chipsy

It isn't a one-size-fits-all market, and lumping together "marketing" with the industrial sales funnel does a disservice to the numerous games that used other marketing techniques, on their own or accompanied by a traditional push.

That doesn't mean that marketing isn't important - if your goal is commercial then it really should be up in that 60% of developer time range - but the way in which you do it requires at least as much design thinking as making the game. The whole premise of the game needs built in sales value or else you're part of the crowd, fighting to break out.

Most of the tricks you can do with advertising and production values only reduce reasons for people to say "no" to a game. They don't make people say "yes", and if nobody says "yes" then all you can do is churn people through the sales funnel, because your game doesn't and never will solve anyone's hair-on-fire problem.

If you're in enough demand you won't be able to work for free for everyone, and then you can start naming your price.

But it's still dependent on "your passion" being in demand in that sense, which is a fragile thing. There's a lot of demand for some musicians, and almost none for most of them.

IRC population has also become harder to track because more people now set up cottage networks that have one server and only host a few channels. There was an article a few years ago discussing this exodus from big networks which I'm having trouble bringing up now.

The worst that can happen to IRC is something like Usenet's death - growing too popular to scale. But scaling isn't of primary importance because a network hosting 100,000 channels is only mildly more convenient than 100 networks hosting 1,000 channels each. Nobody wants a chat stream that looks like a popular Twitch channel, because there is no longer any signal when that happens, so big channels are outliers. (And Twitch chat is IRC-based itself - demonstrating how much this technology is a commodity.)

IRC isn't going to stagnate completely until people decide to give up on text-based chat. The main thing it has trouble with is new client features like inline images.

I came up with a three-tier model myself:

   1. API or API-like things (grep)
   2. Highly configurable app (Photoshop, Word)
   3. Default-heavy app (Instagram)

The tricky thing is that 1 and 3 are the easy slices, relatively speaking. If you only need the 80% case, it can probably be automated into something as simple as a selfie app, with a finite, well-understood level of design and engineering. And if you need something extremely custom, you want the data model exploded into its smallest parts so that you can put it back together again - and the small parts can again be relatively simple, well documented, and easy to maintain.

But the middle part, the product that is complex and configurable, but not really "programmed" with code except through a limited script layer, is the fat middle, because it demands so much more UI, and an experience that is well-integrated, amenable to default workflows, and yet also very easy to customize. Over time, big software projects always drift towards the middle.

The article specifically fits my model's type 1. A type 1 product is nearly ideal for the hacker who wants to glue together a bunch of different technologies. It only falls down when the abstractions are too crude or mismatched to the problem. But the operating system itself is more like a type 2 product - there are numerous assumptions about what the environment, services, access methods, etc. look like, conventions that were established early on in computing and haven't yet been revised. Every programming language makes accommodations for working in that environment, and not your weird custom operating system.

Yesterday, I had the idea that I should try working as a technical writer as a way to realign my past with my future - I don't want the stress of debugging things every day, and I've done this writing informally and always thought, "I wish I could spend more time getting this right but I can't justify it."

An hour and a half later, I had started conversation with the maintainer of an open source project, speccing out a portfolio project with him. It's a bit early to tell, but treating the writing as my only goal, rather than as a supplement to coding work, is doing things to my perspective...there's definitely a need for the humanities in technical environments. A really great piece of writing can do more than instruct clearly, it can motivate creative uses, put the techniques into perspective and lead people away from dangerous ideas. As well, in-depth writing about technology is a great way to review its real utility and add discipline to development that has gone astray.

And there is so much technology that would benefit from doing this better. I think it might be the proper antidote to cargo culting.

The analogy to math always lingers in my mind: before we had efficient, well-understood formulas, we would always rely on lookup tables to solve real problems. True of construction in ancient Egypt - also true of many programming problems today.

I got into an argument the other day about the idea of using fewer names for things in code - I wasn't doing a stellar job of articulating the point since the obvious rebuttal is "if you aren't using a name what are you going to use instead?"

But it happens so often that what you are - or should be - implementing is not a business rule, but supporting computation - and in the latter, naming is relatively unimportant. And when you do finally reach business logic, it turns out to flow more smoothly if you allow a procedure to be a complex "train station" or "Manhattan Island" and don't carve it up unnecessarily, because more is done with fewer variables or more obviously short-lived and temporary variables. Fewer things get passed around, thus fewer things need names. And the code is generously imperative but can be understood because a top-to-bottom reading is possible.

