nstart

For those mentioning the price, it's worth noting that you receive games for free on the device. That's part of the package

From their homepage:

> Here's the truly unique bit. Playdate isn't just an empty system. Once you set up your Playdate, you'll start to receive two brand new games... every week. For 12 weeks. > >That's 24 free games, in lots of genres. Some are short. Some are long. Will you love them all? Probably not. Will you have a great time trying them? Absolutely.

Still expensive, but also only just. Especially given the hardware crank part which I definitely would want to be high quality seeing how much it's going to be used.

The only question I have though is what type of games will people be making for this before the novelty wears off? It's going to need games which are made from "crank first" perspectives if this device is to actually last.

So! To kick off a conversation here if it's not too late. What games would you make if you were developing for this device?

I'd probably make a couple

1. A skateboard game where the crank is the balance

2. A game where you control a tank/space ship gunner position and the crank is used for both reloading and targeting.

I can't think of any game right now where there would be a story where the crank mechanic is central to it. Curious if anyone else has ideas here.

Oh oh! I got a recommendation as someone who learnt how to draw from scratch using online resources only. It does however break your requirement of using something like udemy.

Brent Eviston’s course, The art and science of drawing, starts from the basics of how to draw lines and moves its way through measuring, 3d forms, contours, and then into shading and finally gesture followed by full sketches. Follow it fully and you’ll have enough experience by the end of the shading course to start working on other courses too. That latter point is the best part; the fundamentals give you the ability to know how to pick up more skills from other classes.

This is how I would work through it if I was doing from scratch

Complete the basic skills class - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Basic-Skills-Getting-Star...

Complete dynamic mark making - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Dynamic-Mark-Making-Drawi...

Move on to 3d forms - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Form-Space-3D-Drawing-Per...

Contours - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Contours-Drawing-with-Com...

Measuring and proportions (this one can be done in parallel with the 3d form class once you get to chapter 6) - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Measuring-Proportion-Draw...

At this point you can start to work through drawabox - https://drawabox.com/ . Some people recommend this as a start, but honestly, if you are starting from scratch it can be hard to know if you are doing things right. The previous courses will give fundamentals to actually enjoy drawabox

Meanwhile, keep progressing on Brent’s courses

Fundamentals of shading - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Shading-Fundamentals-Draw...

Shading beyond basics - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Shading-Beyond-the-Basics...

If you have time you can pick up the figure drawing in parallel since you don’t do shading at that point.

Intro to figure drawing - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Gesture-An-Introduction-t...

Measuring for figure drawing - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Measuring-Proportion-for-...

Finally , volumetric figure drawing - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Volume-Structure-Learn-th...

Notably absent from all of this is landscape drawing. Landscape drawing is a different beast depending on how you want to approach it. If you just want to sketch with a pen, the skills you pick up by the time you do the measuring and proportions class of Brent’s will be enough to let you go into any city scape and observe the area and draw. Learning how to let go of certain details and add your expression is a very individual choice so at that point, you can look out for certain artists and study their work to choose what works for you.

Also notably absent from all of this is colour. That’s because colour doesn’t matter without fundamental understanding of form and light in black and white. For this, there are many amazing courses in proko’s online library. Marco Bucci has amazing material. And if you want to do digital painting, Ahmed Aldoori has a lot of stuff.

Basically after you pick up the fundamentals, the choice of courses opens up and each course will teach something new. But without those fundamentals, the value of those classes is hard to absorb.

Feel free to mail me if you want more info or want to chat :)

First up, that's a completely rational/understandable position to have on this topic. Business papers constantly involve jargon to get themselves published.

Given the context of this particular article I wanted to share somewhat of a counter point to this that I learnt a few years ago. From my readings and experience, what's happening here is that we are creating a shared vocabulary, or, pedagogy, to describe shared experiences. I used to think it was bunkum until I read some books including pedagogy of the oppressed. The truth is, when we have these terms that we can share and discuss, it gives a lot of power for affected people to express what they are feeling more clearly.

In the example of this article, one could read it as tackling the topic of individual ethical compasses. Ethics has fuzzy edges all over. Sometimes, business needs will cross those fuzzy edges but it's not necessarily unethical. An example will be asking people to temporarily set aside the discomfort they are feeling with a a local situation (eg: politics) that affects their personal life in a long term manner. It sucks. Work also needs to get done. There's a good chance you hurt an individual's ethics along the way. An individual can feel ashamed of themselves sometimes when they feel they are doing work that ignores the plight of people around them. If you go about this the wrong way (completely innocently) you end up causing... what?

