stephbu

Watching the “Making of the Interstellar Soundtrack” is quite simply inspiring. The process and mechanics of making such moving art with such primative tools is amazing.

“On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter used in the opening scenes of Arrival is one that really punches you in the gut - if the theme and monologue isn’t enough to already give you a lump in the throat as a parent.

Wow - quite a blast from the past. I’ve not see that first page in almost 40 years.

The latter is more likely than the former, and I’d suspect reconnaissance to add to that support.

We’ve driven the west-coast corridor a bunch and contemplated several getting a different brand EV to go with our Tesla. Often seen/watched/checked-on-ABRP the EA sites down to just one or two working CCS chargers e.g. at Woodbury, OR. It put us off this year at least.

> Modern AAA franchises do not innovate. They are just shinier.

> There's still artistic and interesting things being created, just not by AAA studios :)

I guess that's my point and I didn't write it very well. AAA publishing/production has become a low-risk money-machine that feeds a very large audience occasionally surprising but increasingly bland content, while making small formulaic incremental changes year-on-year e.g. next-gen textures, bigger maps, more multiplayer servers and modes. Unfortunately a large proportion of players are happy with just that model as evidenced by the revenue derived from it.

Think of what you acquire when you acquire a company. You acquire intellectual property - products & ideas, you acquire people - future ideas, you acquire customer base - players. If you behead the company you certainly will lose critical people with it risking the products and customer base too. This isn’t Microsoft’s first acquisition, they’ll manage realignment of the new organization differently than just wholesale ejections. I’m sure Bobby’s new schedule has time for rest while he vests.

I agree with your view point - however it’s hard to see any other outcome for the AAA franchises. Player expectations of a modern title are increasing - as are the time, human, and fiscal capital required to ship a modern title - years of engineering, hundreds of people, hundreds of millions of dollars. The risks are huge - missing your date, or game experience can sink a company - consider what Cyberpunk almost did to Projekt CD RED - to ship they cut to the bone very late in the day. The economics of the AAA business is optimizing towards managing and distributing that risk thru supply-chain and scale. I don’t see a better way on this current trajectory.

> “vital network data and metadata and could impact “operator’s ability to efficiently manage telecommunication networks.”

Complete bunk - Their (TMobile et.al) “value add services” are nowt more than network content provider toll-gates that the proxies bypass. Meanwhile they are also selling every bit of user context data (position, DNS/sites, cookies where unencryptable, phone-id’s etc) that they can scrape individually and in aggregate to any and every advertiser. Context is worth serious money to advertisers.

Just as likely as basic credential compromise is lateral attacks on compute resources from vulnerabilities such as Log4J.

Enabling MFA, restricting intra/inter-VPC access, removing hard-coding credentials from configuration files/source etc., switching to SSO/removing user accounts with passwords, creating and applying restricted IAM roles, and applying those reduced privileges to EC2/ECS/EKS instances are all things that and should be done as soon as possible. (Non-exhaustive, but illustrative list)

This is a really great resource. I wrote a DNS Server in C# once upon a time, it was hard, I wouldn't suggest it to anyone unless the benefit weights up as $millions. I could have killed for a tool like this, instead I spent a tonne of time in PCap and NetMon :(

Its out there on my GitHub if folk are interested. Ironically 53 comments just before I added this comment...

Yes, it reminded me a lot of when I first started in computing. Today we are so abstracted from the horsepower that produces our experiences, to the extent that most Software Engineers don't actually know how their code works. Not saying that is a bad thing, not saying that it is mandatory, it's just an art and science that is eroding rapidly.

I started as an 8yr old, reading computer magazines, and initially coding in BASIC in 1K of RAM. I into Z80 Assembler and Machine Code at 10yrs - learning primitives like NMI's, Display DMA and Sound IO by hand with pencil, paper, and lots of reboot-causing mistakes. It was bruteforce, but still very influential in my understanding of a then-modern computer system.

Z80 was a simple-enough chip instruction set that I still remember most the mnemonics today, and many of the architectural principals are still valid even after so much time.

While preserving binary “playability” is important, the rapidly increasing longevity of titles and fighting bit-rot is an equally large challenge for both the game and software industry.

A game is rarely just the binary execution itself, but often depends on an interconnected mesh of services and downstream partners - most of which are rarely set-up/committed to multi-decade durability, especially as the surface area of problem domain, and actors/threats have grown. For example, who’d willingly port a service that only worked on Centos 5, with SHA1 hashed TLS, or the CDN service that your game update assets were delivered from in 2007.

The techniques to isolate a game from its gradually crumbling ecosystem are an after-thought when priorities are survive to shipping. I’m not inferring this is right or wrong, just indicating that it is not even in the calculus on the path to shipping.

Came here to write the same comment. The points/measures selected as “data” seem incredibly arbitrary - and seem more likely to be created to fulfill the hypothesis. Closed window, moved on.

TBH this… Not one of these consumer printer businesses is going to survive commoditization of their now-primary source of consumer revenue - ink (the printer is just a loss-leading on-ramp to that business). These suicide-pills are the last gasps of a dying business model. Businesses don’t tolerate such shenanigans, but you and I will pay the price for doing so.

While I love the clarity from of the technology, the ergonomics of reading while standing isn’t great, let alone contortions I used to go they on the Tube to do it.

The meta-business of evaluating human-capital investment seems like a wood&shovels/gold-rush equivalent.

I must be getting old <g/> ligatures:false all the way at this point...

hits tiny staple with enormous sledgehammer

While it is possible to use ES as your primary store, doesn’t mean it is a great use-case. Pushing ES to durability takes resources (people, time, compute) and rigor.

For a blog site this feels like overkill. Your priorities are durable low-freq writes, and more freq-reads. Hands-free day-to-day maintenance, and simple recovery mode such as restore. Caching (and optionally queuing) can absolve sins of many topologies to fulfill these requirements.

ES brings a much larger surface area than just store blobs and metadata. Big tax to gain free-text search - which while interesting most users will almost certainly never use (thank Google for that)

Focus on a cheaper, lighter, database engine that is durable, checkpoints regularly, and has simple, testable backup/restore processes. Ship the backups somewhere e.g. S3

My tier 3 team is on 1-week point-Dev rotations. Roughly 1wk in 9 on primary, same again on secondary. They take about 2-3 calls per primary+secondary. I’m on Tier 4 in mgmt roster, and on call every other week. Take escalations and fall thrus every 3-4mths. Tier 4 also plays duty manager during events such as product launches.

Yes, this. From this small seed grew a huge industry, the careers of millions of people, and products that literally changed the world. RIP.

Person of the year should go to Amy Hood - she brought the divide under control by starving funding and driving consolidation. It’s hard to have internecine fights when you can’t afford the guns.