Something irked me about this post as a long term EM, and then reading the final part actually provided the clarity: The author is a sociopath.
Stalking your superiors is insane. Most of the behaviour here is insane. Decoy cup size? Present the option that is best for the business and be done with it.
The part that irks me is the sense that this person advocates these methods always, as though it's a cheat code for success.
I think we've all had to deal with difficult people or organizations that might need methods like these to allow them to come to a mutually beneficial decision either faster or at all.
A common technique I've heard of is "hairy arms". This is from the graphic design world, an area that practically everyone thinks they are qualified to judge or comment on. Some stakeholders will always give a comment or request a change, no matter what is presented. So the technique is to put hairy arms on the mascot, the lady, etc. A small flaw so that stakeholders can feel that they've given feedback, been heard, but avoid large changes that often cause multiple rounds of feedback.
Should you use that technique on everyone and every project? I think that's a bit disrespectful. Should you use that technique when dealing with a client that always has feedback, even on excellent work? Probably.
This is so wrong on so many levels. At its basic, it’s exhausting to speak up about process improvements and see things turn to shit each time one comes up.
Overly nihilistic view. As someone who was a working nightclub DJ for 5 years, these kind of tools lower the barrier for entry into the hobby and trade and also serve as a great backup plan.
It’s not intended as a replacement to a curated collection of white labels, bootlegs and edits which you build up and over years.
Because the wealth is unequal, sure, but look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago.
What is wealth when everyone is fed, watered and entertained?
Only stating this as an explanation to why there has not been a civil revolution. People are still dying in poverty with no way to escape every day, and we need to address it.
Its a matter of scale. Compared to medieval times, we are much better off. But if you shorten the scale to eg. younger generations and eg. home ownership, things point in the other direction.
And there are many more of such indicators!
This "we are all better off" is partially true but helps to neglect valid criticism.
Do you really understand just how unequal it is? Most Americans vastly underestimate it [0]. And that's from 2013; inequality has rapidly worsened since. Do you understand the effects of that inequality?
> look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago.
I don't think this is true.
There is quality of life in owning a house, a family house. There is quality of life in having job security. There is quality of life in feeling safe letting your kids go outside in an urban environment. There is quality of life in not having record proportions of your populace behind bars. There is quality of life in being able to weather illness without filing for medical bankruptcy. There is quality of life in being able to support a family with an average wage. Etc.
I admire your restraint while responding. Saying "at least you're not a feudal lord's slave!" is the most uninspiring argument by the intellectually lazy status quo apologists.
(I'm sure the parent isn't in this category, so I'm speaking in general.)
> Do you really understand just how unequal it is?
But the above blog post and study you linked to are misleading as well. For instance, wealth gets vastly skewed by age. The average net worth for people 65-75 is almost 10 times the average net worth of someone under 35[1]. For anyone who knows anything about investing, this isn't very surprising. Steady investment will cause people's savings to grow drastically from when they start to when they retire. A vulgar look at the numbers can have people saying "person A has 10 times the wealth of person B!", without considering that person B will also reach the level of person A when they get to the same age.
That's not to say that age alone would simply explain all of the inequality in society, but it's a major factor and an example of why you need to actually dive into the data rather than running with the baseline numbers. When it gets ignored it's likely people are pushing a polemic and aren't genuinely interested in what's happening.
> The average net worth for people 65-75 is almost 10 times the average net worth of someone under 35[1].
Is that because they're older? Or is it because when 70 yo's were young they could go through college on part time work, buy a house with an average wage, and then have that house skyrocket in value because housing was turned into an investment vehicle?
Dig into those statistics, and look at how much of the €400k net worth is tied up in their homes, homes which they owned outright at 25-27 years old. That's unimaginable today. People that age are living with their parents.
Look at those statistics and compare the median to the average - the distribution is extremely skewed - you could even call it 'unequal'. 'Record levels of inequality' even.
Age isn't as much of a factor as the 'nerdwallet' blog seems to think; and to the degree to which it is, is a natural consequence of having had more time to work and invest during a boom period, then having a certain generation and class of people 'pull up the ladder' after them.
Honest question, but do you know much about investing? The investment curve isn't linear. Someone making steady contributions should have around 10 times the amount of wealth at age 67 than they do at age 30 [1].
Millennials have more wealth than previous generations _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[2]. Generation Z is earning even more than millennials _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[3].