Describing these moments is much easier when you have the right words to use it. And the thing is, it's really hard to understand how it's useful until you've experienced it yourself (i.e., suddenly having the right words to express yourself). Hence, lived experiences.

Finally it's worth noting that these terms don't get invented out of thin air. Moral injury has a history dating back to 1984 for example(wikipedia page on moral injury). These terms are born out of iteration as people strive together to find ways to describe how they are feel. And personally, I think that the language enables that is actually something to embrace and celebrate.

I believe Obsidian uses capcitor for their mobile app, and frankly, the experience has been nothing short of amazing.

> Rounded corners also make effective content containers. This is because the rounded corners point inward towards the center of the rectangle. This puts the focus on the contents inside the rectangle. It also makes it easy to see which side belongs to which rectangle when two rectangles are next to each other.

Personally, as a non designer and someone with close to zero natural aesthetic abilities, this single point is the one that resonates. There are some forum tools that used to choose to separate content threads by rectangles. When scrolling through a page quickly it was easy to miss where one thread started and the other finished. After the switch to rounded corners the distinction when moving fast became a lot easier to see.

I can relate to this. I’ve worked remotely for 6 years but that feeling you mentioned is something I’ve felt for the past year.

I think it’s worth noting that remote work during the pandemic doesn’t really do justice to what remote work should really be. Prior to the pandemic kicking in, my remote work involved mostly working at home. But when I felt the need for change, I’d combine things like grocery shopping with a visit to a nearby cafe and I’d work for a few hours there. Other days I’d meet up with a friend I worked for and I’d work out of their office for a day and enjoy lunch with them. In the mornings I’d drop my son off at school and go to a nearby coworking space and hotdesk there. Remote work also meant that I was able to break my work day into a few segments and I could then take on things like coaching school children in some sports.

With the pandemic that all changed. Instead of taking my son to school, I sat in the room with him to help him with the laptop from time to time. Work was a few steps from there to my table. No meeting with friends to work. No cafe work. No going out to break up the day.

I’m sad that most peoples remote work experience has basically been work from home all the time instead of work on terms you are happiest with. If this had been my experience from the start I’d be kind of itching to go back and see people at the office from time to time.

With pandemic restrictions lifted for the most part, things have now gotten much better. So I’m gradually becoming “un-sick” of working remotely again.

All that to say, what you are feeling is perfectly normal. Just do understand that this pandemic edition of remote work is definitely not normal. It’s isolating and should never happen on a normal day.

Appreciate you sharing your direct experience. Thank you!

A quick question about the MIT course this student followed[1]. Am I correct in assuming that the way to follow this course would be to take the lecture notes, the assigned reading material, and simply read it before then moving on to the assignments? Just wanted to make sure I'm not missing some video/other content before I take a look into this stuff.

[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

This was a great article in that it was a decent example of how pop-science articles could be written.

- the claim made focuses only on the results of the chemical itself

- the explanations adequately state the limitations of the results themselves

- the follow up comments from in field individuals clearly states the relationship (or lack of it) to the study

- the article notes quite strongly that while babies emit the chemical, it’s unknown if the amounts emitted are enough to alter behavior.

Never thought of this until I read this thread and now this is going to be my next fun hobby project for myself. Thank you!

I think the commenter you are replying to meant 2TB after 3 or 4 months. If so, I’m guessing that sounds more reasonable

Is it just possible that the workflow of a power user has changed now while still retaining the core value of finding smart and efficient ways to get work done? Some examples that come to mind:

The productivity industry is huge. Pop into the YouTube rabbit hole of people demonstrating how to use tools to be more productive, and you’ll stumble into a community that is bending every tool to basically serve their personal approach to life. The effectiveness of that is debatable but these are people who are absolutely pushing apps to their edge. A lot of them are mobile tap-only people too. But they also satisfy the condition of learning lots of smart and efficient ways of using their tools.