Using more table-driven code just happens to be one particularly effective way of streamlining logic and named fields out - it's more effective than most uses of OO abstraction because it is a concrete specification of possibilities, yet it doesn't preclude extension in any dimension.

The people who are going to load up on electronics first will be the relatively-wealthiest in the area, which generally means commerce gets the first dibs, not students.

Still, cause for astonishment is valid. There's plenty that can be done even with simple news, price checks, and email functions. For most of the undeveloped world that has meant a basic featurephone until recently - but who knows what's going to happen next?

The problem is that that is too much business for individual creators to be bothered with. It is not a matter of whether they can literally do it if they behaved as a rational, rent-seeking Homo Economicus, but whether it's actually on their minds to do business first and not just act on their emotions and run away from the problem altogether, leaving money on the table. For artists, the latter is far more likely to be the case. We should not blame human beings for being flawed and fitting into our arrangement of society poorly.

Inaccuracies and overly-broad statements of this article:

Bob Moog did not invent the idea of a synthesizer. It emerged much earlier in the 20th century, from a mix of electric-powered organs and various other early electronics, with many of the inventors working independently. The boundary between "organ" and "analog synthesizer" has a gray area, and there were some unique pre-Moog instruments like the Theramin. Moog's contribution was to make programmable synthesis more affordable and standardized for professional use - but many of the "synth-like" sounds used in 60's and 70's records are organs with effects pedals put on them; small electronic organs had become affordable in the post-war era.

The distinctive-yet-samey sounds of the 1980's aren't entirely attributable to presets; the presets are a symptom of the underlying appearance of digital technology in music. Digital simultaneously opened up new realms of affordability and privilege - at the same time you got cheap tone boxes like the Casio VL1, you also had monsters like the Synclavier, used on "Thriller" and in many movie soundtracks, with high-end configurations billed in the ballpark of $500,000 dollars(1980's money). Digital gear also changed mixing in favor of extensive production, leading to the heavy reverb washes and gated snares everywhere. Using a "high end" sound was a status symbol, so it was flaunted even if that meant you were using the same orchestra hit as everyone else.

The reappearance of analog is attributable to the same backlash seen in every media market that has experienced a race-to-the-bottom in price points: Synth designers have decided to do an end run around the piracy/DRM/price-pressure issues by going back towards manufacturing. The sounds are "classic" now, and marketed as such, with a few new tricks added to keep up interest. Musicians often get into very idiosyncratic workflows and for some of them, working directly with knobs and patch cables is the right way to go.

I started working with it for DSP and game code recently. It hasn't posed any major issues yet. I am getting what I wanted out of the language - something that is more modern than C or C++, but retains much of the root lineage. There is a lot of room to configure things to your liking and disable things you don't want.

The standard library forking issue is far in the past now - which doesn't mean that it's as complete and comprehensive as it could be yet - for an example of one I ran into the other day, the "pure" annotation is absent from some math functions because they call out to C standard libraries which use global state for error codes.

But the things that are the focus now are mainly "nice-to-have" technologies that will be good for productivity - check out "std.experimental.allocator" for an idea of what's cooking. There are also multiple implementations of the compiler tech rolling around now, not just the Digital Mars one, which is a good sign for future quality.

As long as the industry keeps growing quickly, we'll keep seeing teams that consist entirely of inexperienced youth.

I think the only thing that distinguishes now from previous periods in the software industry is that there is less of a engineering-driven culture in the companies - product and sales more frequently take a leading role, and the technology used is cheap and accessible enough that bad developers can still make a go of it, get the business through launch and into profitability(albeit with catastrophic bugs, no security, no backups, etc.).

If you expand capacity in one mode but hold the other ones steady, you're still running into Braess' paradox. It doesn't matter that there is more bus capacity if people were tolerating the existing car congestion before. People will not switch until the roads are jam-packed.

The paradox still applies when we consider the Tokyo rail network. There's lots of rail in Tokyo - it transports most of the commuters. Major lines are quite literally packed during rush hour. [0] Adding more rail will make the system even more popular, so the problem won't get better.

