Yeah, I agree with the OP here. After all this time, being able to change the chat colors at this point has some real We-reached-the-bottom-of-the-backlog energy, and they're just now implementing the ideas that weren't considered important enough before by the PMs to consider.
It hardly feels like a next generation release.
As a related anecdote (not saying that this is industry standard, just pointing out my own experience), the startup I work for launched their app four years ago, and, for all four of those years, we've had "Implement a Dark Mode design" sitting at the bottom of our own backlog. Higher priority feature requests are always pre-empting it.
The core product failure here is overhyping incremental improvement, eroding trust.
PMs operating at this level ought to be bringing in some low cost UX improvements alongside major features. That simply isn't a sign that they've run ought of backlog. (That said, it is rather pathetic to paywall this)
A moment's consideration ought to show that Open AI has plenty of significant work they they can be doing, even if the core model never gets any better than this.
I have deuteranomaly, and the hallucination worked for me, and it did appear like a crazy saturated blue-green ring around the shrinking red circle.
I suspect, however, that those of us with deuteranomaly probably see a different blue-green than normal-sighted folks due to the bent color cones.
The real question is, what about the folks with Deuteranopia (no working green cones at all)?
Deuteranomaly, though, is still probably the best place to start since that's the big one that affects (some say) up to 10% of all males. Every other form of colorblindness affects a much slimmer percentage of the population.
At the very least, one should be a regular user of a platform prior to marketing on that platform. Every platform has nuance to it, and if you don't understand that nuance, then you're better off paying someone else to do it on your behalf.
The OP was never going to succeed in her efforts there.
On one hand it seems she already has audience so she should have positive traction.
On the other hand it seems like she started from 0 on the platforms and expected to be already a star “because I am an author”. Then she wanted to hack away with tricks like “posting daily” attracting people who liked her “dog posts” - because she didn’t have better stuff to post.
I read that post yesterday and it started sinking in. She did everything wrong.
Her audience as she mentioned wasn’t transferable to socials so she really was starting there from scratch. Posting your funny dog pictures and your daily routine will not make you stand out - everyone does that. Being “an author” also doesn’t make much of a difference when I can follow J.K Rowling and watch her funny dog pictures or laugh at her making inappropriate comments.
Edit: I also checked just now what was her book. That’s definitely not aligning with lifestyle influencing with happy dogs or husband in perfect golden hour video.
I've got a great example of this. I'm renting a house that provides a gas powered lawnmower for tenants to use, and I've elected to just let the grass grow because I have no idea how to use the thing
Now look, there's debates to be had about whether or not lawns are good idea, or how long grass should grow, etc. but there's no excuse for not figuring out how a gas mower works. I could tell you here in a paragraph or you could watch a 30 minute Youtube which will contain in it somewhere the 1 minute of actual instructions you need. It's a pretty damn simple system.
Put gas in it. If there's a soft rubber thing near the gas, hit it twice to provide some fuel but no more as you risk "flooding" the engine.
Hold down any handle at the top of the mower, often the thing will require you to manually hold it down during start and all operations.
Look for the starter pull. It's often on the right, on the motor or mower handles. It's a piece of plastic attached to a cable. Give it a yank with a full follow through. It doesn't have to be maximum effort but too gentle won't work either.
Are you joking or something? It's just check the gas and oil, hold down the brake lever on the handle, pull the crank a few times and away you go. Maybe it's old and has a fuel bulb or a choke, or fancy and has a transmission and the lever to engage it, but it's really not complicated at all.
I grew up around many different sorts of power tools. By my mid-20s I was comfortable using routers, table saws, sawzalls, jigsaws, jackhammers and more.
But nobody in my family had any gas-powered motors for anything at all.
I'm 61 now, and a volunteer firefighter. We have lots of gas powered chainsaws, circular saws, ventilation fans, and more.
I'm still extremely uncomfortable with starting these engines.
just anxious. i live pretty remote; if i get hurt and cant get to a phone, no one will find me until my lease expires. one of the downsides of auto payments i think.
It's actually pretty hard to hurt yourself on the active blade of a push mower. I've only heard of one account of this happening first hand, someone 1) slipped while 2) gripping and not releasing the handle interlock switch as they slipped while 3) pushing the mower uphill and 4) wearing flip flops. Don't do that, and you'll be fine.
I don't have any data but I'd assume it's vastly safer to mow the lawn than drive a car.
Probably depends heavily on how you normalize the risks, and I had a good chuckle at the thought of “injuries per 100k miles” applied to lawn mowers.
I would guess lawn mowers are higher risk per time or distance, but lower prevalence in injuries per year. I would guess the injuries are mostly a) hit rocks, b) did something dumb with the mower, or c) general outdoors risks like slipping or being bit by snake, etc.
