1,780 karma · joined May 29, 2021
DKIM et. al. security concerns aside, I don't think a mailto link will be easier to use because the web server doesn't control the user's configured handler for mailto links and there's a lot of ways for that link to go unhappy.
Shopify's version:
> Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong. Now, we have to adjust. As a consequence, we have to say goodbye to some of you today.
He will be successful because the Incredibly Online people haven't yet learned the golden rule: don't feed the trolls.
With this article, and these comments, consider him fed.
Microsoft's strategy is to sell PC games on Windows devices. They might call some of them Xboxes.
Valve's strategy is to maintain a Linux distro that can play PC games.
Sony also ran.
I could see Nintendo bucking this trend but they have enough IP to be their own island.
It might be smart for Godot to punt; it lets them go faster than Unity and catch up
What are the limitations of gdscript you allude to? Let's say I want to render an infinite scrolling hex grid. Why would c# excel or gdscript struggle?
If you resolve the ambiguity in real time in favor of the preprocessor syntax, you break existing websites.
If you perform a preprocessing step it now blocks CSS parsing and slows down all websites on the internet.
Maybe the preprocessor authors should have thought harder about their syntax if they wanted it to be adopted as a web standard.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/...
During your lifetime consoles have been largely static and mobile gaming came out of nowhere and eclipsed every other form of gaming combined. But you're also old enough to have fraternized with those who rode the big console wave. 'Big' here is of course tiny compared to the mobile gaming wave. But it felt big at the time (and was.)
There are those who believe that games aren't how much money they make so they continue to ignore mobile gaming. Still, the timeline at least explains developers' behaviors.
There's nothing about microtransactions that makes premium games unreleasable. This is part of why I view the anti-MT stance as gatekeeping.
Back then games had a huge problem with equitable access. You needed the equivalent of $90 disposable income in 2022 just to try a game sight unseen. Gamers were incredibly wealthy and privileged in those days.
The industry dealt with rampant piracy from those who wanted game experiences but couldn't afford them. Gamers relied on written reviews by a handful of curators to derisk purchases.
All the while the table stakes to develop a game were rising. The nature of the console games industry is a technology reset every decade which undermines economic efficiencies in development tools. Development costs were kept artificially low by poor working conditions for those in the industry. Poor job security and stolen wages.
I haven't yet mentioned that gamers' expectations for control schemes, camera behavior, animation fidelity, environmental realism, and much much more have only grown and contributed to table stakes.
I think you are putting the momentary happiness of a niche gaming cohort on a pedestal and it blinds you to what the industry has become and just how many it benefits.
Lastly your claim that whales are gambling degenerates or people with poor self control is FUD. This claim is itself part of the gatekeeping from capital G Gamers because it assumes people spending money on games in novel ways can't possibly be enjoying those games. Whales are wealthy people with loads of disposable income. The same people who fly private jets or hire famous musicians for private parties. And everything in between. Why should games miss out on monetization models benefiting other entertainment formats?
A much simpler explanation is that Gamers who had grown accustomed to being the Alphas in a hobby they self-identity with, are grappling with the economization of their hobby and being priced out of Alpha status. In effect, the games industry has sold out, man. A naive position that overlooks all the economic realities I outlined at the start.
However, more people play video games than ever before and more games are released per year than at any other time in human history. So what died exactly? Certainly not an industry. Only a business model has died. A game's business model has always been inextricably tied to its design, going back to arcades. So designs you like are dying.
This is why I classify your behavior as gatekeeping. All those happy gamers must be enjoying games wrong. The designs they like are not valid game designs because they aren't adherent to your design aesthetics.
Do you miss paying a fixed price for a fixed amount of content, never to be updated? Nothing about that is incompatible with microtransactions. In the old days we called them expansions. These days they're called battle passes.
Do you miss paying for access to a live game server? Those used to be called subscriptions. Now we've found a way to offer free subscriptions to any and all, subsidized by gamers who have the financial freedom to support their favorite games.
[edit: for politeness]
Celeste is derivative of Donkey Kong Country. I agree that for an author who thinks derivation itself is stinky, using an overly reductive critical framework where every game is derivative of, I don't know, unaliving Donkey Kong at the arcades, it was odd to see Celeste as a counter example.
Most of game innovation the past decade has been in the monetization model, moreso than mechanics. The author looks down their nose at microtransactions so they have probably missed all the innovation even as it continues to cross pollinate with every aspect of the games industry. No wonder they think Stanley Parable is still a noteworthy observation in 2022.
News of Pluton and its security goals have been readily available since 2020 from reputable hardware sites like Anandtech, or directly from Microsoft themselves. There's nothing new or hidden or surprising about it unless you live to dream up Microsoft conspiracy theories.
