erik

There was a window, from about 2007 to 2013, where basically any decently well made indie game that came to market would be financially successful. But the trick was, to get your game to market you had to establish a relationship with Microsoft, Valve, or whoever controlled the platform you were targeting.

Around 10 years ago the platforms started to open up and it got a lot easier to get a game into the marketplace. Seeing the success of the previous wave of Indie games and lower barriers to entry, people started to make a lot more indie games. Competition got more intense and finding financial success became less certain.

The worry of the "Indiepocalypse" is that as this trend continues, it will become harder and harder to make indie game development a viable, sustainable business. Which isn't suggesting that people will stop making indie games, it's suggesting that they will mostly be made at a loss and it won't be a viable business for the vast majority of developers.

The degree to which this worry has come to pass over the years is debatable.

I wrote some notes on this in a sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30761695

Would love to hear more details if you can share them!

Logs were written to a ram fs. We experimented with occasionally flushing logs to disk, but ended up disabling this and leaving the microSD card filesystem read-only 100% of the time.

I've seen failure rates of >5% / year on 24/7 read-only Pi deployments across a variety of name brand consumer microSD cards. Are you getting better reliability than that? What cards have you deployed the most of?

The main problem with running a Pi on a microSD card isn't write endurance, it's low quality controller and firmware implementations on the cards.

Contributing factors include:

- Even when used read-only, the flash memory occasionally needs to be refreshed, which means the controller needs to shuffle data.

- Controllers have to map drive addresses to flash, and they store their tables on the flash. Firmware bugs, power interruptions, or problems with the flash can render the tables unreadable and lose all data.

- Some controllers even store their firmware on the same flash that is used for user data. So problems there can brick the card.

Another factor: data centres moved to fiber. And fiber is less physically robust and not great for desktop connections or plugging in to a laptop.

10GBASE-T exists, but it turns out pushing 10gbit/s over 100m of twisted pair requires chips that are hot and power hungry. Again, not great for desktops or laptops. And because it’s not used in data centres, there are no economies of scale or trickle down effects.

Gigabit Ethernet and wifi being “good enough” combined with 10gig over twisted pair being expensive and power hungry means that the consumer space has been stuck for a long time.

> I haven’t been able to buy a CPU that doesn’t have SHA2 acceleration for an number of years now.

This is incorrect. Intel only launched their 11th gen desktop processors March 30, 2021. The 10th gen and earlier desktop processors do not have the SHA instructions. You can still buy a new i9-10900k from Newegg today.

(Note that 10th gen Intel mobile/laptop processors are a different micro-architecture, and do support SHA.)

Edit: Perhaps you're thinking of the AES instructions? They've been around a lot longer.

If a trackpoint is a hard requirement then you have very few options to choose from.

In theory a proof could show that such an algorithm must exist without producing the algorithm itself. Though that's not what this linked paper tries to do.

My take when he says he "missed mobile" is that he regrets that Facebook doesn't own the platform. Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp are enormously successful apps, but because Apple & Google own the OS, they are vulnerable. Apple's introduction of App Tracking Transparency and the way Facebook have struggled against this show the nature of their postion.

Maybe "remaster" is the better term here?

Apparently the "OSV" in the track title means "Original Sound Version". TIL!

> Which software exactly is functionally the same yet consumes more resources? Can you give some specific examples?

Compare basic document editing in Office 365 with Office 2000 running on Win2k. Sure, 365 has loads of additional functionality, and your data follows you across devices. But the base user experience is largely worse.

> It’s easy to forget that 20 years ago we had 800x600 screens, 24 bit color was not ubiquitous, and 60hz monitors were practically non-existent.

This was maybe the case in the mid-90's. But by the late 90's 1024x768, 85hz, and 24 bit color were standard. 1280x1024 and even 1600x1200 were not uncommon.

This sounds more like you are getting counterfeit books, not print-on-demand.

Can you reach out to the original composer of the game music? They would likely care about the bogus claims. Particularly if it is a smaller studio. It’s not a great solution, but it might work.

