definitelyhuman

Incredible quality! I also expected a time lapse, but the variety and consistency while maintaining beautiful composition & colour is truly impressive.

Great to see more support for Godot! The lead VC and the company pledges bode well for keeping the bulk of the new tech open I think.

Biggest red flag is the lack of anyone with games pedigree. If the goal is to crack the duopoly with a great FOSS engine supported by paid BaaS + enterprise support plans, you’re going to need strong connections, partners, and knowledge of the real product requirements. First sales will be pretty challenging, but if they can get traction and ship great games there’s certainly an opportunity

How have you communicated your cap table and investment activities to the lead? Does the lead want the whole round? Did the higher valuation come from the lead or you? Provided you aren’t trying to shift their stake or acted as n bad faith, a reasonable VC should be fine with adding valuable people to help the company. SAFE that basically auto executes sounds like a strong option to me

Tough situation, clearly lots of emotions which is understandable. As others mention, startups are high risk, don’t let cofounders manipulate your thinking on that. Re:launch cost & funding, I’d ask if you actually need that money. Can you get any customers with what you have? Investors are spoiled for choice, and can afford to make startups hit higher burden of proof before funding. Regardless of market challenges, showing sales & fit is a big deal. Getting that could change your fortunes. If you do shut down, take pride in what you tried to do. Be sure to do a post mortem and take the learnings with you in your career. Startup or not, you’ve done something very hard that very few try. It will serves you well as n future work

I agree the first two points are more about understanding trade-offs - but the result is still focus. Overall I thinks it’s a good articles about achieving goals. Focus can be an overused word, but still works well here IMO

If your org is 10 moving to 50 in a few months then you have a BIG change ahead. The good news is that you are responsible for how your team operates. You've identified problems, and now you get to fix them - not by coding, but through leadership & culture. This isn't to say it's easy, it's a massive challenge, but it is yours to solve and does require technical knowledge and skill.

No first time CTO's had it figured out either - continue to show the courage to ask advice (as you've done here) and figure it out bit by bit. Nobody has made your org before - there's no playbook only prior work.

The flip side is if that is of zero interest, you're likely in the wrong role. No shame, depends what motivates you.

Absolutely, I hope we get to hear the story at some point - so much bad blood between AL and IS. With this proposal coming on the day of Unity's shareholder meeting, and sending weak signals about AppLovin's outlook, it's such a weird play. I'm too much of a rube to know if it's brilliant or desperate, but I'm sure it's a good story regardless

A four month old company worth 4B would feel like an invincible rocket ship. Hard to be rational in that case. I’m sure they told themselves the story of Facebook turning down the 1B acquisition way back and saw themselves with the better story

EA retains league and player likeness rights, which is the real value

Waterloo region is building density, despite complaints (1), because there’s no supply. People claim to want all of: affordable housing, no sprawl, no community impact - but that’s not possible. Glad they prioritized units, although a lot are still condos which are not quite ‘affordable’, but the supply will help

(1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/belmont-vi...

Given all the excitement about this topic, I thought it was important to share that the emergency is over.

Advice and rules rarely seem to apply anything but pressure to parents. The real solve is building connection to and understanding of your children. Likely this won’t come from a template - although it can be a good framework to understand the possibility space and have ideas. Expect to try variations, and don’t ignore the pressure of ‘perfection’.

The only statement I’ve found true is: Whatever is hard now will go away - but it will be replaced with something harder. Parenting is a grind. Love your kids especially when it’s hard, learn your emotional responses and hang ups, let go of perfect.

It’s amazing how much pressure first time parents can put on themselves. The number of expectations is insane and impossible, and makes an already stressful situation worse.

Our first was difficult as well and advice never really applied. As a baby heavy metal actually worked well, which horrified my mother - but it’s all about finding something that works to calm them. Great closing sentiment, so I’ll paraphrase: it will be hard to love your child sometimes. Love them always, keep them safe, treat them well, and show them the beauty in the world. What seems hard will get easier.

This is a really important point - your own mental state is so crucial. Kids are hard, they can’t communicate well (or at all), and it’s the parent's job to figure out. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and consumed with emotions. Being ok with taking a break given everyone is safe helps rebuild energy and perspective. Especially true for new parents - after the first you become more intuitive and understand the grind.

Well executed unique approach, great job! I’ve worked in games my whole life, and that’s hard to do!

Like others, I personally don’t like the time pressure and have really enjoyed the async one a day whenever format of wordle. It largely depends on your target audience and objectives for whether it’s right for this game. Separate zen/challenge modes would help players self select, but also muddies the onboarding. Great job though, fun game!