If you have evidence for why we should dismiss age cohorts, feel free to share it. All of the data I've seen shows that it's extremely important, and people who intentionally ignore it are pushing a narrative that doesn't match reality.
> Someone making steady contributions should have around 10 times the amount of wealth at age 67 than they do at age 30.
What part of that justifies or explains away record inequality?
> Millennials have more wealth than previous generations _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[2]. Generation Z is earning even more than millennials _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[3].
Hm - might that be because they live with their parents and can't afford kids? Or because they're sharing an apartment with 5 other people, and having a lot less fun in their life (aka, quality of life).
And are we ignoring the difference between average and median when cherry-picking statistics?
> If you have evidence for why we should dismiss age cohorts, feel free to share it.
My argument isn't that we should ignore age. I never said that. No one said that.
It's that even accounting for age, however you want to do that, there's an extremely problematic level of inequality.
America has 10 million hungry children. Half a million people claim medical bankruptcy every year. There's no excuse for that - and now a cabal of billionaires is gutting Medicaid to help pay for a $4tn tax break mostly for the top 1%.
As of 2023, the top 1% of U.S. households held 30% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50% possessed just 2.6%.
This is all deeply psychotic. It's perverse and abnormal in the extreme; and no, it's not explained away by age demographics. It's very intentional bipartisan policy, inflicted against the will of a large majority of Americans.
Quality of life is about to take a very hard hit, directly because of the level of inequality [0].
You can't separate these things and expect the world to make sense. When the ultra-wealthy capture too much of the levers of power, and strip-mine all our potential just to get a bit more in a bid for total control, quality of life for humanity suffers.
We've been suffering for it, as I explained above, and we're going to see a lot more of the same. House prices could double in the next 5 years. Even if you own a house or 6 and think that's just great, society will suffer and quality of life will fall.
You might think that owning houses, starting families, clean water, living oceans, a habitable biosphere and healthy division of power don't affect quality of life, but I promise you, they do. And those things are suffering, because of the level of inequality we have reached.
... Let's say, being generous and ignoring a lot of negative externalities, that we actually have improved average quality of life by 10% over the last 50 years. Put that in context - productivity has doubled. Where did all the difference go? ... And what are the beneficiaries of this wealth doing with that money?
The level of inequality is huge, and rising rapidly. That comes with a very serious level of existential threat to life on Earth itself; not just its quality.
You make a lot of claims about the future, but you are guessing. We have no idea. All I hear is fear mongering and hate against people with more than they have.
Fwiw, I think there is a upper bound where inequality starts hurting the average (we aren't near it) however all the solutions I hear are worse than doing nothing. The government forcing equality by taking from one to give to another will never work. It's been tried and it fails horribly.
When I joined my current team I found they had changed the technical test after I had interviewed but before I joined. A couple of friends also applied and got rejected because of this new test.
When I finally got in the door and joined the hiring effort I was appalled to find they’d implemented a leetcode-esque series of challenges with criteria such as “if the candidate doesn’t immediately identify and then use a stack then fail interview”. There were 7 more like this with increasingly harsh criteria.
They’ve got the weird shit covered still, apparently the joy cons in this gen can be used as mice.
Was heavily rumoured/leaked and this teaser video literally shows them gliding along a surface.
How Nintendo will leverage that functionality, who could honestly say, but that’s the genius of keeping a toy company mindset in an industry full of sports car company mindsets.
That last sentence is worth an essay of its own. Everyone else keeps pumping resources into being photo-realistic blah-blah-blah without nearly enough attention to "is this fun"?
One of my favorite video essay's on this is "Nintendo - Putting Play First" by Game Makers Toolkit [1]. It goes into when making a game, Nintendo first determines the mechanic they want to focus on; jumping, throwing a hat, shooting paint, etc and finding out how to make it fun, then building and iterating on the idea.
It's how they can keep putting out essentially the same games but are completely different.
I can't tell you how much respect I have for this mindset. Like them burning a heap of money on Metroid Prime 4, for years, and then coming out with an announcement along the lines of "sorry guys, this sucks, so we've chucked it out and started again because we only do things right, see you in another 3-4 years when it's ready."
It pays dividends, because they just don't ship junk, so everything they DO ship sells extremely well.
GMTK is popular, but he's mostly talking out of his ass. He's got zero industry experience and most gamedevs I know personally clown on his takes constantly. Unless he references specific Nintendo interviews where they talk about their design process, I have doubts about this video containing an accurate description of how Nintendo does things.
