PoW doesn’t magically address the interface problem with the real world.
I have to assume by now that any responses in the crypto world that amount to “this coin will fix it” are made by people that own that coin. No further analysis is necessary at this point.
> PoW doesn’t magically address the interface problem with the real world.
I didn't claim it did? PoW solves the "how can we trust this transaction should have happened" problem which prevents some centralized org from stealing coins from your wallet. However, it does that at a huge power cost (it has to, by design).
PoS solves the power cost problem, but cannot be initiated until there is enough stake holders with enough to lose. Start with PoS and you are basically asking for your centralized management to be trusted. The PoS transition has to be planned pretty much from the coin's foundation.
Of course, there's also traditional banking which I think are generally the better idea. Not because they are more trustworthy necessarily, but there are 3rd party enforcement mechanisms which are hard to stop if a bank becomes a bad actor. (the legal system). That, of course, assumes a functioning gov, but my assumption is that's what most HN commenters live in.
The major problem with crypto is that 3rd party enforcement is not possible (by design). So, if someone steals or scams you out of money, you are SoL.
The productivity of solo indie game devs is just really impressive.
While I’m aware of the “go fast alone, go far together” quote, I’m depressed by how inefficient app/ui development is at big tech companies compared to game studios, especially short staffed indies.
Really makes me wonder about the “engineering excellence” that tech leads and “architects” pride themselves in when games are developed much more quickly and are - to my eye - much more stable and performant.
A lot of it is about tradeoffs (long term vs one-off projects, business stakeholders, and a long etc), but there's also significant selection bias. Most "indie" projects die before having much of a playable thing, and many successful solo indie projects can take many long and grueling years (e.g. Stardew Valley).
Engineering in most organisations will place stability and predictability very high among priorities, and pay a hefty price for it (sometimes, messing up along the way and getting neither benefit). An individually brilliant engineer can be a great asset if properly managed, but you need the majority of people to be less of an outlier.
I think we can ignore the selection bias because I’m not aware of any “AAA app” (for lack of a better term) that moves as quickly and productively as the best game studios do (see my comment about Grinding Gear Games below). Additionally, these apps employ engineers that are supposedly amongst the best money can buy. At least, if there is some better way to hire top engineers it should be fairly obvious in AAA app output of some orgs with better hiring processes - but I’m not aware of any such apps or orgs.
As for stability and predictability, I’m not confident that AAA apps are hugely (or maybe even significantly) more stable or predictable than the best games. Maybe my tolerance for bugs is higher in games than apps, but I do seem to tolerate quite a lot of jank and slowness from apps, so I’m not sure.
Part of that is probably that game developers tend to be passionate about the work they do, whereas most people working in app development probably don't give too much of a shit about the boring apps they're making. It's hard to get motivated when you're just making a glorified front-end to a database, another e-commerce site, etc.
Of course, the tradeoffs in work-life balance for game development is massive, so it's not like that extra productivity is free (unless you're management). Nobody working at a typical software firm is going to be expected to crunch 12 hour work days for weeks just to ship.
I've had my eyes opened recently onto the world of modern game editors (Unity, Unreal, Godot, etc.) by watching gamedev streams. The productivity of these environments, and their associated asset stores, is amazing. You can't help but think that other domains would also be well-served by a fully-integrated experience like this. Surely the universe of "webapps" or "unix-y network services" is at least as constrained as "3D games" is (possibly more?).
I would certainly be interested in a "Unity for line-of-business apps." I guess this was VB6 lol.
The interesting thing is that the other comment alongside yours is talking about GGG, who rolled their own as a team of about 6 (in the early days), and they're by far the most productive game developer I've ever seen.
I think Unity and the like have made the average project much more productive, but they don't add power to the top end. The power of having everything perfectly customisable by a team of experts with perfect domain knowledge is just too much for anyone else to match by getting quick wins off the work of others.
I typically bounce around the twitch category before settling on one. These tend to be smaller streamers who don't have regular hours. One that I try not to miss is Jonathan Blow, though his current project is in a custom engine (written in new language on a custom compiler, even) so it's not immediately relevant to learning about modern game editors.
I think what he said is awesome! You are presuming that others are on the same page as you: I have zero understanding as to why you “lost respect” at all.
Perhaps you could share your own thoughts, opening yourself to criticism and a chance for interaction, and perhaps learning. I wrote a few comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31990217 (discussing an opaque article titled “The Mysterious Return of Imposter Syndrome”).
Grinding Gear Games, as an example, is a NZ based game studio that releases a new expansion to their famous RPG - Path of Exile - every three months.
