michaelteter

Historical inaccuracies aside, when making a game it is essential to frequently stop and ask, “does this make the game more fun?”

A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.

The current US “leadership” is working as hard as it can to prevent any progress and to even dismantle some of the gains we have made.

Meanwhile, China has made the obvious realization that independence from oil and gas is economically, geopolitically, and environmentally beneficial.

But like many commercial activities, the full cost of the endeavor is not entirely met by those who will gain the most. In other words, the corps will get the benefit of lower energy costs by going into markets where their buying power will allow them to essentially slurp up the cheapest energy, pushing the rates up for the individual population (who will not gain financially from the new assets).

This is especially true for limited natural resources like water. And it's been true for oil and gas development for a century.

Heheh, sorry!

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks :)

Yeah, the concept popped into my head a few months ago, so I went looking for a game to play. I found and played a lot of Vector TD. No offense to them, but while I liked some things about it, it didn't really match up to my memory of games like that from the past. So this is what spurred me to make my own.

Since this was intended to be a weekend project, I stopped myself after several days of effort so I can return to doing "productive" things.

But I have two more improvements on the agenda: personal and global high score list, in the old style of just three initials (and maybe let you choose your country flag); and more ambitiously, a map editor and public maps with vote/ranking.

Will not happen with the current administration.

Like so many other big promises, it will appease a lot of people, but there will be no real follow through.

Any regulation that prevents unrestrained capitalism is immediately decried as socialism and therefore evil.

These kinds of promises are made which temporarily create market volatility, and once it later (usually quite soon) becomes clear that the big thing will not actually happen, the markets snap back. At this point, it’s incredibly likely that these situations are manufactured to both look good AND create large short term investment gains for people in the know - without actually changing anything.

I certainly am also. 32 years of professional work. Capable and willing to wear many hats, communicate with people of all walks of life (and neuro-divergencies), and even travel frequently.

Over the last two years I have applied to at least 150 jobs. For each application which would accept a cover letter, I wrote one. And I only applied to roles which I really believed I would fit into - I didn't just spray and pray.

I think I've had 4-5 companies that I got to interview with. The closest one to hiring ended up choosing another guy who had a little more frontend experience (this was for a backend role). But they said they really liked me. That's great, but it doesn't help :)

The rest were usually silent rejections. I'm actually grateful when I receive a rejection email (vs indefinite silence).

Along the way, I've built maybe 8 demo projects as part of the application process. I got to show off a few to the companies, and despite delivering what I honestly believe were clean, quality solutions, I didn't get the jobs.

Eventually I gave up applying for some months. It's just to demoralizing to keep trying and getting nowhere. Now I build things that make me happy (for no money), like my new web game, Vector Defense -> https://michaelteter.com/vector.html

I've started applying to companies again. If nothing happens in the next six months, I'll most likely walk away from my tech career and just get a "regular job". Maybe I'll open a gym in Bangkok; they don't have many, and the few decent ones have surprisingly high monthly fees. I could compete; and I love hospitality and providing nice experiences for people. So if anyone wants to partner with me, hit me up!

Many of the crazy things we see happening today come from the same root problem: the wealth of humanity has increasingly been funneled into the hands of a few. These may be mostly companies rather than individuals, but they are a proxy for a relatively small few people.

This glut of finances leaves those few with a problem: what to do with it? And since accumulation of wealth is the ultimate goal, FOMO encourages increasingly foolish decisions (or at least unsustainable ones).

The housing crisis is one of the outcomes. This AI bubble is another. I'm sure if we look around, we can find other examples.

If resources were more evenly distributed, we would see different regions and peoples doing more varied things which would be appropriate for their needs.

This seems like an intentionally misleading title, since they don't mention that the study was for one county (Montgomery County) in Ohio, which is basically just Dayton, OH and surrounding rural area - < 600k people.

I'm sure you can pick other counties in the US which have either very high representation of THC users or very low representations. Without knowing how other counties score in terms of driver fatalities and THC, this is not really very useful.

To me it sounds like an effort to paint THC as big and scary. But in my experience living in a few large cities, weed is rare - but lots of people go out, drink, and drive home one or more times per week.

ScienceDaily goes even further by rounding up to 50% and burying the location halfway down the summarization.

"Nearly half of drivers killed in crashes had THC in their blood THC-impaired driving deaths are soaring, and legalization hasn’t slowed the trend. Date: October 5, 2025 Source: American College of Surgeons Summary: Over 40% of fatal crash victims had THC levels far above legal limits, showing cannabis use before driving remains widespread. The rate didn’t drop after legalization, suggesting policy changes haven’t altered risky habits. Experts warn that the lack of public awareness around marijuana’s dangers behind the wheel is putting lives at risk."

Unless they publish who funded the study, I'm skeptical that the alcohol industry might be involved. It's absolutely in their best interest to paint marijuana as the devil (and take attention away from alcohol).