At least in this video, all the interviews and documents that they base their claims/opinions on are listed in the description, so you can easily also peruse them if you doubt the interpretation.
I've seem some of his videos, but I'm not that familiar with GMTK. But they did release a game, and it was by all accounts "Very positive" /pretty good.
This always made sense to me. Think of Super Mario Bros. No way you come up with something like that from a top-down design document. Probably slapped Mario on a screen, played with the physics a bunch, and threw a lot of different stuff at the wall to see what stuck before they came up with the final product.
Not sure about the original game but at least since the 3d age, Miyamoto is on record, saying that when making a new Mario game, one of the first steps is that is just fun to goof around with Mario alone in an empty flat void and mess with whatever new abilities they are thinking of giving him.
I saw an interesting analysis years ago about whether or not the most powerful console 'won' in each generation (i.e. whether or not being the most powerful console of your generation leads to success).
Generally speaking, no, it doesn't actually affect things, and in several cases (e.g. the Game Boy, the Wii, and the Switch come to mind) the objectively 'worse' console (from a tech perspective) was more successful by a country mile.
It's interesting how many people see the Switch as being in its own category rather than acknowledging it as the winner of this console generation (which I completely agree it is).
Most people think the “console” battle is between PlayStation and Xbox, and that PlayStation is the winner.
This is probably a big win for PlayStation’s marketing team.
I kinda think that way when buying. The Nintendo console is the Nintendo console. If you want what they do, you're buying it. The other two are where the competition is and where there's a decision of which one, not buy this single product or don't. They're much closer to being interchangeable than the Switch is with either of them.
> This is probably a big win for PlayStation’s marketing team.
I don't have any current Gen console (nor have I played one) but as a long-time tech market "interested observer" my understanding is that XBox had a bit less raw power last Gen and tried correcting this Gen and succeeded in having a bit more raw power than PS5. However, it apparently didn't matter to the market. So it seems to be another example like Betamax vs VHS, where the product with somewhat better technology didn't win because consumers found other factors more important. In modern game consoles, I assume those factors would be some mix of exclusive titles, compatibility with existing previous gen game libraries, marketing+brand perception and, more recently, the console's subscription game service.
It's interesting that Microsoft apparently didn't internalize this lesson, since Nintendo has been remained competitive for ~20 years by combining significantly weaker hardware with high-quality franchise games plus a clever differentiating factor (novel interaction (Wii) or portability (Switch). Of course, it would be wrong to conclude "CPU/GPU power doesn't matter" because it's more complex than comparing mips, flops, rops, etc. It also depends on how much, and how well, developers and game engines optimize for a platform's hardware.
Microsoft definitely learned their lesson about high-quality franchise games with their recent (and very costly) acquisition spree including Call of Duty. Although, to get anti-trust approval it can't be platform exclusive for at least a decade. I'm wondering if MSFT's claims that they're happy to be a games software company selling on all platforms may actually be true. If so, it may not bode well for the future of the XBox hardware business - which would be sad because more competition is generally better for consumers.
Part of the issue is Xbox segmented the market with the less powerful Series S and put constraints on releases needing to have feature parity between the two, quite a few devs have had issues with. It delayed Baldur’s Gate 3 for months until MS waived off the split screen co-op. Seems bizarre to chase power at hard and then make it harder for your devs to develop to it.
I agree that the XBox senior leadership has made a series of critical strategic mistakes going back over a decade which have nerfed the otherwise generally quite good hardware, software, game and online service execution. Just with XBox One the long string of gaffes and fatal errors was... impressive.
* Going all-in on bundling the Kinect, a very costly depth camera interface peripheral, with every XBox.
* Committing to making XBox an "all-in-one entertainment system" by building in an expensive HDMI input capability to enable being an electronic program guide, digital video recorder, Blu-ray disc player, streaming TV service and music service. The Kinect camera peripheral also had a built-in IR blaster to control all your other living room devices.
* Announcing pervasive DRM that would tie game discs to the user's account, prevent reselling or lending game discs.
* Aggressively pre-announcing no backward compatibility with previous XBox games. A senior XBox exec apparently told the media (on the record), "If you're backwards compatible, you're backward."