Content creators. Especially younger ones. I’m floored by the kinds of videos younger people, aged 16-23, are making by pushing the limits of their mobile devices to create engaging content. And I’m not even talking about the ones who make use of multiple tools across both laptops and smart phones. I’m just thinking of the people who will combine a few apps with the native functionality of something like TikTok and they create high effort content that is representative of someone who has taken the time to learn smart and efficient ways to get their work done. Again, the value of the output can be debated all day. But I think it’s obvious how far people are pushing their tool sets.

There are probably other groups I don’t know of because of my bubble, but I do think the above groups show that power users are alive and well even if they look different than they did in the past.

On a similar note, if I’m not mistaken, Monzo stores customer passwords (?)/keys used to access their bank information from other bank accounts (through monzo plus?).

I wonder if Monzo has done a similar deep dive into how they structure their architecture/security practices to protect against the threat of this information+encryption keys being stolen.

That and the graph on ratio of air transport prices to shipping prices were probably the key facts of the article that brought it all together. Dealing with 10x normal pricing is something I can't fathom in such large logistics businesses.

Did anyone else read this article and feel like it is a lot of words to say very little? I feel like the core of the article can be summarized into this:

Air transport is still more expensive than shipping. But the magnitude is less than it used to be. This is because shipping is seeing bottlenecks and surcharges to handle the bottlenecks. Therefore it makes the more expensive air transport ok to use especially with time sensitive holiday purchases coming up.

If that sounds right, almost all that comes from the last few sentences in the article.

I wish I could take the time to analyze findings and correlate; could this be due to a period of fundings reaching a peak many years ago?

I recall there was a time it seemed a lot of celebrities were suddenly dying and there was an article that came out pointing that many of them simply belonged to an era of media growth (or something along those lines). So they were all roughly from the same age group and were well… For lack of a better way to put it, reaching their expected age range of demise together.

I recall that years back when I was in uni, the software funding market was becoming super active and people were predicting (and denying) a bubble back then. This was in the 2008 to 2012 time period I think. Are we just seeing a lot of these companies now all “graduating” together? It feels like it matches the timeline of around 10-12 years or so which is when they might be expected to IPO?

PS: I feel like a lot of what I said is based on vague memories of things I’ve read over the years so I apologize if any of that is untrue.

I’m glad to see people mentioning this passage:

“In the popular imagination workers’ share of the economic pie has room to grow at the expense of profits. But recent research suggests that labour’s share of the value created by firms has in fact been fairly stable in most rich countries during recent decades“

That entire piece needs some citation. What do they define as labor here? Are they analyzing all job categories? Are they lumping in highly paid software engineers from FAANG with people working at a retail outlet?

Regardless of source material, that part also misses the point entirely of the workforce category that’s demanding wage increases.

Workers in this category are saying “stop hoarding y’all profits and pay us more so we run with less profits and bonuses for the high levels”.

The article is suggesting that if wages are increased, prices will need to increase which will in turn devalue the wage increase. But it fails to discuss if the chunky profit margin can be sacrificed without raising prices too.

Honestly, I like a lot of the economist but this particular article in this weeks edition had me shaking my head hard.

As much as this sucks, I can’t say that I’m surprised. I made a script to unfollow everything 2 years ago (and I did the same to Twitter). Shared the script on GitHub gists so the few people who were willing to open the console and paste the code in would do so. Several people asked me to make an extension. It would have been trivial but I refused because I figured that would put me on FB’s radar and get me banned. Just running the script was nerve wracking in case I triggered some detection mechanism (I inserted random times between actions to avoid it if possible).

If I was this person I’d have done this as anonymously as possible.

What’s more sucky though is that at least with Twitter I was able to use the api for this. FB has locked down their APIs for personal use which resulted in having to script browser actions :-/

> I guess the options will stay limited, as the author wants to sell his commercial sync service.

Just putting a note in here to say that that's unlikely. On Android, you can use a lot of different approaches and I actually didn't need to use Obsidian's sync service. On iOS it's more complicated than that because of iOS's way of handling files. Building the integration of any other sync providers into Obsidian itself feels like a giant time sink for 2 people.

Basically, the options will stay limited but probably for actual feasibility challenges rather than personal gain.

Replying to this one since that was my first impression. On closer look they did seem quite different.

