If it's using infrared light for signaling, doesn't that mean waste heat could more easily corrupt data?
153 karma · joined July 18, 2014
2. Unfortunately quite common.
3. No. Try not to dwell on it. Pity them quietly, stay focused on the work, don't lose yourself in their negativity. Treat others as you'd have them treat you (even though they don't yet), and lead by example.
If any consolation, you're going through what I call "celebrity training." Since moving to LA, I've noticed particularly successful/famous people can be particularly difficult, demanding, and even insulting.
When you meet their assistants and see them graciously cope with their superiors being completely insulting, demeaning, abusive, awful human beings, it suddenly becomes clear: That is why you want to get to know the assistants.
It's like they know how to speak a foreign language reserved for a special few- some of the most powerful, intelligent, successful people in the world. They all speak verbal abuse.
Most people when they hear verbal abuse freeze in shock, do as instructed, feel embarrassed, explode in retaliation, or run. But if you're fluent in verbal abuse, you learn how to ignore it, see past it, even reform it, but most importantly, they learn how to work around it.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of your fellow bad-asses may have mild autism/aspbergers, which makes it hard for them to tell when they're offending you. If you get up in their face about their shitty behaviour, you might be surprised by their surprise. They may not even be able to detect how much they're upsetting you.
If you haven't already given them feedback, then you should. A simple "Hey, it kinda stresses me out. Maybe less of that?" will do. Remember to do it immediately after an infraction. People are like dogs, and the sooner you interrupt and correct and throw it away, the more likely it'll stick. Also like dogs, people need gentle reminders, as they'll keep slipping up for a while until it sticks.
Keep it light and funny, not dramatic. Try a quick, soft-spoken "rawr?" with about the delivery and tone you'd use to say "lip?" while pointing out they have a suggestive dollop of sour cream on their upper lip at a house party, and you just want to bring attention to it very subtly for their benefit.
Also remember that an important part of training your dogs is to reward, not just punish. While looking for infractions, you also want to look for spontaneous moments of good behaviour and thank them for it immediately, even with only a smile and a nod.
Best of luck!
In my shirt pocket, I always carry stickers from a game I'm working on. Whenever I bump into a parent wrangling kids, I offer the parent stickers with this line, "In case these are of some use."
I do not explain they're from my game, nor do they have any branding on them. It's not about that. It's about making a kid happy with a sticker, and it works.
They do all kinds of things with them, from sticking them on themselves to immediately creating stories behind them. The good parents usually remind their kids to "thank the nice man for the stickers" and then they proceed to be good kids and deliver perfectly adorable "thank you"'s.
I've seen and done a lot of things, and it'll sound trite, but not nothing can compare to making a kid smile.
It sounds like this service belongs in the 80s or 90s. Books? Pens? We don't really need these anymore, and it's not actually environmentally conscious to be manufacturing and mailing these things around. And who doesn't already have enough T-shirts?
These days, it seems like if you were to subscribe to a monthly service, it should be something custom-designed to solve your particular problems, not designed to be helpful for a hypothetical "typical" developer.
It would be super trippy to see entities like Anonymous and the US gov't collaborating.
I find a little bit of alcohol provides a little liquid courage to start writing a big, scary system from scratch without harming my ability. For reference, I weigh about 170lb and very rarely drink, so about a drink and a half is about the right amount. More alcohol than that, and it's a net loss. Lotta bugs, and I get sleepy.
For really dull, boring coding work that I'm not looking forward to (usually refactoring code or working on a decidedly unsexy part of the codebase that needs attention), a couple of gentleman's corners is a great way to make it easier and find my blue collar groove. For creative work (I make video games), a lightly packed but full bong rip can be great for design and story ideas, but in both of these cases, it needs to be a good Sativa strain that gives me a thinky high, and not a sleepy body high. I smoke regularly to manage depression and anxiety, which can interfere badly with coding, so while it's definitely a sub-optimal way to write challenging code, I'm still a functional coder after smoking. It beats navel-gazing/misery.
Joking around in sometimes very non-politically-correct territory is not at all uncommon in the game industry, but it is also not that uncommon in lots of other industries. The things people say when they think they aren't being heard are generally very different from what they say when they know they're being watched/recorded. The typical butt of jokes in just about any industry is whoever isn't in the room.
To be honest, I wouldn't worry much about racism. I'm not saying it isn't an issue with some folks, but on the whole, if the game industry is anything, it's a meritocracy. If you've got a fucking cool demo, you can open just about any door with it. Many people of profoundly different colours, nationalities, sexes (including indeterminate), behaviours, and smells have paved the way for you.
It's very unlike film, for example, where there are strict hierarchies of who you are and aren't allowed to talk to, and contacting the right people is extremely difficult without the right introduction.
Actual talent and what you do with your time is so important to the game industry that it eclipses just about everything else, including professionalism. I'd definitely get used to that. They really don't want to interview you. They want to make games. They don't want you to do tests. They want to make games. They just want to know whether you're a fucking bad-ass coder, to see whether they want you to make games with them. If you can prove this in some other way (a great demo/game w/ source), you can also drop any pretense of professionalism and tell them you're not going to do their tests or interviews. Great coders with demonstrable proof of same are in such short supply that you will still be seriously considered at most places.