While the last two mistakes were walked back before the console even shipped, building in & bundling costly hardware couldn't be walked back. Nor could the significant investment in developing operating system and application software to support electronic program guide, IR control, video streaming and recording. These large hardware and software investments certainly came at the cost of investing as much in hardware and software to better render games, play games and support game development. You can kind of understand why MSFT thought each of these things would be good for MSFT strategically, but they were all tone deaf in terms of what their market wanted and fatal distractions from the main business of being a good game console.
I hope someday a definitive case study will be written giving insight into how otherwise smart, experienced executives can make so many catastrophic strategic errors over such a long period of time.
I'd say your observation on hardware and software is quite accurate, except I don't agree PS is the one that's winning.
PS is suffering from decreasing fan loyalty due to the not-that-good subscription service and not-that-exclusive game titles. Also, their pace of new hardware seems to be off considering the half-dead PS VR2 or that streaming handheld thing. The way I see it, the subscription service is supposed to be a counterpart to MS's game pass or XGP; the handheld thing is most likely to be a compromise from current gen (PS5) performance and NS's pressure. But don't forget their legacy from previous generations, they have *the most* experiences in developing and publishing 3A titles, which is why PS is still my most played consoles.
On the other hand MS had the issue of XSS dragging XSX down (as mentioned above by others), and their hardware sales seems to be losing momentum due to "If I can play it on Windows why would I need a XBOX". But from their past doings I think MS is always on the chasing of "Combining their all platforms together". While Windows Phone might turn out to be a failure, XGP actually did succeed, thanks to the huge user base they have on Windows.
Whereas NS has the exclusive advantage of their cartoonish/pixelated artstyle. This alone, in my opinion, saves them a ton of money. Not saying the artstyle is worse than realistic ones, but the development cost is indeed much much lower. Not to mention it requires much less computing power to render, resulting in cheaper hardware products. Their console can't run 3A, but that is actually a smaller downside than some may think. Because cartoonish/pixelated game and smaller indie game is a huge market.
So... Though the 3 manufacturers are competing in the same game console market, they each found a smaller but more suitable target market for themselves. If there has to be a "winner", profit-wise, it should be NS undoubtedly. Just look at their hardware upgrade cycle and console/game sales/profit.
I agree. Sony isn't winning the console market. In terms of both unit sales and combined hardware/software profitability, I think it's pretty clear Nintendo is doing best. Although, Sony might possibly net more total revenue due to higher priced hardware, from a Return on Capital perspective Nintendo is doing better.
I think Sony probably feels they are doing okay, although they think they should be doing better than they are. It's Microsoft's XBox business that I think is in long-term trouble. While they may be profitable at the moment (I don't follow it closely enough to know), the brand and forward trends aren't looking good. To me, the massive acquisition spree buying leading game companies was a very risky 'bet all the marbles' kind of move. It was so expensive that to justify it, they not only have to win but win big. It's a huge bet on making their Game Pass service not only grow but increasingly profitable. And it has to win PC gamers and console gamers with a unified service. Maybe it'll work but the high costs and constraints limit the number of ways they can win while the number of ways to lose remains vast.
Personally I'd say both are true. They won the generation, but they did so by not bothering to fight directly with Playstation and Xbox. By basically ignoring them and having a distinct identity they won.
A. Sony has an amazing marketing strategy where they can paint their #1 competitor as not even a competitor.
B. Xbox has a terrible product direction, where they are trying (failing) to beat Sony at being Sony instead of looking at the gaming industry and trying to create a product people want.
I wouldn't say A because Nintendo hasn't bothered trying to compete with them. If they bothered and Sony still managed to be considered a separate category I would agree, but Nintendo appears to not care about them.
However I do think B is true. The only time they were able to go toe to toe with Sony was most of the 360 era when Sony got cocky and built a machine that was too complicated to work with relative to the value developers got out of that effort. Once Sony stopped doing that they've dominated Xbox (mind you the whiff on being too early proclaiming the digital era made it far far worse).
The market penetration of the switch makes it harder for Sony to expand into the family/casual gaming space. That forces Sony to stick to the AAA lane (which is where their focus is) limiting their growth opportunities.
If the switch had been a failure, then a lot of households that currently have a switch (only) would have bought a different console and that would likely have been a PS5 (even if they held on to their previous generation console, and waited a couple of years until the PS5 price dropped below $500)
I have a PS4 and a Switch at home. The kids play the switch and occasionally play on the PS4. I can't justify buying a PS5 because there's only so much
gaming time available, and family gaming is covered by the switch and my personal gaming is good enough on my PC. Take the switch out of the equation and that changes.
