I think you pretty much explained the solution. You need buffering plus real time VM suspend+resume. I was thinking the client could keep sending last shown frame data back to the server and if a hiccup is detected the server stops the clock cycles on the VM and resumes the clock as soon as the buffer is empty. This may lead the user to see a loader for a short time.
Yes that seems about right. I would say lag occurs once every 5 mins and lasts for roughly a second. Not longer than that. But since gaming is such a visual medium that 1 second seems longer than it actually is. One thing I forgot to mention is I was on wifi and the performance may have been better had I plugged in an ethernet cable. Although I would add that wifi usage is going to be what the typical user opts for.
I participated in the beta and was pleasantly surprised to see how the entire experience came together. I only experienced one small technical issue. The game runs in real time on Google's servers. If you have some lag on your network, the client will drop all the frames during that time. Instead I expected behavior like Youtube where you will see a small loader and the game will continue before the lag started. This was specifically a problem when playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey cause in the cutscene the characters would say something like "Go to the * lag * and meet * lag *" and then I had no idea what I had to do next. Lag was still a rare thing during my experience. It's just that when it occurred the timing was unfortunate.
As an engineer in the Bay Area I would recommend most startups to locate themselves outside the bay. Especially if they operate a low margins business. Rent is expensive and so are the employee salaries over here. I have many Bay Area startup recruiters reach out to me with rather interesting projects. However, a quick look at Glassdoor reveals that the liquid portion of the salaries they offer is so low that I would need to live in a trailer to work there.
First SV used unethical data mining and ad targeting techniques to earn millions of dollars and now they are spending those dollars unethically to get an advantage for their kids. This is definitely a behavioral pattern at this point.
A recent law passed in India seems like the kind of regulation that is needed to prevent this kind of behaviour https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/05/amazon-how-india-ecommerce-l...
Essentially what the law says is that if you own a platform you can't create and sell products on it. This law targets Amazon and Flipkart since Amazon also uses their own website to sell Amazon basics products. Amazon also uses internal metrics to determine which new product categories to launch which other sellers on the platform won't have access to. Apple and Google app stores should also have similar restrictions.
For me the saddest thing is that even if Lyft stock tanks after the IPO the founders Zimmer and Green will have very little impact to their personal finances. The founders along with the investors will be able to move most of their stock through the markets making them billionaires. It's mostly the Lyft employees stuck in the post IPO lock up period who will be hurt by the dip in stock value. Another reason why the rich keep getting richer.
I think the author has confused himself into thinking that just like a computer has discrete physical components called RAM, CPU and Hard Disk, the human brain at some physical level has similar components. However when neuroscientists are talking about these terms they are talking in logical terms and not physical terms. The 'chemical changes' and 'rewiring of brain' that the author thinks are the reality of how the brain works are still compatible with the logical way in which computers work. The memory and computation and storage are distributed across large collection of neurons in the brain yet they logically conform to computer design principles.
Windows: Updates are absolutely critical for the safety and security of your laptop.
Me: Is this a security update?
Windows: No, it's an UI update.
Me: Please don't install this update.
Windows: Restarting...
Back in the Windows XP days you could install security patches without updating Windows to use the new UI, settings or other random things that the dev team decided to change. Wish Windows 10 brought that back.
I think the struggle to find meaning in jobs is correlated with just how abstract the jobs have become nowadays. Most people don't directly interact with their customers or they don't see any tangible effect of their work. Their work is so specialized and niche that they cannot figure out why the economic machine needs them doing this.
When I was in grad school, I applied to a lot of companies but didn't here back from any of them. Getting desperate a friend suggested I should try signing up for Dice.com. From my perspective it seemed like just another LinkedIn. So I signed up. Within a week I had a plethora of recruiters contacting me from companies I had never heard of. Not being too picky back then I took a few of these calls. Most were largely Indian run companies. One of the recruiters asked for my resume. So I sent over a pdf file. The next day she calls me and asks for a .doc version of my resume. Naively, I thought may be the recruiter isn't tech savvy so unable to open a pdf file. I told her to download Acrobat reader. She said but she wants to edit my resume before showing it to the clients. I promptly ended the call and deleted my dice account.
