I absolutely agree with the author that we should normalize "finishing" projevts again - but I think there are some practical differences between "finished" and "abandoned":
- There might be security vulnerabilities in the project's code that would endanger users if not fixed.
- There might be vulnerabilities in dependencies that required that the project updates to a newer version.
- If the project uses external APIs, those might have breaking changes, be shut down, etc.
- Last but not least, the environment itself that the app is running in might have breaking changes, e.g. the OS going out of support.
If a project really is finished but the author expects people to keep using it, then as a user, I'd expect that the author still does the above maintenance from time to time, so the project stays functional and safe.
The complaint from the people is "it's difficult to cancel a gym membership". A metric to judge the success of a policy tackling that could be the # of complaints to consumer protection associations, authorities, politicians, or bank chargebacks.
The most concrete part I get is that it has a recognition and positioning system built-in, so it can recognize the IDs and relative positions of nearby beacons. Beacons are inside bricks, tags and minifigures. The bricks seem to also have some kind of color sensor to detect the color of nearby normal bricks.
Then it does ... something with that information.
From the promo it almost looked as if that data was fed to an LLM that could then generate an audio response that fits to the play scene. Something like "You are a <Lego Star Wars minifigure>. You are <sitting> in a <vehicle: air plane>. The vehicle is <turning along the Z axis>. What do you say?" (Where the stuff inside the brackets is inferred from the nearby beacons and the rest would be a fixed prompt template)
But that would require the bricks to have an internet connection, and I have no idea if that's the case.
Looks like some people have discovered the first "accidental" game mechanic: The horse can walk over cherry fields, but the player cannot place walls on them - so if a level designer places cherries strategically, they can create unblockable paths.
Right now, this is only used for troll levels, but I wonder if you could also use it for some actual puzzles.
> I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it.
I interpreted it as standard "top-down" RPG graphics, where the Y axis always doubles as the Z axis. As such, I didn't find it visually confusing - but it did made playing on mobile annoying, because you often end up targeting the wrong field.
- There might be security vulnerabilities in the project's code that would endanger users if not fixed.
- There might be vulnerabilities in dependencies that required that the project updates to a newer version.
- If the project uses external APIs, those might have breaking changes, be shut down, etc.
- Last but not least, the environment itself that the app is running in might have breaking changes, e.g. the OS going out of support.
If a project really is finished but the author expects people to keep using it, then as a user, I'd expect that the author still does the above maintenance from time to time, so the project stays functional and safe.
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