keerthiko

Presumably a response to Unity's new "Runtime fee" [0] which is driving gamedevs in droves to other engines and delisting their existing games

[0]: https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma...

Telltale is more or less reincarnated, and [actively working on WAU2](https://telltale.com/the-wolf-among-us-2/)

unless the government is providing these agreement-parsing legal services to citizens, i see no reason why governments should protect the language in these dark-pattern legal agreement texts.

Is any content in this blog particularly relevant to Easyful's reason for existence or are you just mentioning it because you enjoyed the post?

(I remember reading it when Sahil posted that first, as a fellow bootstrapped tech cofounder but I don't remember anything of note from there to discuss re: Easyful)

To make this simpler I made Regittable[0] for personal use. As only an occasional RM2 user (a weekend a month), I activate the python script on my desktop, pack my RM2 and go to a cafe, and when I'm back my files are all in Dropbox or in the project git repo, depending on if they're new or old respectively. I had plans to add more features to Regittable (like have it submit PRs instead of committing as you) but never needed them myself so didn't bother.

> wonders if the hope with NFTs from game developers

As a gamedev actively relatively socially involved with other gamedevs, those with any hopes from NFTs were a pretty small minority, and most of the shillers were non-gamedev members of the greater NFT grifting community.

IME a big part of this misdirection stems from school focusing on the mechanics of math, rather than the intuition of math.

In the long run, the mechanics of math (how to do long division, or differentiate an expression, or expand a geometric series) are important only insofar as to help us model and predict and analyze the world, intuitively. However, students who do not intuitively see the power of mathematical intuition as a tool for understanding and modeling the world better, think that they are taught the mechanics of math just for the sake of "no phone/calculator/computer available" circumstances.

> This isn't my experience at all

Have you experienced/been affected by any racial, gender or class stereotypes or biases from other people, prior to interacting with LLMs?

Giving relatively trivial access to lurkers is the most reliable way to continue gaining community members - I have been a multi-month lurker on every community i finally became a regular participant in. Not to mention several more subreddits where I have contributed information/knowledge because I happened to visit them but had more information than the discussion already had, which is still valuable to the community even if I do not become a regular member.

Discord is a space for a completely different kind of community, and in no way replaces the longevity or value that comes from a subreddit, or to a lesser extent from a forum.

Love it, why can I not choose YYYY/MM/DD as my date format though (tbh this should be default with manual selection to anything else!)

It is really good as is, do there really need to be any further "plans for the future" beyond "keep it up and running, minor UX fixes"?

I wish we were more okay as a society with some good things staying good and simple.

and then ChatGPT showed ChatLLaMA how it should have responded by roasting itself from LLaMA's perspective?

Now that's an alpha LLM flex.

I used streeteasy[0] almost exclusively during my home search. They label every listing by home type (co-op, condo, townhouse, etc)

I don't think I found a condo under 800k, while there are plenty of co-ops across the boroughs, including Manhattan, in the 300-800k range.

EDIT: just noted you said "in another place". In my experience it's very hard to find this information in America outside NYC without investigating individual buildings.

[0]: https://streeteasy.com/for-sale/nyc/price:300000-800000

In NYC, a lot of the affordable housing stock are part of co-ops, where the board has to approve your finances before you can move forward with a purchase. If your monthly income is less than a certain multiple (you would think 3x, but it's usually 5x - 10x depending on the co-op) of your monthly payments ie maintenance + mortgage + insurance, they can reject your application.

And even if you found a condo (usually 2x as expensive as a co-op for same QoL) without a board to reject you or just lived in a city without co-ops holding a lot of housing stock, banks have similar requirements in co-op applications as well. So you really need to have a massive income to go in without a >20% down.

Among the young people who may like to buy a house, this probably applies to a few rare folks working for a bay area tech company salary but are allowed to live in any other city where the home prices are more affordable.

This is so true, but to follow this advice takes a respectable amount of personal discipline, combined with picking a very specific niche to focus on. A business with an R&D core such as AI should only be considering generalizing (if at all) after developing concrete confidence that you are on, and will stay on the bleeding edge of your initial niche. It's easy to feel ashamed when you tell someone you're doing X, and enough lay (tech) persons ask if it uses the trending research technology, and you're not. It may also make you think like you should use that tech, but it's likely a costly distraction more often than not.

