adrianhon

adrianhon, 4 months ago to random

Apple nerds in the US, for the love of god:

Stop bleating on about how EU regulators are terrible, they don’t know anything, wont do anything, don’t represent what EU citizens want.

The world is not America. The EU is not America. They do not always want or value the same things. Maybe try talking to some Europeans?!

adrianhon, 1 month ago to random

NYT opinion pieces on Trump sleeping during trial:

Bret Stephens: Consciousness is for the woke

Maureen Dowd: I once had a weekend where I didn't sleep

Ross Douthat: Trump sleeps for us all

Jamelle Bouie: What the constitution tells us about snoozing

David Brooks: The (fourth) wife of my dreams

adrianhon, 3 months ago to random

OK I wrote up my dopamine rant so now I will never have to speak upon it again (until next week) https://mssv.net/2024/02/20/dopamine-for-me-addiction-for-thee/

adrianhon, 3 months ago to random

Loved this piece by Hamilton Nolan on writing and editing; silly, but I agree! https://flaminghydra.com/how-to-write-good/

adrianhon, 2 months ago to random

RIP to a real one. Practically everything he wrote was decades ahead of its time, not to mention superbly entertaining and deeply humanist. https://file770.com/vernor-vinge-1944-2024/

adrianhon, 4 months ago to random

This is huge. If these rules had applied to all users worldwide, my company would’ve saved six figures, maybe seven, on App Store fees for our games.

It also enables new kinds of apps like eBook stores that would’ve been impossible if you had to pay Apple up to 30% for each sale - more than your entire margin. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-announces-changes-to-ios-safari-and-the-app-store-in-the-european-union/

adrianhon, 1 year ago to random

ChatGPT, write me the most Hacker News comment of them all

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813694

adrianhon, 11 months ago to random

This is what happens when people stop doing humanities

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36353231

adrianhon, 11 months ago to random

It's impossible to overstate how good a job Aaron Reed has done with his book 50 Years of Text Games.

You may have seen his excellent free newsletter. The print version is even better: well-designed, easy to browse, and full of primary source material.

https://if50.textories.com

Two page spread showing code from Digital: A Love Story

adrianhon, 4 months ago to random

“A publisher told me that his (successful) business operated on the rule of thumb that 80% of books were not read by the purchaser - they were either gifts or found their way onto glass tables or dusty bookshelves

…That's why we like to say a record collection defines who you are, and a book collection defines who you really want to be.”

Will Page in the Winter 2023 issue of The Author

adrianhon, 3 months ago to random

“The Vision Pro can literally DRM your eyes — if you’re watching a movie in the Apple TV app or Disney Plus and go to take a screen capture, the content blacks out.”

Welcome to the future! https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr-ar-headset-features-price

adrianhon, 10 months ago to random

Here's the thing with Elon.

At Tesla and SpaceX, he could hire engineers so passionate about electric cars and building rockets, so frustrated by the slow pace at other organisations, they willingly worked themselves to the bone and covered up for his many shortcomings. Quite how sustainable that is, we'll see.

But there are plenty of other companies with the same mission as Twitter. And software engineers are so sought after, he can't hire the best on peanuts. It can't work.

adrianhon, 9 months ago to random

My grand unified theory of punditry is that many (most?) have a few good ideas at first, but as attention grows they need to keep publishing more stuff to feed the beast, so they venture into areas they have no idea about and quality control goes down.

Finally, they say something dumb and instead of reassessing, they double-down and are drawn into the Rogansphere.

adrianhon, 9 months ago to random

Truly depressing shit

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-guidebooks-artificial-intelligence.html?unlocked_article_code=xxW_l72V7G_SaNjDRiv-8g-kMifnAG07A4ZPdXHdG_ezikWtRogYGsCRQixqEJgj8v-z34qNSEF0qX78wnZlC_22_PhDsdYZ_qM6vbqZF3thwGvz3yEgDnJMJYojd3wwdGbHhz5KeiVxzL2UMrwn-DTFOZGFunvrUOxIiSpUF2veADaGHfeZxBhuSRIS9Iw_EjBAQVIJ7THhkUWgqQgjDZrB5E-MVFFKF6HBuQMLHHmcmHupuPsW3CA2WQAEvfguljy7Yu9Uz5YDg4cYuyozqzIb7t2OAaSuZpmn6OsESFk2d8GHhMQ-t1dDribjCvB4Kp0SNh-kOAwmV5kpK82wj7S1dhjP8rJbdqiLrOFtcjsBRA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

adrianhon, 1 year ago to random

My form letter to people who are unthinkingly skeptical of VR and AR

adrianhon, 3 months ago to random

Holly Gramazio has written a very good post about how she solved a crucial puzzle for her Husband Generator webtoy:

How do you make some of the husbands appealing? https://buttondown.email/holly/archive/an-infinite-supply-of-husbands/

adrianhon, 11 months ago to random

Cityscapes is what you'd get if you added free-to-play monetisation to SimCity, then you ripped it out again because you sold the game to Apple Arcade.