Many other hardware manufacturers have similar security offerings including Intel and Apple. Microsoft is arguably late to the game here, given their only recent interest in PC hardware. OS integration isn't even new. Macs have been shipping with T1 and T2 chips for over five years. Has the sky fallen on that ecosystem?
I never need to stack PRs cuz I can work on the next one while the first one is under review and rebase once it's merged. I can see if the review phase is long at your company that this wouldn't work. But I prefer it if possible.
One thing I hate about stacked PR delivery is ppl go dark for a month building this whole new world and if you have architecture concerns in the root PR they will resist them because it means rebasing and changing all the downstream PRs as well. Bad incentives all around.
So I would offer that as another solution. Congratulations to OP on shipping your first game and learning a ton. What would a sequel or spiritual successor look like? This thought exercise gives you the freedom to question mechanics you already shipped which may be holding back your other design goals.
There's no static playbook here, you're trying to play society like an instrument.
Figure out why a player would be motivated to share and then make that action as obvious and easy as possible. For example players share Wordle results as if to start a conversation with ppl they already engage with: "I bet you can't beat my performance". Or, "look at my proud performance." Wordle optimizes this impulse in two ways: it fits the request into a tweet, and it uses a novel presentation to compete with all the other content posted to Twitter.
Novelty is a huge component in that last bit. Once twenty games are spamming Twitter with emoji posts, they'll all suffer. Think Facebook in 2011 when Zynga had everyone's feed stuffed with nails and wood boards and goats.
I would start thinking about the intrinsic rewards your game offers. If it makes players feel smart, they may be tempted to share to humblebrag. That's half the equation (and why focusing on sharing isn't enough) because now you need what they shared to be as enticing a click as the other content on the platform.
Makes sense to me why leaderboards didn't work. Nobody cares to compete with total strangers and even friend leaderboards are extrinsic motivation. It will only speak to competitive player types. Plus if you have any level of success, hackers will ruin your board by submitting unreachable scores.
They've all generally picked horrible selectors which then leads to getting a dev involved to provide a better one. So the angle you have on selector intelligence is the most compelling aspect to me.
How readily can new rules be added? And do you have lots of rules specific to different frameworks? For example if I'm using FrameworkA and it loves to splash ids like Component-12345 where 12345 counts up from zero, the id will be very alluring to basic selector generator tools. One stop identifier. However the example I give is an unstable id because every execution loads components differently and the ids will be assigned differently next time
Also as I get older I find the hot takes I used to write down are not interesting enough to share in article form. They live better as comments or tweets. I'm more aware of nuance in everything, and caveating my claims out the wazoo to appropriately constrain my claims is not worth it.
I see a lot of this hot take style writing from other young devs making it to HN front page. So that's not to say this style of writing isn't popular. But it isn't popular with me, and first and foremost I'm writing for myself.
That's all the pros and cons. It doesn't fundamentally change the work experience itself because in any given conversation at least one other person will be having their remote day, forcing the interactions to take place in a remote-friendly way. You can sit at home or sit in the office, but you're still a remote worker. Many people, especially younger ones, won't take the deal. They have no family burden to escape and everywhere else to be. Therefore the return to office is all or nothing.
Any company doing hybrid right now really wants to be fully in office. And they'll boil the frog to get you there.
More interestingly, what will new companies do? Financial momentum is in favor of remote work. The burden of proof is on new companies to justify why they should reduce their runway by 25% and limit their hiring pool by investing in an office in some place. If there really is an advantage or an efficiency to in-person work that could otherwise be remote, we will find it shortly.
I think if privacy laws were to be made that restrict what data the Oculus can snoop, Meta wouldn't raise the price to compensate. They would sell or shelve the entire Oculus brand and endeavor.
VR has little value to Meta other than a way to sneak cameras and microphones into your home. If you've seen what the Kinect could do a decade ago with IR cameras, the Oculus has those. The Kinect could monitor your heart rate in real time and track multiple bodies.
Nobody will be thinking about the Oculus when they pass the laws, but they may be thinking about Echos and Nest cams and pass laws to restrict audio and video snooping. So Oculus is along for the ride even at its current level of irrelevance.
The day Meta bought Oculus they killed the platform for privacy-conscious webizens. I say this as someone who would love to try the Soda Island VR experiences and often lament the acquisition.
The penalty for a wrong prediction is rubber banding, so if you can get away with streaming their past at high latency, I would avoid predicting at all.
That's the model often used by async PvE games (think social games, invest/express, etc) and I think that approach would map best onto SaaS presence features.
One additional parameter to keep in mind is how real-time does your simulation of remote players need to be? If you don't need real-time positioning there's a whole other dimension of shortcuts you can take by introducing what amounts to a 'streaming delay'.
In a lot of these apps the cursors can't interact with each other so you have no need for real-time positioning and its accompanying smoothing techniques. Cheat cheat cheat! That's how games get their performance, way more often than being smart they're clever opportunistic cheaters!