Don't mow rock, wear protective eyewear and a mask if you don't want to inhale dust/pollen/etc and you will be protected from 99.9% of all conceivable injuries from a modern gas mower that has a safety switch.
lol. not sure what age1s6cz86s99unkfm2sqy045w5w79n8lyyulwu9qy3gkaeydmexwv5qvkh2pp means, but if youre in the greater seattle area and want to teach me how to be an adult, shoot me a text. 360-624-3791
I wouldn't necessarily assume it's at all modern. I've had Briggs-and-Stratton-powered mowers that had the deck rot from corrosion long before that B&S engine dies. Point being, if the mower was "provided", who knows the vintage? It sure isn't going to be the landlord's top-shelf mower fresh from the dealer.
Note that once the grass has grown past a certain height, you won't be able to use a mower anymore even if you want to. At that point it will require a line trimmer (a.k.a. weed whacker) which is a lot more work.
Though personally I'm a fan of "kill your lawn" efforts. You can smother it with cardboard (or burn it, or till it, etc) and replace with native meadow.
(Has cleared overgrowth consisting of both vines and grasses roughly a meter high give or take some)
What you do is tip the mower up, holding the handle near the ground and push it right into the mess. Then lower it down, essentially taking a "bite", which will cut many folded over plants.
Pull back, then tip and advance repeatedly, cutting more each time.
I cleared a quarter acre this way. Took one hard afternoon and a couple tanks of gas.
hmm ok. its mainly ryegrass, though, so i dont think itd be a problem to cut through. i just think its really pretty, plus the birds/squirrels/chipmunks seem to like it a lot.
> But imagine spending $30 on a story-driven video game and just skipping the story.
I cannot imagine buying a "story driven videogame" honestly. I love reading and I love stories, but to me the appeal of videogames is to play. Videogame stories mostly just get in the way of the actual appealing fun part for me
By discussing why we like things, we may influence others to try those things. I enjoy avoiding story-driven games because they're controling and lack replay value, and I'm recommending this as something you may like to try too.
Recommending to stay away from something is a valid recommendation in my mind :-). I may not agree, and in this case I don't, but I appreciate the spirit in which it's given.
Disco elysium, deus ex, cyberpunk 2077 have tremendous replay value to me in various ways. The story, for me, builds the flavour and the world, gets excited and invested, so that I want to replay and spend time in that game. It's not tough mutually exclusive from also enjoying games purely for their mechanics.
> I enjoy avoiding story-driven games because they... lack replay value
I don't agree at all that this is true. I've greatly enjoyed replaying story-driven games much as I would enjoy rereading a book I enjoy. Much like with a good book, there is enjoyment to be had in immersing yourself in that world again, spending time with the characters you grew to like, and noticing things about the work that you didn't spot the first time around.
I replayed Cyberpunk 2077 four times because it is fun to play, not because I cared about immersing myself in the world or spending time with the characters
Yeah, Keanu as Silverhand is fun
But by the fourth time through the game when you hit those Relic Malfunctions that are long and drawn out and trigger long and unskippable talking scenes, I was pretty ready for a game option that was "Get rid of all of this and let me play without interruptions"
I would have loved a quest system in that game that would randomly assign a building in the city to have a random enemy type inside it and an objective to handle, so I could just play
I love that game. I think it is very fun. I like trying out different builds and weapons. I would probably play it more but the idea of starting a new game is not appealing. I don't want to slog through the first few hours of the game again until after the failed heist just to get the game world to open up
Sure, I probably played Arcanum (2001) five or six times. But I spent the years from about 1999 to 2006 playing Angband and Sid Meier's Alpha C. That's the kind of difference in replay value. And the only reason I played Arcanum more than once is that the different characters offered different gameplay, e.g. "this time let's be an explosives expert," or "this time let's be a really charismatic gnome".
Arcanum was good story stacked on mostly poor gameplay. It wanted to be a steam punk fallout and the story/setting carried out through what was otherwise pretty shitty gameplay.
I tend to agree that I liked the idea of the gameplay more than the way it actually worked out. I remember things such as: a pet dog you could add to your party who would steal all the experience points for himself; a skills system where in theory you could mix magic and technology, but in practice they interfered and more than negated any benefit of being creative with it; and a graveyard where zombies would spawn endlessly so that you could grind them for XP for as long as you could bear it.
I guess the atmosphere sells me on games. That's a whole other thing. I note "/setting".
"You know this thing you like? Have you tried not liking it? Yeah, it's because I don't like it, and I just really think everyone should give disliking it a fair shot, even if they've tried it and think they like it, that just might be because they haven't really made an effort to dislike it"
ETA: Or, to make it simpler, most people are more interested in finding things they might like than in finding ways to no longer enjoy things they already like.