The podcast Flow State changed my life - lyric-less music to drive focus, built around 30m pomodoro intervals. Highly recommended

Good question! Cider is unfiltered and cloudy, and gets a rich brown colour from the pulp sediment. Apple juice is totally clear, and has been strained of all sediment. As others mention hard cider is alcoholic, but most people just overload and use cider, and distinguish by context - which isn’t helpful. You can make hard cider from juice or cider, the flavour will differ, but it the name. However, most commercial cider is just flavoured malt liquor - which also gets the same name, so ingredient checking is important!

Safari 14.1.2 on latest Catalina doesn't render

Totally agree - the definition of done is really hard in creative work. Having a culture of refinement with the courage to ship early and often is a powerful tool to hone in on great results

Oh wow, yeah my first mobile game studio had a huge industrial fastener shelf with little drawers stuffed with different phones. We started in 2004, and feature phone game dev was indeed wild. We did a lot of WWE games in 2d and 3d, needing ~15 different reference builds ranging from 64k 2d builds to 800k 3d for high end, plus another set for all the BREW devices. Managing code, asset pipelines, and qa across high/med/low 2d/3d Java/cpp permutations was a huge challenge, but it was so satisfying to be good at. I love what mobile has turned into, and never want to debug another random c crash on device ever again, but I do miss the cabinet of phones and all the crazy variation

Same here, ls output needs formatting help on mobile. I was hoping glob might work too - could be a useful update

The impact of these changes on FB ads depends on what kind of ads you run - VBO, AAA, and LAL will be challenged. But interest, geo, and demo targeting will continue as is. None of these iOS changes affect FB’s ability to serve ads, nor small business’ ability to run ads and find customers. It’s the tracking of activity and the deeper funnel events that is changing, not advertising for small business

It’s all about identifying the ultra whales willing to spend thousands a day. There’s an infamous story of a machine zone employee being stopped on the tarmac by the FBI trying to flee with a thumb drive full of IDFA’s. GOW had people dropping millions, and you could eat their lunch quickly with a fast follow and best customer list. Not sure it was ever publicized, but I’ve heard that story a few times

Awesome - good to see a full accounting! I know mobile gaming well, and there’s a bit arms race around tracking for targeting efficiency to increase ltv/roas. It’s such a high volume business, there’s a lot of data needed to maximize returns. It will be interesting to see how the IDFA deprecation affects the industry, as their silver bullet is being taken away

No surprise who the top collector is (Free & FB) but I am surprised the whole Gaming category was omitted. Lots of trackers and tracking in games, especially ad supported

[Edit] Author update to capture gaming, leaving the comment up for context

That’s the right question, and it doesn’t seem clear yet. FB will have iOS 14 specific ad accounts due to how different everything is, and I’d expect CPA, VO, and LAL + retargeting to be neutered

They aren’t losing their audience for impressions, or their targeting data for FB users - unless shadow accounts won’t work as well, but I’m not sure how that data is gathered.

The removal of IDFA and shimming SKAdNetwork between the app and ad networks means the ping back of rich app usage is useless, which is what breaks more advance campaign types.

Traffic, app install, engagement etc will still be valid, and you should still be able to use existing FB audience details since that’s backed by FB usage data.

So I’d guess the impact depends on your ad type usage, and how you target users. Targeting parents in specific geos should work fine on IG and FB. FAN is going to suffer though since it doesn’t have FB account backing and relies on IDFA

Bingo. ValueOptimized and CPA, on top of lookalikes drive huge revenue, and all become effectively useless. They retain their massive audience, but their differentiating value is severely challenged by this change

They’re pretty determined, with March being the best rumored rollout so far. Delays are around SKAdNetwork, as the change destroys traditional attribution and alters how ads are run. They gave networks and publishers more time to adapt, but there won’t be any more delays

Antitrust risk could be a factor, as the preferred treatment of ASA seems dubious - but the change seems to be coming regardless

I agree that this seems predicated on growing ad revenue: 1. strangle the effectiveness of FB/Google targeting and MMP attribution by removing IDFA 2. Build out ASA to fill the targeting void, which can be done via AppleID 3. Search Ads becomes more effective and useful, growing value

This is a pretty dicey strategy from an antitrust perspective, but the separation of the opt-in for tracking, and the focus on growing service revenue, suggests to me it’s the direction Apple is going

True, but I think this is disingenuous on their part, as they don't need the IDFA since everyone using their services is logged in with an AppleID