The game is not a simple program by any stretch - which might be a fair criticism for Papers Please by comparison since it is purely client-side and all possible states of the game can be fairly easily enumerated.
Path of Exile is a persistent cross-platform 3D online multiplayer game that has daunting requirements for consistency, latency, and graphical performance.
Despite that, each three month release cycle introduces more new UI elements and features than I think the entirety of Google apps release in the same timeframe. And that’s not because Google isn’t trying to build new things - they are and I’ve written UI for several of those projects.
Does anyone else feel a real sense of deflation when it comes to app/web development velocity compared to games?
Is immediate mode GUI's just that much better? Instead of a complex React/Redux style setup, how much easier would state management be if we had a render loop like game dev? Does that even make sense?
I am very envious at the pure programming skills of so many game developers. UI's in indie games are just a side thing in the deep complexity of a game and they end up looking incredible compared to the level of effort required for year long web app projects.
They've drifted away from calling it that, but the whole idea behind React was to bring immediate-mode rendering to the web. It has an event loop where each "frame" you render the current state from scratch, rather than explicitly updating the state of retained controls.
I use Zui with Kha/Haxe - an immediate mode GUI library. I cannot overstate how immediate mode GUI greatly simplifies ui development. React is massive step up from OOP/scenegraph/display list style gui, but it is still so complex and cumbersome compared to immediate mode. I can’t fathom why there is such little exploration in this space and it seems mostly limited to gamedev.
Immediate mode GUI makes perfect sense for applications that repaint themselves all the time 60 (or more) times per second, as they're already doing the work and there's little overhead added by handling such GUI. I can deal with 3D editor working this way, but I don't think I would be very happy if my e-mail client did.
That's just an implementation detail. The main benefits of an immediate mode UI is the API for using it. There's no reason that the loop has to run at 60 FPS. It could even be event-based, so it only updates when the user does something, for example.
Yes and no. That API makes certain approaches easier and other harder. Even if you manage to render only the changed parts of the screen, you still execute all your UI logic all the time so the renderer can be aware of what changed in the first place. Also, more involved stuff like animations become much more complex once you go event-based, to the point where retained mode UI may end up being a better choice from the API perspective. It all depends on what exactly you're implementing, and games often are a natural fit for immediate mode as they usually allow to keep it simple with no real downsides.
I don’t have much understanding of the internals of the immediate mode renderers, but I think there are optimisations to only redraw regions where component inputs have changed.
You typically have to implement those optimizations yourself, and most people don’t. It’s outside the scope of the renderer in most cases for it to decide what should or should not be rendered. As a result, immediate mode GUI, while fast to develop, typically really kills a battery life on mobile.
Not to take anything away from the game devs (PoE is great and I wish I had started playing sooner) but I wonder how much internal politics plays a part.
I can imagine that the game studio has most if not everyone onboard helping collectively to make the game better each iteration. It is a common goal.
How many different product teams and managers get in the way for products at other companies where each is fighting for funding or privilege?
Being in that kind of environment is draining for the product teams.
Having worked at places that matched both these situations, I know where the quality and quantity of my output was greater.
Usually they have multiple leagues cooking up in the oven at any given time, so that if the league they want to release isn't ready in time, another, simpler idea will likely be within reach of completion.
The timeline is as such because their business model requires engagement spikes every three months. Remember that Path of Exile is free-to-play.
I also want to add that PoE has grown into one of, if not THE most complex games ever made; there are so many overlapping systems and mechanics that there were memes about what would happen if they added any more special destination buttons to the worldmap. And I'm not even talking about the initial release; it was a complicated game then, but now it has the mechanics of at least a dozen leagues baked into the core game play; many of those leagues are an entire game unto themselves (like Delve)
I love it for this, but it makes me sad that most gamers don't try and reason about this complex thing, and instead follow build guides and copy streamers, instead of experiment. Also, because of the nature of the game's deisgn, you need to play for a stupendous amount of hours to reach the end- endgame, and for most folks you also need to trade items with people IRL as the designers intentionally do not add a decent trade system. There are a lot of other quirks that reflect the designers' intent to not make life easy, either, and players both love and hate that.
The inertia at big tech companies is likely from the overwhelming weight of the business itself. No one wants to push out updates lest it upset the finally tuned business machinery.
A UI change can impact usage. Which can impact revenue. Which can impact stock price.
The end users for large tech companies are essentially shareholders and investors.
Remember last Tuesday when you wanted to add something, but your manager said no.
Remember 2 weeks ago, and you really wanted to implement CICD, but the DevOps team told you not to.
When you're developing any solo projects, you don't have anyone else telling you what you can't do.