Really impressed that Samsung has matured the display manufacturing process so much that they can launch a mass market foldable screen. Also, surprised to hear the speaker say 7nm processor in the Fold. I didn't know the technology to fabricate 7nm chips existed.
I have the same reaction when companies say we only hire the best. Why should the best people in the world be working on this problem? There are profound problems we need to solve as a species like tackling global warming and building a sustainable economy. Should the best and brightest we working on CRUD apps?
Haha. Just to offer some more insight, I started taking Uber everyday because it was cheaper than car ownership and I am happy with that decision so far. However, now the math has changed and therefore I am considering other options. My job has decent pay to be honest. Most of my colleagues drive a Tesla for example. But, I am trying out the whole FIRE thing and not escalating my lifestyle unnecessarily.
Uber is getting more expensive with time as they try to consolidate losses. For my commute to work nowadays Express Pool costs the same as UberX did a year ago. And of course express pool includes overtly long sight seeing detours and dangerous pick up/drop off points. This is getting prohibitively expensive and I plan to switch to an electric scooter + public transit in a few months.
Google and Facebook are ubiquitous outside the US, as well. Uber faces a lot more competition such as Lyft, Grab, Ola, Didi, GoJek. Also each one of these competitors has acquired a piece of the market. Google and Facebook were also easier to scale since they are purely software pursuits. Uber on the other hand has to deal with driver protests and government labour regulations and taxi licensing.
I think there are two kinds of entrepreneurs. One is those trying to replace their current job with a hobby they are passionate about and makes them roughly the same amount of money as their current job. Two is those that want to replace their current job with a new one that is 100x more monetarily lucrative than their current one. Your blog caters more to type one entrepreneurs whereas the TechCrunch glorified stories cater to type two entrepreneurs.
Thanks for the good read. Very insightful book. I am not from a developed country but still had the same misconceptions that the author wanted to highlight. I think most people from developing countries also think the developed countries are way ahead of them and their home country is only getting worst.
Hi Sahil, I don't know why but I see you a lot in my LinkedIn feed. Hope you succeed even more in building Gumroad. Just visited Gumroad for the first time. Here is some of my feedback based on initial impressions.
1) The homepage seems to be designed around creators and not customers. It's trying too hard to onboard creators while ignoring the main source of revenue for the entire ecosystem, the customer.
2) The search bar for products is not very useful. It felt like I already need to know what I wanted to buy. There should be an alternative way for discovering, for example, top 10 selling items in each category. Like the first page a customer sees when visiting Amazon.
3) The review system although designed to help customers make more informed decisions, is not useful at this point in the product cycle. I could only find 5-10 ratings on every product. Compare this to the several 1000 reviews on Amazon products makes me scared to spend money on Gumroad.
I don't want to be too critical of the product but I feel like your motivations are genuine and hate to see you struggle. So, wanted share some honest feedback.
One additional problem for Netflix is that although they have spent over $13 Billion on original content most of their subscriber prefer to watch 3rd party licensed content (eg Friends). This further reduces the moat that Netflix is trying to build. Disney or Amazon with much larger pockets can easily woo content creators for exclusive licensing deals on their respective platforms.
For me it was this free book available on https://www.core-econ.org/
It is an easy to approach economics book. It helped me understand how a few simple ideas like free markets, firms and technological innovation led to the creation of the amazing prosperity of our civilization.
The barriers to switch jobs (tech interviews) are so high that people who are willing to switch may not be able to. This reduces their negotiating power in asking for raises.
I also agree with these observations. The AI essentially uncovered a bug is Starcraft. Mass rushing Stalkers with carefully calculated blinks can beat any opponent strategy up to a certain time in the game. I think a patch that removes Stalker blink would fix this bug and force the AI to try something else.
Game development is super fun. Especially if you make one for android or ios and let your friends play it on their phones. Feels very rewarding. It's also quite challenging to get the feel of a game right. So there is lot's to learn as a programmer.