indigochill

As someone with both AAA and game jam experience, you just put my vague misgiving about the AAA process right into words. This is exactly it.

At least my game jam teams have always focused on what the core game loop is first, built that, then iterated, and my AAA teams have always tried more of an assembly-line approach where there's no game at all until everyone's already feeling the pressure. Because supposedly it's more efficient to pre-plan everything and just trust that it all comes together perfectly (art, level design, system design, engineering, sound, etc) first try rather than leaving time to iterate.

Which kind of makes sense when much of generic management takes its cues from automotive manufacturing (assembly lines, Kanban, etc).

I think we're agreeing.

> But even there, what you need is a persistent identifier with which to build a reputation, not a government tracking number

The persistent identifier is all I mean. I agree that tying it to a government-issued identification is problematic since it then gives the government the administration/moderation power. As long as there is a persistent identifier (and one the community owns so it can take meaningful moderation/administration action when necessary), then we're good.

By "anonymity" I mean the absence of a persistent identifier (for example, someone uploading something to BitTorrent is anonymous by default, as far as I know).

> To have community standards you have to have a community, and each community will have its own standards. Which means the standards belong in the community

Also agree with this. This is where federation really shines in my book, as it lets each community apply its own standards while also enabling networking across communities with sufficiently compatible ideals while retaining the autonomy of each community.

> worth compromising the design of a network

That depends on what the design of the network is.

In my mind Freenet is too free for reasons discussed in sibling comments (but in short, literally no safeguards against Not Safe For Life content, by design).

For me, practically, federation provides a far improved middle ground. People can still freely distribute content without being beholden to any particular middle man, but there is more visibility afforded to node operators about what they're hosting and they therefore can both remove content that they don't want to be hosting and remove users from their network who are making problems.

Gossip protocols are another solution which also works for similar reasons.

Ultimately, anonymity is an anti-pattern in the same way that the hot new zero-trust stuff is in the blockchain world. Humans, social beings that they are, fundamentally operate on trust, which fundamentally requires identification. Removing either of those creates more problems than it solves.

> You are not going to solve a hard math problem with average IQ no matter how much persistence you throw at it.

I'm inclined to disagree, but there's an important piece here that I've found when solving problems that were at least hard for me: sometimes I can get hung up on making a particular approach work when it's not going to and what I need to do is back up and find a different angle of attack.

For example if you're solving a hard math problem with little math knowledge and average IQ, if you're really passionate and persistent about it, then you'd realize you first need to learn more math to build your understanding of the domain. IQ/persistence in this case is not really about the problem itself, but more about the problem-solving process itself.

Sorry, I meant it as an example specifically of this (similar to the Hobbits "outsourcing" their defense):

> There's not a lot places in the real history of the real world where a society had no defense burden

I'm certainly not making an argument that it has signs of long-term stability.

Iceland is one example. They have a coast guard but no standing military. On the other hand, their independence is formally guaranteed by the US (and maybe others, I don't remember), so nobody's gonna be trying to annex them any time soon. On the other hand, Iceland's only been "independent" since slipping out from Denmark ~WW2.

I'll take a stab at it, since I'm one of those privacy advocates (and also prone to making sweeping statements like this).

Let's say Alice and Bob are doing life and emailing each other about normal life stuff. Charlie runs their email server.

Charlie also runs an advertising business to fund his email server. He somehow reads (not necessarily manually, but the details don't matter) the emails coming through his server to learn what people are more likely to be interested in buying. Everyone benefits, right? Alice and Bob get free email, the advertisers get well-targeted ads, and Charlie gets paid by the advertisers.

Well, along comes the Police. They know that Charlie is able to access contents of emails going through his server, because it's how he funds his email server. The police would need a warrant to search Alice and Bob's communication for something that might incriminate them in an investigation, but Charlie doesn't need a warrant. The police strike a deal with Charlie of mutual benefit. Information for another revenue stream. But still, the police are upholders of justice and only use this "email tap" for good.

