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What every well-meaning parent will say, when pressed, is that they want their child to "be successful". But that goal brings us right back to the gauntlet of testing and ranking; to be successful in the systems of industrial society means being relatively better at what is tested, not your overall development. Everyone who doesn't fall in line manages to survive only by finding a "cheat code": a personal portfolio that has no competition, drive to start a business, pulling off a successful crime, marriage into wealth.

That is, the only way to really make the parents happy is to never promise a clear path to success, for once you do they will rush to gatekeep it for their child, disregarding the child's motives or perspective. It's the "extrinsic reward negates intrinsic reward" hypothesis at the greatest scale.

Don't look at individual politicians, look for the emerging trends in the political class.

The NYT has a century-plus history of pushing the defacto national narratives used by politicians - while they might not be openly backed by any federal interest, they are certainly stochastically willing to play along. Therefore, if they publish something like this, take notice, because it's most likely that some group inside the power structure wants it to now become a political issue as a part of a future economic framework. The current framework is in a failure mode and this fact is becoming increasingly evident at all levels - support for a radical change of some kind must be built and factions are emerging across various sides of the issue.

As the article notes, the last time four-day normalization was floated was the 70's, also a period with substantial labor unrest. The resolution ultimately arrived at then was to cut safety nets, taxes and jobs, clearing the way for investment in the productivity booms of the 80's and 90's. This time might be when the issue is campaigned upon, since the prior doctrine has already run its course and the signals are raining down from up high to attempt a green-energy "own-nothing" economy. The contra faction of this, of course, is also something Rick Scott is pushing - the "crypto economy." The actual outcome is likely to have a blend of both approaches, as is typical with political realignments. Four-day normalization could be compatible. We shall see.

J Paul Morrison "Flow-based Programming", while not really about documenting historical methods, got my head thinking about programming in terms of the pre-CPU paradigms of data processing with unit record machines, since that is what this style draws on most strongly.

Along the same lines, while not a book, videos and documents about debugging electromechanical pinballs and modular analog synthesizers provide great reference points for what digital systems could look like or strive to emulate, and physical engineering, woodworking and construction decenter the computer as the whole of the process while still being very logical and systematic. At the top level it's usually finding the right structural metaphor that dogs practical programming and gets it into a loop of endless data collection and reprocessing, so it helps to have other things in mind and try to discern ultimate aims.

It's very hard to compare oneself to others.

There's an arcade bar I frequent to play DDR. If I go later in the evening when it's busy I will always get someone who is a bit awestruck and says "I've never seen anyone so good at that game" and I'm like "yeah, there are better people than me" or "the machine tells me exactly how bad I am". But it does not really matter to this audience that my technical skills are less than perfect because what they saw was astonishing regardless. And for me, it's a personal journey in returning to a game that I played for a while when it was new and then returned to many years later, after realizing that having it there filled in a "missing piece" of life and the actual thing of being good at the game was not really important.

More recently, I've been doing some digital illustrations for fun and have gradually built up a process that is hugely digital in its design: composite reference images together, do some tracing over them to study the proportions and planes, then redraw as needed with a simplified design, using art fundamentals to guide me. Doing this has largely eliminated "guess and check" and gives results that are extremely accurate and detailed in their representation, more than any freehand from-imagination result. But that's just one measure of success in the imagery. I'm still going to be a bit jealous of artists who have great control over their freehand lines, but I can finish work this way instead of sitting and dreaming. So it's a great step past the creative bottleneck.

With stories like those of a Chris Sawyer, there's a combination of obsession with the craft and coherence of purpose. That is, Chris spent a huge part of his life thinking about assembly code and its applications towards games, and then eventually put it towards a project that had few contradictions to it, which became RCT. There are many people, myself included, who put years into their game and then realize they were kidding themselves and had an incoherent approach to the design that ensured it would never feel finished or focused. And when that happens the craft ceases to matter - the project is just a timesink.

Failing in that way, putting in a huge amount of time on a game, really made me despair for a bit, but then right as that happened the cryptocurrency portfolio I had made a few years prior achieved moonshot gains, which is like, "oh, well then, I guess I succeeded anyway?" That moment really clarified how arbitrary succeeding can be; the comparative effort/return of the two endeavors is enormous.

You're only 30, and that's actually fine. Between 30 and 40 often marks a shift in attitudes because you're getting out of the feeling of being a "young striver" trying to get ahead of the crowd in a highly visible space. You can fall into a depressed state if where you are isn't where you saw yourself, but it's also easier to give yourself leeway to pursue things nobody else cares about, which means it can be creatively fertile. It just rests a lot more on continuing to build yourself up beyond your personal issues - health, finances, character development, virtues and all of that. Maybe you don't have the fortitude to make a huge game project or research cutting edge techniques, but you can do more modest things and still find admiration as with my DDR sessions.

