phillryu

Ah ok yeah I see where you're coming from there. It's kind of like the question of did Steve Jobs need to be an asshole to be as successful as he was. And it can be tempting to think that they are intrinsically linked, but I also like to believe there is a world where he grew more on the empathy side but was still able to lead Apple perhaps even better.

You could be right, but in the hypothetical world where he's 100% right, and the current path the project or feature is taking is heading towards a dead end or is broken in some way. I feel there is a real cost that can be more easily ignored, e.g. working on a dead end or slowly failing thing that isn't set on the right trajectory is ultimately demoralizing and ends up in hindsight having been an opportunity cost and waste of your time vs. working on something else. And conversely if he's right about something like this, there should be positive feedback when it is turned around and starts performing better for the team involved?

Trying to understand what you're saying, especially with 'let's fix that right there'.

Is it basically the idea that the good we've gotten out of it (like driving down extreme poverty) has required 'social democracy' as another concept or force, to bend capitalism towards something better? And that a more useful perspective is zooming out from just capitalism by itself to include that?

I do feel like I still have a pretty limited understanding of how all of this fits together, so I appreciate you trying to teach me something here.

I think this is a pretty common and growing sentiment that I've felt too. One thing that has grounded me is learning and reminding myself that capitalism has driven extreme poverty across the world to the lowest share in known human history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#:~:text=Extrem...

I'm not sure if this on its own is enough to make up for the negatives, but it did personally restore some perspective that there is some real good to it alongside the bad. So I've personally shifted from more doomer sentiments on peak capitalism to feeling a little more hopeful. (That despite the dysfunctions of it there could still be a functional good foundation worth keeping and iterating on rather than the only solution being throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)

For me Ted Chiang short stories are like a little trip in a story form. He's not the most rounded storyteller in atmosphere or dialogue and rich characters, but the central idea he's interested in exploring in each story often blows my mind, and that seems like his end goal, like breaking open the boxes we're stuck inside a little bit. He seems satisfied if he's able to reach that destination concisely.

Yeah but the burden is now on you to sift through the garbage to find the good stuff, especially since it's mostly mixed together in recommendations or search results etc. It feels more limited to me the other way around, like yes we have added some more good stuff, but good luck finding it.

If my favorite hobby store kept on expanding and expanding and the ratio of great stuff to garbage kept going down, I would definitely perceive the overall quality as being well into some death spiral.

Oh ok. It looks like as a small business we use Gusto, so that's been useful for us. But it's kind of strange to me they had such a string of big B2C successes early on and then that side evaporated entirely.

The B2B stuff seems like things YC companies can just sell each other and make startup pain points easier, like pick axe stuff that doesn't require as much original vision or as much risk.

I have heard of that one, and I guess to be fair looking at the list again I've heard of OpenSea a few times too as an NFT marketplace. Just not the target customer I guess, I am not a developer (or into NFTs).

I'm surprised I don't recognize a single one of these companies. Isn't YC most famous for companies like AirBNB, Reddit, Twitch, Instacart, Dropbox, Doordash, etc. all things I use and that broke into pop culture? Or is that entirely from pre-Altman era and now it's just all tools for developers?

This is more about back in its peak, but E3 used to gather all the gamer's attention to a single keynote, it was like the Super Bowl of gaming. Basically if your game was on stage/shown off well it would be covered by every single gaming press and magazine and almost guaranteed mainstream gaming culture hype.

Today Geoff Keighley's Video Game Awards basically took over that role and similarly is the single biggest stage/audience to announce a new game to. If you had a game that they were interested in revealing + you thought it would sparkle to its audience it's a powerful platform.

I think the question is more like could a great team produce the next FIFA AND the next Call of Duty due to some kind of process improvement? I don't know, maybe there are hugely inefficient processes right now, but the sorcery of the art, to find 'the fun' of a new game concept or formula still feels very mysterious and ambiguous. Of course most games are just building on existing formulas of fun, but then you need a fresh edge to fight the established incumbent of the genre.

And if you found this secret process or meta formula for coming up with new amazing game formulas, why not just keep it to yourself to build the most spectacularly successful game studio in history. (Maybe that's Nintendo? Blizzard at its best also has some magic touch on any new genre they touch, even where they mess up like Overwatch they end up making and taking down the entire genre with them.)

I dunno, maybe in ten years game development will be like some automated AI windtunnel/R&D lab remixing various game genres and formulas and spitting out new fun things. But I like that there is a sorcery to it for now that elevates human creativity over process.

I think my main point was more that despite what you (not you personally, anyone reading) think of Elon, at least he has this track record of visionary companies and Sam does not.

Personally my take on Elon is something like this – he found a vacuum in the industry of smart engineers who want to work on something truly ambitious, the kind of people who feel most SV startups are bullshit. And as a sci-fi nerd he came in with money and pitched several sci-fi ambitious project ideas/visions that attracted these engineers etc. to make them happen. And I think he was rewarded for this. You could tally that as another vision that he had that was onto something.

When I compare the two Elon was (lucky?) to at least have a string of vision-fueled ventures that became a thing. What is Sam's history of visions? Loopt? Is Y Combinator considered in a new golden era after he took over? Did Worldcoin make any sense at all?

I'm honestly hoping I'm entirely ignorant of his substance and would feel better if someone here can explain there's more to him than that… I would feel better knowing that what could be history's most disruptive tech is being led by someone with some vision for it, beyond the apocalypse that he described in 2016 that he tries not to think about too much:

"The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

Part of the article's characterization of that camera as a toy seemed to be how simple it was to operate and designed, and that's what allowed a non-photographer astronaut to make use of it, or the engineers at NASA to remix it days before the launch for their priorities. So at least it makes some case for the value of 'toys' while it might simultaneously look down a little at them. The toy-like approachability and simplicity is what enabled these people to play with it and have space photography taken seriously as a result.