I guess so, but the two come as a package, don't they? "Don't watch that, watch this," where the reason for being pro-this is also the reason for being anti-that.
> I love reading and I love stories, but to me the appeal of videogames is to play.
I enjoy both. I wouldn't want a video game which has no interesting gameplay, but neither am I very drawn to games which are pure game and don't bother to have an interesting story. They are at least better than the former, and can even be good (Doom for example), but IMO can't reach the heights of games which are fun to play and have an interesting story.
Mass Effect is actually one of the game series that convinced me that video game stories aren't really worth it. Taken as a series, Mass Effect is a pretty bad story with wildly inconsistent writing quality. Taken as individual games they are all pretty good for different reasons, but they don't really form a coherent whole trilogy. I didn't bother playing Andromeda
Mass Effect 1 had the worst gameplay, honestly. The shooting mechanics weren't good, the RPG mechanics felt tacked on. It did have the best story and most developed lore and characters though, but they aren't good enough for me to ever want to replay it
2 had the best gameplay imo, but ths story took a nosedive. Some of the characters are alright, but overall it's a really bad story here
3 was probably the middle ground between them. The story picked up a bunch of the hanging plot threads from 1 that 2 wound up ignoring. It also changed the gameplay a bit from 2 in ways that weren't good imo
I used to think this sort of thing was the pinnacle of video games. Now I prefer playing stuff like Monster Hunter or Dark Souls, where the story is not the focus, but the gameplay is very fun and dynamic
Witcher is the best AAA implementation of a great story driving an otherwise decent game. I actually think that cyberpunk was weak mostly because they focused on Star power and the story was meh.
Witcher 1 might have the best story ever written but I'll never know because the gameplay is tedious
Witcher 2 was a serviceable game with a serviceable story
Witcher 3 was a vast sprawling story with gameplay that got old fast and it made the story a slog to get through. I had to force myself to finish it
I played Cyberpunk four times in a row just because it is so damn fun to actually play and try out different builds and approaches to completing the missions
W1 had a tighter story. W2 expanded the world and w3 world is so huge it’s easy to lose the main story line. What I loved is that every individual sub story was well written and really made the world come to life.
Cyberpunks world is a mismash of different sci fi themes and not consistent, the gameplay is good but the story is a bit cringe.
I cannot imagine weighting story and writing higher than gameplay when judging the quality of a videogame
Every videogame journalist who writes about games from a "ludonarrative" perspective just comes across as someone who failed to get into writing about movies
I have one criteria: is the game fun to play
I can put up with a lot of cringe in a story if the game is fun
After all, cutscenes and dialog are almost always skippable. Gameplay isn't
I'll take Dark Souls minimalist storytelling or Cyberpunk's cringe storytelling but fun gameplay over any kind of game with mid gameplay and amazing writing
Edit:
I guess what I'm really saying is that for me, a good story and characters is icing, but games must be fun first. A bad game with good writing is still a bad game. A good game with bad writing is still a good game
I do not understand why people place so much emphasis on non-gameplay elements when judging a game. Watch a show or read a book instead if story is your main concern
A good story is relatively cheap and can make up for other issues in the game. If starfield had decent writing it could have been a b/c tier game dispite lackluster gameplay. The players imagination would have helped fill in the gaps
Don't forget the tried-and-true "Don't sell to your customers; listen for their actual needs" advice that's repeated ad nauseum in a thousand different ways by B2B experts who claim to have "cracked the code" to increasing sales.
It's repeated because so few people actually talk to customers and meaningfully listen to them… But you're right, it has become overused.
An interesting counterpoint to "listen to your customers" is The Innovator's Dilemma, which details how increasing profit and producing a better product for your customers can sometimes make a company vulnerable to disruption.
> By the way, if you control for HN comments made by me on 5/7/25, this is the #1 ranked comment.
I have nothing to add. I just wanted to show that I helped contribute to make keenmaster's 5/7/25 comment on this thread his #1 comment on this thread for the day, 5/7/25. Hello to all of the future historians looking back on this moment!
That's not what he says. He dedicates most of the section that's directed at Republicans critiquing the administration's wholesale dismantling of the Department of Education and warning that they could run on education in the future if they, you know, didn't do that.
I think people just have an idea of what his political slant must be because he's defending the indefensible state of Mississippi.
It hardly feels like a next generation release.
As a related anecdote (not saying that this is industry standard, just pointing out my own experience), the startup I work for launched their app four years ago, and, for all four of those years, we've had "Implement a Dark Mode design" sitting at the bottom of our own backlog. Higher priority feature requests are always pre-empting it.