Cities Skylines is not a game that rewards strategy, because of how it works it is primarily about defending against and exploiting the simulation's deficiencies
1,330 karma · joined August 27, 2024
That's in part why the enforcement of the "no reposts" rules and their conditional counterparts is so selective, having the ability to allow/deny these on increasingly large subreddits effectively amounts to running a money printer as you can then pick and choose who is allowed to karma farm, or direct userbases to their hustle culture bullshit reselling pokemon cards, watches, shoes, or bots to do this, etc.
This is also why there is often so much frankly insane drama over moderators getting catfished, outed as pervs/creeps, etc especially after a genuine subreddit with solid original content gets "too popular".
There are also weird second order effects, especially in places like popular subreddits for games, where selectively allowing what complaints actually make it to the top of the sub are utilized by those who make disgusting amounts of money from botting/farming the game to sell in game items or currency for real money, to create what looks like a genuine public outcry for balance changes or features that seem fun/good on paper but at the end of the day only exist to make it easier for them to get more items to sell. This practice has roots predating reddit, back when everything was still forums and the RMT markets for titles like Diablo 2 were in their infancy. Earlier this year an RMT account for Path of Exile was finally banned, you can find videos where people go through archives of what they had on hand when it happened and tally up prices, no bullshit millions of dollars in total value.
I learned a lot of this firsthand by getting involved in a city subreddit when I first moved out on my own, some people found out I could code well enough and tried to pay me a lot of money to assist them in creating these kinds of farms/influence operations. I obviously declined, this is all so fucking stupid! A few of them flew too close to the sun and made millions of dollars through ad programs on places like facebook, used what they could to pay off their college loans, buy a nice car, and then lost their asses in court and declared bankruptcy after giving most of it back.
Fighting with mermaid is so frustraiting, especially when it comes to normal vs github formatting. This is going to replace several ad-hoc half impls I have laying around
This is mostly driven by the fact that even in the current optimal case where they can maintain the number of defective pixels per panel, multiplying the number of pixels tanks bins. And then the follow on effects of longevity based on heat/brightness vs refresh rate, which improves generation over generation much faster than the former. The shit they're doing to print OLED panels out like an inkjet is exciting because once it gets good enough they will no longer need to write off the failures and will be able to selectively remove or overwrite the defects, which is not something that can usefully be done with other screen types.
The operation of switching the pixels themselves becomes increasingly inexpensive as they get smaller. For a long time the biggest barrier holding progress back was consistently and reliably being able to deliver smaller and more precise voltage swings. Almost all of the increased power consumption comes from either how much less backlight can make it through (which also becomes heat, this is already enough of a problem that certain display types include a separate extremely tiny panel that sits there and displays nothing so that they can be measured to adjust the voltage levels and termination resistances), or how bright each individual pixel can be. That's why the first 6? generations of OLED panels have so many wacky and (IMHO goddamn abhorrent) arrangements of R/G/B/W shapes and subpixels.
I was vaguely okay with this when they started doing things like including yellow/magenta subpixels on TVs but anything other than a square pixel aspect ratio for computers is so gross. Even if you're willing to ignore the fringing or outright cannot see it, I can still tell one generation of iPhone apart from another consistently in books.app with the smallest white on black text, the leading/trailing edges of the letters have different rainbows.
And displaying fractionally lower resolutions onto high dpi displays does not incur much of a cost at all, retina displays existing at all on mobile phones is proof of this.
I understand this is quite good, but I also have something like 20/12.5 eyesight. To me, using these things feels like looking through a coarse screen door.
E: For reference, I can comfortably count pixels on a 24.5" 1080p screen from a normal seated position.
I've been buying HMDs since the first Oculus, and I promptly sell them to somebody else. 37 PPD is a little more than halfway to "perfect" for someone with 20/20 eyesight
There's still so much software out there that is an absolute lynchpin to a business that will never have the kind of durability/compatability many take for granted. The only thing that has changed in the past 2 decades is the operating system running the VM. In 2026 they are still yelling across the office or exchanging phone calls when one has finished and signed out so that the other can sign in and pull the updates.
It often isn't taken seriously or is written off because it's a "small business", but those 2-8 people run a book of business that clears this comment thread's lifetime earnings annually.