Sure, it's still addictive, but in a deeply confusing and unusually offensive way.

https://adrianhon.substack.com/p/cityscapes-sim-builder

adrianhon, 3 months ago to random

I keep thinking about this @simoncarless post on how the vast catalog of Steam games – so many of which are still playable and polished – means that new games are competing with all games.

It used to be that constant hardware and OS changes meant older games were harder to play, and perhaps not worth playing. Now that things are more stable and it's easy to distribute bug fixes and updates online, that's all changed.

And it's happening to consoles, too... https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/just-how-big-have-pc-and-console

adrianhon, 11 months ago to random

Unusually self-aware, self-effacing thread on Metafilter!

People suggesting lots of cutting-edge features like "better mobile posting" and "better quotes". I have repeated my annual suggestion that Metafilter migrate to Discourse or people accept an extremely long wait for any of these things.

https://metatalk.metafilter.com/26319/What-Should-We-Learn-from-Reddit

adrianhon, 9 months ago to random

Adore this piece by
@annehelen about the gamification of health, which starts with a quote from me and goes way beyond that.

"I want validation for an unscheduled week — or month — on the calendar. I want a smartwatch that does those little explosive emojis when it sees that my body was tired and I listened to it."

"If you could design an anti-growth badge for an app or device, what would it celebrate?"

https://annehelen.substack.com/p/wheres-my-rest-badge

If my watch can measure something as complex as heat acclimation, why can't it offer a Recovery Mode? An obvious setting (not hidden under layers of menus) you can toggle on when you're sick, when you're rehabbing from injury, when you're forcing some rest after a big event - or that you keep toggled on it, for whatever reason, your body needs longterm rest. It seems so obvious and yet somehow impossible, as if these brilliant computers on our wrists have no capacity to understand a "goal" as anything other than the constant push for more. It makes sense, I suppose, that a running watch isn't built to anticipate the needs of someone who's not trying to run every day. But I don't stop wearing my watch when I'm injured, even though the 0.0 in the left hand corner of its screen taunts me. I know people who've stopped wearing their devices altogether during vacations or recovery periods or Covid because the reminders and encouragement to "keep moving" became too much to bear.
Give me dynamism! Give me glorious failure! Give me subdued lateral movement! What about the hard work of showing up for the same volunteer shift every week for years on end? Of building or rebuilding a friendship? Of quitting a high-paying dream job that made you miserable? Of reading so deeply you entered a flow state not dissimilar to what happens during endurance exercise? What if you want to be ambitious in the care you provide others? What if you want to work hard at being someone's Harriet? What badge do you get for that? I want validation for an unscheduled week - or month - on the calendar. I want a smartwatch that does those little explosive emois when it sees that my body was tired and I listened to it. I wish having enough time to sleep as much as you need wasn't quietly interpreted as a sign that you clearly don't have enough going on in your life ("must be nice!") I want to live with challenges, not constantly vanquish them and heed the expectation to take on yet another challenge. I want to decide for myself what's hard and worth pursuing, and when and if I do that hard thing, I want space to process and recover from it, too. I'm bad at that, but thinking hard about how to be better.
And so I'm wondering: What's an area where you feel yourself resisting the push to constantly grow? What have you noticed about your reaction and others'? How have you had to reconfigure your relationship with rest, and how has it affected your relationship with family members, friends, and coworkers? How do we square resistance to the growth mindset with the need to periodically do arduous things, either because they need to be done or because they feel good? If you could design an anti-growth badge for an app or device, what would it celebrate?

adrianhon, 2 months ago to random

Sigh, I guess we’re in for another few weeks of Apple fans and tech podcasters being insufferably ignorant about the law https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/21/24105363/apple-doj-monopoly-lawsuit

adrianhon, 9 months ago to random

No time to read my 12,000 word piece about the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel?

Try my 800 word writeup for The Guardian! That's my secret, Cap – I'm always writing.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/aug/09/pushing-buttons-disney-star-wars-hotel-florida--galactic-starcruiser

adrianhon, 10 months ago to random

Museums wouldn’t do “Paintings: The Exhibition” or “Fashion!” and yet they insist on doing Videogames 101 again and again. Pathetic.

“There ought to be exhibitions on Myst and Surrealism; The Sims and interior design; Red Dead Redemption, Albert Bierstadt, and the American West.”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-art-world/the-puzzle-of-putting-video-games-in-a-museum

adrianhon, 6 days ago to random

I just went on a 35 minute dark ride at Cosquer Méditerranée, an immersive reproduction of paleolithic caves.

Could this be the longest duration active dark ride in the world? Curious to know other examples! https://blooloop.com/theme-park/news/etf-ride-systems-cosquer/