Time goes on and our glorious democracy erodes into an autocratic state (ask Germany - it happens!). Suddenly our justice-loving Police have become the Gestapo, but money talks and it's in Charlie's interest to stay on the Gestapo's good side, so the email tap remains in place and we have Alice and Bob, good people that they are, collaborating on how to resist the autocratic state, which gets funneled straight to the Gestapo. Bad guys win.

Essentially it boils down to this: the means for the public to resist tyranny is a necessary prerequisite for freedom. Conversely, the more power (and information is power, especially personal information) is centralized, the more impactful a potential hostile takeover becomes, and the easier to orchestrate (much easier to infiltrate/control one source of information than thousands).

Although a different context, I always find the writeups of cybersecurity CTFs that go through the "What I was thinking, what surprises I encountered, how I pivoted" process both more enjoyable and more enlightening than writeups that simply explain the solution as if it was known from the beginning.

At the same time there might be some editing since there might have been approaches tried that didn't go anywhere, and whether that's interesting/relevant to the reader is probably a judgement call from someone who knows the domain and whether those dead ends might have been natural things to try in that specific context.

I've never heard of a musical group or artist who can make a sustainable living on just a local scene (although maybe that's rather the point, since they stayed local to wherever they are). Even for huge artists, from what I've heard merch is where the money is, not ticket or record sales (or today, streaming, which is _ludicrously_ tilted against the artist actually making any money). Admittedly I last looked into this around twenty years ago and my sample is tilted more towards the folk singer-songwriter type rather than, say, DJs.

That's not to diss local artists, though. Some are incredibly talented, and I loved the scene I was in it. Just, if we're talking about investing, making music looked like 9 times out of 10 a money sink you do for the love of it, not an investment opportunity.

He also designed the Netrunner rules that Android: Netrunner was based on, and that had such a committed community that when Wizards pulled the license from FFG, the fans just kept developing the game.

I tend to think the answer is to go back to villages, albeit digital ones. Authentication only enforces that an account is accessed by the correct "user", but particularly in social media many users are bad actors of various stripes. The strongest account authentication in the world doesn't help with that.

So the question, I think, is how do we reclaim trust in a world where every kind of content can be convincingly faked? And I think the answer is by rebuilding trust between users such that we actually have reason to simply trust the users we're interacting with aren't lying to us (and that also goes for building trust in the platforms we use). In my mind, that means a shift to small federated and P2P communication since both of these enable both the users and the operators to build the network around existing real-world relationships. A federation network can still grow large, but it can do so through those relationships rather than giving institutional bad actors as easy of an entrance as anyone else.

I disagree that open platforms are always susceptible to EEE. In my mind, their openness (or more precisely, the true openness of their protocol(s)) prevents that.

Sure, there's a lot of DRM crap on the WWW now, but there's also still plenty of plaintext. The mainstream going with the EEE crowd is a given (being money people, they have the motive, means, and opportunity to streamline onboarding in a way the openness true believers don't), but the WWW platform remains fundamentally open despite everything thanks to the openness of the protocols it's built on.

A classic example of EEE closer to a protocol takeover is how Google handled XMPP. Yet people still use XMPP. It's just not huge. But open != huge or mainstream. Usually quite the opposite (see above about money people herding the mainstream to their platforms).

A rather more blatant takeover is the more recent hostile takeover of Freenode IRC. In that case the community revolted against the takeover and relocated (some to another IRC server and IIRC some to Matrix)

Something I'm coming to realize is even independent of the whole "engagement" thing, media in general (that also goes for movies, TV, video games, etc) are manipulating our brains into expecting higher highs and lower lows than most of us will regularly directly encounter in our real lives (and when I say "expect" I mean in the sense that when we don't get that, we experience that as a negative feeling of boredom rather than a positive feeling of freedom to start doing something interesting).

When you get off that diet and start interacting with people more in real life and use "boring" time as an opportunity to try new things (again in real life, offline), it feels good. Like eating fresh veggies after subsisting on fast food for so long you forgot what real food tastes like.

I'm kinda preaching this to myself since I grew up on all that stuff and am trying to maintain the awareness of this different perspective in order to improve my own mindset (I was tempted to say productivity, but raw output isn't the goal so much as using that "boredom" feeling as a trigger for exploration).