501 karma · joined January 25, 2010
If someone jumps on something I'm struggling with, I take it as an opportunity to really pay attention to what they're doing and try to learn. They might just be way stronger, but they probably also have some better technique ideas.
For #2, I just take it as a slightly awkward attempt to reach out and socialize. Advice isn't harmful. At worst it's a mild spoiler (oh well), or just wrong (then ignore it). At best it's a great chance to learn something.
I'm awkward and it's rare for me to start a conversation, so I just take someone else talking to me as an opportunity to connect without having to make the awkward first step, and try to spend a minute or two (at least) talking with the person.
I let my kids have access to the app in the hope they would be inoculated against being obsessed with AI video and it actually worked. They got bored in like 2 days.
It simply doesn't compare well with handcrafted short form videos that are already plentiful on TikTok (which I absolutely don't let my kids watch).
In every other case by writing your own engine you'll be wasting your time on a million already solved problems instead of actually, you know, making a game.
If you're interested in game engine development, or graphics programming, and not so much in finished games, then you can write some engine code as an educational exercise, though.
Not only possible, but exactly what AI does. :)
The goal of having every developer viewing the code with their own preferences just isn't that important. On every team I've been on, we just use a standard style guide, enforced by formatter, and while not everyone agrees with every rule, it just doesn't matter. You get used to it.
Arguing and obsessing about code formatting is simply useless bikeshedding.
This by definition can apply to only 16% of people who are at least one deviation above the mean.
What about the other 84%?
That definitely could be something interesting, but I'd probably need a decently larger player base to get enough data, considering how many words are possible.
In practice, the way I approach this is by reacting to complaints from players who either don't know words I included or were disappointed I didn't include a particular word.
That said, wow. Charging a monthly fee on game installs is absolutely wild. The personal fee (for first world countries) is $0.20 / month. If you charged $10 for the game, you'd be losing money after only 50 months (around 4 years).
Besides which, it's not like a majority of people will ever quit the news. You alone doing it is not doing anyone else a hardship. It's not like anyone is thinking, "Ugh, I have to keep scrolling twitter so that I can keep my news-less friend in the loop."
I find Marie Kondo's advice on this very practical: https://konmari.com/gifts-that-dont-spark-joy/
“The true purpose of a present is to be received.”
"... You don’t have to keep using the gift forever. If you try using the item and decide that it still doesn’t suit you, thank it for the joy it brought when you first received it – and bid it farewell. The true purpose of a present is to be received, because gifts are a means of conveying someone’s feelings for you. When viewed from this perspective, there is no need to feel guilty about parting with a gift that ultimately doesn’t spark joy."
I rarely read the entirety of the documentation for something, but I usually will read the entire FAQ for something I'm interested in. It has a far higher usefulness-to-length ratio than most documentation, since if done properly, everything in the FAQ was useful to somebody (or hopefully many people).
It's also arguably the best format for certain types of information. For many things, there are "obvious" questions one would ask about them (e.g. "Does this take into account X?", "What about Y?"). When I think of these when reading about something, I'll check the FAQ, and it's often presented right there. It ends up being by far the easiest way to get answers to these types of questions.