OTOH consider congestion charges. When interviewed[1], individuals do not believe they were significantly affected by the introduction of a charge, even though overall traffic levels go down substantially, by one fifth in the example used of Stockholm.

What we are changing when we change capacities is not speed or comfort, but a preference for what kind of congestion we get and how cheaply it will be filled. If our only goal is congestion reduction we should not be looking at the roads at all.

The San Francisco area has plenty of car traffic, but more recently, within the past decade or so, the public transit has become extremely popular. This is not because the transit has gotten substantially better by quality or speed metrics. It is because the population is making more trips and longer ones, and the public transit systems were the last resort for capacity. Demand for new trips is in turn caused by available housing being located distantly from workplaces. If newcomers were able to live where they worked, congestion would drop significantly.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRBLnth4oSg [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC33HAq--x8

That only appears to be the best option if you specify all trips to be made via private automobile. Road bandwidth is more efficient on bike or bus, but people will default to a car if the road is well suited and there is parking at the destination. It's not that the road is useless, it's that it perpetuates demand for driving and so can't solve congestion except by brute force saturation.

It's one of the big shifts in planning thought to get away from a simple engineering problem of moving more cars faster and try to integrate different modes and give land use a more careful impact assessment.

There are a lot of aspects of the phenomenon of "chiptune sound" that aren't given much due. For example, early arcade hardware was more prone to using analog components - think of the rumbling explosions of games like Space Invaders, or the 6-voice subtractive synth used in Sente games[0], reused by Sequential Circuits as a standalone synth[1]. The Atari 8-bit chips(both TIA and POKEY) contained "distortion" effects (based on a variable-length LFSR) that could be used for both noise and guitar-like tonal timbres[2]. The true successor to the SID is the Ensoniq DOC used in the Apple IIGS[3] and SQ-80[4], but it gets little attention. And lastly a number of later chips, including the Game Boy, had a low-res wavetable on at least one voice, which allowed for some more timbre options(albeit 90% of the time it was a sawtooth)[5].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xCiOXQJO18 (MAME emulates this chip but does a terrible job)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa-Cwn4po40

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDeV7wrB2c0

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WujTzBCRBAY

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y8fNnDJUx0

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caz21XapSiA&list=PL3B271CECB...

In truth, we don't have a very good picture of how to model the inflationary effects of BIG, except by crudely analogizing one demand increase with another. IMHO the main thing to keep in mind is who immediately gets money as a direct consequence of a policy change, what they feel obligated to do with it, and how that might turn into a bottleneck later.

Traditionally when money is "pumped into" a economy, it's via lending to banks(producing a "multiplier" effect). That money lands in the hands of the biggest capital-holders first - big businesses, investment firms, etc., so it acts to stimulate supply more than demand. The hope is that firms will see the easy money as a signal to expand their operations and take on bigger projects. If it doesn't work - and efforts like QE have basically stopped working - all you're going to get is greater inequality of wealth, as the money stops being put to use and feeds itself back into the capital markets.

And when we stimulate demand in the fashion done in the post-war era, with a huge expansion of government spending, the money is mostly landing on people building war machines and associated technologies. People are being employed and paid, but they're locked into employment of a certain nature which isn't directed at consumers - so more money is chasing a broadly similar basket of goods. The late 60's and 70's saw rapid inflation, and the technical advances and new markets that opened up from that period to today are pretty much all rooted in that early investment in military R&D.

On the other hand, when you have money land directly into the hands of consumers, that money is only skewed by cultural values. They could go Kickstart some wacky project. They could push for higher quality goods. They could pay off debts, change residences, and go back to school. Consumers aren't purely profit-seeking or utilitarian - how the macro situation would change is one huge unknown, but the main point of appeal is that it would be a very fluid kind of demand, and if consumers start disliking their ROI in one category, they can smoothly transition to something else - which means the traps and bottlenecks of other policy changes may not apply.

The snowflake syndrome is the modern means of building a minority political bloc - for any underrepresented group or condition, a representative comes along and declares themselves champion of the people(the people that they represent, that is), and encourages shaming of the rest as a form of unification.