For one, "7nm" and "10nm" are just marketing names at this point, and don't really correspond to the physical dimensions of anything on the chips produced. Intel 10nm and TSMC 7nm are considered to have very comparable density. TSMC 5nm and is quite ahead though.

As to why it's not just a matter of buying a bunch of ASML lithography machines and plugging them in: In addition to what the other replies have noted, there is so much complexity and precision required in a fab. Consider all of the challenges that would be involved with starting with a bunch of industrial robots, and trying to build a fully automated assembly line that manufactures cars. Then scale precision requirements up by many orders of magnitude.

The top end most profitable SKUs are fully enabled dies. That they are now able to ship dies this large is a good sign. The 10nm laptop chips they have produced so far were rumored to have atrocious yield.

It doesn't even have to be during a write operation. Nand needs to be periodically refreshed after a read, so the controller can be shuffling data even on a read-only mounted card. I've read speculation that most consumer cards store their controller firmware on the same nand that is used as the general storage, and thus are prone to corrupting their own firmware if something goes wrong while shuffling data.

Power loss is definitely a threat to an SD card in a Pi. But I've seen many cards go bad while the system is still running, so it's not the whole story.

Weirdly, I've had a number of cards that entered a state where they would be inaccessible under Linux or Mac OS. But they could easily be recovered by a re-format under Windows. No idea why. Perhaps the manufacturers test a lot more thoroughly with Windows?

Consumer mircoSD cards commonly have firmware bugs. A Raspberry Pi running Linux will consistently trigger these bugs given enough time, even if you mount the card read-only. The nand is fine, but the card will be unreadable until reformatted. You might never see this from a single Pi running at home, but people who deploy large fleets of Pis inevitably run into these problems. Industrial microSD cards aren't perfect, but they are more reliable.

Two other factors that are often overlooked in the early success of the ipod:

400mb/s Firewire let you actually put a lot of files on it in a reasonable amount of time. The theoretical 11mb/s of USB 1.1 was painfully slow in comparison.

The ipod was _tiny_ compared to the other hard drive based mp3 players of the time.

Sterilize-and-reuse programs for glass bottles are excellent, but they are rare. In theory melting down used glass for inclusion in new glass production is an energy win, but it seems to be rarely used in practice. About the best most glass "recycling" seems to do is mix crushed glass into gravel and paving materials.

Yep, sometimes people use 2k to mean 1440p / QHD. But it's a particularly bad name for that resolution. 2K is an existing cinema spec that is much closer to 1920x1080 than anything else.

Rosetta 2 includes both ahead-of-time translation and run-time emulation. It can run x64 jit software for example.

Some brief googling tells me:

- Razer Book 13

- Dell XPS 13 9310 2-in-1

- MSI Prestige 14 EVO

- Intel's new whitebox laptop platform

I think I've read that there are now Ryzen laptops shipping with LPDDR4x as well. It's awesome that Apple is using ram with this much bandwidth, but it's not exclusive.

On the PC, if I don’t want to pay Valve or Epic’s cut, I always have the option selling directly. That’s a significant distinction.

In the late 90's starting a new search engine would have seemed crazy to many. It was a competitive market, there were major incumbents, profit potential seemed low, and it wasn't obvious that search could be significantly improved upon.

Scramble is a side scrolling shooter. Thrust has a different sort of game play, with a lot more in common with Gravitar.

Nostalgia might be a factor.

But I think the bigger appeal is that a system like this can be understood in a much more complete way than what you can achieve with a Pi or even an ESP32.

PCIe 4 and 3200MHz ECC are readily available on the Ryzen and Threadripper platforms. But if 8 memory channels is a hard requirement, then AMD's answer for you is the above mentioned Threadripper Pro in the ThinkStation P620.

If you can live with 4 memory channels, consumer Threadripper opens up your options enormously.

> “Battle royale” is simply a recent development because up until recently we barely had any 3D shooters which had maps huge enough to allow for this style of play.

It's often surprising how long it can take for things to become mainstream. The first Battle Royale mod dates from 2013. And Planetside supported hundreds of players in a single match back in 2003.