Our company [0] developed a cutting edge computer vision system focused on detecting cardio machine exercise cadence (hyper specific!) and became the only reliable camera-based solution to do so. We then tried to generalize to all exercise motion (rep tracking, a still unsolved problem), achieved mediocre success, and put the exploration to sleep later because we think waiting for other technologies to mature would be easier and faster (better 3D cameras, AI pose models, etc). On the other hand we've picked other niches that meet our business needs to expand our CV R&D into, with pretty good success but mostly just for internal use (video content creation tools). More importantly, we're still the best camera-based indoor cardio detection tech out there, and that's a big part of why we're still alive as a bootstrapped business founded in 2010.

Quadruple down on your niche first!

[0] https://www.activetheoryinc.com/

Until AI can give us a just society where people are fed, clothed, medically treated and housed globally, I'm not tripping over myself calling it the future.

It's just more of the same, just faster and bigger. Sure, that's something, but it doesn't give me much hope by anything it has proven so far.

Surely you would feel very differently if you were born in a slightly different time in the not-so-distant past. How do you imagine the first "actual Nazis" came to the position of power where they could slaughter thousands of your community with impunity for nearly a generation? How do you imagine it couldn't happen again, if not in your lifetime, at some point in humanity's timeline? If not regarding Jews, regarding some new community?

Do you really think it would be avoided simply by more people taking "don't let words affect you" to heart [ * ]?

[ * ] (assuming, quite unreasonably, that that's actually something that could happen at a societal level)

> The problem I see with tolerating the common cancel culture is that it's often as arbitrary as those motivated by racism etc because it depends on exactly what the article was arguing

IMO any "arbitrary" cancel culture response will quickly self-correct, unless the affected party doubles down on their offense and doesn't handle the response well. That's kind of a PR skill and I don't see it as a problem of cancel culture itself, but just a lack of maturity among (mostly) celebrities/influencers in responding to this relatively new form of public expression (see: Andrew Tate)

Glad you mentioned, the whole "JK Rowling is a TERF" scenario is a perfect example of where I think cancel culture is Good Actually. She has a very large and engaging platform that has influenced an entire generation and more. She then chose to align her public opinion ("trans women don't deserve the rights of women") with the basis of an opinion that is the root of much trans violence. I think the response to her proclamation is proportional to the distance she placed herself at to that extremist position — she put herself pretty close, and every time she doubled down on it, she got hit by another "wave of cancellation". She quieted down and improved her PR response (presumably without changing her opinions), and she seems largely unaffected as a civilian or in her income. The cancellation seems to have just been a "regulating" force on the opinion that "trans women aren't women".

But at the end of the day, that's just an approximation of market responses to her brand. She chose to stick to her brand, and the market has responded. She still makes a tidy royalty sum, she isn't under threat of state punishment or sanctioned violence, and the "offended" aren't legally empowered to act in any way specifically against her that they aren't legally allowed to otherwise.

Re: racists, yes, racists believe they are right and justified, and I disagree with them. Still, my hope and trust that society will impose a counteracting force that will cost racists more for that opinion than it gains them, in the long run, not that racists are forbidden (somehow, not sure how) from "cancelling" people they arbitrarily choose to discriminate against.

For the sake of this discussion, I'll define "cancel" as in "cancel culture". It would be to "boycott their activity, discourage others patronizing them, and prominently proclaim you do not agree with them or want to support them financially or the growth of their platform, with the aim of aligning collective action to reduce their influence".

> Like, if some group went out to cancel people because of their skin color

Are you, by any chance, referring to racism? This flavor of "cancel culture" transcends my definition in a lot of ways (often involving physical violence, unjust law enforcement incarceration, employment discrimination and more).

Also it is as old as modern global civilization, far predating the modern discourse about free speech, and yes, I dislike it. And so we as a society exert some amount of opposing force in response again, by "canceling" the racists in turn. This feedback loop continues for generations, and we slowly (hopefully) trend towards a less racist society.

So how do I feel about it? I dislike racism, but it exists today as part of an ecosystem of forces that seems reasonable to me.

Yeah as another commenter mentioned, if the payout is proportional to revenue generated for magnaplay, it should never go more than [rev-share%]*[$monthly-rev]/player/month.

This doesn't feel like abuse...now if there is a free user tier that is measured somehow for payouts, though...

