100 karma · joined April 2, 2020
CD Project makes great games, but gaming industry is all-or-nothing. They already had colossal flop at their previous release. If another flop happens shutting down GOG is clearly would be on a table as a cost cutting measure.
I live in EU for many years, but due to my birth country being sanctioned I can't use any financial instruments like investing or even simplest savings deposits. Getting mortgage or loan is also much more harder for me, even tho I have much better financial situation than average person in that country. Apart of that I need occasionally go to the bank in person to proof the bank that i'm good person with valid documents under the threat of freezing my funds and closing my accounts.
Funniest thing in that is all these sanctions are issued by EU and US, and not by the country I live, where i'm pretty welcomed.
So I would better prefer them playing three-in-row. I think after some time it even would be possible easier to "sell" to them playing some kind of minecraft with grandchildren.
Also, I vividly remember parks in Georgia (country!) crowded with elderly loudly playing chess and domino, instead of watching "who deserved to die by our god-chosen almighty army today" crap.
Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys. Some exceptionaly lucky or with natural born trading skills were earning serious money — from quater to multiple salaries of an adult.
Maybe because casino-tourism in Belarus made people here slightly less prone to gambling, or maybe parents were not used to gift their children micro-transactions — e-sports betting, gambling and trading was financed mostly via in-game drops, returns from these bets and trades, and of course, sometimes, pocket money (which, on average were like 3$ per week).
That said, in modern times where micro-transactions are so common that you are ok with giving your kid V-bucks as birthday gift, I want say that anti child gambling narrative is a good thing.
2) At that time, and afaik it is true even today — you could use skins as a virtual currency to pay for a real things. It was proto-cryptocurrency/NFT in terms of being KYC and AML free.
This is really big market. There are aritcles on NYT about real life terrorists buying real guns for skins.
But without US-centric sensationalism, I beleive you can still pay for VPN or ChatGPT in very sanctioned Russia in CS skins. This can be also done with crypto (and mostly done now), but crypto has learning curve and you already playing CS.
1. I shared the app with the small audience I have and received some feedback in very unexpected places. First, it was hard to understand how lists work because putting things into lists was an unobvious process. I fixed that by adding DnD that works well both with mouse and touch (turned out it’s two separate APIs). Second, users thought that the screenshot on the quite minimal landing page was the real app, and they clicked on it. The problem was so frequent and surprising that I decided to add something funny for people who do that, as I’m not willing to contribute a lot of time to the landing right now.
2. I underestimated how bad discoverability on the internet is. My expectation was that I would make my site fully server-side rendered, add a basic sitemap to Search Console, and have a few dozen organic users during the pre-holiday season when users are filling their wishlists. In reality, I got zero — not even users, but even visits. So I started actually working on SEO, no black magic but just adding slightly more complex sitemaps, micro-markup, and other stuff which I thought only products competing for the first page would need.
My next steps are to work on getting some minimal organic inflow of users and improving stuff related to auth and user management, which is the most time-consuming part of the work right now.
I try to read everything on the internet via my reader so it is important to me that it:
1. can discover not so obvious feeds like youtube or reddit 2. makes rss feeds for non rss services — in the past it had feeds for twitter, vk and instagram that didn't provide feed. Sadly this is no longer a thing I beleive as such thing as social media public api dissappeared 3. can retreive full text of article
That said I believe you need to think of choosing of RSS reader as about choosing a mighty backend for the feeds. There is nothing difficult in rendering nice text from XML. Real difficulty is in making RSS avaliable on sites that are hostile to RSS (and will became more hostile in future).
And for the chosen backend, you can choose any frontend — just look at RSS apps in app store for your platform. Most of them will support using other backends. Reeder for Apple devices is nice.
I procrastinate on my plans to making it into true public-facing product. I can't make myself doing any marketing, have very vague monetization plans, miss some feature that people for some reason want a lot, and occasionally put crap into prod!
That said enjoy building it, learned a lot of backend stuff, felt in love with svelte, and, most important, me and my friends enjoy using it.
To balance enjoyment and pressure i'm trying have some small wins constantly, even if they are very low effort. For example current landing page was procrastinated for six month and built in 30 minutes. It's not fancy and good but it's better than 0!
> Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire
but they acquired Pocket in 2017 [1] and neither this app was growing (despite market for such apps was in very good shape few years ago) or it was delightful addition to browser experience
that said what annoys me about Mozilla, is that while they are position themselves poor and underfunded, they still act like they are backed by billionaire: they buy random apps for no reason or donating tons of money to not tech-related political organizations [2]
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/mozilla-acquires-po...
Sadly, I almost stopped using Sublime Text around a half year ago. Development of AI coding tools made flexible UI plugins support a must. Right now when I'm using ST as main editor I feel like 0.5x developer compared to myself and my colleagues with Cursor, because of being limited to very lazy and limited Copilot suggestions passed via LSP.