Missing the hackernews part of product to research and development,:
Is your company planning to use the exponential growth nature of software to enter into a overlooked niche or rapidly take over a existing industry? In that case, product development does not really catch the situation. Cause using the situation, closing time window till competition appears or funds run out, is way more important than the product or its quality
Seems like a variation of #1 where the rewards are probabilistic and lumpy. I agree that the motivations and resulting behaviors end up pretty different.
Eh, no? Zero-k was there first, and gathered vital info.
The original setup for spring rollout of games was thoroughly inadequat to supporting large number of gamers.
Fuck, the first lobby server wrote match infos into a freaking textfile.
The first indicator of that popped up, when valve ended greenlight, and just greenlit all the things. Which propped Evolution RTS upon the steam front page for half a day, flooding the original lobby system and showing how inadequat the whole ecosystem was for that. The original Evo dev Forb learned from the whole mess after he returned from his day job.
Zero-k then learned the lessons, developed a ingui lobby, started the whole matchmaking and better server deployment, detached from the whole "one central server" thing of the spring eco system.
BAR did some graphical overhaul, with Floris, Beherith, Sprung and the whole original crew supported by new faces like Teifion and on and on.
They optimized the Spring engine into a new version- more tailored to BARs needs and reworked alot of the stuff.
Its gpl open source, so the project order and who invented what is pretty flowy.. everybody copies from everybody, one progress is everyones progress..
I disagreed about «BAR is more of a unique game (for better or worse), while ZeroK is much closer to an HD remake of Total Annihilation.»
P.S.: You might also be mistaken about EvoRTS' Steam release being specifically behind the motivation of Zero-K splitting up, since according to lead ZK dev the second at least partially predates the first ?
> 2012(ish): Zero-K splits off to its own infrastructure after disagreement with infrastructure developers. From my perspective they were very stubborn regarding extending the protocol to allow for new stuff (Eg matchmacking, more advanced planetwars) and would make sudden changes that broke our autohosts.
> 2013-2014: Evolution RTS is greenlit on Steam and released in 2014. I don't think Steam was on my radar at the time, but now it looked like a possibility. Looking back at the dates we actually put up a greenlight campaign five days after the Evolution RTS release.
(Lobby interface issues being another thing, but then IIRC EvoRTS had already tried to improve on this before release, though not successfully enough ?)
I don't think it's much about the timeline but more about the feel of being close to TA. In which case BAR indeed is closest to a some sort of TA-sense while Zero-K is more unique (and that's great!).
Eh, the engine was a accident. It started out as a 3d-viewer, capable of replaying ta games by the svedish yankspankers (clan sy).
What started out as a viewer, escalated into a 106.0 version long engine, providing a war that consumes planets, each side with only one final wish - Total Annhilation at Zero-k, beyond all reason.
Naw, the community comes and goes ebbs and flows. Its mostly on recoil discord, some are still on the irc server, the rest is on the BAR discord.
Presuming that the main code contributions also come from the Swedish scene I'm not entirely surprised that this happened. It sort of fits my impression of the gamer/programmer culture here (although I can't quite express why)
Surprisingly, that was only one metal band and every other metal band hates them for it. I have been told the average metal fan freaking loves churches and their acoustics. They might not like The Church, but they love churches.
So what can create dry air? Circulation chimneys and cool caverns were the moisture runs down the wall? I wouldnt want to rely on electricity in a wet-bulb.
Finding ways to cool the air down without electricity might be easier. If nights are still cold you can use thermal mass to get a long-term temperature average (kind of like your caverns). The ancient Persians combined that with evaporation cooling to create fridges. There are also specially engineered paints that radiate heat energy in very specific wavelengths that aren't absorbed by the atmosphere, breaking the equilibrium between absorption and emission of IR and cooling the material by a couple degrees.
Desiccants aren't nearly effective enough to dehumidify something like a room. [EDIT: apparently desiccant dehumidifiers are a thing too, although much less common in the home consumer world, so never mind -- disregard this whole comment!]
