keerthiko

One of the cliche transplants from SF to NYC: The lack of concrete jungle, and that desire from people both who predated the tech deluge and those who arrived because of it (like you are planning to be) is precisely why it has become as bad as the blogs make it to be.

I think some things are not as bad as the blogs make it be, and many things a lot worse. In the latter category:

- there is now a "fire season". Yes, those precious outdoors, swathes of it gets burned and the beautiful CA air gets filled with smoke from burnt forests, houses and people

- the city is politically paralyzed. Everyone now treats their SF stay as even more temporary (moreso than the natives already complained about before, because now it's crappy to live in for everyone, not just the poor people) = limited investment in political future

- diversity shrinks every year. It gets more white/asian, more male, more single/childless, more tech, and more techie-centric entertainment, and less everything else everyday

- offline businesses are narrowing operation. Not merely "local" and "small" businesses dying, but even chain stores are not able to find staff or attract enough foot traffic because...the city simply doesn't have that many people out and about anymore. Business hours are shrinking, stores are receding to the downtown center streets, and service staff is disappearing. There are hardly 50 stores left in all of SF that are open 24 hours, even my podunk hometown in Oman, Middle East has more.

- the tourist industry is dying. People used to visit and fall in love with SF. Now, they get embarrassed about the state of the city (the more obvious stuff like homelessness, cost of living, filth) and leave trying to forget about this city.

I still love SF, and would love to move back if they can turn the ship around. As a non-US citizen I cannot even vote, and felt utterly helpless in the face of rampant NIMBYism preventing any development, upzoning, housing reform, transit reform, tax reform, homelessness relief, police retraining, non-tech subsidies, etc. But over the course of the 6-7 years I lived there, it went from a "this city is wonderful" love to the kind of love you have for a drug-addled suicidal family member.

It is incredibly relieving to see NYC being run extremely competently in contrast, and while I vaguely miss the weather, imo the summers here are better, the winters perfectly tolerable, seasons are a nice way to keep track of the passage of time, and I can enjoy nature more every time I go out of town.

This is really great, and I hope it gains traction -- it's nice to see things that can supplant the funded-walled-garden-startup incumbents for these such cases with services that embody the original vision of the WWW

This has absolutely been the trend in India. Majority of male names from my generation and my parents' generation end in consonants, and ending with a vowel was indicative of a feminine name.

So I doubt Indian immigration at least impacted this trend in the direction suggested.

The reverse effect is correct, this is the classic game interaction design challenge of 3rd person vehicle cameras which aren't pegged facing the forward direction of the vehicle.

Our hand-eye coordination does not intuitively adapt to remap the arrow keys relative to the spatial position/orientation of the vehicle, and we keep thinking relative to the screen coordinates itself. After you play with it for about 5 minutes you will project to the car instead of the screen and it will feel intuitive again.

Yep, it is flawed and, conversely, can be gamed with unintuitive choices. Yet, it is an improvement nonetheless just because fewer people get an outcome they liked less.

I'd guess mostly WeChat/Alibaba/TikTok, and a few tiny players that ebb and flow in impact.

> - What's WeWork's secret sauce or first mover advantage?

Softbank $$$

The Nexus 5X was a disaster of a phone so I don't blame them for sticking to the minimum. I actually switched back from my Nexus 5X after 6 months to my fully working Nexus 4 when I was pleased to find it was continuing to receive all the OS updates. Probably could still finagle a Android 10 ROM onto it if one tried hard enough.

I will grant shitty devices like the 5X is something that happens slightly more often with Google devices than Apple (although the Macbook pro keyboards kind of brought parity).

I still think for the layperson consumer, apps continuing to work even if they are not being actively developed is a bigger deal than continuing to receive constant security updates, from the perspective of device usability past 3 years at least.

? Google devices receive Android updates well into 5+ years. I had a Nexus 4 (2013) running Android 8.1 (2017-2018).

I also belive Android tends to have fewer breaking OS changes that render modern apps incapable of running on both older and newer OS versions, compared to iOS, so it's significantly worse for usability on iOS with a device that is ~4+ years old.

I think it was in the mid-to-late 90s as the internet was just becoming more available to lower income groups.

"Nobody buys physical encyclopedias anymore, everything else is going to go that way soon too"

In high school debated on the side of the demise of books (2002) and I won. Back then I convinced myself of my side for the sake of my debate performance, but I'm pretty sure today that books are going nowhere in a hurry.

