I can see both sides of it. There’s a fancy bread bakery by where I live. I go infrequently, the bread is great. But it’s expensive, most of the I just want a cheap loaf from Target, as do most people.
Instead of broad employment of artisan breadsmiths, we have people doing email work, because it’s more economically valuable. If the government mandated a higher quality of bread, we’d be slightly richer and bread and slightly poorer in everything else.
When I was near the end of high school, my family visited London, and I was thinking about being a game dev. So I sent Terry Cavanagh an email, and to my surprise he completely agreed to get lunch.
He was extremely kind, gave me a lot of interesting life advice. I remember him saying that he got most of his ideas just from playing around with mechanics and experimenting a lot, he was never really one to get grand visions.
Anyways, great fellow, glad he opened source V (as he called it).
> I remember him saying that he got most of his ideas just from playing around with mechanics and experimenting a lot
This is important. Too many people assume that novel ideas come from abstract concepts. Yes they can, but they can equaly arise from playing with the medium.
Playing retro games seems like a good way to get ideas. The VVVVVV gravity mechanic is pretty much Gravity Man from Megaman 5 (I guess Megaman is not the first time it was used either).
Mining retro game mechanics was probably easier at the time VVVVVV was developed as the explosion of indy games has probably reused the best forgotten ones of the 80s/90s. It's getting close the time mechanics from 00s games can be reused though...
I don't see why you can't reuse whatever mechanics you like.
Return of the Obra Dinn was a 2018 mystery puzzle game, where you have to figure out how everyone died in an ill-fated voyage at sea. Amazing game.
I searched Reddit for "games like Obra Dinn", and this led me to Case of the Golden Idol, a 2022 game with similar mechanics. The developers were quite open about being inspired and influenced by Obra Dinn -- and they ended up creating something in the same genre, but very much their own creation, with their own flavor. And also very enjoyable.
Originality is nice, but I'm not at all convinced it's a prerequisite for quality.
To further justify your position; Originality is just the unique composition of various unoriginal things. If you chase quality, originality will appear as a byproduct as you deal with the intricacies from your specific combination of features.
That is, everything interesting appears from the relationships between subjects, not the subjects themselves (the edges, not the nodes, of the graph). You could change any one major component of the game, explore it sufficiently, and you will inevitably have something sufficiently original despite 90% of the original core being duplicated — the nature of exploring the relationships thoroughly — chasing quality — will inevitably lead to a cascading series of changes until you reach the new stable point
When I turned 30, I was like what the heck, I'll get a game boy color and play some games I played as a kid. That's since spiralled into gbc, gba (all models), psp, ds/3ds, ps1, ps2, xbox, 360 etc. Along with a now fairly sized collection of the requisite games.
I've been picking up all the games I missed on those platforms, because most people seem to have only played 2-6 games per platform when they were kids, same as me. I'm getting recommendations from friends of games I'd just never gotten into and coming out loving them and having many new perspectives on which game mechanics work and which don't. Especially given barely any modern games are coming out that are compelling enough for me; I barely ever gamed anymore before getting all this old stuff - new games just seem like the same old copy+paste for the most part.
Atm I'm playing through coded arms on psp, pikmin 2 on gc and timesplitters fp on xbox.
The gaming world has lost so much magic and fun stuff imo. From weird hardware like the motion sensor in kirby tilt n tumble, light sensor in boktai to game mechanics like the furious lassoing in pokemon ranger, or the unique gameplay of Archer Maclean's Mercury.
I haven't done a game jam in years but I'm so ready to smash it if I end up doing another one!
Kinda easy to imagine the opposite as well... having some idea and then implementing it and feeling unsatisfied. Especially a game. It may check all the boxes thematically and have the required features but just not feel fun.
Not to say starting with a firm idea is bad... more like it may be hard to avoid playing around and improvising with the medium in any case.
* You can't get a no if you don't ask
* "Never meet your heroes" is a sham and you need to meet a few shitbags before you can really appreciate the realest of people.
Wow, that is cool! Did it help/affect your later choices with your career, did you end up a game developer, or at least try it or so? Always fun with closure! :)
I made a very mediocre platformer in my senior year of high school, published on itch.io. I ended up becoming a software developer, which I enjoy 80% as much, but without any burnout or worrying about the superstar economics of being a game dev. Once the singularity hits, maybe I'll make more games.
