2,235 karma · joined April 17, 2009
It's not "jealousy" when I'm asking to be able to support myself. Is it unfair to expect not to start out in life heavily burdened by student loans, unable to get a job that provides any sort of benefits, or to be able to pay bills? I'm not asking for the shiniest and newest, I'm asking for a basic living. It's not status; it's not being stuck living at home.
The whole blog has a lot more about AR/VR from an informed technical view, but I recall this being the most relevant post.
In the "sheer complexity" department, imagine trying to depict any of the following well graphically: randomly generated artifacts made of random materials, the ridiculously intricate damage models, and completely randomly generated titans (which do start with a base creature, but have random materials/bodyparts galore). While you could just do essentially what he does for the ASCII and have one symbol that represents all these, he doesn't seem to want to go this route. Which is insane, but hey, insane seems to be the normal for DF development.
The second part is that his last game died partly from his trying to implement graphics too early. Notice how the full title is "Dwarf Fortress: Slaves to Armok"? Armok was the game before this. Similar in overly ambitious scope, but with an early 3d style graphics. However, for some reason or another, it became to difficult to support its development after graphics, and it collapsed under its own weight. Hence the switch to ASCII: he could continue implementing hundreds of features without as much regard for performance or implementation. It's easy to add in dozens of new creatures, random titans, genetics and randomized traits when you don't have to actually worry about representing it. I highly suggest reading his devblog (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html) just as inspiration for what one crazy ambitious man can do.
As for why he doesn't enlist more help, make it open source, etc, the answer is even simpler: this game is his bread and butter and both he and his brother live off the donations. Yes, part of it is that he wants to maintain control of the project, but if a program was literally the sole means of supporting you and your sibling, I think you'd be wary of giving away its code too. He has said it will likely be open sourced when he dies however.
Seems to cover a lot of studies, but it could be a "submarine" post. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
This article focuses on the sheer "access" aspect, because that's the most noble. If you can't legally buy a work, you aren't going to pay for it. If ever the word "entitlement" should be used in these debates, I'd say it's here. For people who aren't able to legally access these culturally significant works, I'd say yes they are entitled to be able to access these in an illegal manner and experience our culture. Note culturally significant. I'm not talking about the artistic merit of Hollywood blockbusters and the top 40 here.
Similar to the "access" argument, there's the "exposure" argument. How many works have been pirated simply because they were free, but not something you'd be willing to risk ~$10+ on? Piracy enables people to get a taste of genres and styles they never would otherwise experience. I grew up in the age of Napster, and I was in middle school going to high school when Limewire was getting big. I listened to a much wider range of music and watched movies I never would have otherwise because they took almost 0 effort to acquire. I am a rather different person than I would have been without piracy. I look at my music library and my taste in movies, and realize almost all of that is because I was able to pirate them. I think the fact that older people tend to be more hostile to piracy isn't only because of ingrained habits, but partly because they weren't shaped by its effects.
Again, you don't know people's situation. It's arrogant to criticize (edit: without having better information). "Bitching" about a poorly implemented system is entirely valid. Pardon me for foolishly believing the "Play offline" button would allow me to play my games offline, but it is labelled exactly as such.
However, I have noticed that Steam's offline mode is rather fickle. I try use it when I'm at my friend's house (lack of wireless and a lack of an ethernet port. Weird, unusual scenario, I know), and half the time "Play offline" simply doesn't work. It's put me in the weird position of considering downloading cracks for games I legally own so that I can play them.
It's funny, because it seems the exact opposite to me in many cases. Sure, my best friend and I occasionally shorten conversations by acknowledging we both saw the same stuff on reddit, but we also follow very different bubbles overall. One friend is far more interested in gaming news and funny videos, another in politics and law, and another in finance. I mostly follow science and tech. We each have a separate filter bubble, and we each have something interesting for the other person whenever we talk. Talking to these people makes me realize what a narrow slice of the world I consume, and I love hearing them talk about what interesting things they've found. The internet has greatly expanded the amount of niche content we can consume, and I'm aware of that whenever I speak to them.
That's not to say we don't talk about non-internet things, but I'm just focusing on that since that's the topic of discussion here.
http://news.ycombinator.net/threads?id=Of_Prometheus
As far as I can tell, he was hellbanned for 2 bad comments. Both are bad, yes, but he's regularly been posting well since. Having other users tell them to email PG or make a new account is not a sustainable solution for this.
We should have an "unflag" option for wrongly hellbanned users if they can be autobanned. The community of HN generally drives away trolls by its very nature. I rarely see banned troll posts, because they simply don't bother here. I do see banned posts by decent posters who simply made a mistake or two at the start.
Quinn Norton had a good series on it. There's also a longer talk by her about body hacking in general online.
It's an interesting frontier, but I don't have any good resource that has continual updates on it. Any recommendations? The only other place I've really seen stuff about it is BME Zine, but it's focused on BME in general, so there's a lot more noise than signal.