PS5 is winning the AAA console lane, no doubt. But Sony could have been making more money if they could also own a significant portion of the family console lane.
I don't know that the Playstation 5 really plays in that market when the cheapest version is $450, so nearly $200 more expensive than the switch. Keeping the price down is part of how Nintendo owns that market, on top of their first party game lineup and the like.
The PlayStation also doesn't play most games on Steam. Exclusive games don't mean the platforms aren't competitors — back in the day platform exclusivity was even more of the norm than it is today, and yet the SNES and the Sega Genesis were clearly competitors, as were the original PlayStation and the N64.
Well, that's because this console has different hardware than the others, with it's own pros and cons. And that has happened in every console generation.
Nobody would say the Sega Saturn wasn’t a console because it couldn’t run Crash Bandicoot, or that the N64 wasn’t a console because it couldn’t run Final Fantasy VII.
The Switch may not run certain titles, but it can run other AAA, like DOOM, Mortal Kombat, No Man’s Sky, The Witcher 3 and more. Sure, those games may run better on more powerful hardware, but that hardware isn’t portable. That doesn’t make the Switch any less of a console.
Most AA and indie games are available on all platforms, and all the reeeeally popular ones like Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, Rocket League, etc.
Easily 80% or more of the catalog is the same across all consoles.
So why we define what a console is by those games that aren’t on the Switch’s catalog?
All 3 consoles are doing the same, they sell a closed hardware/software solution with access to a propetary storefront where they sell you games, the same games mostly. Their marketing may be directed to different demographics but at the end they all do the same and compete for the same market.
I find it interesting that we don’t see more “officially-licensed demakes” of AAA games being released for devices (the Switch; phones; old PCs) that can’t play the AAA version. It used to be very common (with e.g. SNES games getting simultaneous GB reinterpretations released with them.) But the only thing I can think of that did it in recent memory is Final Fantasy 15.
There are some, like DOOM, but it’s not a lot. If Switch 2 can pull off PlayStation 4 quality I bet there’d be a bonanza of ports and some good money made.
But if you demake a game hard enough (i.e. really clamp down on the asset details, by using intentionally-stylized art rather than lower-quality realistic art, etc) then it doesn't need to take so much time and money to create the port. It can be a bounded added marginal cost.
Also, there are things a modern "parallel demake" (like FFXV Pocket Edition) can do to reuse certain types of assets from its AAA sibling, that in the previous era would have required remaking those assets from scratch. So a modern demake can actually be cheaper to produce in some ways.
For examples:
• You can just copy-and-paste the script and associated audio assets straight over, as anything can play audio clips.
• You can also copy over all the animation "choreography" scripting for NPCs and cinematics, with the particular named animation cues just mapping to different actual animations for the simplified models.
• Depending on how your AAA game models environments, you might even be able to export the abstract "level data" (what type of terrain goes where; basic geometry and material-type for meshes of buildings; placement of things like furniture and other large freestanding decor objects) from your AAA game engine, and then import it directly into your demake's game engine. (You'll then still need to run over everything to add new decor and details, make sure nothing is clipping, etc — but this is still a major speed-up.) IIRC this is how the recent third-party-implemented Pokemon titles [Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee and BD/SP] were implemented — they started with direct dumps and imports of the original games' level data into their engine.
Competition isn’t the secret sauce we pretend it is. There is power in non-competing and doing your own thing as well. You just have to know when to use either strategy.
Singleplayer AAA gaming on top of all that feels like work, the older I got the less those games kept me playing because I don't want to spend 3 hours running errands to be rewarded with an item/spell/skill.
The melodramatic storylines are also pretty grating, there are a few games with good storytelling but most are some rehash of "this world has been destroyed/is in the process of being destroyed, in the aftermath a hero is about to rise and save it" so if the mechanics don't feel fun right from the get-go I lose interest completely.
The most fun I have with games are the ones with a very iterative game loop (roguelikes for example), or social/multiplayer games, anything with a lot of replayability, and the constant feeling of improvement is like crack to me.
A surprising example I re-discovered last year after only playing it for a while some 15 years ago is Trackmania, got even some friends hooked on it to play hot seating trying to beat each others time. The game loop is short and intense (about 1-2 minutes max), has a high skill ceiling, and you feel yourself getting better at a track each time you play it, nailing some very tricky part that felt impossible 30 min before is absurdly satisfying.