Catch is, the rules (laws) of the Old Game are such a complex mess that we have to hire expensive lawyers at hundreds of dollars an hour just to interpret slivers of the rules that apply to our particular situations. It's not fair to those still at level 1 (in poverty) still learning to play the game and who can't afford to pay people just to know the rules. Even at level 100 (extreme wealth), no one likes that they have to hire armies of attourneys just to protect themselves from being the targets of lawsuits.
This is poor game design. We learned years ago that players don't read manuals. That's why games don't come with them anymore. We learned they can't even stand tutorials. What they want is intuitive gameplay and gentle pacing, so that their minds aren't blown with the whole wad at once, and so that they can get a sense of steady progression and accomplishment. That's definitely not what the Old Game has to offer today. Perhaps it once did, but not anymore.
Today, the Old Game essentially tells us: "Congratulations. You've graduated high school. Maybe. Now, the rules moving forward are... incomprehensible. Don't suppose you have a few law degrees? Oh no, that's right. High school. OK. Better get a job, or you'll be homeless and will starve. Cool? Oh, unless you're rich, in which case, don't worry about it. You have no obligations." You haven't played any games like that because they wouldn't be compelling.
Worse, the Old Game has evolved to a point where it now tries to place a monetary value on all things. Its precept is that all your problems can be solved with money. Need new laws? Spend money on lobbyists. Need new politicians? Spend money on their campaigns. Need a date? Spend money on a dating service. Need excitement? Spend money on travel. Need new cloud infrastructure? Spend money on coders.
What modern game has a single currency that satisfies all your desires? It's hard to think of one, isn't it? That's not by accident. I assure you, we tried it. It doesn't work. We discovered empirically that money just isn't that satisfying. You need things that can't be bought, like random loot drops, level ups, status, new goals, friends, exploration, surprises, emergent behaviours, challenges, defeats, victories, romance, and more. We've even learned the importance of breaks. Too much is too much.
The Old Game is losing its competitiveness. It would have flopped long ago if it were not for the fact that playing it is mandatory. You need it to clothe yourself, eat, shelter yourself, and receive medical treatment to not die.
But read that list of items more carefully. We have 3D printers marching steadily towards finer-grained resolutions with more materials and can now build just about whatever we need, even tools, homes, and clothes. We have the ability to automate the gathering of our own energy, the ability to grow our own food (you can eat healthier with a fish tank and some algae than you can visiting most supermarkets now), the ability to diagnose and even treat ourselves.
The costs of living are plummeting. We are approaching autonomy. These things subvert capitalism, because they subvert your need to change the spin of more magnetic domains on your bank's hard drive.
You are in an incredibly enviable position. You have an enormous amount of potential excess income, probably a decent savings, and certainly a valuable skill set (for now- you know you can already feel the competitive heat from younger, cheaper minds than yours). You can continue to play the Old Game while scaling back your dependency on it so that you can transition to a new game of your own choosing.
I get that it's frightening, but I assure you, it's mostly your addiction to money that makes it frightening. The Old Game certainly hasn't kept up with the times, but it does know how to addict its players, and it keeps us playing by frightening us with scary potential consequences if we stop playing it.
I don't want to trivialize the risk, but to put it in context, the outcome is the same for all of us. Game over is death. You don't lose or win. There's no high score or prize. All we can do is decide what games we want to play getting there.
I don't recommend playing the Old Game anymore than you absolutely have to. It's just not well designed.
Money is an addiction, like a high score for the world's oldest, most fucked up MMO called "capitalism". This MMO has been patched so heavily that it's totally unmaintainable, incomprehensible spaghetti code. The gameplay is wretchedly paced, totally unbalanced, and unfair due to the ridiculously silly positive feedback loops strewn everywhere. It rewards people lavishly for bullshit work that doesn't really benefit our species much less the species we're busy exterminating through neglect. It really needs a total rewrite from the ground up, but that's called "revolution", and it's generally bloody and awful and no fun.
So the fix is to stop playing the game. Ween yourself off money. You don't need much of it to get by. The lower you get your burn rate, you'll find the happier you get. Bills put a lot of subconscious burden on you.
And do something deeply satisfying. Cloud computing infrastructure isn't that for you anymore. Move onto something that resonates deeply. Get into the import/export business and take what you've learned to an entirely new field. Which field to pick? Try something you dreamed of doing as a kid. You were more honest with yourself as a kid.
In the meantime, if you want to start a for-profit company, why you can pick from one of a half dozen different varieties in any state in the nation by clicking on a few buttons on a website.
The only possible counter-argument to making it easy is worry about fraud. For every other reason, starting a non-profit should be easy, but if fraud's the big one, then for goodness sake, spend some money watching the non-profits.
The government should be, anyway, because most non-profits are doing works for the public good, you know- that stuff that the government used to fund? Maybe it could learn a thing or two? Maybe the government could pro-actively send them funding, instead of them having to wait and wonder whether a grant application will go through?