Build coupon flows. Every billing platform/provider/service provides coupons, but they never provide what seems like the obvious types of coupons you want, or the flow you would want, unless you are just starting out and have the most basic of coupon needs. If you try to use built-in coupons from your payment processor, after the 2nd or 3rd promotion you run, you are left tacking on custom functionality, writing custom coupon validation, checkout or activation flows, invoicing, or modifying customer account details.

doesn't your common abstraction layer become your single point of failure in this situation? The only robust economical way to do that is too use a third party multiplatform abstraction service, especially given the complexity of maintaining functional billing across multiple payment processors, you're kinda screwed if you try to implement this in house for a small business (either losing revenue to bugs or losing money to in house implementation time/costs)

this is the same vein of question a third grader has asking why he should learn how division or multiplication works when a calculator (or computer) can do it better and faster no matter what... which is akin to asking why learn carpentry when a drill can place screws more perfectly than you twisting the head with your thumb and forefinger.

It's important to have an understanding of the fundamentals of your task before relying on the tools to do the complex version of it, so you can reason about the next step and decide what the task is, not just how to do it.

Putting the disclaimer is still harmless. GP took some liberties with fixing grammar and wording in addition to formatting, on text from an obvious ESL speaker. Of course, OP's post is plenty comprehensible grammatically for a competent english-speaker, despite the minor syntax issues here and there.

As a bilingual non-western national, I find the disclaimer respectful and appreciate it! FWIW, I would not have been offended per se, but would have been mildly annoyed without it.

why do people need to be doing something interesting by your or anyone else's standards to hate being interrupted? "people like to not be interrupted too much" is certainly a weird take.

yet, equating "likes to not be interrupted on someone else's schedule" with "likes extreme social isolation to the point of mental illness" is a weirder one.

just because i want people to text me that they're coming over, and waits till i see it and confirm that that's cool with me, doesn't mean i'm into driving myself crazy in solitary confinement. this is the default for most people agreeing with the article, and folks like you are just upset because you hate not being able to get your hit of extroversion in on your schedule but have to wait (more than in the 80s) for folks to agree to share their social energy.

chargebacks may get you banned, but cancelled cards are fine. It's on the business to perform dunning requests and maintain short billing grace periods for automatic renewal charge retries before retracting services.

Revolut's method is to automatically cancel the virtual card after the user-initiated purchase goes through, not before, and not by issuing chargebacks. Obviously if you actually want to have a subscription autorenewed and stay uninterrupted, you shouldn't use the virtual cards there as you will be getting service interruptions every billing cycle and have to manually update your payment with a new vcard. Still, not likely to get you banned.

A different risk of using virtual cards is that the merchant might not be able to issue a refund after the bank destroys the card.

source: as primary billing engineer at our subscription B2C company — cancelled cards give us no problems that make us consider banning a customer. The closest is when we have a customer using such a feature bombarding our support about service interruptions because of his own cancellations, and trying to calmly explain that they did that themselves.

Chargebacks definitely do pose a problem though, as they increase the risk of us getting blacklisted as a fraudulent merchant, and also a more lengthy settlement process with the customer and bank, where we aren't even able to simply issue a refund and close the issue.

well that one makes more sense than some of these others...

I don't get it. Why did we ever consider the algorithms of private corporations as a fundamental or viable avenue for free speech to begin with? The owners and controllers of private algorithms will always have the ulterior motive(s) of protecting their interests.

The fact that we (the software and information industry worldwide) have conditioned any society to think that algorithmic feeds are a representation of reality is the real problem here, regardless of how many or how few corporations are participating in that.

carmack is a brilliant engineer, but he's not really known for empathy or even being a good game designer. supply and demand is not really the best indicator of a positive vs predatory experience

IMO, your take in the broader sense is an extremely profound and important point for AGI ethics. While GTA is seemingly extreme, I think that's going to be a problem no matter what simulation space we fabricate for training AGI agents — any simulation environment will encourage various behaviors by the biases encoded by the simulation's selectively enforced rules (because someone has to decide what rules the simulation implements...). An advanced intelligence will take learnings and interpretations of those rules beyond what humans would come up with.

If we can' make an AGI that we feel ok letting run amok in the world after living through a lot of GTA (by somehow being able to rapidly + intelligently reprioritize and adjust rules from multiple simulation/real environments? not sure), we probably shouldn't let that core AGI loose no matter what simulation(s) it was "raised on".