Out of curiosity for the jargon, is your ankle facing the wrong direction still referred to simply as a "severe sprain"? That sounds like it would involve multiple fractures, a dislocation, and several ligament tears (not just one like in what I consider a "normal" sprain).

Isn't there some term that comes with the weight of increased severity for that, which would make paternalistic jerks, at the very least, think twice? Compound fracture? Multiple sprain? I have heard what you suffered described as an "open ankle sprain" which at least calls for something to be google'd before commenting on how slight it is. I was agreeing with gp until you described the injury further.

I agree that reliance on the American (informed guess here) medical system is not a smart move, but for good reason the global medical consensus is that self diagnosing and prescribing is very dangerous. The problem is a medical system here that is not tuned to respecting patient's opinions and prioritizing their correct treatment and well being over being another profitable capitalist entity that doesn't break regulatory law.

I'm in the exact same boat. I feel like the game industry has made this really distasteful shift, of the big AAA companies just adding shoe-shine on existing projects -- whether that's servicing a SaaS like League of Legends or World of WarCraft, or doing remake after remake of Age of Empires, Homeworld, StarCraft, Final Fantasy, etc, while leaving all the innovation and creativity to be explored at the expense of indies, mod creators or mapmakers. DOTA2, LoL, and the entire MOBA craze was spawned because of the success of a custom WC3 map, and since then AAA have 100% adopted this as an R&D strategy. DayZ/H1Z1 from the mod community spawning battle royale, DOTA Auto Chess custom map spawning DOTA Underlords, TFT, and Epic Games' Auto Chess (the newer big trend).

Once in a half decade we get a AAA game with a novel concept or a new IP (Overwatch, Fortnite maybe?), but even sequels are starting to just feel like polishing phases or DLCs on a tested IP and gameplay formula.

The indies used to look to the AAA for inspiration and something to aspire to, but the tables have turned in a way exemplifying the capitalism and diluting the art of the medium.

I once was changing the pricing for the primary subscription product for all 8000+ users registered in our CMS, and accidentally resumed the subscription and charged 300+ customers $75 who had cancelled the plan months or even years ago.

The payment platform's API's `updatePlan` function had an optional flag for `reactivateSubscriptionAndBillImmediately` with default value of `true`, as it turns out.

I had to stay up till 6AM writing a script to detect all of them, refund their money, send an apology email with some free credit, and cancel their subscriptions, and also write a note to my cofounders outlining the situation so they could crisis manage while I was out cold.

After which I wrote an angry email to the billing platform (probably harsher than they deserved given I didn't test their API appropriately on our dev instance). To their credit, they promptly changed the default. They were a young company and apparently not that many clients had used that API endpoint before.

It resulted in some very angry customers threatening to cite us to various business practice enforcement bodies around the world, but all in all some floor-sweeping profuse apologies and prompt action laid concerns to rest and no harm was done.

> Anyway when I was a kid I only cared about having good games to play

This was generally true for me too, but in 2019 games are primarily a social hangout spot. They're like a park or a concrete basketball court next to the parking lot, where the kids come hang out and shoot the shit in the lobby even if they aren't actively in a match.

Not being on the same game your mates are playing is akin to telling your kid "you can't go to your friends' park 30 minutes away, why don't you hang out in our perfectly nice backyard with a basketball hoop"

Edit: upvote for the rest of your comment though

> Do people buy into badges, leveling up, daily streaks, etc?

No (and yes). Some people who thrive off of tangible validation may, but you will not drive long-term engagement or real enjoyment from it. Badges/levels/streaks and other "meta-game" only add value to a strong game itself, and is just a small part of the more holistic art that is game design. Same with vibrant animations, cool sound effects, pretty particle effects. Another small part.

It's better than nothing, to be fair, but if you really want to make your apps enticing in the way games are, you should play and get into a few games, and then study the vast field of game design as you see fit - presenting a challenge with demonstrable mastery, balancing multiple viable strategies, social components, enjoyable mechanics, challenge pacing, providing flow state, etc.

Otherwise you will just end up with an app with badges, and we kind of have enough of those.

> Michael S. McCarthy, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, said he could not comment on the specifics of Mr. Ajjawi’s case because of privacy rules.

The irony of this statement is making my head spin

I often quote/link your article on the Adjective Fallacy [0], about once a month since I first saw it nearly ~4 years ago! Thanks for a great resource.

[0] https://betterexplained.com/articles/adjective-fallacy/

everyone agrees with your point, but the fact remains that your comment was not only a spoiler but also added nothing useful to the discussion in this thread or to the thesis of the article.