Gameplay, goals, all of that is similar to screeps. But the game board and therefore the mental model itself is quite different. Where screeps feels like an endless multiverse along the lines of old school browser games like oGame, yare carries a feel of a more quick starcraft battle. Definitely not a copy even though it carries similar mechanics.

Basically, I feel like I could do games on yare randomly whereas screeps has always felt like a long term investment I need to make.

EDIT: Also also, yare seems to be far more simple for the moment in terms of environments and resources but that could change in the future and I'm looking forward to developments there.

+1 to this. Remote work vs work from home during pandemic times are very different experiences. The latter is definitely not pleasant in the long run. Even though I worked from home as a usual practice pre pandemic, breaking up the monotony with an occasional hot desking at some other place which may end with a board game night, or working a bit from a coffee shop, is the kind of thing that made remote work such a joy normally.

Activity diagrams. I find that they are my go to when I want to communicate how something will work. This is when we are considering a modification of something that already exists or if the idea is new but well defined.

I'll use draw.io usually but if it's to clarify something small, I'll just draw it on my notebook and snap a photo of it.

That's what I love about the activity diagram. Communicates a ton of information in a form that even if you've never seen it, it will be pretty intuitive. And creating it is also super lightweight.

I too am interested in Twitter's April launch. It feels like a lot of clubhouse buzz is centered around twitter. Maybe it's twitter's turn to find success in integrating another company's idea into their product

This seems like an ok time to point to Shaan's twitter thread on why he believes clubhouse will fail [1]. Nothing is guaranteed of course, but it is an entertaining read. It's designed to be a bit over the top, silicon valley esque story style. But the person who wrote it, is writing from their experience of actually launching, and burning out in an attempt to build a similar company which makes the thread that much more interesting.

In any case, it surprises me that Clubhouse is staying in closed mode for so long knowing that the bigger social networks are coming for them, especially Twitter which is where I see the most number of people talking about Clubhouse.

[1] https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1371972261004070913

I'd be interested in what clubhouse bios look like once it opens up. If you haven't been looking at twitch lately, the most consistent category is "just chatting". It's literally a steamer monologuing with a comment stream to respond to.

To me, this category seems proof that the clubhouse social network model has demands outside of stonks and hustle culture. In fact, if clubhouse was to bring in more varied creators, I wonder if luring away streamers from twitch to clubhouse will be a viable strategy in the future. It even comes with monetisation strategies built in (tips and subscriptions and possibly pay to ask questions just like twitch).

This post seems like a good time to note that by default, there's no direct way to verify that what you are downloading from dockerhub is the exact same thing that exists on dockerhub [1].

Discovered after seeing a comment on HN about a bill of materials for software, i.e., a list of "approved hashes" to ensure one can audit exactly what software is being installed, which in turn led me to this issue.

[1] - https://github.com/docker/hub-feedback/issues/1925

IIRC you need to use npm ci to ensure that package-lock.json is used. That said, when developing locally you are going to use npm install or npm update and update the package.json and package-lock.json files accordingly. I could be entirely off target here since I'm writing purely from memory. But there seems to be a few different ways one could trigger a pull from the malicious repo and end up with it inside the package-lock.json file

Huh. That's a pretty nifty thing to do. Just wrote a python script to do that for me and it's running in the background right now. Shall be interesting to come back to it today in the evening. Do you recall how many seconds each screenshot would show itself in the final video (basically what was the framerate?). Currently considering about 4 frames per second but would love to get your take on it :)

Flagged this one for being on edge of being a conspiracy theory. Others have already talked about the misdirection of certain points in this article. And honestly, the questions they ask about why not end to end encryption by default has also been answered by Durov in his blog posts. I can't get the link right now, but it's from August 14 2017. Overall, this article is just noise and clickbait.

> It's important to note that there are no real rules here like "start at 50% lightness" or anything — every color behaves a bit differently, so you'll have to rely on your eyes for this one.

My hunch is that this is dependent on contrast. I've also seen several comments talking about designing in black and white first and then adding colour. A lot of this feels similar to painting. When learning to paint you first learn to paint in black and white to understand values (lightness/darkness) and contrast. This is not directly related but there's a great video on painting that shows how the colour picker's values can be deceiving in showing the true brightness/contrast of colours. If anyone's interested in how colours truly relate to brightness this video is definitely worth a watch -> https://youtu.be/gJ2HOj22gDo