gmjosack

I ended up grabbing the Affinity bundle since it's half off despite concerns about Canva. I'd expect even if they end up moving to a subscription I'd at least have the versions I bought for an extended amount of time. I still have a working copy of Photoshop CS 5 as well. Hopefully we see Affinity remain committed to affordable non subscription plans but if they don't I think the one time purchase will last me a long time. If they put out a version 3 without subscription and it's compelling i'll upgrade, if not i'll continue to use 2 for I'm sure years to come.

puzzmo.com | NYC | Full-time hybrid | Junior Frontend Engineer

Come build web-based games with Zach Gage (Knotwords, Good Sudoku) and Orta Therox (TypeScript, Artsy) and a small team of designers and engineers. We’re pushing what’s possible with web tech for games: help making existing games even more native-feeling, and help us ship a steady stream of brand new games to our new daily games site.

Tech: React / TypeScript / Node.js

Learn more about the job and apply at https://eevd.fa.us6.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/CandidateExperienc...

oh it's a very temporary sigh. finish up what's in the pipeline and get the hell out of there.

I'm in a lot of gamedev communities and I'm not seeing any complaints. Everyone agrees this is fine. I believe if they announced this initially people probably would have complained but nothing close to the backlash there was. Most people just don't trust Unity after this. This is after all the second time we're getting a promise not to change the terms on an existing engine version as a result of backlash. How long until the third?

This is basically everything policy wise they needed to do to quell the storm. This is honestly what should have just been announced originally. So much reputational damage just to arrive at a reasonable model weeks later.

I'm happy for all the Unity developers out there that are breathing a sigh of relief. Hopefully they can ship their ongoing projects but I'd be hesitant about a continued long term relationship with Unity after this.

This isn't the first Unity backlash and I'd be surprised if it's the last.

We've been calling it "Install Bombing" after the common abusive practice of review bombing. Unity claims they have anti-fraud systems in place and you can always appeal with their fraud team but I don't have an reason to blindly trust a black box that when fails makes Unity more money and puts the burden on me to prove otherwise.

This video[1] talks a bit about this from a lawyer's point of view and is a really good overview.

For people who are not paying as much attention to this I'd like to summarize the main points of frustration.

1. Unity has just shown they believe they are able, and they are willing, to change the terms on what you have to pay them. What are the bounds to terms like this? What if Unity is tight on money and decide to squeeze developers further? The risk to continuing business with Unity is very high as you have unknown future exposure.

2. The monetization model they've chosen is tied to installs, not revenue. On the initial day of announcement they even claimed re-installs would count but they've since walked that back (or "clarified a miscommunication"). Unity has been extremely wishy-washy on how they even plan to track this mentioning proprietary systems they can't elaborate on and your only recourse is to appeal if you think they got the numbers wrong. This is not a metric tied to your revenue and is difficult to plan around.

There are a lot of people arguing against a strawman of people who don't want to pay unity but that is not at all what this is about. Unity chose a terrible model they can't even explain for how they want to bill people and apply it to all past games that use the engine for all future sales.

This would be similar to if Microsoft said everyone who ever built anything on C# has to start paying a fee for every future install because it includes the .net runtime.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMrebXypJo

The terms have been changed so that all future installs can incur a fee even on older games that used unity even if the haven't been updated recently.

To add to this I found these tutorials good starting points for a structured lesson with my kids. Would do about 30m-1h a day (mostly up to whenever they get bored). When we started off we'd focus on letting them run the GUI changes and I'd work on the code and explain the concepts to them until they started wanting to do the coding themselves.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/first... https://kidscancode.org/godot_recipes/4.x/games/first_2d/ind...

After that my son wanted to switch to making his own game so we've been re-implementing boss fights from cuphead and lately he wants to make an idle game.

I've also found its fun to just get them to be part of the design process in game jams. It's really great to see the creative ideas that come out of young kids and game making with kids has been super fun and educational.

The 4 games on this page were all made in Godot:

https://gareb3ar.itch.io/

I've been doing Godot development with my 9yo and he loves it. If you're looking for something with less emphasis on text based programming Construct and GDevelop are engines I've heard good things about as a continuation from Scratch.

This is definitely a known issue that I've personally experienced but is even listed as a warning on the docs[1].

> Godot 4's HTML5 exports currently cannot run on macOS and iOS due to upstream bugs with SharedArrayBuffer and WebGL 2.0. We recommend using macOS and iOS native export functionality instead, as it will also result in better performance.

> Godot 3's HTML5 exports are more compatible with various browsers in general, especially when using the GLES2 rendering backend (which only requires WebGL 1.0).

Web exports are essentially unusable for Mac users. It's the biggest complaint I get from my games using Godot 4.x.

[1] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/export/expo...

Would love to see more disruption in this space. Like others have said it's actually amazing how bad the calendar/scheduling portion of PagerDuty is. Multiple places I've worked we ended up making our own interface to managing schedules because the UI at PagerDuty is so bad. Also, people mentioning the rock solid reliability of PagerDuty likely don't have good monitoring of PagerDuty. When I worked on monitoring in the past we regularly encountered delayed notifications and ingestion failures. Pulling up their status page right now confirms they still have multiple issues a month. At a past employer we had our notification system actually check outstanding alert status and fall back to direct SMS when the ingestion latency was too high.

