thedudemabry

This is an interesting reaction. It could seemingly apply for the game creator or the "Let's Play" creator.

For the game creator, their work is being built upon without permission or license (other than, hopefully, a single game sale) to create something new and interesting, but their name and pedigree is bolstered by the exposure.

For the "Let's Play" creator, their work is produced without expectation of licensing payments but they gain the ability to grow their audience using another's work as raw material.

This comment put into words the weird, hand-wavey feeling I've had about the two being symbiotic. I'm still not sure that we've found a good example of the right balance between the two, but I like the Dragon team's tone when describing the tensions.

I agree with the points you've made, but I would also posit that adding a dependency using this mutable package manager is making a commitment to maintain the integrity of that dependency, which is arguably more work than maintaining the handful of lines of code.

I completely agree with your description of prematurely setting in stone the interface between two subsystems (which could be modules/libraries or independent processes.) If a chunk of functionality is identified as a candidate for a microservice, making an otherwise isolated library in the existing codebase is by far my preferred first step.

It lets you live with the seam between the two systems for a while, adjust responsibilities and communication patterns cheaply as they reveal themselves as pain points, and delay or avoid paying whatever costs are associated with deploying a new microservice (which at my current company, at least, are non-zero.)

Outside of a few examples where we've identified a simple and truly orthogonal set of responsibilities up-front for a new microservice (e.g. image resizing, push notification delivery) I have always regretted prematurely building a new service instead of extracting it from an existing codebase.

I have a similar experience. When browsing articles and blog posts online, I definitely don't hear a voice unless the author uses a noticeable conversational tone in their writing. Especially if I'm familiar with the writer's speaking voice.

In narrative fiction, I often hear the words spoken by distinct voices, though this too wanes as I focus on reading quickly or become tired.

Wow. This rung a bell for me. I wouldn't have known how to put it so concisely, but this is exactly how numbers automatically reveal themselves to me visually when I'm considering them.

If only that extended to the size estimation part of my brain. I've gotten pretty okay at eyeballing kitchen measurements, but I'm completely useless at determining what will fit in the back of my car when shopping at Home Depot without a tape measure.

Since you're here, I just want to thank you for the most thorough, accessible, and pragmatic Erlang writing I've run across. Cheers!

I just spent two hours hammering away at a handful of thorny puzzles in this game. I broke out a graphical editor (Monodraw, you're awesome) to prototype ideas. I took many, many photos with my phone. I drew intricate diagrams in a paper notebook. And after each puzzle was successfully checked, I was far less motivated by the audio "ding" than I was by the satisfaction of making the right connections and drawing the correct inferences from all possible sources of available information.

Mr. Blow often talks about "unethical" player motivation in game design, and rightfully draws some skepticism when he does so. But he has absolutely delivered one compelling alternative in The Witness.

I would posit as a counterpoint that improving compilers, programming languages, and programming editors feeds back into improving the open-source tools available to tackle the problems of others. Hopefully, we eventually arrive at a series of summits where creating a useful solution for a non-technical problem using an open-source tools requires less and less obtuse, finicky, technical knowledge gained through trial-and-error.

That being said, I agree with you. Anecdotally, I haven't contributed anything to non-technical open-source projects outside of the odd bug report. That may be a good belated New Year's resolution.

I'm also hoping that interesting experiments in lowering the unnecessary barriers to doing powerful things in programming will inspire folks like me to find a useful way to contribute to one of those summits. We need infinite Alan Kays and Bret Victors.

I'm far from an expert, but what I've heard about Denuvo's latest generation of DRM tech is pretty clever. The details that have surfaced from their PR and independent analysts is that they're verifying the integrity of the executable and loaded libraries in memory occasionally at runtime. This short-circuits a lot of simple memory-clobbering or library-substitution tricks that crackers use to route around additional vendor-specific DRM solutions added by Steam or Origin.

Coming from the anti-DRM position, I'm pretty impressed because they found a way to verify that the original game is running as intended without impacting the player experience in any observable way. Not my favorite thing from a "you can't modify this thing you bought" perspective, but in terms of making good on the ideal game DRM, it's pretty cool.