My biggest problem is I'll finally get a chance to sink enough hours in to start something AAA, do maybe 4-10 hours over two or three days, and then have life get in the way and not touch it for a month or more... and completely forget how to play and WTF I was doing.
Some of my favorite UX features in newer games are automatically and contextually reminding you how the controls work when you pick it back up after a while, and quick story recaps or quest reminders on loading screens. I like to label those games "parent-friendly".
I have this issue with TV and movies too. I have so many shows I want to finish but when I try I have no clue who anyone is or what’s going on. I either watch a recap or just give up instead of restarting.
Got any examples of a game doing recaps / control reminders? Curious to check them out
My biggest problem with AAA gaming is I waste a lot of time tuning graphics settings to keep games from crashing, and wait a lot for different sections of games to load. I miss the 90s era of snappy UIs.
This is such a trite take. Whenever I hear it, what comes to my mind is: "bro, do you even play games?".
The gaming industry is huge and gamers are varied. What is fun and play to one person is boring and vapid to another. I think Nintendo's first party titles are generally excellent, but I recognize that they're not for everyone. It's not like the rest of the industry is shuffling around going "boy, if only we could figure out how to make fun games".
It seems that you want to exclude Nintendo from AAA gaming, which is also weird. Their first party titles are developed by large teams with big budgets. They're not some scrappy startup making indie titles.
FWIW, the game that won Game of the Year at the most recent game awards is Astro Bot - an amazingly fun and playful (some would say Nintendo-esque) game that is a PlayStation 5 exclusive.
Money happened. The gaming industry produces more revenue than the movie industry and the music industry combined. Making a AAA is a $50-$100 million endeavor. At that scale, doing weird stuff because maybe it'll pay off is almost unconscionably risky. It's the same problem movies have, and it's the reason why indy films and indy games are so much more interesting.
I can't remember where I read this, but I came across someone talking about the fact that these AAA photo realistic games are hugely expensive to make, but if you look at what young people are spending their time playing, they're games like Fornite, Minecraft and Roblox. As soon as I read this, it clicked for me.
I have two teenagers (15 & 17) and this is exactly right. My son plays games all the time and although he's played Elden Ring and GTA and other games of that sort, over the years I would say 80% of his time has been Minecraft and this other 2D game with a platformer vibe whose name I forget that has procedurally generated maps. He's frequently calling me over to his computer to check out his latest architectural creation in Minecraft. I know it's not just him, because he plays multiplayer with his buddies as well, and again, a lot of it is these games with quite frankly primitive graphics. But they're fun!
I have a younger kid that's in Roblox a lot as well, and something I noticed the peer group do is have a facetime/voice call in the background so they can talk while they play. I like it better than watching them type chats.
I'm a huge Nintendo/Mario fan but I've recently been playing through Astro Bot on my PS5 and I must say, when you combine super fun mechanics with amazing graphics and performance, it's quite an experience! But there isn't nearly enough content like this on the non-Nintendo consoles, so point is definitely not lost on me.
I play one game at a time for about a month and then move to the next. When I first played Mario Odyssey on my switch I was over the moon with how much pure fun it was compared to all the good looking and serious RPGs I played in the decade before. I had forgotten games can be this enjoyable. Nowadays I try to do these super fun games in between my souls-like sessions.
Focusing on tech or unoriginal production values (that's photo real! You don't need a great art director, you need a photo..) is appealing to companies because it's predictable vs the creative uncertainty and subjectivity of "fun".
Astro Bot won game of the year because it had amazing graphics and physics and had Mario-tier fun. The team actually made a cryptic shout out to Nintendo at the award ceremony.
Nintendo has great games, but the resolution on TVs, even cheap ones, is outstanding now and it goes to waste using a Switch.
Playing a great game that also uses what the TV has on offer is really the best experience. If we get 4k and ray tracing on Switch I’ll be stoked.
The “is this fun” part is the reason why I bought a Switch in the first place. Still the only console I’ve ever owned
I love the “just start playing” ethos of most Nintendo games. Reminds me of the games I used to play as a kid. No long story or exposition - just a game load screen and a start button
the teaser also has a clear shot of the side and there's a sensor that looks identical to an optical mouse sensor. It seems really rough from an ergonomics perspective but maybe there are accessories for that. It could also go the way of the IR camera where it sees niche uses in a couple of random games but isn't really a staple of the console.
