I stopped wearing my Apple Watch because notifications were too distracting when trying to work (even with Work Focus, I want some notifications, but I don’t want my wrist buzzing and lighting up all the time). I don’t miss it. The only real use I ever got was GPS directions when riding a bike or electronic scooter. I guess I also tracked my runs with it. But I don’t use those often enough, and I can wear the watch for those situations if needed.
I do also love the idea, though. I think part of the limiting factor is that you can’t attach sensors or peripherals to it. Even with a hackable watch like in TFA, there’s only so much you could add without it getting bulky. And the screen is too small to do much with.
There’s a similar situation in game dev. Players are very good at identifying problems - this isn’t fun, this feels too hard, etc. However, the solutions they suggest are often terrible, resulting in broken, unfun games. The same advice applies: Figure out what’s actually wrong and fix that.
Is that level really too hard, or did you just fail to properly introduce a new ability? Is the story boring, or is the story taking away from the enjoyable gameplay?
Totally wrong. Game mods constantly create game experiences that should have been there on day 1 and weren’t because dumbass devs refuse to correctly use the very tools they built.
Game after game you get some half baked feature kept gimped by poor choices of values from the developers, and a bunch of modders have to go fix it to keep the game good.
Rome 2 total war (divide et impera)
Empire at war (thrawns revenge)
Rimworld
Skyrim
Stalker (project gamma)
Blade and Sorcery
And so many more games are just like this!
Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. Folks like you would argue that the “lethal” difficulty added to ghosts of Tushima “broke the game”.
Star Wars Jedi knight 2/3 are infinitely better when you turn instakilling with light sabers on. I had to do that in the games built in command line.
Game devs are fucking morons. The cello maker is not the cello player. The map is not the territory.
>Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game.
eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description.
Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI would be negative a few million percentage points.
You seem to be taking examples where an individual player can tailor an experience to be just what they want, and extrapolating it back to presume the developers, who have to make a game for a wider audience, are stupid somehow.
Its a bad opinion, based on nothing and very much in the mode of the modern gamer.
Maybe the developers should've put more porn in. (Hell, a lot of the time they know the game should have more sex, but leave it to the modders because of instructions from above and/or to maintain plausible deniability).
Bethesda does have sort of a weird hangup on that front, at least since Daggerfall where you could disrobe the characters.
Bethesda has quite a unique approach to everything. Its almost a joke at this point where most of their negative reviews are demanding more content after 300 hours of gameplay. I knew a guy who bought Oblivion at launch and played it for 2 weeks straight before declaring it trash. I would like Bethesda staff in general to get high and make weirder games like they used to, but at the same time, a lot of people are screaming at them to become like every other modern RPG which is not going to improve them at all.
Its clear they could get away with more sex thanks to games like Witcher, but i think they think it would require making more elements of the world fixed and detailed, where they like to spread their attention further to less depth.
Reminds me of all of the Elder Scrolls Online players who use guides to speedrun their way to max level, BIS gear, etc. and then complain that there's nothing to do. My guy/gal, you deliberately skipped the entire game
Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind. You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff. The actual taste of the food escapes you. Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement. Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
The wide audience argument is the death of art. Catering to the lowest common denominator produces the exact kind of grey sludge you are currently defending. You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint. You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets. Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
>Your obsession with volume and porn mods is a classic midwit deflection from the core reality of design competence. You are hiding behind Sturgeon's Law to protect the feelings of developers who cannot even balance their own spreadsheets. Nobody cares about the trash at the bottom of the pile when the peak of the mountain towers over the original vision.
Translation: You have decided to move to cherry picking. Got it.
>Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind.
If the developers cant do what you suggest while being profitable, then it isn't a sustainable path for them to take is it?
>You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff.
No I judged it by the average quality of output of the kitchen staff.
>Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement.
Modders do a lot of stuff. As a category their output is starkly below average.
>Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
No about 100 hours out of those millions are probably worth anything.
>The wide audience argument is the death of art.
No it really isnt. You are presuming "Widest Possible" audience which would be. But I was only talking wider than the audience for any particular mod. Which is roughly a good spot for art and roughly where games have been for decades.
>grey sludge you are currently defending
You just seem so mad now you cant even articulate an argument without using the standard slurs from slop youtube reviews.
>You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint.
You mistake a couple of nuggets for a mountain of gold lmao. Regardless of the shit they lie in.
>You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets.
Some shit you just made up. Yawn.
>Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
And now you seek to gatekeep a discussion you aren't even fit to partake in yourself. Boring. Go and goon in peace.
Maybe pick a more restrictive modding engine or cut out obvious fetish and meme material from evaluation? Even gems of games ala Factorio 1.0 aren't really as good as their peak mods ala Space Exploration. If you limited to larger scale overhaul style mods I think your economic argument starts collapsing quickly
That’s such a good one! I wish more people understood this. It seems management and business types always want some upfront plan. And I get it, to an extent. But we’ve learned this isn’t a very effective way to build software. You can’t think of all possible problems ahead of time, especially the first time around. Refactoring to solve problems with a flexible architecture it better than designing yourself into a rigid architecture that can’t adapt as you learn the problem space.
That’s how I understand it as well. It’s not about an abstract ideal of duplication but about making your life easier and your software less buggy. If you have to manually change something in 5 different places, there’s a good chance you’ll forget one of those places at some point and introduce a bug.
If you asked a typical person outside of San Francisco or Silicon Valley, nine times out of ten they wouldn’t have a clue who he is. However, as a co-founder of OpenAI and the former Director of AI at Tesla, he is widely known and respected in the tech world—especially for coining the term 'vibecoding.'" He comes in as second on the list of Github Users Global Ranking right behind mister linux: https://wangchujiang.com/github-rank/.
Genuine question: Who uses stars on GitHub? Even if I use a library or tool, it’s never once occurred to me to give it a star on GitHub. Is this a real thing people do? And if so, why?
Very interesting article! I love reading about hacking in the classical sense: Using a system in way it’s not intended to accomplish an unexpected/unintended outcome. It’s a shame the media has perverted the term to exclusively refer to cyber attackers (“crackers”).
In some ways, I feel the hacker mindset embodies how I like to approach systems and problems. I like to dig in, get my hands dirty, and see how things work. In programming, this often means a lot of stack traces, breakpoints, and print statements. I’ve jumped into a lot of new areas and figured things out on my own.
But on the other hand, I often feel my hacker mindset isn’t nearly as well-developed as some people I meet. That’s probably a lot of imposter syndrome talking. But the things some people do are amazing, things I’d never even think to fathom, let alone attempt, let alone succeed at.
Care to share what those “other things” you’re concerned about are? If you mean what I suspect you do, then this is a complete false equivalence. But it’s hard to evaluate when you don’t actually state your claim or concerns.
Calling Richard Feynman a “professional bongo player” is hardly an honest description. He was a Nobel prize winning physics professor renowned for his problem-solving abilities. He was certainly qualified to analyze the Challenger explosion.
I do also love the idea, though. I think part of the limiting factor is that you can’t attach sensors or peripherals to it. Even with a hackable watch like in TFA, there’s only so much you could add without it getting bulky. And the screen is too small to do much with.
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