For mobile gaming there might be some creators here or there scratching out a living like that but probably about 0.1% as many as you imagine, or as there seemingly should be considering how much money is in the ecosystem. The vast majority of that money is sucked up by big IP and older established apps and pseudo publishers/install networks that rip off the latest trends and blast them to their audience full of ads etc. Apple Arcade was trying to create a healthier walled garden within App Store but years later feels kind of like a big brand bargain bin the way it's been run. It's just very extreme winner takes all dynamics.

I interpreted it more about its game design – GTA is about a giant sprawling city come to life as an interactive playground, one way you can think of it is most genres of games are represented within it. (Story game, single player, online semi MMO, anarchy sandbox simulator, life sim, racing, deathmatch shooter, gambling game, sports game, Crazy Taxi, flying, etc.) But that also means fans of those individual genres looking mainly for that specific experience within it will be disappointed by the lack of depth or richness compared to games that focus purely on that one genre vs all at once. That said this is probably the most expensive game ever made, so they are also able to invest surprising depth into each of these 'genres' despite it all. And I guess that is one reason why GTA V (previous in the series) has sold something like 150 million copies – it's a very different game to many groups of these customers but still satisfying.

I will say in this case Catan is cool and feels natural, like what people would call it if they're still playing the game a hundred years from now. So maybe it was politically sparked but the rebrand feels solid.

After 2008 Blizzard produced Hearthstone, Overwatch and Reaper of Souls which consensus 'fixed' Diablo 3 and were all pretty great. So I can't comment about the culture but I disagree with the general narrative that Blizzard's games have gone off a cliff. That might still be coming, but it hasn't happened quite yet.

Edit: snipped the bit about Hero's of the Storm since that was post acquisition

I feel like it's relevant to mention how huge Hearthstone is, and that's a mobile first game (at its best on iPad which is rare) that I feel is totally Blizzard tier quality with expected polish and substance to it, and both satisfied a lot of Blizzard fans + successfully tapped into that 10x market.

There's fair criticism to how it monetizes but it still dominates its category for a reason, they continue to own it like the MMO genre with WoW.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I guess just that between Overwatch and Hearthstone I actually mostly enjoyed this recent era of Blizzard and I'm more hopeful for what's next. I didn't feel contempt from them playing these games, I felt that old Blizzard spark.

It seems like they're setting up for that with OW1 being compatible with OW2 multiplayer. They'll probably just make OW1 free to play shortly following launch of OW2.

FYI Another Earth is directed by Tim Cahill not Zal. From what I can tell Brit Marling is the main common thread between that movie, The OA, The Sound of Her Voice.

These three I've seen personally are all good and have a lot of overlapping themes and premises, like mysterious charismatic figures in a slightly off kilter, ambiguously fantastical world convincing people to believe and follow them and their reality.

It's almost comforting to know that The OA is a third or fourth shot at that kind of premise by Brit and her collaborators. Maybe that's why it felt so beautiful and out of nowhere and perfectly formed.

Heads Up! party game for iPhone | iOS developer | Remote | US timezones

Work on a game your friends and family love playing and have a huge impact on a tiny team (4 people) responsible for a super popular game. Heads Up! has been a top paid app for 5 years straight and we’re looking for someone great to work with on it full time for its next 5 years.

More info and email to apply here: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/4wwVXRJndzBBBTXoSQPvN

Bomberman is the original Battle Royale: Lots of players starting distributed around a map, farming and gathering powerups and making their way to each other until there's one person left standing. (Even including the map constricting in size as time runs low like the 'storm' in Fortnite and PubG.)

One of my favorite Ted Chiang short stories also explores how much is shaped by our language: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...

I can feel my brain rotting with every click. This is extremely refined entertainment on the ADD, zero-commitment, fizzy side of the spectrum. And it's very addictive.

Does anyone know if these gif 'samples' from movies and TV shows fall under fair use? They seem so brief and low fidelity, surely they aren't infringing on copyrights?

We debuted the app at Macworld. Our Clear coverage was in a MacRumors post that covered highlights from the show floor.

Our marketing was definitely competent. Realmac Software worked with a local video producer and shot a great sizzling video, and we reached out to a bunch of people with the beta and promo codes before the app hit. But there wasn't anything special or crazy going on in the external marketing.

I can't stress enough, the answer to the submitter's question is the app, and what I would describe as a design and feature reboot to a very crowded space. I think this resonates with iPhone users.

The app got people who saw it and tried it very excited. It sells itself, and seems to make evangelists out of its users. Sure, our marketing and press efforts helped accelerate its spread through twitter and stuff on launch day. But as a random anecdote, we've had thousands of people send out copies to friends as gifts already, and I've simply never seen that before.

If we're onto something here, it's definitely with the app and its design and not so much its marketing. Clear's marketing is very vanilla. Its design, not so much.

I find this blog post ridiculous, considering HipChat includes emoticons ripped straight from iChat. Pot meet Kettle. Surprised nobody's noticed or mentioned this yet.

I'm excited for the fictional game concepts they develop over the course of the show (if it happens). And I hope they release those concepts as real games as a part of the show's marketing.

This is a great plugin. And, if someone created this for Grubhub and Foodler with integrated Yelp reviews I would be forever grateful. I can't count the number of times I've had to do the yelp crosscheck on those sites.

Did you work for MySpace?