aaanotherhnfolk

I have only a layman's grasp of philosophy. Why doesn't this field challenge its definitions of consciousness more, and why is ethics treated as an axiom? These both seem like anthropocentric positions to me, limiting the discourse. Why can't trees have a conscious experience? And who cares about the morality of a storm cloud?

I'm hard on story-driven games as well, I don't think games are very good at telling narratives because the narrator's desire to control what happens next is at odds with the player's freedom to choose what happens next.

The ideal game is somewhere in the middle where the designer focuses on mechanics which combine to produce more than their sum, and then anchor it in handcrafted content meant to show the best angle of the mechanical emergence.

One way to split the hair would be to say the mechanics are procedural (I would rather reach for the programming metaphor of composition, however) while the environments are hand crafted.

Nintendo is the king of this, but I also mentioned multiplayer games because they intentionally focus the designer on the mechanics and the levels while leaving the challenge generation to the players (and a whole conversation about how best to matchmake them.)

I can't wait for the computer generated content trend to end. I understand why it's attractive to indies, because they can focus on the engine - and a game emerges from the effort on its own. But hand generated content is always superior. Turns out Shakespeare writes better stories than even a million monkeys.

There was an era of gaming where it was reasonable to think your game could become a hobby for tens of thousands of players, with all the requisite fame that comes from creating it. Spelunky opened the door here, and a lot of high profile indies like Vlambeer and Spryfox led the surge.

What I think actually happened is that so many games started coming out, that there's more content than any one player can consume. The hand generated stuff floats to the top and a new class of indies now sits the throne. Anyone distracted by procedural gen lost their spot.

For another parallel where players choose hand generated content over procedural, look to the prevalence of multiplayer where humans generate challenge for each other on the fly - versus AI baddies that can be cheesed by easily shared internet guides.

Gitlab might also be looking for where they can grow during the pandemic.

1.5% of 6m existing free tier users is 90k accounts who now need to reduce usage, pay Gitlab, or move to another platform. Only one of these options is fast!

I don't think this is the only reason they are doing this, but it does sweeten the pot.

Simplest compromise I've heard so far is for Apple's cut to scale with size of IAP/subscription.

30% cut starting at $0.99 purchases. As mentioned this barely covers processing fees.

20% cut starting at $9.99.

10% cut starting at $49.99.

Not only does this fix the Epic, Netflix, Hey, etc issue where high value or high volume txns get unfairly middlemanned by Apple. It also incentivizes developers away from the "race to the bottom" effect that made everything a crummy $0.99 microtransaction in the first place.

A calculation of effectiveness should contain not just an assessment of magnitude but also of scalability.

Most people can't become Bill Gates or Elon Musk. There's not enough births of the computing age, or births of online banking to go around. There's a lot of people seeking to do social good within the confines of capitalism.

So while most (all?) techniques may be less impactful than Gates and Musk, we shouldn't hold back people trying to find other strategies (dare I call them entrepreneurs) by confining them to being ruthless capitalists who later grow benevolent or build Wayne Industrieses.

It is a total hassle to keep up with Googlers changing everything constantly. It's not just GCP it's every platform they control. Try keeping a website on the right side of Chrome policies, a G Suite app up, a Chrome extension running.

Thousands of engineers chasing promotions by dropping support for live code. If it was their code they wouldn't do it. The org is broken. If you want to see what mature software support looks like, check out Microsoft. Win32 binaries I wrote in college still run on Win 10. Google looks unimpressive by comparison. But they all got promoted!

People watch over a thousand hours of TV per year so if time spent was sufficient criteria for addiction we would be a pretty afflicted population. Think of how addicted I'd be to showering! I do it every day!

I would encourage you to be less hard on yourself. Think of a good game like a hobby. People play hundreds of hours of golf too and still find the time to lead productive lives.

I've been on a team like this before with heavily separated feature and refactor pods and it doesn't really work.

The feature pods outpace the refactor pods. Feature pods can use a bad pattern 50 times in the time it takes refactor pods to fix 10 of them. Not every fix can be scripted. Some bad patterns restrict the ability for the codebase to stay up to date on dependencies, etc. Lots of reasons not to accumulate this stuff faster than you can strip it off.

It also impacted team cohesion, as refactor pods started to resent the poor quality of feature pods' deliverables. Since refactorers are peers, it got weird when they exerted refactor pressure on feature devs who got wedged between their peers and their managers.

Ultimately I think this article is a little too black and white. The "just do the ticket" dev is as undesirable a teammate as the "refactors to excess" dev. It's better if devs are a little of both and the team culture helps everyone keep a healthy balance.

Analogies may be less about equivalency and more to do with bridging ideas. They can help the analogiser draw someone closer in thought, like a shout in the dark to help your friend find you

I know this was just written as content marketing, but a more accurate insight wouldn't involve the conversion to uniques at all. On one side you'd have count of unique IPs from the access logs at your web server. And on the other side you'd have count of unique IPs seen by the tracking tools you use.

And even then you wouldn't be able to map this quotient to human behavior. But you would have an upper bound on how inaccurate your analytics tools are.

Reminds me of the whole "you're holding it wrong" antenna event. Where Apple's design failed and they tried to blame it on the users.

The desired user experience is peace of mind from a physical barrier; no amount of LED bulb hidden behind the flush surface is going to solve for that.

It's also like the keyboard keys. User experience has taken a back seat to Apple's product design goals as they pertain to their bottom line. Products users love are expensive to build and maintain, so Apple won't make them. When you can't grow profits selling more devices, you start to cut corners on the ones you _are_ selling.

I had used it back when it was an Adobe Air program. Maybe the death of Flash contributed to the decision to build a web version instead; but I also think the Google Docs metaphor is a much better fit for the tool commercially. I hope they do well.