bellgrove

Games in general, but specifically AAA+ games, have an insanely risky business model. From early concept to release is often 4+ years of heads down development with zero revenue. Tastes and trends change within that time and what may have been a compelling concept 4 years ago might seem stale by release. Then there is balancing the game which is a monumental challenge in itself; when you've been playing the same game for several years you lose perspective on what's fun or not, what is easy/difficult, etc.

Not defending execs but having worked in games for nearly a decade, it is difficult for even the most passionate game studios to really understand what makes a good game. Creative processes are difficult; and for every BioWare or hot indie darling there are probably 10 or more studios who've failed and that you've never heard of.

Hoka makes excellent running shoes. How they managed to convince people they’re great every day shoes is a bit of a mystery to me.

I think the author comes from a very specific perspective; RAD tools, as I understand it, generally has only one, or a very few, software engineers per product. The way I would write code on a personal project is very different than the way I’d write code in an environment with changing team members, interns, guest commits, etc.

Also, In real-time simulations (ie games) often then way you write code can be the bottleneck. In web services the bottlenecks are more often network calls, database model, etc.

As a consumer what is the incentive to not use a card? In North America, at least, there are points programs that heavily incentivize my usage of credit cards plus other benefits like travel insurance. I also trust in the consumer protections that the major credit cards offer. On the flip side, merchants incur a fee but I doubt that even in a world with all direct payments that they would pass any savings along to the consumer.

Perhaps this depends a lot on location. Parking is a nightmare at my local Costco. The employees are friendly enough most of the time. I truly admire the value and business model but Costco is pretty much the absolute worst shopping experience I can think of.

Social networks definitely existed, they just didn’t gain the same momentum/popularity as Facebook. As others have pointed out there was MySpace - but even before that there was Friendster and Asian Avenue. I’m sure there were probably another one or two.

That’s not to take anything away from the success of early Facebook, but the idea of a social network was not created by fb.

Lots of inner monologues that have a sort of stream of consciousness feel to them. Plot is secondary or non-existent. But I do feel like his movies usually have a coherent theme and he gets it across successfully. I don’t know anything about films so am unable to appreciate any technical feats like lighting - but I really like his movies. I feel like a lot of “good” movies are also fairly formulaic; I enjoyed f1 and predator badlands, but it feels like they followed the Hollywood formula and were good movies because the executed it well.

Interesting - I got something completely different out of The Thin Red Line. To me it was fascinating to see how different people processed the war and their different struggles, whether philosophical (Private Witt), with relationships back home (Cpt Staros), or PTSD. It was a little scattered as it bounced between so many soldiers but the central theme seemed to centre around Pvt Witt and Sgt Welsh - the actual battle was almost secondary. IMO there’s no snobbery - though Malick is maybe a little self indulgent - and I enjoyed movies like Saving Private Ryan or even Fury just as much.

Agree. To me the general reaction seems to be mourning or indifference. I don’t see why the latter is a problem - there are so many gun deaths in the US; I believe there was yet another school shooting the other day too.

I haven’t seen any of this, anecdotally. Don’t confuse indifference with celebration. You all had a school shooting the other day too and I’ve hardly heart about it because it is overshadowed by this news.

I think today it is a lot easier for businesses to do what Amazon does - but a lot of that is true because of Amazon. Shopify, stripe, and logistics & last mile providers fill some gaps but they were not as widely known or as easy to integrate with long ago - most didn’t even exist until well into Amazon’s existence.

Respectfully, this argument reads like it is completely ignorant of the e-commerce landscape over the past 30 years and how much Amazon has shaped and innovated in the space. Not to mention that today they have several verticals beyond e-commerce that make up their valuation.

Having worked there in the past, Ubisoft is awful. When I was there previously there was an aggressive push for UPlay (now Ubisoft Connect) integration into all products. Then there were the bullshots for promos/E3/etc. There were often clashes with leadership who would fight against creativity / novel ideas in favour of cookie-cutter mechanics that would not add anything to the experience - certainly there was a mentality of, let's just copy what was recently successful.

I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.

Not an American, so maybe I don’t have the same depth or insight into the candidates, but as bad as Kamala might have been, I think she would have been better than Trump. But then again I think a potato would make a better president than Trump.

> Is there data for this question which would back restricting populations from having tools of self defense against tyrannic government(could happen in Canada too one day) and make it high priority for society compared to other problems?

The US has these tools and a dictator upending the country and yet these tools are not being utilized.