Ha. Since when does Nintendo care about ensuring functionality they add to their devices are leveraged? Other than first party games, and even that can be limited, almost no one ever implements the weird little functionality they add to their devices.
Not just Nintendo. The PlayStation 4 controller had that touchpad in the middle that also clicked in to act as a button. I played a lot of games that used it as a button (usually to open a map, or something) and don't remember a single game that used it as a touchpad.
Microsoft is somewhat to blame for new controller features being underutilized because they're extremely reluctant to add anything to the Xbox controller. Motion control in particular stands out, the hardware isn't expensive and it's proven to be very useful in some types of game, but the lowest common denominator Xbox controller still doesn't have it so multi-platform games can't be designed around it. Especially multiplayer games with crossplay since you can't let some players have more precise inputs than others.
A lot of that was necessary for Nintendo get away from the "it's a video game console" comparison after the video game market crash. That's why the NES looks like a VCR too.
As a mice or a air mouse. The smart tv stuff is limited by a remote control from 1980 (more or less, what changed?). I'd make lifestyle apps for the switch if they enable it.
As a mouse mouse. It seems to have an optical sensor on the inside edge (the side that attaches to the console) and the video shows the joy cons zooming around on that edge.
It does make you wonder, Safari recently had a burst in features where they modernised and even overtook Chromium/FF in some features, and then in the past year or so it’s languishing again.
I do wonder if the metrics show the average person downloads Chrome straight away so they’re just not investing heavily in it? I mean anyway, who browses traditional websites any more, right…?
They've purposefully underinvested in Safari to force developers to create native apps for their platforms where Apple makes a sizeable cut of all sales and subscriptions rather than allowing developers to create a web-app that could have done the same thing where the developers reap all the rewards for their work.
The only reason they had that burst of activity is that they needed to quickly catch up and save face in an attempt to prove to EU regulators that they weren't hampering developers.
The EU didn't buy it and forced Apple to open up their devices to allow alternate app stores and browsers on their devices in the EU.
> They've purposefully underinvested in Safari to force developers to create native apps for their platforms where Apple makes a sizeable cut
Can't speak to how accurate this is, but for WebXR, this hits the nail on the head. Purposeful stagnation on supporting it and thus indirectly bringing down the whole point of the standard, pushing of their own AppStore bound ARKit, and when they released Apple Vision Pro it's magically supported again, because I guess they needed content that badly.
Those are the problems I loathe the most, where the real problem is figuring out how to parse the input into something more workable. Once its parsed its ezpz.
Are you solving all puzzles? I find usually that the parsing isn't my problem, but some of the puzzles puzzle me (ha, couldn't resist), because they expect some kind of graph knowledge or some mathematical trick or so. Last year got stuck at day 17 for example. Usually some learning in it then, but parsing, while possibly annoying day after day, wasn't usually what stopped me from completing puzzles.
the input parsers don't get increasingly complex over the days. The problems themselves do. Even on the most difficult days around 22 or 23, the inputs are all just lines of space separate ints or some grid of points or something, just like the trivial problems on days 1-3
From last year: hot springs, the pipes problem, gears, pulses, range math.. half the problem is turning the text input into the correct data structures to solve it.
yes, that kinda is what the reality of programming is. Correctly representing the problem so that the solution easily follows. Various famous people have various quotes about this, for example Rob Pike: "if you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident".
Depends if you're really stuck on a problem. I'd rather learn by getting a look at how it's done, even if the code is incorrect, than be completely suck with no idea why or what to do.
This is his entire point: getting to this brick wall is _where_ the real learning happens. When you start scrambling, reading old stackoverflow posts, and breaking out the calculus text book you're pushing the boundaries of what is possible for you.
Body builders don't grow by watching other people lift weights.
That isn't an accurate comparison. Asking an AI is functionally equivalent to searching the web. Your comparison is like saying you can't get strong by filling up the buckets you have handy with water and lifting them, you have to do what real bodybuilders do and lift weights. Whether I'm researching the answer using a search engine or an AI prompt, the result is the same.
How do they become pioneers? By digging into the body of knowledge. They know what books and authors are good, what blogs to read, they posted questions on SO. They don't search for direct answers, but instead they search for the knowledge that allowed the person who made the question to make the question, and person who found solutions to find the solution.
