BigglesB

Yes, it can feel like a chore at times (especially forcing myself to do more in-depth periodic reflections) but without a system like this, I quickly find myself completely rudderless & my mental health & productivity both collapse pretty quickly.

You'll actually hear quite frequently that people diagnosed relatively late in life went under the radar for so long exactly because we developed our own massively over compensating systems like this & can appear (externally at least) to almost have the exact opposite of "executive function issues"!

So if any ad is shown based on user profiling from data gathered illegally (i.e. without a proper opt-in as per GDPR etc) then the site showing the ad could potentially be sued?

Essentially, make it so onerous to legally advertise without risking a large class action lawsuit that the practice more or less dies out without technically being "banned" per se...

It's all in aid of "Free Our Feeds", a campaign to "keep social media open, people-powered, and billionaire-proof", which they've so far raised over $100k for out of their $500k target

There is clearly an intentional narrative being pushed that defines anyone who disagrees with the current administration’s ideology as an enemy who should be punished. Even if the risk to any one person is currently relatively small, just the threat itself will have profound effects on individual’s decisions.

A massive brain drain seems inevitable but such a war on free speech will also radicalise people, even if it starts only in whispers. That will likely necessitate further oppressive measures to “stamp it out” and so forth, creating a vicious cycle. With each iteration the stakes increase, justifying increasingly violent measures & countermeasures on both sides, further increasing the consequences of — and the need avoid — actually being held accountable for those actions…

Feels like not that long ago that this would have been considered a fringe paranoid perspective. I used to being an early adopter & getting my real name as a username before anyone else. Plus there was an ego thing back in the day of wanting to be a famous artist etc :-)

But I originally felt pride in showing up online authentically as myself rather than hiding behind anonymity. But I also realise that's a naive approach that only made sense in a more civilised time, perhaps, if even then... online discourse has become so toxic over the last decade that I've definitely self-censored & engaged less & less in the fear that anything I say could well come back to bite me.

Tbh, even having a post like this in my user history is apparently the sort of thing that could cause complications at the border! So much for “free speech absolutism”. Makes me wonder how many others will stay silent to minimise that risk & whether that’ll lead to an illusion of support for these policies…

Source: I fought in (and won!) a one-off chessboxing exhibition match in London back in 2012

It is great how quickly you can get something up & running & then iterate on it.

I would disagree with this, you can absolutely buy your way to the front page of Steam if you know what you’re doing. On Steam, everyone’s front page is different so it’s perhaps not as obvious as hitting the front page of HN though and it’s in the interests of Steam & most successful indies to paint a narrative of purely organic growth leading to great success.

You don’t necessarily have to have an “exceptional game” but you do need to know your audience, what they like & how to reach them. Even then, once you’ve got that stuff down, you don’t just build it & hope they’ll come via the Steam algorithm. That’ll only really help you once you’re over a certain tipping point & it’s getting to that tipping point where the judicial use of a sensible marketing budget will make all the difference.

Bringing it back to the points raised in the article, it’s very much the believe that “all you need to do is make an exceptional game” that causes indie developers to sink years into a single make-or-break game which almost certainly won’t recoup its development costs.

I’m almost 2 months into a project which essentially boils down to an iteration of Asteroids & have a demo up on Steam, but while I’m really pleased with it so far, I’d be surprised if the game even makes $1,000 at this stage, let alone $10,000. I’d be very happy with the latter though as I’m treating this very much as a learning experience, not the least in terms of getting my head around the marketing & community building side of things.

I’ve also worked on a game which I’d consider to be a “modest success” that took 2-3 years with a friend & sold enough copies for my share to so far pay (almost) £24k/year, which as others have mentioned isn’t exactly a competitive salary for a software developer generally.

In particular, while I can probably build small games in the 2-3 month timeframes suggested (especially if each is an iteration on the last), don’t forget all the “marketing admin” & trailer making & so forth. That’s also definitely not enough time to build enough wishlists to get any Steam visibility etc.

Still, definitely timely food for thought for me personally!

A device like this already has so many conflicting constraints to deal with that I’m not really surprised that they didn’t prioritise the things that would benefit gaming.

Hand controllers may well come a few years down the line (if the product line survives that long), but it’s very much in line with their behaviour historically to initially avoid requiring additional input devices: anyone remember how long it took Apple to release a stylus for the iPad?

Also seems like their efforts to protect privacy by restricting direct gaze input access may make certain kinds of gaze-related input actions tricky to implement, but the Unity video shared earlier suggested that they may be giving developers more access to that stuff (at least via Unity-based apps) than they’d previously implied.

MiFi support down the road will be unlikely to solve the issue since without bundled controllers, the market size for games that require them won’t be big enough to justify making them & vice versa… unless each studio does something like Guitar Hero & releases their own peripheral & bundles it together with their game…

I can imagine lots of game genres that could work fine but they’ll only be economically viable if the market for VisionOS games itself is big enough to support such a business model or if Apple jump-starts things by investing heavily in individual titles. Their messaging to date hasn’t really suggested that they’re interested in playing that game though.

We’ll see, though.

Having said that, perhaps this move indicates that Meta are finally acknowledging that’s where they should have been focusing their efforts all along?

Not many posts on there just yet, but experimenting with being super open while developing my next game!

Exactly the sort of child the article implies would at risk of being over-diagnosed with ADHD as a pre-teen. Except I wasn’t diagnosed until almost 25 years later.

Of course I’m just one data-point, but I’d be curious whether the developmental age differences might potentially _cause_ ADHD development among younger classmates rather than just indicate misdiagnosis.