I think the analogy of cryptocurrency's position to the 90's internet is the wrong one to pick, because it describes an environment with some maturity and acceptance in its base technologies, primed for waves of consumer commerce to take hold. The proper example to pick is personal computing circa 1982. When you look at the envisioned uses of personal computing, the advertisements really reach: it helps your child learn. You can store recipes on it. Balance your checkbook. Write documents. And (whispers) play games.

As well, one can occasionally find reassurances in the literature that the computer is your friend, not the back-office monster that billed you incorrectly last month. Would you feel convinced? Many people saw no use for computers in their lives. And the reality of personal computing at that point was that it was mostly a nerd hobby, with a few niches where it could have immediate, direct impact(white collar information work). Professional graphic design functions, audio and video were all still years away, far out of reach on the consumer platforms. It all cost too much - the computers, accessories, the networking options.

But it's also a representative inflection point: microprocessors as a product category had only been available for a little over a decade, and it only took about a decade from there for the embrace of all things digital to kick into high gear with the onset of commodity PC clones, the Wintel monopoly, and then the Internet. Cryptocurrency is seeing a trajectory like that - we're nearing 12 years in and, like early personal computing, it's understood by few, often advertised deceptively, and seeing massive amounts of growth and capital investment. The applications are gradually appearing, and industry incumbents are hopping onto the bandwagon, but it's sneered at by experienced code jockeys: they work with much bigger and fancier hardware than these toys. Nobody is sure of the business model to use. Prices are all over the map.

In many of the arts, a typical famous biography will involve study and development of a great amount of technical ability through their 20's, and then to branch off from that some time in the 30's into a more streamlined and conceptual approach. They favor different things: a twenty-something will "take to the grind" because they are hungry to do so, and this often sends them on the path to a totally incoherent result - but is great if it's just a really hard puzzle and all the pieces and prerequisites are there(which is often the case in industry). Someone older may have less sheer energy, but is placing much more calculated bets and using more abstract thought processes, which is good for problems with long timelines and large scale.

It helps to give some context to 90's game coding by looking at the predecessors. On the earliest, most RAM-starved systems, you couldn't afford to have memory intensive algorithms, for the most part. Therefore the game state was correspondingly simple, typically in the form of some global variables describing a fixed number of slots for player and NPC data, and then the bulk of the interesting stuff actually being static(graphical assets and behaviors stored in a LUT) and often compressed(tilemap data would use either large meta-tile chunks or be composited from premade shapes, and often streamed off ROM on cartridge systems). Using those approaches and coding tightly in assembly gets you to something like Mario 3: you can have lots of different visuals and behaviors, but not all of them at the same time, and not in a generalized-algorithm sense.

The thing that changed with the shift to 16 and 32-bit platforms was the opening of doing things more generally, with bigger simulations or more elaborate approaches to real-time rendering. Games on the computers available circa 1990, like Carrier Command, Midwinter, Powermonger, and Elite II: Frontier, were examples of where things could be taken by combining simple 3D rasterizers with some more in-depth simulation.

But in each case there was an element of knowing that you could fall back on the old tricks: Instead of actually simulating the thing, make more elements global, rely on some scripting and lookup tables, let the AI be dumb but cheat, and call a separate piece of rendering to do your wall/floor/ceiling and bake that limit into the design instead of generalizing it. Simcity pulled off one of the greatest sleights of hand by making the map data describe a cellular automata, and therefore behave in complex ways without allocating anything to agent-based AI.

So what was happening by the time you reach the mid-90s was a crossing of the threshold into an era where you could attempt to generalize more of these things and not tank your framerates or memory budget. This is the era where both real-time strategy and texture-mapped 3D arose. There was still tons of compromise in fidelity - most things were still 256-color with assets using a subset of that palette. There were also plenty of gameplay compromises in terms of level size or complexity.

Can you be that efficient now? Yes and no. You can write something literally the same, but you give up lots of features in the process. It will not be "efficient Dwarf Fortress", but "braindead Dwarf Fortress". And you can write it to a modern environment, but the 64-bit memory model alone inflates your runtime sizes(both executable binary and allocated memory). You can render 3 million tiles more cheaply, but you have to give up on actually tracking all of them and do some kind of approximation instead. And so on.

The hypothesis of the "blockchain startup" rests on the idea that this tech can succumb to the standard platform monopolization plays and ultimately see a new "big tech" company emerge. A lot of the market action to date is driven by this: capital pouring money down a chute to create a dog and pony show of heavily hyped tokens. There's still smoke in the air from all the action, but the picture is getting clearer.

By building it as a company, you're taking a fundamental disadvantage to anonymous competitors, because the anonymous act as a sovereign micronation and can make the rules for themselves, while you are just another striver within the state, forced to compromise and not step on toes. I wouldn't rule out tokenization as a company, but I sense it existing in a separate, collaborative niche from the anon projects.

