Minecraft, Call of Duty, Warcraft, Diablo, Elder Scrolls.
778 karma · joined October 23, 2015
To this day there's significant social pressure to not acknowledge how much racism and racial division played a role in them growth of suburbs in the US, but ultimately it's the documented history which is revealed to those who research the topic.
In many cases individual families were not overtly racist but they were caught up in the economic effects created by racist dynamics and felt they had no choice to go along. If property prices in your neighborhood are decreasing, because neighbors are leaving, and you have the means would you not feel compelled to leave to somewhere with rising property values? Real estate firms intentionally tried to create waves of fear to get people to rush to move, selling low, and then profiting on selling to newer Black families.
It was common for suburbs to have deed restrictions limiting areas by race, and for a while federal housing guidelines would not underwrite developments that did not racially segregate.
At the same time there were massive amounts of state & federal funding pouring into suburbs and highly disruptive unpopular overhauls occurring in cities while cities were also losing tax revenue. For people with the option the future of good living seemed like it was in the suburbs independent of segregation, but part of what fueled the frenzy was the racial segregation.
I think "make it observable" is a good principle for a lot of software, but also is useful here. Like if you have something changing in how it operates think about perceptual clues that are unobtrusive but give the user a sense of what's going on. Think a car engine sounding weird, a laptop getting hot, or a water bottle being filled up rising in pitch.
Being able to rapidly clue in to how something is running in a bunch of different ways is useful. In synth plugin systems I've seen with node graphs I think having some sort of perception of data traveling that you can assess at a glance could be useful. I can see both color and perhaps the "texture" (dotted, dashed, etc.) of the connections being mapped to some important property of what's being transmitted.
On the "cross interactions" thing perhaps there's a design opportunity to find interesting properties of different components you wouldn't normally expose that you can feed into other systems. Perhaps if audio were to clip that is both something you don't want but also a control signal that can feed into something that self-corrects, or even entirely changes the composition. With that you might have some sort of dynamic gain that as it approaches clipping it steps into a new composition creating a strange "ecosystem" of sound.
In general there's some interesting opportunities to try to create real systemic components that try to make mechanisms with interesting properties rather than precisely controlled things. Perhaps you add an input that pulls the current moon phase, astrological signs, time of day, or weather. Then your composition could change and be a sort of live work each time, but not in a totally arbitrary way. If you wanted to extend the idea of "observability" all the way to the user you could by convention add some brief narration at the start describing the conditions of the composition "It is Wednesday. Rain is forecasted. The following composition has been changed accordingly."
It also may be interesting to weave in more sophisticated mathematical systems, or physics simulations, and then feed them into other components. It'd be quite odd but I can imagine like a bunch of balls on ice floating around and when they touch that creates a signal output, but you could have an input that's like "table shake". It'd be fun to see a program triggering these sort of rube goldberg-esque chain of things to create some sort of interesting sound scape.
No idea if that's helpful!
As an example in No Man's Sky the player immediately starts with a jetpack. It makes it so the terrain is approached the same way every time: you just jetpack over it. Very rarely something is tall enough to require you to walk around.
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a positive counter example. You have stamina so you're constantly thinking about the height of cliff faces, you can glide so you're thinking about height points and straight lines through the world, cliff faces cannot be climbed in rain so you think about the weather, slopes can be slid down on a shield, etc. There are a bunch of systems that may you think about the topology of the terrain, so even just varying the height map becomes interesting.
Similarly in No Man's Sky there are different resources but they work the same way on each planet and the player interacts with them pretty much the same way everywhere.
When I say elements should be "understandable" what I mean is that a trap, which Dwarf Fortress falls into, is to add a vast simulation which the player feels they can never really grasp. Simulations should not be a black box because then they begin to feel like a random number generator.
The aim shouldn't be to make an "infinite" game but to make a very interesting system for the player to slowly understand and master. The developer shouldn't just add stuff, but they should think about the long journey (and eventual mastery) a player might take as they spend significant time with the systems.
Could we describe the first humans manually writing Assembly and their own higher level abstractions as "compilers"? Loosely I think we could, and LLMs fit the same mold.
Releasing the models for free accelerates the trend but if you're a startup that needs leverage it's a good way to build brand and customer momentum that will be relevant in the more established future market.
I can see an American company taking on the same strategy, and in fact Thinking Machines based out of San Francisco did that just a few days ago by releasing their first model with open weights.
The tech industry along with US foreign policy has become much more zero-sum in its ideology in recent years, and I think that's a tremendous mistake.
It's used heavily by major web apps like Figma, it's used to run non-Javascript languages on Cloudflare Workers, many compute-heavy web libraries rely on Wasm modules, many web games rely on Wasm, it's used for safe plugins in some native apps like Microsoft Flight Simulator, amongst other use cases.
Apple has often in the past positioned itself as an aspirational product for those who aim to be tasteful, talented, beautiful and wealthy.
The risk of becoming too disconnected from reality is that the typical person may stop aspiring to the sort of rich-person reality Apple presents. Think of how many of the symbols of wealth of prior generations, like fine tableware, were rejected by younger generations.
In the past Apple has been pretty good at anticipating and responding to shifting cultural dynamics. I wonder if they'll recognize and adjust?
And yes you're right again it's only in the allocator.
The blog post cites the concern that malloc could block, however when Rust's standard library is compiled with support for atomics enabled the Rust allocator's locking implementation busy loops instead of waiting on the main thread.
