khalilravanna

Funny from the title I thought this was going to talk about how Cities Skylines lacks the soul of Maxis’ SimCity games. Skylines always felt sterile and dead. Just a piece of software. SimCity felt like a toybox buzzing with life and charm from buttons in the UI to the people milling about to the jazz soundtrack. There was vision and creative intent beyond just programming some systems. Hell, as much as everyone threw a tantrum over SimCity 2013 I think it still has infinitely more charm than Skylines.

Don’t even get me started on the gameplay loop that just feels like a simulation more than a game that’s been tightly balanced to be challenging. More of a sandbox with no real challenge to grow infinitely.

Different strokes for different folks but it always made me sad seeing Skylines take off and be talked about while the possibility of a true SimCity successor seems to have been buried with Maxis back in Emeryville.

Such a cool piece of technology. I will say though I enjoyed our 200 lb monster CRT of yore I’m thankful we have Mike Chi and the RetroTINK 4K now. Being able to play any old console on any modern TV while still having it look accurate it is a dream.

Take a company already known for its cynical “value extraction” approach to games, barely fostering enough life within its doors to squeeze out acceptable versions of games that used to be truly Great from among their vast hoard of IP—take that company and add 20 billion dollars of debt and private equity overlords and I can only assume we get something akin to the blood orgy from Event Horizon but in game company form.

I have to disagree. Evidence for this being wrong is right on many games websites a la Backloggd with plenty of people rating older games very highly, more than many new releases. More evidence: numerous games being re-released with mainly surface-level changes (older Final Fantasy’s, arguably Oblivion Remastered).

While I absolutely agree some games age like milk (IMO Persona 3 FES/Portable mechanically play like garbage and P4 ain’t much better) there are many games that were either the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there’s a bunch of PS1/PS2 era games having a big second life with the younger generation.

Same. Mine had expanded so much it almost popped the battery panel off. Thankfully replacements are quite cheap! I went through and replaced old ones on my PSPs, DSs, etc and now keep em all charged (with a mess of cables) to hopefully keep em semi healthy and not cause a bonfire in my closet.

This reminds me of my first software job, an internship in college in 2012 building an application from scratch to facilitate evaluating teachers. It was basically an app to allow people to create a form for their school’s evaluation criteria and then submit those forms. Sounds super straightforward, right? It was. The catch was our team was 2 CS undergrad, a masters CS student, and a high school student. All with no professional experience. We knew nothing. Well kind of but more on that in a second. Our manager was absolutely non technical. In fact they were the second highest person in the company (fairly small company) and were managing our project and a bunch of other stuff at the company. And somehow with almost 0 oversight we built a functional Django application that the business was able to sell and make money from. My favorite highlights were 1) the codebase was initially shared over FTP (“Hey you’re not editing file X, right? Oh you are? Ah woops I just overwrote all your changes.”) till someone intelligently suggested “Uhhh Git?” 2) the actual best programmer amongst us was the high schooler. They suggested Django, picked the DB, they suggested using Celery to speed up async work, Redis for caching, and yes, “Uhh Git?” In retrospect the only reason we succeeded was because of them. They were like top 5 on the stack overflow Code Golf site IIRC. 3) My interview was basically showing my aforementioned manager who had never coded in his life a project I worked on at school and him being like “Yeah looks good. You’re hired.”

With 10 years of hindsight, I cringe thinking back to all the bad decisions I pushed for and the no-doubt terrible code I wrote. But I also marvel and look back fondly at being given a shot and being in an environment where I could just build something from the ground up and learn everything soup to nuts on the job. God bless whoever inherited that codebase.

This is incorrect information. Check out levels.fyi. The average stock grant for Meta E6 is well over $1M/4years. Just one example. Plenty of data on other companies offers there.

Never heard of this. So I went to the website to find out what it is. "Your pocket companion" the top of the website reads. Ok, don't know what that means. Scroll down "push to talk button", "conversational interface", and some other hardware features. Still no idea what it's for. They have a keynote video. I press play. It starts with them showing a bunch of press coverage and social media. Still no description of what it is. Not even a demo of what it does. I got several minutes into the video and it's all acting like I already know what it is. I've completely lost interest. Mystifyingly bad marketing.

I wonder if the engineer working on this thought “I wonder if someone on YouTube will use this to try and become famous by breaking their finger? Surely not…”

An algorithm that closes the door harder if it meets resistance seems a bit insane, right? What if there’s something fragile? Is this how these auto closing doors normally work? God I’m happy I drive a dumb manual car with no real electronics other than a radio.

Similar experience.

- Rented Model Y. Show up and no Model Y. “We got a 3”. I’m driving to Vermont with snow but no choice now. “Ok sounds great.”

- Have to stop every couple hours to charge.

- Multiple times the GPS plotted us a route which would have battery hit 0% before arriving to charger. Nerve wracking.

- Most of the full speed charging stations had lines and if we did the slow speed ones our entire weekend trip would be spent charging.

- Regenerative braking is cool till you’re going down hill in snow with all season tires. Then it’s a great way to lock up and slide. Thankfully I’m not a noob. (Also not that I expected winter tires from a rental, even in Boston, but cmon Hertz.)

My biggest takeaway is that if where we stayed had a charger for overnight charging it would have been fine. Without that it was undeniably worse than renting a gas car. We basically had to plan our days around the rental which is a bit insane. I don’t doubt that having one to whip around local with a charger at home would rule but for anything more than short drives I don’t think a rental electric makes sense.

This sounds like it mirrors my usage. Basically treat it like pairing with a really junior dev: assume everything it writes will be wrong and then go from there. If you do that then best case it speeds you up and worst case you waste a little time reading what it wrote that was wrong and ignoring the suggestion and moving on.

There was an automated tool like this someone built at Twitter. At first it was cool just to see who the most tenured people were. Then the layoffs happened and it became essential due to the absolute 0 communication happening thanks to the Cool New Management. I remember we used the count of people in one of the default Slack channels to keep track of how many people got the axe. Woof.

Same. Only time I ever dealt with shipping on FB marketplace was the time I was selling my Steam Deck and some guy didn’t want to drive. So I said “How about I list it on eBay so we’re both protected, send you the link, and you buy it there”. He was on board and it worked well. Of course I had to eat eBay’s fee but better than getting scammed.

Ah good to know. I also forgot the obvious case where a game’s disc only contains a subset of the content on it and a download is required for the rest. It’s not really a day one patch but just the game is too large to fit on a disc.