It's the shaming that eventually got to me. It's such a prolific and harmful tactic. The people who do it the most tend to lack virtue themselves, when held up to the light. And it doesn't matter how well your internal sense of guilt works - you can always be judged poorly for reasons that become obviously unfair when pushed to far-reaching conclusions. It encourages you to polarize into a completely fanatical or disengaged state, without a healthy middle. If we've improved any, it's in that outright dehumanization is less common now, replaced with convenient euphemisms that diffuse blame.

Stoicism has the appeal of "It doesn't matter how bad the outside world gets - I am going to do my own thing and fix up my own principles and actions." It encourages you to work on small everyday behaviors instead of constantly diverting your attention to the Big Important Problem that the news is currently pushing at you(and that you can't do much about, without derailing your entire life).

A lot of our inability to automate comes down to not being able to operate at a big enough scope. For example, all commuter transportation problems are ultimately caused by having too many people, too distant from one another. But we can't simply move them closer together for a variety of reasons, and so we have to think about trip planning instead. But we could also reduce the need to make trips and reduce the average length of each trip.

The future is going to be full of complicated thoughts like this - problems to which automation can solve some things but policy and design solves others. We'll have to be really good philosophers to avoid catastrophic error.

We aren't streaming 4K video regularly yet, and 8K is coming up. Each time we double the dimensions, we increase the pixel data four times. We also have higher frame rates and bit depths. This is only going to stabilize after we've reached some extreme resolution with lossless encoding - we're only just now getting there with audio data.

This is a "spiky version of the present" future - all the prominent things seen by one individual, extrapolated linearly. As such it has a discontinuous shape.

The main element I would critique is in the culture. Culture in 2015 will feel old and dated by 2030 - our memes, our artisan craft breweries and hip indie games. Something else will overtake them. Culture has the soft power to change people's perception of reality even as the substance of that reality remains more stagnant. And culture isn't directly associated to a new tech so much as it is the proliferation of that tech.

For example: "Drone" today equates to big war machines dropping bombs. "Drone" tomorrow could mean the kid across the street with a new toy and the ensuing shenanigans inflicted on stodgy 50-year-olds who think you're going to blow everything up.

Saturated fats make carbs digest more quickly. For example, if I have oatmeal I can go to bed immediately because it's low GI. But if I add a spoon of peanut butter then my heart will get a little bit contentuous and keep me awake.

As well, adding a new substance introduces the potential of allergens. I have a dairy sensitivity. If I have a grande latte from Starbucks I'll spend the next hour in a haze. I can have it, but it's worse than just sugar in many respects. But the equivalent soy latte leaves me refreshed. For some people the opposite might be true.

She's trans.

It means that games download fast and don't need a separate thumbnail. It's the most strenuous limitation but it makes sense in terms of being able to host content cheaply.

9-6(8 at office, lunch hour uncounted) is typical for an established company that is not experiencing a managerial crisis.

I absolutely agree with the assessment of "it's things that cannot be explained with calories." In China, within the span of a generation nearsightedness went from a minor condition to one spanning the majority of the cohort. That's something brought on by industrial lifestyles, but we never want to turn to food as a culprit. Food tastes good, after all. Food is life.

But if you take the idea seriously, then the problem is - which ones? For me, I've arrived at the answer, more of less, of "dairy and poultry." The first one, specifically casein(milk) protein, gives me all sorts of small issues if I treat it as a staple - joint inflammation, hayfever, trouble concentrating, elevated heart rate, etc. It may have been responsible for my scoliosis and nearsightedness too, though I'll never know for sure. The second tends to trigger migraines. I've only ever managed to become substantially overweight by consuming a lot of dairy and sugar, and as soon as I cut those out I slimmed down again.

Fortunately I don't have to put my foot down too much to make a compromise. When I have a burger it's always the plainest burger, since all the others have cheese. Nearly any snack food manufactured to taste "addictive" will contain the odious phrase "milk protein", with the exception of some potato chip flavors. The most unavoidable one is pizza, but I can take a hit there occasionally. And I'll default to lower-GI foods like oatmeal where I get the opportunity - although I tried the "avoid grains" strategem a while ago, it was never something that resulted in a _reaction_ like milk, it was more a matter of "after having milk I wanted to eat more."