Can you elaborate?

Anecdotally I've found that almost all alcohol-free cocktails on the menu are priced the same as regular version cocktails; like $15-$20! In Canada, at least, I believe there are licensing and taxes that contribute to the price of alcoholic beverages, so I don't understand why an alcohol-free cocktail should cost anywhere close to the regular drink.

I feel like there’s some software adage about the last 10% being the hardest. It certainly holds true from my experience - even if they are 90% of the way there, it’s not a linear path to 100%.

Interesting... Drukqs was my introduction to RDJ when it was released and to be honest I have never really gone back to give it a dedicated listen. Perhaps his other works stand out more to me because it was released (or I discovered them) later. Thanks for the comment; I'm going to revisit the album and maybe reconsider!

I love most of his work. Drukqs is his weakest (but still good!) album IMO - Avril 14th is a great track. His Analord series is also amazing and Rushup Edge under another alias - The Tuss.

I wonder if some (or all?) of this scorn is due to LotR's pop status - many probably consider it the pinnacle of fantasy without having read through much else in the genre of that era; for many more it probably is everything they know of fantasy. His works are indeed special but there are some really great authors like Eddison, Peake, and Leiber (and Moorcock, I suppose) who don't seem to get much recognition.

I thought he was rather well known in fantasy circles. He definitely does not have the same pop-cult status as Tolkien but his Elric series as well as Gloriana are worth reading, IMO.

Maybe it's age - maybe it's because I don't use Reddit "properly" - but I feel like it has got worse over time and as the user-base has grown. I prefer to remain a lurker; no account, just viewing r/popular or occasionally specific sub-Reddits depending on what I'm looking for.

In ~2007 I'd go to Digg for low-brow content; pics of cats, posts for shock-value, humor, etc. and Reddit for news or discussion, etc. It felt almost like Slashdot but maybe less tech centric - maybe nostalgia is slanting my memory but that's how I remember it. It feels like Reddit has morphed into the former (with Ads now) - at least judging by popularity (or whatever the algorithm is feeding me). I might be wrong, it's above my paygrade and skills, but it feels like any changes that would need to happen to make Reddit a successful growth stock are at odds with what I liked about it in the first place.

Have you considered not using an engine at all, in favor of libraries? There are many amazing libraries I've used for game development - all in C/C++ - that you can piece together:

General: stb https://github.com/nothings/stb

2D Phys: box2d https://box2d.org/

UI / Editor: imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

Platform: SDL https://www.libsdl.org/

Engine: Quake https://github.com/id-Software/Quake

Ok, Quake is more of an engine than a library - but it is well documented & widely used. Even many current day AAA engines are still originally based on the Q1 engine (though, of course, heavily modified over the years to stay modern).

I don't mean to bring down anyone but I feel like game engine announcements are a dime a dozen these days. As someone who has worked in the industry I'd favor putting together my own simple engine based on libraries for smaller scoped projects. Most open-source engines, I presume, are not really going to be battle tested, well-supported, well-funded etc. There are some exceptions of course (like Godot). If your goal is too complex; why not just use UE5 or Unity? Epic has been in the industry for a long time, Tim Sweeney is a really smart guy, and the engine has been widely used in AAA and indie games.

I completely agree. Plus, part of Amazon's candidate evaluation is to consider whether they are (or clearly have potential to be) better than 50% of your peers, as part of the hiring bar. Between that and stack-ranking/forced-attrition, even previously high-performing employees can one day find themselves on the chopping block.

He received $28k from his father and $10k from his mother - in 1995 dollars that is not an insignificant amount of money. But, as far as I know, I agree that it feels false to paint him as someone who succeeded because of generational wealth.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/1/23895069/walter-isaacson-...

Slightly of off topic, but how did Fridman get to the point that he could pull big tech C-execs and celebrities onto his podcast? He has such a monotone voice (no shade meant, I am the same way, no matter how hard I try otherwise) and - this might just be personal taste - but I feel like this unedited long-form interview format is the lowest bar. I would have thought that an excellent interviewer would generally be considered one who is efficient at extracting interesting data (or can at least edit it to appear so) and can engage with & challenge the interviewee; long-form seems like the opposite of this.

I really loved the Gormenghast series. Worm Ouroboros. Gloriana and the Elric saga by Moorcock.

Perhaps I went into this series with unrealistic expectations but I found it pretty disappointing. Same for Rothfuss. There is a huge volume of older fantasy novels that are a much better investment of time, IMO.