Looking how it's done doesn't equal you doing it. It's apples to oranges. OP was referring to needing to do work in the gym to get results. You didn't get results if you looked at others and did the same in the advent of code etc. You are merely entertaining yourself, but you are not competitive participant. With that approach you'll never be on top.
There are people who use frameworks and people who write frameworks. The first group struggles when there is no official documentation or tutorial on a topic they need. The second group when faced with the same goes through the source code and gets the answers.
Bottom line is the question of what you want to achieve - just go through the problems and be done with them, or deep dive into new topics ans material, to widen your knowledge?
I don't see much to disgree with in what you're saying. Were clearly talking about different things.
What happens when you dig in and exhaust all your best efforts and still don't find a solution? Are you a lost cause because you couldn't figure it out for yourself? Or are you allowed to be shown the way it's done so you can learn from that?
Many times in my life have I not been able to figure something out for myself, and needed shown how the thing was done. Just because I couldn't do it on my own doesn't mean I wasn't capable of either doing it once shown, or that by being shown I didn't learn anything.
You've spent the last hour trying to curl the 50kg dumbbell and you just can't do it. You walk up to the yolked out guy and ask him to show you how it's done, he picks up the weight and curls it with ease.
At this point its not really fair to say you curled those 50kgs, and you didn't get much out of the experience. Maybe you noticed something about his technique that helped, or he gave you some pointers, but you still can't lift the weight by yourself even with that information.
Now if you instead went back and trained some more at lower weights not only would you get more out of the experience (in terms of growth), but also seeing someone else do it is more beneficial since you can try it again yourself and directly apply what you just learned. Eventually with enough training at easier weights and progressing naturally you'll be able to lift the 50kg weights. But that one curl you're now getting to do for the noobie is in no way indicative of the time and effort you actually put in to be able to do that one curl.
Now if you're instead in a warehouse doing your job moving heavy boxes from A to B getting the yolked out guy to help you isn't that bad - sure you can't do it in the future but all that matters is that it was moved from A to B. If we take that same mindset into the gym we'll get nowhere since the gym isn't about moving something from A to B, it's about making you better at moving something from A to B.
Sometimes being shown the answer to a problem is just what you need to move forward, especially if you are inexperienced. Shown the answer with an explanation as to how you get to it is better.
I think the difference between the textbooks and AI is that the AI can answer exactly your question without providing the necessary context/reasoning behind how it arrived there.
When you are drawing connections between SO posts, textbooks, whatever you do a fair amount of reasoning yourself.
Now that I think about it it isn't AI specific (more knowledge specific) - I'd say the same if you wait a few hours and then look up the AOC solutions on github. Sure you'll have "solved" the problem but you never spent the time to actually figure out the solution.
> And at the start, novice body builders will of course watch other body builders to learn how it's done.
"Learn how it's done" - not get bigger. This is the important difference. If those novice body builders watched others and learned how its done without putting in the reps themselves they'd get nowhere.
Say I have no idea how to complete day 12 of AoC. Racked my brains, done some searching, researched as best I can, can't find anything that makes sense. I'm stuck.
By your logic I would gain absolutely nothing, learn nothing, but either looking up the answer or getting AI to give me the answer. I don't accept that.
Reason being? I've been in the exact same situation. Guess what, I learned different approaches to the problem I could not solve. I improved and can now solve similar problems as a result. Is it cheating? Maybe. Do I care? No. Why? Because I'm not doing AoC for the struggle, I'm doing it for fun, and I know my limits too.
I think in that case you can only guarantee that the code you're looking at isn't broken in some ways neither I or the author on Reddit know enough to spot.
If Claude generates it and it produces correct output for the challenge but is subtly broken on some edge case not in the challenge input, how is it difference from pulling some code from Reddit that produces correct output for the challenge but is subtly broken on some edge case not in the challenge input?
Here's your opportunity to learn something: Different people can get enjoyment from the same thing in different ways, and you can learn things about data structures and algorithms without learning the syntax of a particular language to implement them.
For me, it's my ability to give feedback directly to a dev team building out an imperative language for use in our products: what was easy, what's a PITA, what are big, glaring gaps making things impossible, etc.
Stalking your superiors is insane. Most of the behaviour here is insane. Decoy cup size? Present the option that is best for the business and be done with it.
This is a sign of a sick company.