As someone who casually browses articles about DRM technology, I'm really impressed by the partial descriptions of Denuvo's method. They seem to have found a way to thwart piracy (for some large value of thwart) without disrupting the user's experience in any observable way (no phoning home and no expensive game-loop calculations.) They haven't released many details about the system, but the little bits that analysts have been able to piece together are really clever.

I once had an audiophile coworker describe how he listens to his favorite records. In his words, the way it was intended to be listened to is probably (but not always) the closest thing to the artist's desired vision. A 2016 blues album recorded in an old shack in Tennessee and printed to vinyl is intended to be heard on a record player. A 2016 pop album released in stunning digital clarity, but also released on vinyl, is probably best listened to on a good digital setup. All communication and art is about authorial intent. What did they want to listen to?

I found myself in a similar position a few years ago, looking for a new job after a startup had floundered, and felt really stressed about jumping into a new organization with false enthusiasm. I didn't want to lead any company on, but was really deflated from my prior experience.

Thankfully, I found an amazing consulting firm constructed of around 15-20 folks with a similar history that really valued work-life balance and carefully chose its clients based on respecting those boundaries. We did really great work, within those boundaries. As a starting point for a search for that kind of company, I would recommend weworkremotely.com (where I found that firm), because they're generally companies willing to make convenience/control tradeoffs (such as working with remote employees) in order to get stuff done.

I was recently in the market for a newer SUV and the thing that struck me about every single touchscreen jammed into them was how obsolete they would seem in the near future. Even now, they're clunky and unappealing visually.

My microwave has a MyPlate.gov button on it. May have seemed like a good idea when our home's previous owner renovated back in 2011, but it's silly now.

My "smart" TV has an app called WebVideos on it, which does nothing but apologize for being shut down.

This trend of timely design rather than timeless design in appliances is not great for the consumer. It reminds me of bundling crapware OS-extensions onto budget PC laptops. Design that respects the orthogonal-nature of connectedness to a device's primary purpose should be praised.

One counterexample that comes to mind is my Nest thermometer. It's super convenient, works great. And if Nest ever goes under and turns out the lights on their API, or if wifi becomes an irrelevant network connection technology, it reverts to being a thermostat with a really nice UI.

That's a really interesting perspective. I didn't know that Canadian internet providers operated that way. I wonder what the effect would be like in the US, given that we could muscle last-mile competition regulations through. That could change my mind about data caps.

I agree that there needs to be more competition in the provider market, but I think the issue that the author and I have with usage-based billing is that it artificially stifles competition and innovation for a wide variety of industries.

As you say, the 20 or 30 GB user would pay less for using a reasonable amount of email-checking, occasional youtubing bandwidth. But that reasonable number is orders of magnitude higher than what the same user would have used 10 years ago. Innovation in improving user experiences has driven bandwidth usage way up, even for the unassuming customer. Artificially limiting that cap results in stifling innovation.

Why is that limit artificial? Unlike water or power, data transfer is not a reservable resource. Bandwidth is a shared resource, but unused data transfer capacity has zero value.

And as others have indicated in this thread, the largest providers are not on the losing end of the current service bargain. But they are losing their hold on unrelated services like broadcasting. Switching to a usage-based model from a rate-limited model in an industry where startup costs are enormous and providers make a healthy profit is strictly an anti-competitive strategy.

I really enjoyed this article, but it made me realize that I don't have a good understanding the goals of the voir dire process. It reminded me of job interviews, where certain questions are off-limits in order to hopefully limit the effects of some of the personal biases of the interviewer.

From a game design point of view, it's fascinating. The selection process attempts to give both opponents an equal chance of eliminating undesired pieces from the board. But from the system's point of view, balancing that power against the delivery of justice as innocent-until-proven-guilty/burden-of-proof/reasonable-doubt seems kinda suspect.

I'm totally going down the rabbithole reading about this over the weekend :)

Hah, same here 9 or 10 years ago. University of Kansas recommended it for their intro to software engineering class (I think) game project. My project team created a shitty RTS that used pirated starcraft sprites. All I remember was that implementing that fog of war was a CPU hog.

I'm genuinely curious, as an occasional motorcyle enthusiast myself, whether it's physically possible to counter the movements of the rider in addition to and counter to their movements, which represent a large portion of the vehicle mass. My gut feeling based on the segway is, yes, it's possible. But I'd love to hear any analyses to the negative.

