sinbad

sinbad, 10 months ago to random

Meta apparently found that chronological feeds "caused people to log off" and engage less with their platform, which is why they don't like them. https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds/

Perhaps it's because they saw what they wanted to see quickly, and went on with their lives. Instead of wading through a ton of engagement fishing outrage-bait and doomscrolling their way through the day.

We know by now that high engagement does not equal healthy usage. Meta et al thrive on unhealthy patterns.

sinbad, 9 months ago to random

Science has not been able to make a violin small enough for all those companies struggling with retention / recruitment after mandated return to office policies.

sinbad, 2 months ago to random

I feel like subscriptions have generally made software quality worse. There was an argument that having to make paid upgrades to generate revenue to pay salaries put pressure on companies to change things that didn’t need changing, just to get that upgrade money, and subs reflected the holistic task of careful maintenance better. But in practice what’s often happened is the subscription props up bad decisions on product direction, because subs have to keep paying either way.

sinbad, 8 months ago to random

I actually didn’t know how deliberately unprofitable Unity was, I assumed they had modest profits before the VC nonsense, but apparently not. Billions of debt. They did the thing of burning through money to wipe everyone else out and get into a position of dominance, before hitting the screw-tightening button on their captive customer base. You know, the standard late capitalism shitty monopolist manoeuvre. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unitys-self-combustion-engine-this-week-in-business

People trying to make profitable engines never stood a chance

sinbad, 3 months ago to gamedev

First pass of dispensing health potions #gamedev

A fantasy water cooler dispensing health potions

sinbad, 8 months ago to random

It boggles my mind how much tech CEOs get paid to completely ruin a company. Every time someone tries to claim that they get paid the big bucks because “competition” and “global talent pool” I’m like dude, a blind ferret could do the job better than most of these muppets. It’s just a bunch of mates that all go to the same parties and hire each other despite their total incompetence at doing the job they should be doing

sinbad, 10 months ago to random

Big public companies that rose up on the back of the free, open web over the last 20y want to wall it off, make it proprietary.

Of course they do. They benefited from openness on the way up, but now they ARE the incumbents they previously disrupted, they want to stop others doing the same to them. We cheer for plucky upstarts, but then they simply become what they railed against.

The answer is always openness, all the time. And flipping the bird to incumbents, even if they used to be cool.

sinbad, 10 months ago to random

If you care about the open web:

• Stop relying on for-profit social media
• Stop using Google Chrome

These things are the biggest stealth pushes towards Compuserve 2.0 and no-one wants that

sinbad, 10 months ago to unrealengine

Do YOU want to write game dialogue for #UE5? Would you like to write the whole script in text like a movie script, that's easy to edit, and version control friendly? Want to perform camera cuts, sync with cutscenes, and animate characters?

Announcing the SUDS Pro Dialogue System that does all of this and more, now available on the Marketplace: https://unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/suds-pro-dialogue-system

I've put a lot of work into this and it's finally here. Boosts appreciated! 🙂 #gamedev #unrealengine

sinbad, 6 months ago to random

It’s crazy that in 2023 there are no great desktop OS’s, just adequate ones with different problems. You’d think it would be solved by now, but I guess car UX was shite for about 50 years so maybe it’ll start resolving in the 2030s?

Mac: spend all your money, be wrist-slapped when you go off-script (script changes yearly, keep up)
Windows: try to navigate the decisions of 65 competing and entirely insane PMs trying to get a promotion
Linux: quit the day job, configuring this is what you do now

sinbad, 4 months ago to random

A big change in my lifetime is that platform makers used to heavily court developers, because they knew their platforms were useless without software. The platform that was friendliest to developers and consumers at the same time usually won.

The idea that Apple is entitled to over 1/4 of your revenue even if you distribute the software yourself, just because they provide the platform is ludicrous. People who think this is reasonable must just have never experienced the time when it wasn’t.

sinbad, 3 months ago to random

You can see why CEOs get paid so much, no-one else could make the big calls like how fast to copy whatever everyone else is doing regardless of merit

sinbad, 5 months ago to random

One of the things that most pisses me off about tech business embracing of generative models is the sheer hypocrisy about IP. I’ve watched these same assholes spend the last few decades shutting everyone else down through ridiculous IP overreach - “you can’t do that basic thing because I filed some incredibly dumb paperwork about it”, and “my algorithm doesn’t understand fair use, tough luck”

And now they’re wholesale ingesting everyone else’s work without permission and that’s fine, apparently

sinbad, 1 year ago to random

People really should stop spending their time on websites owned & run by super rich weirdos

Instead they should spend it on sites run by regular weirdos like you and me

At least we’re fairly harmless

sinbad, 6 months ago to random

They call it “side loading” whereas we used to call this “owning your own fecking computer and doing what the hell you want with it, what absolute parade of muppets would stop you doing even that basic thing ffs” https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/10/ios-17-2-sideload-apps/

sinbad, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago) to random

I’d heard a couple of people say that Xbox was basically not worth aiming for anymore as an indie, unless they offer you a chunky Game Pass deal - which they probably won’t, unless you’re a known quantity by reputation or sales on other platform. This article backs that up; good to know if like me you’re an outsider to console dev and would be going in blind https://www.patreon.com/posts/do-game-still-to-104149801?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

sinbad, 9 months ago to random

Dear Tech Industry,

Please can the next trend you come up with not be a dark ritual to the worst excesses of late stage capitalism. Come on, you used to know how to do this.

Signed

All the people who used to love this industry

sinbad, 3 months ago to random

slaps roof of AI this bad boy can create a shit version of anything

sinbad, 9 months ago to random

After 30 years programming professionally, I’m still surprised and suspicious when anything works too easily

sinbad, 10 months ago to random

Maybe I should feel insulted but this is just adorable

First page of MSI cartoon instruction booklet for upgrading your GPU. It’s super adorbs but also has decent info

sinbad, 6 months ago to random

The problem with the technology hype cycle is that everyone hyping it has a vested interest in ignoring the fundamental rule that anyone who has ever made anything understands: progress is not linear. Just because it took you a year of amazing progress getting the easiest 80% of the thing working does not mean you’re almost there.

sinbad, 6 months ago to random

All I want for Christmas is for people to stop calling it “generative ai” and be honest that it’s “automated bullshitting”

It is literally that guy at a networking event who can regurgitate all the words in approximately the right order but has no idea what any of them mean

sinbad, 5 months ago to random

1. I have a cunning plan
2. Blep

#caturday

Pippin the black and white cat licking the fish toy string looking gormless

sinbad, 1 month ago to random

PSA: Microsoft may be constantly determined to make the Windows Start Menu worse, but thanks to competing corporate silos another enclave within the company makes the solution: PowerToys Run, so that you never have to use the Start Menu again: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

sinbad, 2 months ago to random

It makes me laugh when I see writeups about why a game (or other project) was successful vs all the others with a similar level of effort because anyone who's had success (especially a mix of success and failure) knows full well that the answer is “Luck”. Also possibly timing, but that’s mostly a luck factor too.

Effort, smart decisions: they’re just table stakes. Loads of projects have that & fail. Luck is the differentiator. We need to own that & not pretend it’s genius