This is amazing, but you can also easily spend countless hours building something nobody really likes. I've made a small handful of games, a few of them have been released publicly. If I had to guess, at most maybe 20 people have played my games.
But I taught myself everything I know via learning game development, and my career is amazing.
Even now, I'm trying out different engines and having a blast. Odds are. I'll probably never produce anything that becomes all that popular. It'll just be another throwaway game on itch that nobody plays, but I can say without a doubt I had a hell of a time building it.
Having a complete mental map of your work environment is the key. Nothing changes without your approval and you have some idea of when and where every change was made along with what it does.
Most of dev work is making sure other people can make sense of your work. With solo dev, that step is basically unnecessary.
I think it’s also why some indie games (eg binding of Isaac) get completely remade instead of making updates a year later. Walk away from the project for a couple months and it’s an untamable beast.
I don’t play a lot of games anymore, but the last one I spent a considerable amount of time with was Stardew Valley. And I couldn’t believe it was made by just one guy.
Yea the self wankery you see when these people place on insubstantial things like correctness against all possible situations in their PRs is amusing.
Elon once wanted to move his programmers to windows upon seeing how fast world of warcraft was developed. Goes to show how fast people can be if they care about the things that matter.
> It's quite literally the symbols doing some of the thinking for you, specifically the symbols are doing the computing or calculating part of thinking.
I was feeling bad earlier this week when thinking about taking the derivative of x^3. I, of course, didn't derive the answer geometrically. I did what most everyone does, I imagined the "3" symbol floating down and being replaced by n-1.
But there is no reason to feel bad! I was outsourcing the computation to the symbols. The notation is good enough that some easily-remembered symbolic rules are just as good as (or actually equivalent to) the real computation.
This paper seems to get posted in most Great Filter discussions now. I don't find it very convincing - or I'm not sure why it is worded so strongly. It seems ultimately like just another opinion piece dressed with a bit more math than the topic usually gets.
My statistics chops might just not be up to snuff, but the authors are ultimately just choosing their own numbers (probability distributions in this case) and plugging them in like everyone else.
We still don't know the values of those parameters. The Fermi paradox exists only given "optimistic" guesses for those parameters. The authors choose "pessimistic" distributions and declare the problem "dissolved".
The problem I personally have with the Fermi paradox is that it essentially works if you assume that every non-zero probability is one, and justify that with there being enough chances for life to get going that it's bound to happen. Except... there really isn't all that much slack.
Another point that I don't see addressed much is the possibility that interstellar travel may just simply be impossible: that building machines that can travel to other stars, let alone ones that are capable of hosting a colonization process, are just simply not within the realm of materials that can actually exist.
Sandberg and Ord are based at the same institute as Bostrom who popularized the Great Filter, if that has any effect on your opinion of the piece. They tend to work on pretty wacky things mind you, I had a discussion with Sandberg on whole brain emulation once and Ord champions donating to fairly sci-fi sounding charitable organizations (including his own, the future of humanities institute).
This is like being presented with eg West Side Story and responding “oh hey but that’s just the same old Romeo and Juliet story isn’t it?”
It really doesn’t matter if you “spoil” most story arcs, because as it turns out, for most stories, it’s not the story arc that matters. On the contrary, if you follow the familiar, recognizable beats and cadences, it gives you a lot more room to experiment and build nuanced meaning, because a lot of the meaning comes pre-established.
An apple is just an apple, until you’ve tried a Gala, and a Honey Crisp, and a Braeburn…they are very different, and you can’t really appreciate that until you've first had some kind of apple.
Is it? I was surprised how complex the heros as well as the antagonists are. One can understand their motivation of all and it has a couple of unpredictable twists.
Compare that to standard Disney movies .. You can guess from the beginning what will happen.
Also watched Mononoke first.
My favorites are Naussica and Totoro :) all movies form Miyazaki are amazing and watchable. If you wonder about his skill,check some of the ghibli movies he was not involved in.
So much agree. Naussica and Toroto capture the highest expressions of depth and delight. Though Spirited Away speaks to me more and more...there is a tenderness about the human condition in that film, which becomes a call to courage.
There is no reason to believe that "Knowledge is a unified whole" and that advancements in technology would parallel advancements in morality. Human history has plenty of examples of technological superiority wiping out relatively peaceful groups.
This blog seems to spew all kinds of over-confident snippets:
"To have a maximally creative society, you have to have freedom, you have to have liberty, and therefore you will have a non-violent society."
Freedom and liberty lead inexorably to... non-violence? That is at least naive. The boundary of individual liberty is where conflict happens. If everyone has unbounded liberty you can expect unbounded conflict.