Now, if I could get my mom to actually try following this plan I would be content. But despite apparently experiencing many similar issues in a more stark, life-impacting fashion, she is far, far too stubborn to give up her 4 AM coffees with milk, her various yogurts, cheeses, etc. She will, in fact, point to the microbiome as a reason to consume those things.

I think our main error was in thinking that objects could be pervasive, in the same way that today one encounters "test-driven" culture.

They work reasonably well at a lower level of granularity - make a fairly complex data model using components under the hood, and then publish the resulting api as a more streamlined mutable object.

But the diminishing returns are fast once you start needing each piece of data to be fungible and adapt to new requirements, and then wrap it up in an object. The relational database has been standardized for some time in large part because it guides you towards coherent data automatically - systems that resist that model are more likely to experience a catastrophic failure, and "ORM" systems are likewise brittle.

Good. Wall Street doesn't know how to safely derisk on its own.

It depends on what you want out of life, I think.

If you try to rapidly see and comprehend an ultimate truth head-on, you pay the price of only being able to think about and express such truths in forms which look insane to outsiders(terrorism, fascism, conspiracy theory, etc.) and with correspondingly drastic consequences to the well-being of you and others.

But if you want to live a healthy, ordinary life, you shade yourself from some of those truths, knowingly or not. You express them cryptically and meditate on them in a deliberately obfuscated way, or dismiss them for the moment. You do not allow that knowledge to throw you around. That doesn't mean that you don't act on the knowledge at all(which is how epistemic learned helplessness is presented here), so much as it does that you can proceed to find paths to acting on it that are indirect and do not trip your insanity alarms.

Culture itself demonstrates this property. It changes rapidly enough, but it does so gradually, most of the time. Reality in the year 1985 meant something recognizable yet quite a bit different - in food, fashion, and music, in cultural attitudes, politics, and should-you-says, and in everyday usage of time and activities. Some of the things that were taken seriously then are dismissed now, and some of the things that were laughable then are taken very seriously now. And in the 30 years that transpired, many of the same people are still around, but nearly all have changed their status and outlook in some way. Many have led reasonably content lives while doing so. Isn't that amazing?

Altruism defined in wealth terms is very narrow. It allows you to steal billions and give away millions and come out with a net balance of "wealthy philanthropist". The characters of this article are so carefully constructed to evade this question that I have to assume malice.

I think many do-gooders struggle with the problem on different terms: whether they can find a place where they both fit in the system and yet also do good for the system. For example, a basic researcher in the sciences does nothing at all now but might open the door to great achievements later. A politician will be distrusted no matter what they do, but if they are adept they gradually reorganize the landscape to enable policies progressive towards their vision of a better society. There is enormous room for people to do work that benefits them and nobody else, but that doesn't lead to a concrete conclusion about all workers, because this problem is faced in every sector.

It's predicted by the market for vinyl and cassette, not by magical thinking about books - a decline, then a rebound. The actual information content is correctly priced to approach zero. The leftover value goes to people who want something premium in their collection, people buying from a local store based on their recommendations, etc. The creators no longer solely derive monetary benefit from product sales, instead using a mix of crowdfunding, performance, and derivative license deals, as well as premium product.

The new world of media isn't ideal, but it offers a lot more flexibility than the old one. You'll be able to get free information, while traditionalists will retain their outlet.

The "3-story barracks" you speak of - they're actually the most humane compromise we have. Something that is relatively cost-effective to throw up, but accommodates a decent number of people, and when built throughout a neighborhood will easily pass the critical thresholds for future services. Much of San Francisco is also built to 3 stories, and it's one of the most dense areas in the country. It's a geometry problem, as you point out - but also a cost problem. It's cheaper to have mid-rises everywhere than a few high rises, and people find shorter constructions more humane on average. But the construction height isn't the _only_ thing to worry about.

Land use in suburban areas is mostly premised on maximizing car traffic. That's why we have the big six-lane streets and the huge parking lots with sad, small strips of grass separating everything. If we optimize for maximizing people movement over car movement, the streets get smaller and so do the parking lots; transit and bikes get more accommodation. Room opens up for more destinations, and you get more access at a lower average speed and energy consumption, further improving the land value - all just by changing the design requirements. Traditional cities are very energy-efficient.