WorldMaker

The Gervais Principle [0] decades ago was arguing that Sociopathy is what companies have optimized themselves for in their upper management. That it is almost the expected "social class" of wealthy people today.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

The Gervais Principle [0] argued that the nature of companies has "optimized" for serial bull shitters (Sociopaths, in its terms) to rise to the top of management.

The argument is that essentially that's become an entire "social class" of people, the people in especially upper management and the people of wealth/privilege.

For whatever reason our society has seemed to have evolved to a point that honesty does not "valuable" or a trait held by "wealthy people".

It's hard not to feel like this is a theme of the movie in question, too.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

> In a way, this documentary was probably _going to_ be about exploring the factual matters and whether or not she knew she was actually guilty or had some level of remorse.

I don't think it was ever going to be about that. Nathan isn't a journalist and his interests as a storyteller generally aren't about The Truth in a journalist sense, but about how we tell stories, especially about ourselves.

The fact the appearance/likeness contract matter doesn't even show up until the second half of the film also doesn't make it feel like the film is about that. That's just a subplot in the larger stories.

But the movie also teases that could just be spin to distract from Holmes' villainy. Just as the first half explores how much the villainy of Theranos by some gets pushed off to Sunny. In about the same ways. Or the first half hints that her Dad as a former Enron executive is the exact same sort of person "who never did anything wrong" but "accidentally" happened to be right there when everything went wrong. (Which is related because her Dad is also one of the big voices for "Sunny was the villain and I knew it all along" narrative in the film.)

But yeah, window into insane wealth and privilege.

The big, big "twist" is SPOILER that last second reveal that Nathan did go swim in the ocean with Holmes and might have been compromised (as Seyfried wonders in the last few moments) and the film really is just another case of trying to make it seem like Holmes isn't the villain because Nathan came away liking Holmes.

(But that's also a game Fielder is playing in this film, how much you can trust him to be an "objective" observer, so not necessarily a twist following along from the beginning, but subtext made text in the last few minutes.)

I did that with SQL Server for a time. It was particularly a strange serialization because I tried to match ULID ordering with SQL Server's UUID sort algorithm.

Assuming the database uses a UUID sort order that reflects UUIDv1 time-based sorting (the last version with timestamps and even then temporal ordering of UUIDs was only one possible sort order; v1 also included machine IDs and some databases optimized for locality by machine for reasons that made sense with v1 but also relate to why we gave up on v1 because machine IDs were problematic privacy issues in wider usage). Many of the databases implementing explicit v7 support are choosing time orders for v7 sorting, and only time orders.

Things like age of an account/record-in-an-account can help find "higher value" targets and/or "less secure"/"more likely to be currently retired/inactive" targets.

I suppose one of the things that influences my opinion is that I mostly don't play RPGs for combat encounters. They are all somewhat equally repetitive filler to me.

Microsoft has a strange habit of doing it. They sold off many of the former FASA's IPs indirectly back to the original RPG source book owner by way of what became WizKids. They made a deal too big to pass up to keep Halo IP when they spun Bungie back out, but allegedly Bungie walked away with a bunch of their pre-Microsoft IP, even if they didn't see how to use it versus building something new with Destiny. (The fact that they've reused the Marathon brand recently seems proof.) Most recently, Double Fine left with all their IP.

(Outside of games, Expedia was a spin out that got an odd mix of old MSN IP.)

> missing some of the favorite Mass Effect things (like the Geth)

Some of that is interestingly handled in the Andromeda novels and there were hints that even some of the cancelled DLC was going to reintroduce some of those elements, but EA diverted the DLC teams to Anthem instead.

I liked the fresh reset because it was good excuse to get back to the "Exploration" roots of Mass Effect 1.

That said, the rumor is the in development Mass Effect 5 had found a story way to bridge the gap between the two and make it seem a lot less like a hard reset and find a way to continue past the ME3 endings.

Of course we likely will never get to hear the ME5 story the way it was scrapped along with the studio in this announcement.

I still think Mass Effect Andromeda was one story DLC away from being my favorite Mass Effect game. The team behind Andromeda was the team that made all the best story DLC for the previous three games. Their wheelhouse was taking the game past the last stages of polish to telling the small stories that really tie the whole thing together. I still wonder what we might have gotten from the cancelled DLC if the technical bugs of the Frostbite engine switch hadn't created such a bad first impression.

(Side note, the ME: Andromeda novels are really good and hinted at a lot of storylines that we may never see closure on, but were certainly building blocks the game was working on getting to.)

Then the cycle rhymed and they got bought by EA between Titanfall 1 and 2, built Apex Legends as a cash cow, diverted to doing nothing but Apex Legends and unceremoniously fired by EA when Apex Legends stopped being quite the cash cow it was at launch.

I think it is also that DA intentionally had a very complex story tapestry, mostly tried to avoid resets between games, and Veilguard went very deep in Elf and Mage storylines at something of a cost of other storylines. If you were very invested in Elf and Mage storylines (say you had been playing and/or romancing Elves and Mages and Elf Mages since DA:O) then Veilguard was extremely personal and culminated a lot of deep lore things and personal stakes things. On the other hand if you didn't side that way/play that way, I could see it feeling a lot less memorable/important.

I thought the smaller scale helped make the stakes feel more believable. The very rare case in scifi/fantasy of seeing any sort of stakes deflation.

(DA2 I completed thrice to really explore the wild variety of the story tapestry coming out of DAO, which also lent a lot of interesting feeling to how well developed DA2 was but it wasn't always obvious in a single playthrough. and I don't expect to have that many finished playthroughs of any of the others. I think that's why it ended up my favorite.)

Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 were Interplay. BioWare's D&D involvement was NeverWinter Nights 1 & 2.

Mass Effect 3 also greatly expanded the endings in post-launch DLC. Though I also still maintain one of the greatest things about the ending was also the psychological trick it made. A lot of people complained "There was only one 'real' choice for my Shepard" but didn't see enough playthroughs to understand that why all four endings [0] were still rather equally distributed. The ending asked the player to sum up hours and hours of game play with a wild story tapestry of complex interlocking decisions and in general that "there was only one choice that made sense" feeling was that you had characterized "your" Shepard pretty strongly by that point, but different playthroughs pushed each of the four different endings into feeling like "the one and only that makes sense for my Shepard".

I still find that fascinating.

(I'm also a rare fan that I liked Mass Effect: Andromeda second favorite after only ME1 and thought Veilguard was probably my second favorite after only DA2. Engine issues and somewhat dull maps aside on Andromeda I thought it most captured the "Exploration" side of Mass Effect better than any but the first one. Veilguard seemed to prove BioWare had finally wrangled their Frostbite tools to be nearly as good at storytelling as their previous engine, and the story culminated a lot of threads for my "main" characters across the series.)

[0] There is a not-so-secret fourth "no color" "walk away" ending through the dialog trees with no epilogue, but it feels like what some Renegade Shepards' only option.

I still think that the storyline of the game and that the fact that an AT-AT just shows up in the middle of the storyline like you should know what it is seemed to hint the game might have at one point been intended to be a "Mandalorian simulator" (the central macguffins also had a very "Lost Mandalore" from Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons/"KOTOR" feel; the central quest hub pub was very Star Wars cantina-ish; etc). I don't think we'll ever get the full story on what happened, but it seemed like the game came out in a period where EA was worried they had lost the Star Wars license forever and might have panicked and over-corrected from a licensed game with a lot of excitement behind its storyline to an "original" property without the right writers to file the serial numbers off very well and without enough passion for whatever they were trying to make original about it. Whereas if they waited just a couple years they would have a shared Star Wars license again and the hype train of Disney+'s Mandalorian show, and a "Mandalorian simulator" might have been very well timed to be what "everyone" wanted.

Mark Darrah suggested releasing a single player only version but presumably this version of EA that has entirely shutdown BioWare altogether has even less reason to release Single Player Only Anthem.

There is maybe some hope archivists will find a production build of Anthem in the wilds of Steam versions with that local server code still accessible in some sort of debug flag and then reverse engineer some of the other live services Anthem depended on.

A long video on the subject from one of its project leads (Mark Darrah): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y65eoBVF0Y&t=10s

Wasm GC is not an object-level GC yet. It's still a very low level bit buffer GC. It's closer to the memory page management of an operating system than anything like JS's own GC.

It sounds like the big 7.1 performance trick will be unmanaged arenas, so yeah maybe something your LLM agent picks up for "cheap".

C#'s embeddability/interop story is as good or better than Golang's. The primary reason they chose not to use it was that C# was seen as too verbose compared to the TS original source. In particular TS used a lot of top level functions and bare/anonymous data types and while C# has picked up top level function support it's still not "idiomatic" and while C# has a long standing anonymous data type support it's not very "ergonomic", certainly not compared to TS structural typing. Golang's traits are a bit more ergonomic by comparison, unfortunately.

I also still think C# would have been a better long term option for maintainability, but I'm not on the Typescript team and didn't get a vote, and I can understand their methodology even if I don't agree with it.

In this case I think it is just a popularity contest. Takete/Maluma were the first version of the study in the 1920s. Kiki/Bouba replicated the study in the 2000s. So recency bias plus "simpler" fake words can explain some of the popularity.

Part of the fun of the experiment is questioning the nominative determinism here. Did cultures pick a name like Baobab for that tree because of something this effect is showing or is just coincidence? We don't really know. Linguists have often wondered if there is a "universal grammar" underlying even our oldest languages that we don't know the full rules of, but coincidences and convergent evolution in our languages seem to tease could exist. Kiki and bouba are one of the more interesting experiments in this space to ever get repeatable results.

The strange spelling is partly intentional to make sure that people read it as a very fake word with no known definition. In English bow, boba, boob are all real words.

The et in etc (et cetera) being Latin "and" (in essentially "and so forth"). The ampersand is said to have started as a very stylized "E" and "t" merged together, so it does have an interesting historic appropriateness in &c.

But a lot less coherent personality. Bob had a somewhat coherent cartoon world aesthetic. This just looks like "TEMU Myst" to me.

It's still not quite something you know or you are, so it is a different factor, even if we can quibble on if it is more weakly "something you have" when not hardware specific.

I think it's only technical users and paranoid users that care about export. Non-technical users are fine with device auto-sync and Cloud backup/restore, which is what they get today out of the box from the most common Password Managers.

We are in the era where the average non-technical user doesn't even necessarily know what a file even is, they are used to apps managing everything with Cloud sync and "just working".

Export can be handy for "offline" backup, but in practice the thing to backup offline is the device PIN or Password Manager "master password". Especially because in practice you aren't using just one Passkey, you are using hundreds or thousands. (One per host/domain/app, at least.)

> implement functionality FIDO does not like

The KeypassXC GitHub issue wasn't "FIDO", it was one guy acting like he could make threats on behalf of FIDO, without even the full backing of his employer, much less other members of FIDO. It was bad communication to write a suggestion in the form of a threat and pretending to speak for others.