I listened to Lex Friedman for a long time, and there was a lot of critiques of him (Lex) as an interviewer, but since the guests were amazing, I never really cared.
But after listening to Dwarkesh, my eyes are opened (or maybe my soul). It doesn't matter I've heard of not-many of his guests, because he knows exactly the right questions to ask. He seems to have genuine curiosity for what the guest is saying, and will push back if something doesn't make sense to him. Very much recommend.
It's funny, I see myself as basically just a pretty unabashed AI believer, but when I look at your predictions, I don't really have any core disagreements.
I know you as like the #1 AI skeptic (no offense), but like when I see points like "16. Less than 10% of the work force will be replaced by AI. Probably less than 5%.", that's something that seems OPTIMISTIC about AI capabilities to me. 5% of all jobs being automated would be HUGE, and it's something that we're up in the air about.
Same with "AI “Agents” will be endlessly hyped throughout 2025 but far from reliable, except possibly in very narrow use cases." - even the very existence of agents who are reliable in very narrow use cases is crazy impressive! When I was in college 5 years ago for Computer Science, this would sound like something that would take a decade of work for one giant tech conglomerate for ONE agentic task. Now its like a year off for one less giant tech conglomerate, for many possible agentic tasks.
So I guess it's just a matter of perspective of how impressive you see or don't see these advances.
I will say, I do disagree with your comment sentiment right here where you say "Ask yourself how much has really changed in the intervening year?".
I think the o1 paradigm has been crazy impressive. There was much debate over whether scaling up models would be enough. But now we have an entirely new system which has unlocked crazy reasoning capabilities.
I had a very hard time working there, maybe the worst time in my life. I worked with a lot of very smart people, but something about the company culture is doomed in a way I haven't seen before.
Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world.
This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing.
This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.
That's a great analogy. I would add that since I left every single smart person in my extended network that worked there has left. As far as I can tell all my former teams are held together with jr devs and bubblegum.
Photos redesign maybe something you don’t like, but you can hardly call it half baked. All of the functionality is there and there’s a new consistency in how it works that wasn’t there previously.
Books automatically downloads to device. There isn’t a way to read a book without it local.
I’ve never had my alarm fail, but it looks like others have hit this bug. So by your definition if a product has a bug (even if rare but intrinsic to the functionality), then it’s half baked. Given (effectively) all software has bugs, then by your definition there are no fully baked software products. I think we have very different definitions of what makes a product half or fully baked.
I haven’t used Books extensively outside of audiobooks. So it sounds like there’s offloading of caching going on that’s iCloud wide; disabling iCloud sync would fix this. I can imagine that being frustrating if the book you want isn’t there when you’re on a flight (which should only happen if you haven’t recently accessed it). I agree there should be a way to prevent this. I wouldn’t call that half baked, but it’s a big enough problem I’d agree that’s not fully thought through (or more likely, they did think through it but came to a different conclusion).
> Have you used Books extensively or just skimmed it? There's no way to keep books on device, make another Google search if you do not believe me.
Once you download a book to a device, it stays downloaded. There is a setting to automatically remove downloads once you're finished with the book, but that defaults to off (and I didn't even realize it was there until I went looking just now).
I read your other comment. It looks like you're talking about iCloud Storage there. Books downloaded from the Apple Books Store do not go into iCloud Storage. Books you've uploaded are stored in iCloud.
I just checked my phone, I have 169 books downloaded. This includes many books I haven't looked at for years and years. This includes many books that I bought 3, 4, 5 iPhones ago and are still present, copied from device to device, because Books does not remove store downloads unless asked to.
Seems like there is more to this. I have been using iPhones since they came out and can't think of a time my alarm never worked, and I use them multiple times a day.
What are you talking about? I’ve got the books app open now, I can see all of my downloaded books. In fact there’s a whole section in the library for my downloaded books!
Go to library > collections > downloaded.
I can see books I purchased and other PDFs that I uploaded.
I do agree on the Photos redesign. I feel like I constantly get stuck on certain pages.
I don't think I have implied that. I have said that there's no functionality to download and keep files on device, which is true, because you cannot trust the device will not delete your files without your permission (or even without warning you first). But I'm not a native speaker so I could have been misunderstood.
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