One of the Xeelee Sequence novels deals with this problem specifically: a pilot in an FTL space fighter uses multiple hops to defeat an enemy, and ends up back before he left. It's a Xeelee Sequence book, grimdark of grimdark, so hilarity does not ensue.
One of the last things I remember about Atom was that by the time they’d figured out all the stuff they needed to fix, VSCode had come in and stolen all the eyeballs, so to speak. So they have a good roadmap, they just need to do the implementation.
If we're collecting scifi references to water planets, "Neptune's Brood" by Charlie Stross features a very large water world, and the problems of certain minerals (like uranium) dissolved in the oceans. Also the fun things that happens to ice under extreme pressure.
So do you only work for companies who have 100% open source and whose business model or product is a public benefit? Eg, "I value my freedom" is a perfectly acceptable position, until Mark Zuckerberg starts signing your checks, you know?
Are you trying to claim that something like React/React Native/Jest weren't mostly done by Meta, but by the open source community, and Meta was just riding the coattails of their free work? You count VSCode to be in the same category as well (swap Meta for Microsoft instead)?
That's quite a claim, and I dont believe it is substantiated.
We have instances that spin up and down quickly. AWS bills by the second; Datadog billed at that time (unsure if it's changed) by the minute. This mismatch led to huge bills, such that monitoring was more expensive than the resource being monitored. It's probably fair to respond to that with RTFM. However, par for the course in the industry seems to be to adjust the bill when our mistake was made in good faith. Their response was to give us a small adjustment in exchange for signing up for additional services. More than just what happened is how it felt. It felt sleazy, and didn't jibe with the way the company was presented in the community.
As for the tech, it seemed like a quality product.
And that resulting in compromises such as high amounts of sampling, ignoring a facet of data altogether because "we won't need it if something goes wrong...", and/or using some kind of log stream processor to divert large amounts of data in S3 instead of allowing it be queried whenever you want.
My annoyance with this is, you can pretty much run a "Blade Runner" TTRPG with any suitable system. You barely need to do any prep: we know there's guns, space ships, FTL, extremely good computers, etc. Thats like half the existing OOTB sci-fi settings. Pick one with the desired crunch and take a few minutes to skin it (no pun intended).
The most stereotypical Hacker News comment has to be the "but you can already do this with existing tools" without recognizing how valuable it is (and transformative of the experience) when someone talented makes a tailor-made solution. :)
Honestly I mostly come here to laugh at everyone complaining at everyone and “constructively” shaming others for one thing or the other. This is a prickly lot to say it in the absolutely kindest way.
Of course. The value of this (as in any RPG set in a universe based on an existing property) is that the rule book and supplements will provide lots of additional background for the universe that wasn't already defined. I remember playing the West End Games Star Wars RPG in the 1990s before the prequels and I loved how the books expanded upon that universe beyond the original three movies.
Those actually created big parts of the SW EU! Stuff that was written for those games got authorized into canon. Star Wars also produced a ton of new material for its EU. It was a living universe, ripe for gaming.
Blade Runner is 2 movies. (Or 14 or something, if you count all the directors cuts)
You can run any setting in any system you want or make up your own system but it's much easier if you're running off of something close and even better if it includes systems for what you want to do instead of having to make them up. There's a reason there's so many settings book for D&D, saves time having to invent an entire world so you can focus on other stuff.
That's surely true in a sense where the gameplay and narrative are disconnected. I think this is common in the practice of TTRPGs, but not necessary. Gameplay can reinforce or even _be_ the narrative and some games exemplify this (Primetime Adventures, Star Crossed, 10 Candles, The Clay that Woke, and Dialect all immediately come to mind).
I haven't read _this_ RPG to speak to it. But I can 100% imagine an excellent "Blade Runner" RPG which goes beyond just skinning a setting on to some ambient system and instead really explores gameplay that itself can tell a "Blade Runner story".
While I essentially agree, I don't think those conversions are trivial for anyone except an experienced GM, with an experienced group, who all consume the same sort of sci-fi media. "Extremely good computers", in isolation, isn't enough information to extrapolate a coherent setting. They're extremely good, fine, but are they, say, all airgapped from one another like in early Shadowrun? The consequences of this small decision affect everything from the players designing their hacker characters to the GM designing the layout of the corp they'll be hacking. Can you run a game without considering this at all? Probably -- just don't play hackers!! But the GM having the answers to questions like this, or better still, the players reading about what computers are like in a corebook before the first session of play, is ultimately easier for everyone and more immersive.
Further, a system used to play a game strongly affects the game's feel. Take the Star Trek license, there's been plenty of attempts[0]: FASA, LUG, even GURPS and d20 modern supplements. None really make for a playable game, because they're mere reskins of games fundamentally designed to tell different stories than those one usually thinks of when one hears "Star Trek" [1]. Those systems are more simulationist and gameist, particularly GURPS and d20, and express more DNA from RPGing's Great Ancestor of tactical wargaming than is appropriate for Star Trek. Star Trek needs a narrativist system.
The most recent attempt, Star Trek Adventures, has a ruleset that's a mere armature upon which narrative beats are hung. But what rules exist power a sort of bennie-economy [2] that allows the GM to menace the players with the mechanical equivalent of threatening musical stings, and allows the players to pull technobabble/white-knuckle-skill solutions from nowhere to defeat those otherwise-insurmountable GM-imposed obstacles.
It just feels more like Star Trek in ways that have nothing to do with the GM or the players individually. I'm not suggesting that this, uh, fairly aspirational [3] project is necessarily going to have that desirable trait, but rolling one's own system means there's at least a chance.
Roy specifically mentions witnessing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, presumably that would be Bellatrix 244 light years from Earth. Given that Roy is approaching 4 years old I think one can assume FTL.
Neuromancer had the "Turing police" monitoring AIs. Watts Blindsight universe has the "Cloudkillers", who turn off AI that gets too smart. It's becoming a more common trope in sci-fi.
