whoisyc

I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself wishing that we, the Western world, were poorer again.

Luxury belief.

Doesn’t it feel a little suspicious that the only people to ever say “we should become poorer” are people from rich countries where even the poor can afford cars and gadgets? Go to the countries actually manufacturing your goods and ask the average factory worker if he wants to be poor and prepare to get flipped off.

Car prices are affected by ease of financing and a huge second hand market. The former make it easier to “afford” a fancy vehicle (whether or not you actually afford it is another question) and the later means fierce competition in the lower parts of the market making cheap cars less profitable.

Yeah, this is why neighboring countries never go to war.

If anything, being able to just fly over the ugly parts and arrive directly at your plastic wrapped all inclusive resort is a good way to increase the social divide and drive us closer to a war.

Realistically “my website fits in 14kb” is a terrible signal because it is invisible to 99.99% of the population. How many HNers inspect the network usage when loading a random stranger’s website?

Plus, trying to signal your way to societal change can have unintended downsides. It makes you feel you are doing something when you are actually not making any real impact. It attracts the kind of people who care more about signaling the right signals than doing the right thing into your camp.

This is why almost all applications and websites are slow and terrible these days.

The actual reason is almost always some business bullshit. Advertising trackers, analytics etc. No amount of trying to shave kilobytes off a response can save you if your boss demands you integrate code from a hundred “data partners” and auto play a marketing video.

Blaming bad web performance on programmers not going for the last 1% of optimization is like blaming climate change on Starbucks not using paper straws. More about virtue signaling than addressing the actual problem.

There is something deeply disturbing about your attitude towards making mistake.

You think you shouldn’t give advice because your feedback is not valuable and may even cause your son to give up writing, but you have so far given no reason why AI wouldn’t. From the entire ChatGPT “glazing” accident I can also argue that the AI can also give bad feedback. Heck most mainstream models are fine tuned to sounds like a secretary that never says no.

Sorry if this sounds rude, but it feels like the real reason you ask your son to get AI feedback is to avoid being personally responsible for mistakes. You are not using AI as a tool, you are using it as an scapegoat in case anything goes wrong.

You think the only game you will lose are generic Unity shovelwares when in reality you will also lose good games made by people with good sense in game making but likely not the resources or technical expertise to make their own engines. Think Cities Skylines (Unity, the studio had only a dozen people in total when it released), Dusk (Unity), Undertale (GameMaker), Spelunky (GameMaker)..

Another comparison is game modding which is essentially using the base game as the engine of your modded game. Do you think Team Fortress or Counter Strike or DOTA would have been made if their creators thought they have to build their own game engine?

Lowering the friction to make a game means more games get made. Yes there will be a flood of bad ones, but we get good one too.

Any mature game engine also comes with mature developer tooling. Think profiling, debugging, assets management, map editing etc. That’s a lot of initial hurdles to overcome before you can even start working on your game ideas. For indie / solo developers who tend to be, you know, driven by one’s creative urges, this is not just a huge time sink but also a good way to ruin your motivation by never moving to the part where you get to actually create the game. When your time and energy is constrained you need to choose your battle and for indie developers this often means forgoing the technical part (unless you really need to) and focus more on the game part.

I have seen many people say “there are more games engines written in Rust than games written in Rust” and I wonder if what happened is that the software developers fell for the allure of building their whole stack from scratch and ended up finding out it sucks to actually develop a game for an engine with no tooling and “making an entity inspector that lets you click on an enemy and edit its attributes” isn’t exactly the sexy part of game development.

Given how the UK works, chances are sooner or later they will only teach the answer to the exam in “public”[1] schools.

[1] They are actually private and selective.

I doubt the typical Godot Engine user is in that segment of the game industry but the big players in microtransaction ridden “gaming” are definitely very interested.

Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.

Beatles songs are around 164 seconds long on average.

https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/uploads/6/5/4/3/6543054/durat...

An 2005 compilation of Johnny Cash’s greatest songs averages just a little over three minutes per song.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Johnny_Cash

Gerry and The Pacemakers did not have long songs either.

https://www.discogs.com/master/369149-Gerry-And-The-Pacemake...

