Explain this comment to me. It seems reasonable to come to the conclusion that someone is profiting on the side from this deal. Especially given the current postmaster general. Is there some other trail of thought you think is being neglected from jumping to this conclusion?
Yes, any deal would involve someone making a profit but that isn't important. The question "follow the money" implies is, was this decision made because it was the best decision for the circumstances or was it made because someone is getting a kickback? I don't know the answer and I'm not implying anything but I feel saying "any deals involves someone making money" is being obtuse to a certain extent.
they don't give away a cut to steam if you donate, but then you lose the automatic updates, but sometimes I think steam is slightly behind the on releases anyways...
Many people can’t read as quickly as you can. My husband for instance speaks English as a second language. Reading is a large investment of time for him; conversely if he does read something, his comprehension is greater than mine. On the flip side, for spoken content I tune out almost immediately, while he is immersed.
I know not everyone is ESL, but it shouldn’t be surprising that different people have different levels of speed and comfort with reading vs audio content.
> I can't understand why people tolerate spoken instruction
Not only do people tolerate it, some people prefer it! I'm going out on a limb here as I have no data to back this up but I'm willing to bet that the average person has not done any dense reading since they finished their schooling. With that context, it's probably not hard to imagine why most people prefer video instruction over blog post and what not.
Count me among the minority then - one of the first things I do in a game is turn the sound effects and background music as low as possible - but I don't care either way as long as I can skip it. Especially if I've already seen/heard the dialog before, making me sit and wait through cut scenes or scrolling dialog is a good way to get me to find another game.
It's not like this for everyone! Some people really enjoy looking at the art or listening to the voice acting or whatever. But please give me a skip button; I'm not watching a program, I'm trying to play a game.
I probably mildly prefer reading... but I very much prefer all the advantages that a game without narration has. It's like the difference between a movie and a book. A movie can have spectacle, but it's expensive, short, and constrained. A book is limitless.
Same with narration. Narration requires a fixed script; don't dare try to give your character a unique name. Text can be generated and modified on the fly to reflect a dynamic game environment. Adding a new sidequest doesn't require actors and studio time; just a gamedev.
I agree you about LTT to a certain point but I think you are dragging them too much. LTT has done some very good tech journalism in the past and brought some very important stories to light. While I do not prefer them for my hardware information for reasons you stated, I would not call them the polar opposite of quality.
If I drop into a random page of a random Ian Cutress article, there's a high probability it will be interesting and well thought-out content.
If I drop into a random LTT video and scroll to a random timestamp, it's most likely going to be some minimal content arbitrarily stretched past the 10 minute threshold for YouTube monetization. I can usually find the answer to the clickbait headline with enough seeking around, but many of his videos contain so little actual content that it could probably be summarized in a couple of Tweets. His specialty is expanding it into 10+ minutes of overly enthusiastic, slow-paced talking about it.
The information density is at polar opposites of the spectrum, and that's by design. YouTube favors quantity and clickbait, and it's no secret that Linus is playing that game as aggressively as he can.
I mean very obviously you're comparing different media aimed at different audiences but even so you're wrong, there are plenty of LTT videos where they dive into their methodology and provide explanations that are fairly in depth. I think you should be blown away by the fact that LTT manages to retain it's broad audience going as deep as they do when it comes to stuff like testing thermals under various conditions. I came into LTT thinking it was clickbait trash but it's absolutely not, you have a long way to go before you get to the "polar opposite of the spectrum".
In any case people are suggesting Ian join LTT Labs, not LTT.
Which LTT has been shown to be interested in producing, buying cable testing equipment, using high speed cameras for monitor analysis, ... and with LTT Labs those efforts will likely increase.
I don't know if this has changed but at some point I stopped watching LTT because my own knowledge of computing exceeded his (as far as I can tell) and I started noticing trivial technical errors in a lot of the content he made, delivered with unwarranted confidence. He's not an engineer, he got his start demoing products for tech retailers.
This is why I've long since preferred AnandTech to LTT. They employ people like Cuttress, who has a respect for scientific rigor and can go deep into the technological weeds and actually report usefully from them, whereas I feel LTT was limited mostly to surface-level observations when I watched regularly.
Create a new virtual machine and set the window size to 720x1440 with 2x scaling (or just 360x720) which is what the Pinephone uses. Everything else is the same as desktop Linux, just compiled for ARM.
1. Buy a device, https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices#Main . I suggest the PinePhone if you want something with decent power management in the next few months, or PinePhone Pro if you're willing to wait a few months for decent power management.
I mean...that's why I said "more or less". There are of course differences, but a lot of app development can be done on a linux system and a cross compiler.
Signal and power management make or break a phone. My Nokia N900 makes for an excellent Linux phone (I have been unironically using it as my daily driver for communication, and the battery has been replaced recently too), but what really kills it is that its battery life is very unpredictable.
Sometimes it lasts 36h on a single charge when in standby, and sometimes a fraction of that. I cannot trust it to last me a whole day without a charger.
Other older phones that I tried last year (ranging from very old Nokia's to Blackberries with 3G) all had issues with call quality and even with random signal loss. I couldn't reliably stay connected with my family, which frustrated everyone.
Your application/mobile OS likely uses mobile data in some fashion, definitely uses up some CPU cycles (in foreground or background), may trigger high-powered modes in the cell radio through its usage patterns, or might miss incoming messages entirely. Testing on real untethered hardware, even as a final check, is needed to see that what you built isn't a frustrating paperweight that cannot fulfill the function of a phone.
Regarding skills not being transferable. This is only somewhat true and the author is doing some goal post shifting here. What he said really only applies to game engines, not game frameworks and certainly not game programming in general. If you want to learn game programming and not a game engine, I recommend using something like Pygame or LOVE2D which are less prescriptive game frameworks as opposed to engines.