See the comment in the Rust source here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/77a4fb62f70c6ea05e182...
This means that if care is taken to avoid any other code that makes the main thread wait it should be possible to use a single shared binary instead of the more convoluted approach presented in the blog post.
So they likely have to wait out the green card process abroad unless they secure a dual-intent visa like an H-1B.
There's also 75 countries that the US has shut down consular processing for so those people may be locked out getting a green card entirely.
I believe the issue with what you're describing is that if you're on a temporary visa, like a student visa, applying for a green card shows intent of immigration so you cannot return to the US on a student visa.
If you have an H-1B already you may be able to do what you're describing. If you're a recent grad in the US this basically locks you out of trying to get a green card until you've already secured an H-1B.
In many ways the current evils of the US are abusing the ways our government is least democratic.
The way the Senate and the electoral college weakens the power of some votes, the checks of Congress on the executive branch, and the appointment system of the Supreme Court all relied on political norms to confer stability. Those norms are being broken in favor of raw political power which is undermining the checks & balances fundamental to our country.
In few other stable democracies would such slim electoral victories result in such sweeping power. Our nation has relied on norms and civility for its stability as much as law, and discarding those makes our democracy substantially worse.
Trump received 49.8% of the vote, 1.5% more than Harris, and his power and ability to engage in corruption is virtually unchecked. In other countries with stronger democratic systems he would be forced to compromise to attain a stronger majority.
Like you would say who you think is credible and human. An algorithm would evaluate trust on your behalf and it would look to the people you trust, and then who they trust, and so on and assign scores to people. Distrust, or even other observations, could percolate in a similar way.
Then on social networks, or some sort of small-web, new users would need to find other people to vouch for them to establish trust. When viewing websites or social media posts the trust score of users could be shown alongside content, and used to filter feeds / visibility. A troll or bot could rather rapidly get picked up by a network of distrust so they could be filtered out quickly.
The algorithms and details of such a thing are fuzzy to me, and I think a lot of care and thought would be needed to try to ensure it doesn't collapse under subtle flaws with time.
On that first point I think it's important to remember that the lineage of video games comes from board & card games and sports. There's always been an ability to inject more complexity and less-intentionality into those things. Sports in some ways are like a simplified and altered role-play of war battles, and more realistic war roleplaying does exist but it has less appeal.
As humans we like solving things and noticing patterns and the intentionality of games taps into that appeal.
On the latter point I do think these world models will eventually be used to meaningfully contribute to building games. I think people will have to find new ways to design that balances intentionality against the freeform nature of these simulations, but it may take a while to have the capability to do so.
Over a decade or so the US is on course to lose far more than it's saving with these changing politics.
Japan-width streets, despite their increased safety & land-use efficiency, are prohibited most places.
I think they're reflexive people and for Andreessen the long period where he was massively invested in the shadiest crypto companies required pushing a culture of conformity.
A lot of Andreessen's investments were essentially pyramid schemes and the greatest threat to those investments was intellectual honesty & introspection.
Under that pressure from him and others a lot of the tech world shifted towards being more tribal. We saw a huge shift away from intellectual honesty and critiquing actions & ideas on their merits to instead a culture of fiercely defending founders and relentless hype.
I also believe that's why they shifted towards the political rightwing, because the more tribalist approach is presently rewarded on that side.
Arguably the greatest threats to the US's future is ourselves. If we fundamentally corrupt who we are as a nation we've already lost before the competition with rivals has even begun.
Our significant tech advances could become tools of our own downfall if they violate our values or undermine the social mobility of the American dream.
Frankly I think the people pushing this competitive mindset (particularly against the EU) are trying to mislead otherwise intelligent builder-sorts to not pay attention to the looting & destruction of American values.
A few weeks into it I noticed a persistent ringing and I thought it was some sort of electrical wine in an old house. A week later I realized it was permanent so I cut out my sound cancelling sleep routine, but the tinnitus has stayed.
I was deeply into Microsoft products for a while. I got my start coding an indie game for the Xbox, I spent years using Windows Phone and developing an app for the platform, I interned at Microsoft twice and then later worked there as a software engineer for a period.
While there I did my best to improve the product I worked on, and I went beyond what most engineers do when thinking about product quality. I would gently and politely email other product teams with bugs or minor product issues that I felt were low hanging fruit. On my own team I was often one of the stronger advocates for the user and for product quality, and sometimes I got pushback for it.
My opinion about Microsoft's product culture is not formed lightly.
I don't believe Apple is faultless, but I think they demonstrate far more awareness of how their product decisions accrue to a lasting brand. It's not just marketing spin, it's real actionable decisions over decades that accrue to brand perception.
Nowadays Chromebooks offer more design competition for Apple, and even historically Linux distros have had more ideas for Apple to learn from than Microsoft.
Apple is also imperfect and I feel leaves tremendous room to do better, but they are still much better than Microsoft.
Take one topic: UI refactorings. Apple has rolled out disruptive UI refactorings but they've also rolled them out consistently across products and throughout their software.
Microsoft did not have the internal leadership discipline or commitment to design to ever get their products in alignment around a design language. It is common on Windows that the included software all uses different design toolkits and design paradigms. For years Windows was infamous for having multiple ways to configure even common settings, often requiring falling back to the old version, because they were not able to ship a unified UX.
Microsoft routinely has 'UX design scandals' of various sorts with dark patterns forcing Microsoft's preference on users. Apple has those as well, but far less often.