Neither did the Kingston Trio.

https://www.discogs.com/release/666498-Kingston-Trio-The-Kin...

Before recording, popular forms of folk music typically has just one fairly short melody. You can repeat it over and over with different lyrics but the “core” is simple and short . Sing “Oh Susana” or “Kalinka” or “Scarborough fair” to yourself and count the seconds before you the melody repeats.

Frankly, “popular songs being over three minutes long” is likely an anomaly in the history of humanity. What we are seeing with shorter songs is probably just a regression to the mean.

I wish more game developers adopt the “no sales, period” policy of Factorio.

Here’s a relevant quote from the developer.

Not having a sale ever is part of our philosophy. In short term, they are good and bring extra money, but we are targeting long term. I believe that searching for sales is wasted time, and people should decide on the price and value, but putting option of wasting time to search for deals or waiting seems like bad part of the equation.

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=159659#p159659

I get why people put games on sale. It gets you on a list on steam and gets people to talk about you on Reddit and gets emails sent to everyone who’s wishlisted your game. It boosts your profits and I get it.

But let’s be honest, these techniques benefit the developer not the player. The developer profits from the players FOMO when a sale happens. The player thinks he has accumulated a glorious Steam library when in reality he just wasted tons of money on games he wouldn’t even ever launch.

If any thing the domain of this website already tells you everything you need to know. It’s all about marketing, aka moving money from your pocket into theirs with psychological maneuvers.

I remember Firefox crashing on me nearly daily around the time Chrome came out. I didn’t need anyone to push Chrome on me. Chrome was just simply technologically superior.

But of course today there is little reason to not use Firefox.

Another day, another well-meaning internet community falling victim to the creative writing major testing water on Reddit before trying to make it in Hollywood.

We are not past peak PC gaming. What we might see soon is the end of big budget AAA game production. It’s not even that AAA games are bad, it’s just they require such a ridiculous amount of production value that they have to be blockbuster after blockbuster to not fail, and when they do fail, they don’t just wipe out the lifetime saving of one guy who quit his job to make an indie game, they wipe out thousands of jobs and entire studios and franchises.

My predictions is by 2030 Xbox will be out of business, PlayStation will be where pretentious auteurs make games that are 80% cutscenes, most savvy gamers play indie PC games, and Nintendo remains the only big name game studio to not collapse.

Universal connectivity was the internet’s biggest promise and it turned out to be its biggest flaw. It turns out if you allow literally anyone on this planet to walk up to your front door, you will end up with the world’s criminals, psychopaths, you know, the ones in a more civilized time would be driven out of town by townsfolk wielding pitchforks, all hanging out on your porch figuring out how to pick your lock, or just to spray paint your house for the lulz and cred.

Look around and you will see every piece of cybersecurity knowledge assumes your porch will be inhabited by bad actors and there is nothing to stop them, so you absolutely need to harden your server as if you are a bank. Have you ever lived somewhere you genuinely don’t need to lock your front door to feel safe? I have, it was amazing, and it depresses me to no end to see the polar opposite to be what is expected on the internet. We were promised a world of peace and unity and total freedom of information but instead we got the tyranny of the petty cyberdelinquent, with no way to enforce prosocial values as we ought to do in a sane society. “On the internet no one knows you are a dog” was a warning, but we would be in a much better world if it’s only dogs we have to share an internet with. When humans get low they can get way lower than the worst dogs ever born.

We are already seeing a Brazilification of the internet. Crime is rampant, so you live in a gated community with private security if you can afford it. On the internet the name of this private security operation is Cloudflare. I hate one private company becoming the de facto gatekeeper of the internet but I cannot blame any individual website (including the one in the article) for using Cloudflare. It’s the thin orange line between a somewhat usable service and getting knocked off the internet by smart fridges every other day because some kid somewhere on the planet got bored.

How will this end? I honestly don’t know.

Name change after marriage is not a tradition in east Asia regardless of how they treat families. To this day Chinese and Korean people keep their names after marriage. Name change only became a thing in Japan during the Meiji restoration.

That’s what GP said about “harder to model the editor’s behaviour mentally” though. In a dumb editor you type a quote and you get a quote, in a “smart” editor whether or not you get two quotes, one quote, or no quote at all is context dependent and more confusing.

