Or at least, not enough subjective value for that person to outweigh the cost. Paywalls are a great screening filter that actually tests if people want to spend any money or time on an article, or merely clicked through from force of habit.
So? Ads are a screening filter that tests if people want to spend time consuming ads to consume content.
What's odd is when people here complain of screening by ads because they'd think screening should instead be by money. It is proper that the choce for the publisher's site is made by the publisher and for the reader's visits is made by the reader.
Except Professional Chess, taken to mean players earning a living solely from paid tournament play, is in the low hundreds? Thousands? Meanwhile there are over 20 million 'professional' software developers. There are many things about that single number demographic that I would argue against, but despite that I'm not sure there's ever been a market for any kind of 'professional chess player', yet there is for 'professional software developer' (for some definitions of 'professional' and 'software').
Our old stand‑up was the classic “what I did yesterday / what I’ll do today / blockers” round‑robin on a call. Now we treat it as an AI‑generated, repo‑driven status report instead of a live status meeting.
Concretely, we:
- Break each person’s day into deterministic, measurable tasks with expected time cost and explicit test/code criteria in the repo.
- At EOD, run the updated repo through an AI agent that checks for those tests/changes, scores how much of each task was actually completed, and produces a per‑person and team summary that replaces the verbal stand‑up.
Happy to elaborate on this more if you would like.
I'm not sure if this is common on other desktop operating systems but the 'Drag Lock' feature on macOS allows you to double-tap an item, then drag it without holding the button down to begin a drag. At that point lifting your finger continues the drag until you tap once to release it.
I would be amazed at how many people using macOS have never found this option except I'm not sure I've ever seen it being called out as a feature, and nowadays it's also buried deep under Accessibility settings (the irony) instead of just being a Trackpad option, so a lot of users might not even think to go there.
I never said it was intuitive, only that it exists ;)
I’d argue that double-click to open a file is also not intuitive, but it is now the expected behaviour. Documents don’t have to be touched twice in real life to have them open and reveal their secrets. Plus, I do use Drag Lock, so that behaviour now does feel intuitive to me.
There’s a lot to be said for what is effectively learned behaviour in intuition.
I’m a fan of Alan Hazelden and Draknek’s work but stating upfront that he a) wasn’t involved with the work directly but b) agreed for it to be used years ago, while then going on to write what seems to read as a light hit-piece for Blow himself, and then using that to launch into a point about how his politics and Blow’s don’t align (not relevant for puzzle game progeny) feels like more like him using the trailer for Blow’s game as a trampoline for his own personal beliefs and politics.
He also used the same thread to mention his own grant fund while not acknowledging that Thekla (Blow’s company) also has (or had at some point) a similar scheme [1]
Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing, or at least seem to be large extrapolations from other Twitter comments also not cited. Is there something in the thread I missed?
>Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing
He sort of went mask off during COVID, so I believe it. I also believe Blow is a smart dude and would try to erase that history right before a PR rally for his game.
I'm not even on Twitter but I hear about such events in the gamedev scene for years.
Also not on Twitter and try hard to avoid the easy source-less Internet drama, though I recall some comments about the vaccines being rushed out and not going through the standard trial processes and periods.
It doesn’t seem untrue, though given the environment at the time justified, but that comment was extrapolated to “He’s a hard-right anti vaxxer”. No citations of my own though, so this is just memory.
Either way, this is why I try to stay off Twitter.
You are picking a small comment among a mountain of them and giving the most charitable possible interpretation of it. Strange for you to join conversation to defend the guy as you admit you have no sources to cite.
A mountain of comments that you or others are able to provide, I’m sure? You’re right, I don’t have any, I’m simply asking others that are making bold claims about so-called extremist views to provide appropriately sized sources.
> The funding for underrepresented creators was a condition of my involvement in this project, so doesn't represent his values so much as mine. He was at least willing to do it though, which I'm not sure he would be today. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115713018435458495)
Seems like this was all sorted out by early 2019 - and nearly 7 years have passed since! Plenty of time for a person to change from somebody you'd be happy to associate with to somebody you might not.
> Some people have mentioned they couldn't tell from this thread whether these games are used with permission. For clarity, yes, we agreed to this in mid 2016 and signed a contract in late 2018/early 2019. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115707937686651789)
> The funding for underrepresented creators was a condition of my involvement in this project, so doesn't represent his values so much as mine. He was at least willing to do it though, which I'm not sure he would be today.
Interesting, and thanks for the sources. I was under the impression that it was the same fund as that announced in 2010 [1] but the date in [2] plus the apparent timeline does align.