Then there is this post which does some nearly-worthless math to conclude that life is extremely rare: nav.al/existence. Maybe wrong, maybe right, but a very shallow thought.
The channel in this post has 20 YouTube subscribers and no more than a couple thousand total YouTube views.
The trending page on PeerTube shows a list of videos with at most a few dozen views.
Is PeerTube supremely unpopular (seems to have been launched several years ago: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube), or am I missing something? Does it really have an order of magnitude more Github stars (https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube) than daily viewers?
A lot of people see the usefulness of PeerTube but don't move because the creators they watch are on YouTube. It's the same for the creators, though - they can't move off of YouTube entirely, because none of their viewers will go to a PeerTube instance just to watch that one creator. Thus nobody moves to PT unless there are other factors (like extremist creators moving because their videos keep getting removed by YT).
Another major problem that prevents creators from hosting on PeerTube is that there are no ads - many see direct-from-YouTube revenue driven by Premium views/Ad views generate a significant portion of their income. Even Linus Tech Tips, with their audience of gamers who mostly running an ad blocker, sees YouTube generate 26% of their profit[0], almost exactly as much as they get from sponsors spots in their videos. If everyone were to move to PT, we'd either need an intermediary for ads, or only creators with audiences that could afford to personally finance them (via Patreon or similar) would be able to survive and make a living off of running their channel.
This is my big pet peeve with people who describe Youtube's demonetization policies as "censorship" and propose Peertube as a replacement. I'm not going to get entangled in the question of what responsibility big social media has and what it should or shouldn't do about giving people platforms, but I will say that if you believe demonetization and being de-prioritized in youtube's discovery algorithms is being deplatformed/censored, moving to a service that doesn't really have monetization or youtube-style content discovery isn't the solution.
If you move your content to PeerTube and want both an audience and to be paid, you'll need a combination of third party services and other social media, and will likely end up with similar problems re: advertisers cutting out "unacceptable content".
I do think it'd probably be better if the content provider was divested from this layer and focused on only providing media, but Peertube doesn't really solve these social/economic problems people complain about with Youtube.
One way people could start is by uploading content on both, Youtube and a PeerTube instance and mention their PeerTube content in YouTube videos. This way they also create a kind of online backup, in case YouTube's algorithms decide to take them down.
If I am remembering right from linus tech tips, they are not allowed to try get viewers to go to an other platform. The are some ways one can indirect reference other platforms, but videos intended to get people off youtube is basically not allowed.
There are a number of prominent YouTubers who advertise their own alternative platforms fairly regularly, if "indirectly". There are also videos about LTT's own video service Floatplane on YouTube [0]
I'm guessing that either there's some clause in the YouTube partner/adsense program saying you can't just redirect your viewers elsewhere or you can't upload videos with the sole purpose of saying "go here for more videos".
That said, I'd be interested to see the details of what GP was talking about, because I believe it exists, I just wonder what the exacts are.
I was going to say that digging through wan shows to find a reference was too hard but then duckduckgo gave me a hit of a HN post I made that referenced the twitter post.
The only restriction YouTube has is that you can’t create videos that purely say “go check us out on this other platform”, which is what they used to do for WAN show when it was only streamed on Twitch but announced on YT.
Yeah, I've seen several creators mention "extended" or "uncensored" versions of their content on another platform. Off the top of my head, Corridor Digital is one example that advertises their alternative content pretty heavily.
I think when certain very talented creators get "demonetized" and they have a bad experience with customer service trying to understand why, and maybe suspect the criteria changed without they're knowing, it's relatively understandable to over-react and say their hard work was censored, even if knowing it doesn't meet the legal standard. I wouldn't let it bother you so much.
"It's the same for the creators, though - they can't move off of YouTube entirely, because none of their viewers will go to a PeerTube instance just to watch that one creator."
Is it so hard to be on both? Something I like about YouTube compared to some other platforms is they never (to the best of my knowledge) engage in exclusives or impose exclusivity conditions. And even when they develop new features, I've rarely seen Google try to restrict those.
Only folks that can sustain themselves, like forgotten weapons, are patreon supported. But you would have to create a channel from the beginning to be patreon supported.
It's not that you have to create the channel from the beginning to be Patreon supported, but that you have to be willing to forego the additional YouTube revenue even if Patreon payment s become enough to support you.
Peertube is really just an "app" providing a simple way to host and publish your content online outside the control of "service" providers that can also easily be accessed and shared by the "fediverse" (in this case activitypub supporting federated networks of servers and end users).
