Yeah, agreed, a good DLC is awesome. The example that comes to mind for me is From Soft. Top notch content, delivered well after the release of top notch games, at a fair price, which expand on the level and boss design and improve it every time, while stepping up the difficulty for those who loved and fully completed the base content.

I wish every game I ever loved would get DLC like that.

Ugh, if only. Amazon has done everything in their power to bury and strip that number from the internet. Once upon a time that worked great.

Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.

So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen… which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon’s “chat support” AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours “in case my package shows up”. I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it’s not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I’m willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final “solution” and I have to restart the convo over and over.

Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.

Yeah, similar experience. The only game I tried was basically a web version of state.io, which was already a free app anyway, but instead I got to play a worse version in YT that made my phone burning hot. Cool.

I actually did enjoy it, so I just… downloaded the real app and never booted a game via YT again.

I’d be very surprised if anything functional actually comes out of this. Far more likely they get scammed out of the money by garbage like the current “AI writing detection” methods, with terrible success rates that cause more societal problems than they solve.

My two are Morrowind, where I loved the quest design and lack of handholding, but the random hit chance and BS difficulty distribution were just… too much to handle.

And also, KOTOR, which I expected to love as a huge Star Wars fan, but the “stand around while dice are rolled” combat was just… exceptionally boring and tedious.

Oh, what an interesting idea! I like this, on Monday I’ll test out switching to this as my main search engine for work and try to report back how it goes!

So true, I have to do this with some predatory mobile game or another every year or two. Sometimes one of them just gets you.

Yeah, nothing but respect for Lego here. Tried it, proved it wasn’t viable, chose not to do it just for the PR, and set back out to continue looking for something that actually works.

Seems like a sensible overhaul, hitting the major issues with the fee, but still going ahead with a version of it. Big points for me:

• Not retroactive. Only affecting the next version of Unity, and you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.
• Data is now reported by the customers. Still not sure how that plan to enforce this, but it’s a hell of a lot better than some arbitrary data collection scheme being baked into the game.
• Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

Still not sure I love charging per install as a concept, and they’ve already overplayed their hand and burnt many bridges, but at least this implementation isn’t insanely hostile. Guess we’ll see how this plays out from here.

Yeah, that’s what burns the business relationship. Because now it’s not just “oh, Unity might screw me, and I’m investing in learning what could become a dead platform”, it’s “even if Unity doesn’t screw me now, they could randomly decide to screw me 10 years from now and retroactively charge me a king’s ransom”. That’s the stuff that has a permanent chilling effect on the whole platform.

Oh, good! I honestly kinda expected Bethesda to do nothing about the missing PC options, especially DLSS. The platform clearly hasn’t been their priority.

Having used tailwind a little bit, I have nothing but praise for it. Effortless copy/pasting of components with confidence, really nice look by default, easy tweaking, absolutely no management or planning required to organize your CSS, and it’s all right there, directly on your html, never anywhere you have to hunt for it. Feels very freeing to just… not think about CSS at all.

And the “clutter” really is fine, modern IDEs with good syntax highlighting, plus a tailwind extension to help complete the class names and clean up accidental duplicates or conflicting properties, and you’re good.

Agreed. The upload schedule has been a holy grail within LTT for a long time, and I truly believe it’s the root of all of this, yes, even the sexual harassment. Or at least how that harassment was handled so poorly. When do you have time to make good HR policies? Pull people into HR for reprimanding? Have opportunities for others to second guess decisions? Do training? Or heck, even just have less tired and irritable people making in-the-moment stupid decisions?

This uncompromising maximum velocity hurts everyone, and I hope they keep never bring it back to this pace, even after the process improvements they have planned.

I also feel like a lot of the value of chronological is lost if I think it’s algorithmic recommendations. If I don’t know I’m browsing the latest? I’ll likely just think the algorithm is serving up some garbage. Especially somewhere like Facebook, where people haven’t really been curating their feed for years, just… following whoever to be polite and letting the algorithm take care of it.

Eh, I’d assume the comparison isn’t flattering. I think the point of this article is to argue you don’t need ElasticSearch to implement a competent Full Text Search for most applications. Splitting hairs over a few milliseconds would just distract from that point, when most applications should be prioritizing simplicity and maintainability over such tiny gains in a reasonable dataset.

Might be interesting to try to analyze at exactly what point elasticsearch becomes significantly useful, however. Maybe at the point where it saves a full tenth of a second? Or where it’s returning in half the time? Could be an interesting follow up article.

Eh, the python one will probably perform better, because sum is probably written in native C under the hood.

Great read!

I think a bonus point in favour of composition here is the power of static typing. Introducing advanced features like protocols can bring back some of that safety that this article describes as being exclusive to inheritance.

Overall, I think composition will continue to be the future going forward, and we’ll find more ways to create that kind of compilation-time safety without binding ourselves into too restrictive or complicated models.

Ah, it makes way more sense for students, absolutely. None of your code is proprietary, so that’s not a concern, student pricing makes things easier.

Plus, your tech stacks are much simpler. Usually just… Java, or Python, or something. Not a python webserver using X framework for templating, Y framework for typing, and Z framework for API calls to some undocumented internal API.

Alright, guess I’ll reiterate my usual beats here. AI code assistance is interesting, and I’m not against it. However, every current solution is inadequate, until it does the following:

1. Runs locally, or in an on-prem instance. I’m not taking it up with legal or security if I’m allowed to send our proprietary code off to be analyzed on a foreign server. And I’m not doing it without asking. It just isn’t happening.
2. It has to be free, or paid for by my company. It’s cool, and it might help me work, but paying a subscription fee on something that only benefits me at work is essentially the same as a pay cut. Not interested.
3. It has to analyze the entire repo. In my current tests of ChatGPT, for most cases I’ve spent long enough giving it context that I could’ve just… solved the problem myself. It needs to have that context already.