I worked on pygerduty, a python client library for PagerDuty, at a past job so I spent a lot of time talking to people at PagerDuty but I think they stopped inviting me to their "Founder's Club" meetings when I told them I didn't care about AI Alerts and wanted better UIs for scheduling and better reliability.

I use CheatEngine and other memory debugging tools as part of reversing/modding single player games for fun. Recently I had a browser tab open to a CheatEngine doc page, not even the executable open, and Fortnite wouldn't let me launch, said I had cheating tools open.

Yea, this was for internal communication, presumably to catch leaks. I've not worked there for 10 years now so I can't speak to whether they're still doing anything like this internally but I wouldn't be surprised.

~10 years ago I discovered Google doing steganography and their e-mails by accident. I was searching gmail for an e-mail message using a word I knew was definitely in the message but it was not being found. Eventually I found the e-mail and confirmed the word was definitely there. Ctrl+F and type the word, it's not found. Turned out there were random Cyrillic characters mixed through the message. Confirmed with others their messages similarly had random Cyrillic characters, but different from my own.

Always found it ironic that their own products (gmail/chrome) gave away their attempts at steganography.

While looking into new engines recently I bailed on Unreal because all the docs and tutorials push towards Blueprint. I'd happily use C++ over Blueprint but everything is pushing Blueprint hard to the point I just moved on. Been looking at Godot lately and I really like it and if I need something more than GDScript provides there are bindings to GDNative. I think for some people Visual scripting is probably nice but for me it's an inscrutable mess of flow charts that's way more difficult to use, debug, build understanding of quickly, etc.

I don't know if I'm what you're looking for but I recently quit my job to take some time and work on projects for myself. I've budgeted at least a year to see how things go. I've spent the last 20 years in the web space and honestly tired of it.

I've spent a lot of time adjacent to games in my free time, doing reversing/modding/speedrunning tools. I'm currently learning Godot and plan to jump into development hard next week working on a rogue-like platformer, in a similar vein to Spelunky.

I was reading through some of the posts when the modal takeover happened and my natural instinct to close the page kicked in. I have so little patience for modals these days.

If you want some kind of delayed call to action maybe some kind of toast at the bottom would be better. As it is today I'm primed to abandon sites that do a full screen take-over while i'm reading.

I don't have a great suggestion unfortunately but I appreciate your thoughtfulness on the matter. I didn't intend this post to be inflammatory, it honestly feels like I notice Jerry in particular all the time but it seems clear my memory is faulty in this regard. I plan to take a more analytical approach to how frequently I notice these and if I have any thoughts I'll send an e-mail.

I think this might be part of why it sticks out in my mind so much. The name with no information just feels like an ad and nothing about it makes me curious it's just "there's that headline again..."

I think it's clear to me at this point that it's not just Jerry, other people seem to notice other ones more. Maybe it just depends on what times you're more likely to visit the site or which headlines you pattern match on more.

Oh thanks for pointing out that page, I'd honestly never noticed it. I think because it's behind a `more` tab in HN Enhancement Suite. I'm honestly surprised to see they're there only once a week because I feel like I notice it incredibly often and somehow none of the other posts on that page really stand out. Either way I appreciate you sharing that as it confirms maybe something just stands out more to me about these posts than others.

I'm not familiar with the mechanism in which these posts occur. I'd expect if it were automated I'd notice them more often but I feel like I only have memories of Jerry posts and it feels like it's very often. May be confirmation bias but there's not exactly a way to search for these kinds of posts.

I've recently started using Notion and I'm surprised at few things that I find incredibly annoying with it so far. Since it seems there are some Notion staff here I'll take this as a change to give some feedback to hopefully improve the product.

* No read-only mode. I like to have documents default to a read-only mode so I don't accidentally typo random characters, or delete something when try copying. etc.

* No floating table of contents. There is a ToC block but it's at a fixed position, where it's not terribly usable especially for long documents having a giant ToC at the top isn't great. I've tried using columns but it just squishes the rest of the document way too much

* Floating heads. When you have multiple collaborators the avatars zooming up and down the left side of the document is incredibly distracting. I'd love a way to disable this completely. I don't care where in a document other people are reading.

* Database/Table horizontal scrollbar. Almost every database in our documents end up with this giant scrollbar that spans edge to edge, looking like a horizontal rule, breaking up the visual flow of the page significantly. I keep thinking it's some kind of page break.

These are just some of my initial impressions. I do think it's a very visually nice product and has a lot of neat features but I'm pretty surprised by some basic QoL stuff missing and hope to see it further refined.

Well, we're currently all remote, heh, but usually prefer on-site in SF. We are open to remote for the right candidate though.

Tokio and Futures have existed since 2016. I worked on the initial loqui implementation that powers rpc at Discord in raw Futures/Tokio in late 2018. async/await was also on nightly back then. Jesse finished it and migrated it to async/await and later used that as the basis for Read States. The timelines make perfect sense.

The anecdote was about getting back the security deposit after moving out.

This happens to me every time but if I request desktop mode it always works 100%. Might be worth a try.

Taxes stress me out. If the government could easily send me a bill of my sales taxes at the end of the year I might prefer that but given the system we have I rather pay at time of purchase over manual and more error prone tracking over a year.

Regardless, and maybe it's not a great distinction, I find a difference in a company not charging sales tax vs a company sending an excited e-mail about how they've found a loophole to avoid sales tax. Maybe that's just me.

Regardless of my ability to accurately account for my online purchases, I prefer online sites take the correct amount of taxes to reduce my liability in regard to accurately accounting for my online purchases.