Exactly. It's super evident to anyone who works on maintaining SaaS that is in production with at least a hundred users at any given time using it in real-time when you are trying to push features or fixes that even going down for a minute will result in serious service reputation damage. We engineer a lot of reusable scaffolding and reporting tools to modify our services in-situ with minimal/no disruption because it is a huge priority. Operating on public infrastructure is the closest real-world parallel.

But to most people who work jobs where their choices don't directly influence customer service uptime (including a construction worker or a surveyor of construction for the same public works, as opposed to the project coordinator/planner/senior architect/engineer), this is an opaque cost.

A hard-to-capture cost factor is keeping highly used services operational or replaced while doing work on it. A super-fancy new subway with lots of stations in Shenzhen where people weren't already taking trains and expecting to use stations for their daily commute will be much cheaper than disrupting a line service to open a new station in London or New York City. Replacement bus bridge services, network-wide service advisories, staff and enforcement training, are all costs that are not easy to quantify or justify because it doesn't directly manifest in the construction of the infrastructure.

Of course there are other factors that vary a lot across cultures:

* China's heavy-handed governmental decision-making leaves no room for inefficiencies via neighborhood antagonism towards the constructions or zoning;

* Car culture differences create different magnitudes of popular roadblocks to investment in non-automobile infrastructure, which can result in large expenditures on lobbying and campaigning;

* Significantly more arbitrary middlemen making their way into the process because of "let the market figure it out" does, in fact, create some process inefficiencies in supply chains and contract pipelines. Few countries are as aggressively market-based for things meant for public good as the US.

In many years of having had accounting terms explained to me and glossaries listed, I have never seen such clean, concise and effective examples and explanations of the differences between oft-confused terms. Do you have a cheat-sheet glossary of (official) accounting terms in your own words somewhere?

I believe replacing `<div`\'<p' and `/div`\'/p' are preferred so you can retain any tag properties (class, id, style, etc), but it could still leave behind any tags with superfluous spaces.

Shaders have always been little programs that run on your GPU, it's just that their original intention was to operate on and then output a texture/set of pixels, which you would render to your scene. However a texture/pixel set is just bits at the end of the day, which can be used to represent other data than colors/alpha as well.

Please don't because you know we'll end up with a frankenstein language with the cons of both rather than the pros of both.

> Apple and the fanboys calling it a "Legacy" port are completely out of touch with reality.

It is now a legacy port on Apple laptops. I think it's the correct term to use in context, regardless of fandom. It is referring to ports that existed in the past, and are being phased out on the platform in question.

Thanks for this interesting data point. Would you/they prefer to just be called latino? Is this common sentiment among Mexicans outside of your family?

I can see latinx only being preferred by non-gender-conforming individuals to whom it applies, as opposed to when referring to individuals rather than to communities (families, neighborhoods, food, etc).

People are happy and healthy in a place for all kinds of reasons. That doesn't make them a desirable settlement destination for others.

Maybe a town is incredibly racist and who lives there is all from the same longstanding community and they are all extremely close and have good personal relationships with each other and feel a strong sense of belonging to the place and the people. Maybe the town is perfectly suited to being students, young and single and there's a lot of things that cater to them. Maybe the town is better suited to families, couples, people who own dogs. Such people will gravitate there. This could mean they are all happy and healthy, but it would not mean that if I, some random bloke from a different state/culture/language/country moved there and tried to settle in and live my life, I would be particularly happy or healthy.

So yes, a place can be the happiest place in the world for the people who already live there, and still be undesirable for the "looking for a nice place to settle" population at large. However, having a highly employable, high income industry, lots of motivated hard workers, a vibrant art scene, and good weather makes a place a lot more universally desirable, and it takes a helluva lot of negatives to offset that desirability (which the bay area is trying really hard to do).

> From the outside, it might seem as if he is enslaved by his pet.

I don't see the issue, this is the explicit contract of having a cat for a pet.

As a core game concept, it isn't common. We came upon it because we want our portfolio to be games that involve a cross-section of skills and play styles (strategic, on-the-fly planning, twitchy controls)[0]

You can think of speedrunning a puzzle game as a racing/puzzle game though :)

[0] https://colorballsgame.com/

Most indies pay close attention to the level design, even if leaning on procedural generation to get part of the way there. I am part of a 2-person team building an indie racing/puzzle game. I am the "tools" guy and my teammate is the "level design" guy, and I provide the building blocks and the generative machinery, and he massages them into an intentional and balanced experience.

Procedural level generation is only viable in production for games if a professional level designer can step in and tweak it.