Obviously nobody should be driving with any impairment, but people do - driving tired, texting, even talking to passengers and turning their heads to look at the passengers while they talk! (Really, why??? I see people doing this all the time.)

Living in close proximity is one thing, but growing them at the speed and scale which we do with factory farming must massively increase the rate of development of viruses. It’s almost as if we designed a special program just to develop a virus that would wipe us all out.

But hey, cheap food!

Never fear! That $2000 check will be coming your way soon.

Does "unicorn" really mean anything beyond "can play investment game"?

It seems like the tech version of the quarterly earnings per share game that has ruined Wall Street and publicly traded companies for the last 25 years.

Or, just use Phoenix with LiveView.

I particularly enjoyed the “every couple of months…” bit. So, about four times?

Interviews allow just a little time for strangers to attempt to sync up and get a sense of each other.

Actual jobs offer much more time for people to learn to sync and communicate.

Also, on both sides of the interview table, people have varying strengths when it comes to short and long term communication skills. Plenty of interviewers are not good at interviewing, just as plenty of candidates are not good at their side of the process.

In short, interviews are a very poor approach to choosing who belongs long term.

Ultimately, regardless of the interview process used, every job is ultimately a long term “try and see” interview. You only know how someone fits by trying them for a while.

The normalization of deviancy has reached the point where nothing matters.

How many times since 2015 has the word “unprecedented” been used in association with something he was involved in?

Ownership by profit focused organizations result in worse service? Who would have imagined!

This is how paid placements work, and it's in the app stores as well.

And yes, _most_ people will just click on one of those top 3 links, not realizing that they are not going where they might have hoped to go.

What's worse is that many people actually go to google to search for the website name they want. And the search engine will "help" them by popping up suggestions before the user might have completed typing .com. So now instead of searching for therealwebsite.com, they search for "therealwebsite". That of course will NOT show them the real website, it will show all the garbage.

The two main premises here are flawed.

1. We don't push the joystick up or down. We push forward or pull backward. Our control devices are usually on a plane approximately parallel to the ground. Therefore, we push forward or pull backward.

2. Despite the flawed #1, the default being "push forward" = "go down", and thus providing an Invert Y option, is contrary to how our most natural up/down system works - our head. Our head is mounted on a pivot below it (the neck). Pushing the head forward is generally how we look down, and pulling back makes us look up.

Joysticks and game controllers are also mounted with the pivot at the bottom and some length above. If you imagine the joystick like our head, the forward/outward facing edge would be like our eyes. Push the stick forward, and the eyes are now rotated forward and downward. Pull the stick back, and now they are "looking upward".

I find that not visiting the lure parent sites is equally effective.

There’s an interesting transition point that we must keep in mind when using these tools.

For research, investigation, and proof of concept, it is good to be flexible and a bit imprecise.

But once a path seems clear, writing a single detailed document (even with “help”) is valuable before working with a separate AI assistant.

The challenge is recognizing that transition point. It’s very easy to just meander from zero to sort-of-product without making this separation.

The purpose of this program has always been to provide cheaper labor for companies. We have never had a legitimate shortage of qualified software engineers.

Nope. While the blockchain craze was less meaningful and slightly less annoying, it died down. This will too (even though there's more actual value hiding in corners).

There are certainly periods where one concept is "viral" and appears quite often; that's normal.

Could it be that one group is more likely to be worried about issues like climate change and human rights, while the other group seems gleefully unconcerned?

Having experienced several overhyped corporate knee-jerk (and further press-amplified) silver bullets, I expect this will play out about as well as the previous ones.

And by that, I mean corps will make poor decisions that will be negative for thought workers while never really threatening executive compensation.

I see this latest one somewhat like TFA author: this is a HUGE opportunity for intelligent, motivated builders. If our jobs are at risk now or have already been lost, then we might as well take this time to make some of the things we have thought about making before but were too busy to do (or too fatigued).

In the process, we may not only develop nice incomes that are independent of PHB decisions, but some will even build things that these same companies will later want to buy for $$$.

... Very far left. How do you measure "far left"? Do you mean they are concerned with all people, and they don't suffer illusions of "I built my fortune on my own" (ignoring all the socialist infrastructure which enabled their success)?

This is basically it. There are a dozen ways to become huge, and they all are essnetially anti-humanity.

There's an expression: normalization of deviance.

This is where we are now. People idolize others because of their wealth, and that wealth is always gained by means which are ultimately harmful to the greater population. Even the wealthy philanthropistMS which will remain unnamed acquired their greatness by cheating and stealing. But as long as you make a great show and give it all away eventually (while living lavishly the entire time), you look good.

When you make a lot of bold claims, and you have your (or a lot of someone else's) money to help you back up the claims with (clumsy) actions, sometimes your bold claims turn out to be truthy.

Prosperity for whom?