The free content for ad views model is only tantalizing for web publishers because the internet, which they did not develop using their marketing budget, provides access to billions of eyeballs for very little cost. That fantastic bargain comes at the cost of playing by the internet's rules. The internet is not a broadcast medium, but a request-response medium.

This is kind of an interesting situation in that telepresence was considered presence by some subset of law enforcement. While I think that angle won't hold up to legal scrutiny, it's interesting to ponder what local laws hold up over long-distance, high-resolution, high-fidelity input connections. If a doctor living in Tokyo breaks an old-timey municipal law against joking with a patient in Blahblah, Iowa while using one of those telepresence broomsticks, could he be held liable?

How does this compare to current wire-related crimes?

Yeah, I have to imagine that this company (or at least its current brand incarnation) is done. The primary thing that they're selling is discretion. That trust can't be rebuilt.

I'm going to avoid addressing the community-created offender registry idea, because like you I'm not sure how to even begin evaluating its potential harms.

But I think that law enforcement will inevitably create something of the sort. Like John Oliver's harrassment video from a few weeks ago described, these are real crimes being committed and the state has an interest in solving them. The current weak link in prosecuting offenders is in training officers and prosecutors to recognize that a crime was committed and in providing them the tools to gather enough evidence for a conviction. And I hope we'll get there soon.

Once there is a lower bar for and less social stigma attached to reporting these crimes and having those responsible judged in court, there will be a public record. So whether someone in our community makes a death threat in real life or via Twitter, they'll face the same social consequences as well as legal ones.

I can totally empathize with the large form woes, having worked on a couple of similar client projects with similarly unusual requirements. Angular (the first version, I hear awesome things about the latest), in particular, fell down hard when managing a very large number of semi-dependent input fields. We ended up customizing large swaths of its collection diffing code to gain minor performance increases before designing a pure JS solution that was very performant, if very expensive and time-consuming to implement. I have no reason to think that React would have fared any better in either case.

For what it's worth, I also work on a fairly large React application and haven't run into organically strange performance dips. If we're designing a component to do interesting things with unbounded data sources, we absolutely consider the vanilla JS approaches before trying to model the problem in terms of composable React components. But compared to every other approach I've experienced building web applications, React does give us pretty ergonomic and efficient building blocks by default.

That's a fascinating comment! As a piano and guitar player only, I have little to no understanding of other instruments. I was shocked when watching Whiplash that drums needed to be tuned to particular keys.

This reminded me of a really fun talk from this year dealing with teaching (and internalizing) music theory using a Ruby DSL: http://confreaks.tv/videos/mwrc2015-writing-music-with-ruby-...

Thanks for the explanation. I love focused products like this with a borderline insane attention to detail. I'm giving the free trial a shot right now.

I really enjoyed the article as well, though I wouldn't consider it one-sided. While it aims to argue for changes to the current state, I thought its derivations of police culture and behavior were directed at the forces that shape them, not condemning any individuals. At different points, it very vividly brought me into the disparate mindsets that underly the racial tensions prevalent in the news.

TL;DR Fantastic read, would recommend!

Wow. I'm unfamiliar with the project, but their planned features would be amazing in any language. I'll give it a try, for sure.

Detecting HTTP servers and interacting with them in an iframe is especially brilliant.

This is an interesting topic. Eviction inflicts a disproportionate harm to those least-equipped to bear it. While rent-control inflicts a purely proportional harm to those best-equipped to bear it. But rent-control also inflicts a difficult-to-characterize harm in the form of stagnant rental construction.

I would be totally cool with a city deciding to make the first tradeoff as a public policy goal, if the construction stagnation (across all rates) could be mitigated. Have there been any successful experiments in that area (I'm only familiar with the craziness of NYC's implementation)?

I'm in total agreement here. The fight or flight response to anxiety feels really hard to overcome, but it is possible using these and other approaches.

Something else that I feel like I should mention is that if you're feeling overwhelmed, scheduling an appointment with a googled therapist near you to talk about anxiety is an awesome concrete action to take. In the heat of the moment, it can feel like admitting defeat (it's not). It's kind of a way of TDD'ing your view of yourself.