You can consume peertube content with any activitypub client that supports its types. In short, peertube is an accessible way for users to publish their videos to activitypub.
Yes, Owncast [0] is another example of a media app that is in the process of adding ActivityPub protocol support [1] and become part of the Fediverse. I hope they'll be largely compatible in the way they implemented their federation support.
Peertube uses very simple and straightforward ActivityStreams (JSON) properties so it's very unlikely anyone is going to make something incompatible.
However, i don't think every property is standardized yet, so having another implementation will be useful to specify everything for future implementations.
> Is PeerTube supremely unpopular (...), or am I missing something?
One reason of seeming more inpopular than it actually is, lies in that while there are many PeerTube instances, they are not all federating together. They are selective and some are not federating at all.
Also I am not sure if counting of views works all that well yet, and Likes require either signing up to individual instances, or spreading of video link via Mastodon to get liked (via ActivityPub integration).
Both the federation and the level of integration with other Fediverse apps is a work in progress and steadily improving.
Maybe the idea of PeerTube is a lot nice than the user experience? I can't say, I haven't tried PeerTube. I feel like this is pretty common when it comes to avoiding big tech though. When Github was bought out by Microsoft I went all in on Gitlab, but alas, the company I work for now uses Github. The sheer gravity of it pulled me back in.
In the video streaming world, yeah that is true. These platforms are not just hosts, they are discovery platforms and if there isn't any content to discover, it isn't a good platform.
Peertube discovery is based on a "following" model based on the ActivityPub protocol. You don't need a Peertube account to follow video creators, because:
- you can subscribe to them from Mastodon or any fediverse client
- your friends on the Fediverse can "reshare" (reshare/boost) videos from their favorite content creator
There's also a "decentralized" (as in "selfhosted") search engine called SepiaSearch being developed for use with Peertube.
I can't say i'm fulfilled yet by the content available on Peertube (although there is some great quality content), but at least i'm happy i'm not being dragged into recommendation hell by a hostile machine learning model trying to maximize advertising revenues... and Peertube federation keeps growing with more and more non-profits running instances for specific interests and communities, and more and more content creators ditching the creator-hostile [0] platforms for Peertube.
[0] Some creators believe that tracking their viewers and serving them dubious advertisement is bad. Most creators agree that automated copyright strikes like Youtube is doing (completely ignoring copyright exemptions like fair use) is bad.
No, this is nowhere near a lot, even for small channels. Make a quality video about something useful and there is a good chance you get more views than this persons whole channel
Well, if you're comparing against all YouTube users, or even all YouTube users who have ever uploaded a video, then yes, it's a lot. On the other hand, compared to most content being viewed on YouTube, it's not even tiny, it's minuscule. There are many niche hobbyist communities or individual hobbyist singers getting much more than that. 20 subscribers basically means that not even your friends and family are looking at your channel.
I have a random "a vs. b" video on my personal channel with 150k views. A few thousand views is obtainable by accident just naming your video a certain way.
> 20 subscribers basically means that not even your friends and family are looking at your channel.
I agree with your interpretation overall, but there's other factors at play:
- Peertube isn't trying to force everyone to have an account like Youtube is
- the Peertube federation is much younger, and some would say it reached maturity for broader usage very recently (this year)
- view count does not account for people downloading the video directly using HTTPS direct connection and/or Webtorrent, only those using the default web client
I think there is a slight misunderstanding. The numbers from my GP were about YouTube subscribers and views, not PeerTube. The point being that this is a minuscule YT channel that is moving to PeerTube, one that is hardly representative of anything.
For comparison, here [0] is the YT channel that has moved to PeerTube, and here [1] is a random musician's channel that I happen to follow. The second is many times larger, even though it is a single person's channel.
Back in high school I had a "gaming channel" where I posted just random clips of my friends and I. The subscriber count peaked around 350. No idea how many views were in total. But I removed the channel years ago.
So I'm guessing as long as you post regularly you can get thousands of subscribers without much effort.
Sorry, this was a bit out of context.
As the other commenter assumed, it is for replacing/extending the functionality of the phone.
For example, I wanted to access the heartrate and other mi band data and it's quite easy with gadgetbridge and my own flutter app.
I tried similar apps before with SwiftUI and the Apple Watch and it was pretty much a disaster (although I have working knowledge of objective C ...). Dart came easy and flutter seems super powerful to me ( I just re-implemented my first very simple ios game in just a day. that's the objective c version https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blanks/id286883373 ). Will publish/open-source the other one, when it's polished.
It uses Android's. It works like a regular Android smartphone, you enable Developer Mode + USB debugging. Android Studio recognizes the phone and complies /runs your application.