The answer is #2. Air conditioning units and dehumidifier units, which are essentially the exact same thing except for where the hot air output goes. (AC's send the hot air outdoors; dehumidifiers mix it back with the now-dehumidified cold air.)
ACs don't send the hot air outside. They transfer the heat outside. They usually recirculate the inside air. But the act of running the inside air across the cooling coils causes water to condenser on the coils and thus dehumidifies the air as well.
If portable A/C units aren't sending the internal air outside, does that mean they're also just circulating outside air as a way to disperse the heat, rather than actually blowing air outside?
Some portable A/C units do send hot air outside, and some don't. The two-hose models AFAIK are the latter type (although the un-insulated hoses are wildly inefficient)
I think electric dehumidifiers are way underused. In a cool wet climate, they're really all you need to stay comfortable down to the 50s. Anywhere you have cold wet air, it can be converted to dry warm air much more efficiently than resistive heating with those things.
There will be a web of trust, with a valuation of nodes by trustworthyness. And people will get only one id for this. Ones name is ones value and a reputation will be a hard earned thing again.
This was how the "internet" functions in the book "Ender's Game".
There is a small sub-plot about how he had to give a fake persona credibility on the untrusted network in order to be able to leverage a creating a fake account on the trusted network.
I love that interpretation, but in today's retweet driven world of politically commentary, I actually find it quite plausible that pseudonymous kids with no grasp of the real world who think rational political debate is the nonsensical slogans they're spouting on the internet become major Twitter influencers that actual politicians want to court for their "authenticity" and "willingness to say the unsayable", and maybe their dank memes.
The conceit of Ender's Game was that thoughtful discourse would be influential online.
Reality has largely demonstrated that far more thoughtless propaganda of the Big Lie, Firehose of Bullshit (or Falsehood), associated with Russia, floods of irrelevance which tend to bury more significant stories, favoured by China, and outrage / hot-button topics, which are common in US-centric media, though a timeless technique.
Memes and simple messages attract attention and spread. Complex narratives and analyses ... not so much.
But yes, voices that deserve no attention whatsover have dominated the media landscape of the past decade or so. Not that this is entirely novel.
But yeah, maybe the idea that you can even 1% trust random content on the Internet without having a source doesn't really make sense if you think about it IMHO. Either you do this web of trust, coming from a well know real world source, or be Wikipedia-like with linked reliable sources for the viewer to check.
By the way, wasn't this how Google ranked pages back in the day? Ranking pages that get linked to higher? And even before that there were P2P web rings.
I wonder if it wouldnt make more sense to just train a Commentator Neural Net with the pages you collect. It then can "remind" you of similar pages you have seen before, directly in the page, with little floating comments like "..skip..." "..contradicts.. http:/link/x/y/z " "..actual paper link.." "..paper is p-hacked shovelware.." "..authors reputation.."
It could be trained to become your personal pre-reading assistant, similar to information accumulators and pre-evaluators in governments agencies or company hqs.
It also suspicously starts to look like planned economics, once the mono-duo-poly stage is reached.
Rare goods, long queues, no choice, bad products and the leadership is off, chasing its own tail in some basebal metric detached from the world. It even features market-libertarians having to defend practices like shredding perfectly fine goods in ware houses.
The moment the ussr was gone, the race horse finally could binge and become something very similar to the ussr economy, but instead of obsessing on tanks & steel, it focused on excel sheet virtual wealth wankery, disguising the slide back into the gilded age feudalism.
I mean if you look at the astronomical levels of defense spending the US greatly resembles the USSR even in terms of the "tanks & steel". Broadly this kind of waste and stratification is characteristic of just about every fading empire.
Yet US defense spending vs GDP is nearly the lowest it has ever been in the last fifty years. If defense spending v GDP is a sign of a falling empire, we fell in 1960.
Plus seriously, if you think spending 4% of GDP will cause a country or "empire" to collapse you need to read some history books.
> What are we getting via VC-led industrial policy?
Oh, its much worse than that, it exposes the hyporacy of hustle culture, and entrepreneur porn entirely if you're paying close enough attention with things FTX.