In Factorio you throw iron ore in an electric furnace and it turns into iron plates. In reality you need coal or coke or charcoal to reduce iron to its metal form. Steelmaking is one of the largest single source of CO2 for a reason.

This is just one example among many. The truth is every single facet of industrial production is incredibly complex and there does not exist a single video game that captures all the nuance. Period. Factorio abstracted away all the boring details of industrial production and that is why it is good entertainment. But it’s still just entertainment. To think someone would become knowledge about industrial production because he played Factorio is like thinking someone is a good driver because he played Mario Kart.

“College” is underselling it. He went to Harvard. He sold a friendly down to the earth image early one and people bought it. But don’t forget he went to Harvard.

He was likewise confident that a shooting game would be less thoughtful than a turn-based strategy game because the moment-to-moment decisions were less complex

Sounds like a classic example of Moravec’s paradox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

It’s not that a shooting (or action, or heck talk to competitive fighting game players) game has less decisions for the player to make, it’s that the decisions being made are all subconscious decisions about movements and difficult to put into words.

Validating input and physics is easy and is effective against some of the crazy cheats people ran on eg PUBG. But it’s much harder to “limit information”. For example in CS if someone is 95% hiding behind a smoke screen with just one foot sticking out, do you tell other players about this player or not? If you don’t, then you are depriving them of information they should have been able to see, if you do, then it still gives a cheater an edge because even if you do spot the foot you will probably have a hard time actually shooting at the player because his body is still hidden.

And even if you can 100% accurately decide when to hide or show information or if you are outright just streaming the game to the players there are still cheats that you cannot detect this way because they only enhance player capabilities within what is possible for an honest human player. For instance a simple cheat can detect if another player’s head is under your crosshair and fire automatically (with a randomized delay to game anticheat systems.) Realistically cheats these days are more complicated and do way more to emulate human input. It’s not easy to conclusively tell if a player is cheating thus way or not just looking at his inputs in one game. Maybe he is just fast, maybe he has lower latency, maybe he is just pre firing at spots he knows an enemy is likely to come from. You can’t know for sure unless you know what’s actually going on on his PC and his peripherals. And if you start banning people using just statistics you will likely end up with many false positives.

At the end of the day there is no silver bullet to cheating. Even if you fully control a player’s PC there are still ways to cheat in hardware [1]. You need to find the balance between annoying too many players with your anticheat and your game getting overrun by cheaters.

[1] https://www.counter-strike.net/newsentry/6500469346429600836

What makes you think the PC gamers who do the PC master race things are the same people as the ones playing games with invasive anticheat? Just because they both game on PCs? Your assumption tells more about yourself than those mythical “PC gamers”, whoever they are.

AFAIK, HN’s “speed limit” is not an anti bot or anti spam measurement. It is an anti flame war measurement.

Given how many complaints about Google search you regularly see on this website and elsewhere, you would think there will be a lot more people willing to pay for non shitty search. And yet Kagi does not have enough paying users to fill a football stadium. To me, this validates GP’s point about how people love to talk about paying for services and then proceed to not pay for any services.

The hard part is how to acquire that 10000 paying users and how to make them stay.

I think a the problem is for every social media user who finds it valuable enough to pay, there are ten more who don’t use it enough justify paying. And if you only serve the first group but not the later, then the first group will just get bored and move back to X or Instagram, or they just ditch social media entirely and move into private group chats. And if you serve the later then your operation expenses will multiply.

Thank you for the snark. I am sure this will work wonders to persuade more people to take their privacy seriously.

Facebook is used to coordinate real world events. Think weekend hikes, dog shows, garage sales, you name it. If you have to hide your real world identity to post on a forum, then it will not be able to replace Facebook.

Your comment would be much more persuasive if you provide a concrete actionable suggestion instead of vague handwringing about “finding a better user agent” (and don’t get me started on how “user agent” is basically just an ingroup signal these days)

Limiting the spread of the information is a feature, not a bug. You don’t want others to take your 2009 forum post out of context and ridicule you in front of a million angry YouTube viewers.