exhilarating.

The F50 article munged together Essex and MUD2 a little, iirc Essex went dark ~1984 and at launch MUD2 was a refactor, unplayably slow and expensive. It went dark quickly.

I made some MUDs of my own... and that scrap of paper led to a startup career in MUDs and MMO development.

I sometimes wonder what the formative experiences my kids are having in Roblox, Minecraft etc. will rustle up in their futures.