The covertness of ivy leagues parents leaning on the VC heavy hitters (Sequoia et al) and making this Sam and his girlfriend to be a super genius' while operating like 2-bit clowns with almost no oversight or due diligence and bribing politicians to get favourable legislation in place for them to corner the market.
I wish it were just crumby ad jobs, but it goes way deeper.
There are some compilations on TikTok of people showing China's public infrastructure to America's (including the ~slums many neighborhoods have become)....not a good look. If the general public had a clue any of this was going on I think they'd be livid.
What is the point of power if not to abuse it. Start a business, it's new and good and you penetrate the market, you grow and grow and... are you willing to let the next better product put you out of business? No of course not, you will throw all the weight you have to squash the competition disregarding fair play and ethics - that's why you grabbed that power, so that you can use it!
The USSR collapsed and 3 decades have past. Except Venezuela there is no menace of worker revolution at the horizon anywhere in the world. There is absolute zero menace to corrupt capitalist governments who run a two-party turnist democracy.
> It also suspicously starts to look like planned economics
EU certainly is, or we have all signs of it: Most funding for French startups come from the BPI, so the BPI drives everyone to the AI Blockchain TechHR and whatsnot, while…
…while, as an example, and I underline it’s just one example of broader customs, French people regularly take hostage managers in factories for 2 to 10 days, until they sign off an agreement, provided limited supplies of water and food. None of those agreements was cancelled for duress. So we put all public funding into having the next Apple, while not letting actual customer demand drive the economy, and still preventing middle class people from actually going big.
I’m already rich so I try to remain emotionally detached, but when the state drives what should be built (Macron putting 500m into AI, and a billion into Intel chips of the previous-previous generation), it really is a state-driven economy.
Well, a couple of things: France =|= EU, which should be obvious. Also, you have to put 500 million in context: Liquid Death (canned H2O) has a valuation of 700 million USD, MS dumped 10 billion on OpenAI and Germany burned 500 million on a road toll system that cannot be built because the whole concept is illegal. Someone else already brought up Adam Newman. And now put that in relation to the budget of an entire nation state. Peanuts, actually.
Regarding those Intel chips: Which chips exactly caused the chip crisis? High end latest gen ones or older tech? And now you can guess on which chips the vast, vast majority of national defence hardware runs. That idea actually isn't to bad.
> I’m already rich so I try to remain emotionally detached, but when the state drives what should be built
This is simply ahistorical, every developed country got there with the help of the state.
Did the interstate highway system get built by venture capital? Did the power grid?
Western governments are no longer capable of these kind of major projects.
London is running out of water.
United Kingdom has huge canals connecting manchester, London, and Birmingham. They were dug without industrial machinery. With shovels.
When I propose to English people that there is plenty of water in scotland and maybe they should expand canals network and repurpose it to redistribute water, they think its madness. Some kind of unachievable, socialist plan.
China has built a canal network to redistrubute water. That why they will be earing our lunch - actually its their own lunch. We arent making lunch, we are wondering why market didn’t bring us lunch.
If you are rich you could have done your part. It is really easy. All you have to do is read some books and then start a fintech (expected budget: 20 million USD, less if you can find a cooperating banking partner) and then all the things you complain about will disappear and you will even earn money in the process. I am dead serious.
hah. okay, in the US, in the "good" old days only very poorly informed or suckers would pay MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price). you would normally have to go to multiple dealerships, figure out what you want vs options that were actually on the car, haggle a lot and usually you would get a [way] better price than the MSRP. Dealers had inventory and cars to sell, so selling a car was better than not selling it.
in the brave new world (where we had a pandemic + supply chain shock + shortages of all kinds) you no longer have an option. Dealers do not have the car or if they do it goes away instantly. You have zero leverage and they will 1/ get whatever price they want for it (usually above MSRP) and 2/ will wait and be happy you managed to work something out.
I'm going to buy a used car you say? Well, you'd be shocked to learn how much used cars are going for (and there used to be a time during the pandemic, not too long ago where, for certain brands you could actually sell your car for more than you bought it new - which to me it's crazy)