"I'm not sure he would be today" is a strawman and just Hazelden's own current views of Blow, but I doubt there's going to be a direct quote (or even better, a new grant from Thekla) to back it up. But yes, 7 years is a long time and the political landscape has changed "somewhat".
That specific quote feels to me like a strange one to complain about, given that it's so obviously his own subjective opinion. Even if you're English, perhaps inclined to employ this sort of phrasing to state something that you are certain is incontrovertible fact (and will be so to everybody listening), the subjective nature has hardly been downplayed!
> not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles, 10 years of dev)
I think a 'number of features' metric can work but only for players that already know and like your game, where an expansion with 'Five exciting new areas' is understood as something that they'd enjoy, and I agree it feels odd for a new IP.
Similarly, saying how many years it took isn't remotely a selling point for a new player. If you'd been following the development process then you probably wouldn't care, and if you hadn't you also probably wouldn't care.
It does seem awkward to have to design a trailer for a pure puzzle game, something that essentially relies on things going on inside a player's mind for fun, which by definition won't be visible.
Baba Is You did have something you can show potential players, but I'm not sure there's a trailer that could convey The Witness' 'Oh, I wonder if I can...' moment as it's a very internal experience that comes from playing enough to get to that point.
The Witness was, however, visually beautiful (IMO) and its symbol-based language let the trailer keep an element of mystery and intrigue. Order of the Sinking Star, while potentially also a fantastic puzzle game, seems to not be able to hide anything by nature of it being very clearly a Sokoban-like. Even if there are as-yet-unseen depths to how it treats the Sokoban format, the trailer needs something to work with, and while I think it also looks lovely it perhaps doesn't have the The Witness visual appeal or mystery to draw people in.
Not to dismiss either your personal experience or any factual accuracy in the response, but curious as to whether you tried the same prompt but with an opening paragraph along the lines of “I’d like you to take the opposite view to the following ideas, while providing citations and sources for all claims”.
Any kind of leading statements in prompts always bias the output towards confirming whatever is said. So the “I feel like I’m being suppressed” is likely to get agreement unless you specifically ask for either an opposing view or at least a neutral view, in both cases preferably with links to sources to verify any statements.
Also useful is to ask for bias detection in the phrasing of any prompt and then ask for a neutral rewrite to use, at the very least to compare responses from isolated sessions.
I tried that. Pasted that exact prompt after the first response. It gave me a really long response picking out some specific technical aspects of my solutions mentioned in my blog article which kind of make sense but nothing that seems like a show-stopper IMO.
One of the points I totally disagree with:
> The Verdict: Developers are using AI to escape abstraction layers, not to find new ones. They want the AI to write the boilerplate they used to buy SaaS for.
I'm a developer. This is not what I see happening. Things like edge functions are more popular than ever. So are SaaS platforms like Lovable and Base44. Supabase is getting tons of traction. You need somewhere to host the back end/CRUD and use AI to generate the front end. The narrative of devs abandoning platform SaaS doesn't make sense. Most devs don't even know how to launch and access an EC2 instance these days.
It concluded with:
> the market stays irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
> the most rational move is to keep (project name) as a personal tool. Use it to build your own apps efficiently. Let it be your "secret weapon" that makes you 10x faster than the employees you work with. But do not try to sell the weapon to the army; they have already signed contracts with Lockheed Martin.
It's speaking figuratively here. I make no mention of the army or Lockheed Martin but the message is clear.
The sources it provided are basically competing startup websites... actually seem to support my work and direction, pointing to similar projects and trends that are successful and aligned with what I'm doing so it's confusing. My current project provides similar features as some mentioned here. The second one is basically exactly the problem that my current low-code project solves. I've built entire complex data-driven apps with it so I know it works and is secure. I have 15 years of software engineering experience working on top projects including backed by YCombinator...
[1] Supabase RLS Documentation: "Row Level Security (RLS) is a PostgreSQL feature...
[2] Chris Paik on "The End of Software": Discussion on how LLMs reduce the cost of creating software to zero, favoring standard/reproducible code over proprietary configurations. (common knowledge in VC circles, 2023-2024 discourse).
[3] Pinecone Multi-tenancy: "You can use namespaces to manage multi-tenancy... Queries in one namespace cannot access vectors in another." (docs.pinecone.io/guides/indexes/namespaces)
[4] pgvector & RLS: "pgvector integrates seamlessly with PostgreSQL's security features, including RLS." (github.com/pgvector/pgvector)
[5] OpenAI Realtime API: OpenAI's documentation on their WebSocket-based API for real-time speech and text. (platform.openai.com/docs/guides/realtime)
[6] Vercel AI SDK: "Build AI-powered applications with React, Svelte, Vue, and Solid... Streaming text responses." (sdk.vercel.ai/docs)