An older pick that came to mind is McLuhan: The Media is the Massage. It has that sense of "possibility" to it, even being a half-century old.

The actual supply coming into the market remains the same while the mining difficulty shifts according to network hashrate(determined by the time between new blocks), hence assuming demand for Bitcoin is static, there is an equilibration mechanism creating a break-even price floor. Bitcoin's price appreciation has demonstrated that demand can be sustained through multiple market cycles, and nothing in particular has changed that assessment.

Bigger worries for Bitcoiners stem from centralization of hash power, and whether transaction fees alone will sustain the network as it exits the inflationary period.

Take up martial arts. That's what I turned to after a windfall. I only stuck with it a year but it got me in the right frame of mind to continue feeling ambitious.

Exchange value only matters when there's trade. My view of crypto is "wrong in the right direction" because it currently addresses macroeconomic coordination via mimicry of traditional finance. The technologies it uses to achieve decentralized coordination do matter, though. Automated consensus on a large scale is meaningful. But it needs a post-trade, natural-systems view of the world to really make sense.

Nintendo has a different core business model, one which is hard to replicate in another public corporation because it goes against the norm of making the quarterly results look as good as possible: Instead of scoring a hit and immediately trying to line up out yearly sequels, or trying to greenlight productions based on a marketing pitch alone, Nintendo typically rotates out IPs to match with prototypes and marketing concepts that have been on the go for a while. Likewise, they tend not to go the route of filling the shelves with a checklisted set of SKUs(e.g. 1 action, 1 RPG, 1 sports game per business quarter) - they will jump on some trends and occasionally dabble in clones and sequels, but their bread and butter has come from a more gradual approach of making each product focused, coherent and unique versus making it incrementally better than a competitor.

Ubisoft - and most of the publishers - can't do this because they're set up to make games that are large in scope, boast technical excellence(an ever-increasing bar) and are destined to be yearly franchises: quantities of assets and features are given precedence over coherence, which means that you get a trail of papercut discontinuities, dropped balls and lack of focus throughout the experience. Coherence has a degree of power over the game experience that is probably hundreds or thousands of times that of scope alone: it means that the software, assets and design work well together instead of creating "door problems" that dev time is spent solving. This means that a game built around a design that coheres well is automatically more polished since it never had to compromise the experience to solve problems. Nintendo regularly takes design shortcuts to this end, omitting entire categories of assets.

The true polar opposite to a Nintendo-style approach is something more like Bethesda's open world games: the game that's launched is a simulation engine with a large sandbox scenario. It may work and be playable to completion by itself, but the underlying product focus is to use it in a way supportive of tinkering, modding and exploitative gaming - to let the player bring a complicated system "off the rails". This tendency towards simulationism goes all the way back to Bethesda's origins in making stat-heavy sports sims. It makes for a less immediately digestible product, but one that can garner a devoted fanbase because it promises to give you most of the scope of a certain kind of role-playing fantasy, and then you can mod in the last little bit that will make that fantasy complete. So they don't have to worry so much about making it cohere, because the player is using it as a design tool.

The older I get, the more I'm attuned to the limitations of talent like Metheny. It's like how there are great mathematicians, and many of them can be strong problem-solvers and do great work, but can still fall short of "genius", because - and this is my hypothesis - they're too strong at tackling fine-grained details immediately, so they don't actively seek out the kind of abstractions that would lead to a different perspective. It's like trying to explain how you walk: "it's obvious." (even though at some point you did struggle with it) When I hear synthestites talk, they are trying to explain how walking works - it's tapping into neural pathways that are wired into the subconscious, skipping over any preliminary decoding. So they often create things that sound marvelous, bring in tons of techniques, but are at their core heavily improvised with minimal "concept" - elequent baby babbles.

For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us explain our results when we get them, and highlights using structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just "sit at the keys" and get swept away.

All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm, scale or harmony.

Increasingly I agree. It's the Byte Magazine 1981 cover where someone inserts an impossibly small floppy disk into an impossibly small wristwatch computer; Metaverse = VR world is not the literal message, it's placeholder marketing for a complex message. The actual things being built to create an interoperable metaverse are mostly mundane "gonna need one of these" core technologies. The stuff actually trying to directly achieve that immediate vision will falter on the technical and social limits of what people would actually agree is a good experience. (And to know where a lot of these proposals fail, you want the advice of anyone with experience in operating virtual worlds and online communities.)

Remember, the last "VR wave" hit not all that long ago. Many people can recite the limits of that particular tech reasonably well - cost, poor accessibility, space requirements, limits on viable "camera positions". The proposal of a metaverse is not really to double down on that particular bet, but to go back and integrate everything top-to-bottom in ways that weren't being done before. It will be half bullshit, but some of will stick.