However, even with game engines, I have spoken with AAA developers who have worked with both Unity and Unreal and they all say the same thing. Game engines are a lot like programming languages in the sense that once you learn truly learn how one works, picking up a new one isn't that difficult.
> Game engines are a lot like programming languages in the sense that once you learn truly learn how one works, picking up a new one isn't that difficult.
As someone who has worked as a AAA game dev for almost 13 years, can confirm this analogy holds true. Off the top of my head, I can recall 8 different game engines I've worked on (all proprietary). You start to pick up on the common patterns and ideas between them, and learning a new one boils down to figuring out familiar interfaces. Just like when learning a programming language, you look for the fundamentals (loops, conditions, data types, etc).
At the end of the day, "game engine" is a fancy way of describing an amalgamation of systems that gather input, maintain a complex state machine/simulation, and draw it on a screen. And from my experience, the way different engines accomplish this doesn't truly vary that much.
The studio I'm at has hopped around a bunch, so I've gotten to do work for a range of franchises over the years. Guitar Hero/Band Hero, Call of Duty, Skylanders, Crash Bandicoot, Destiny 2, and most recently Diablo II Resurrected. And also quite a few different platforms (Nintendo DS/Wii/Switch, PS3/4/5/Vita, XB360/1/SX, Apple TV and iOS).
I've mainly done engine and tools work, often for UI or scripting systems. From my experience, each studio and franchise tends to make its own custom engine and tools. Although, in some cases we managed to reuse a decent amount of in-house technology across projects. The Tony Hawk remaster was an unusual case which used Unreal Engine instead.
It's given me an interesting perspective behind the scenes of AAA games. These titles may all use different software but they're fundamentally built on the same principles. Once you get the gist of how games like this are put together, learning another isn't a big stretch.
I would argue the opposite, there's a really strong skill transfer between gamedev(esp on the engine side of things) <-> embedded development. Both deal with hard constraints(performance, memory, storage) and you use similar approaches to deal with them.
At a more high-level HMI/game design has a pretty large overlap. No one knows what "fun" or "easy to use" are, so the approaches to converge there are similar(rapid prototyping, etc).
Yeah I spent a little over four years in the game industry and successfully transferred to enterprise and web development (while still doing some games on the side). I'd say there's quite a bit of overlap depending on the tools or languages you use.
And yeah, I've switched between many game engines over the years myself. Unity, Love2D, Flash Actionscript, Pico-8, XNA, Cocos2D, QBasic, TI-BASIC (texas instruments calculators), Hypercard, PyGame, Popcap Game Framework (C++), straight up OpenGL, J2ME, Kindle Active Content (basically Java), PhaserJS, and Swift + SpriteKit. It's about as transferable as going from Angular to React (which I did when I switched jobs six months ago). Yeah you have to learn how to do some things differently but you can pick up the new one pretty quickly if you've had experience with the other.
I do have a lot of unfinished projects, but that's also true for me for websites, apps, writing, puzzles, and board game designs as well. It's not specific to video games. Also most of them are unfinished because I got distracted by other projects or decided to go a different direction, not because game dev is hard (although it can be). I do have about 20 video games I worked on that were released into the world at one point, also.
> It's second only to my all time favorite of "I left a company, and here's a blog post about why you should care" post.
As a counterpoint, one of my genuinely favorite post is Michael Lynchs "Why I left Google" post and his yearly solo developer updates. A lot of people simply blog as a way to organize their thoughts, not because they believe people care and need to hear what they have to say.
"Why I left Google" quoted returns 7790 results. It conveys nothing of status and says more about the environment of the person who thinks it does.
I might as well read "Why I left Wal-Mart," except that I expect those articles, were they ever to be written, would show a wide latitude of interesting personal experiences, and not the self-promoting pablum that particular genre of LinkedIn fluff provides.
I disagree. My experience with many engineers - suggest there are different engineering types.
There are the exacting, detailed oriented, pedantic, focused engineers who just cannot think big picture. They're great at rules based / systems following work - and love picking apart anything not based in 'immediate reality'
There are the strategic, forward thinking, open minded who cannot execute a project to save their life.
There are the directive, steam rollers who bully a team - but great at getting stuff done.
Etc. Etc. Other types, but for brevity I cut it short.
One can come into contact with many of the same "rude" type, but it's generally due to the fact that hiring in any given organization is generally based, at least in part, on "cultural fit". This means the various types of engineers will tend to segregate a bit over time. For instance someone who is a bit more contemplative may not meet the "cultural fit" requirement at a crypto defi shop, but might do well at a national laboratory. (And vice versa). This is why we shouldn't meet a group of, let's say "strong personality types", and assume that all engineers in other places are similar in nature. That's not at all how it works.
This is a good application of various behavior/personality type systems (DiSC, etc) to engineer profiles. In these systems there are personalities that will usually clash against one another unless one or both are aware of the problem, perhaps that is what the OP is experiencing and in that regard it’s not just a tech problem.
I'm suggesting not all are rude; I see many uplifting comments. A number are rude - and maybe those who are pre-oriented to replying in text on a partially anonymous board with a pedantic nature are pre-inclined to be more rude.
Engineers by design are used to problem solving or working through the problem solving. If they're not solving the problem - then they would be in "what's wrong with this approach" mode and some may see it as rude.
Is there a possibility that some people are unusually sensitive or have a persecution complex causing them to perceive the slightest push back as a personal attack?
And even ignoring the modern sales, it's arguable they were so good at sales in the 90s (when there were far more competitors) that they created the modern Office situation.
