This seemed like a great guide to starting any sort of meetup, not just Ruby, FWIW. Good read. I think a lot of meetups fizzled in non-hub cities. I lived in Portland, OR up until recently and we had a vibrant meet-up scene before covid where there was lots of walking to different tech offices and you could typically find a meetup every day of the work week, now its pretty dead on most fronts and there is definitely opportunity for folks to step in and restart it!
They're referencing a pretty publicized spat between some folks at the UN and Elon Musk promising he would donate that amount of money towards solving world hunger. It was meant as an example of pricing at this scale. https://factually.co/fact-checks/business/elon-musk-6-billio...
I agree, the "buy" on a streamable product implies that as long as the company is solvent and they have the same overall streamable products available, then your "purchase" should always be upheld.
In a an ideal world, if you bought the title then you'd have the ability to download it locally. I understand the licensing is a main driver of taking titles down, but these agreements are completely opaque to the customer at the time of purchase.
The win/win scenario I think is recognizing there is a market for the preserved titles and putting the effort in to capture that market. There's effort involved in emulating old games to work on modern hardware.
But yes I think you're on to something that Nintendo plays the long game the best, they handle their IPs like Disney does: featuring them across multiple verticals that feed into each other. Its surprising to me how long its taken Nintendo to come back to movies and TV.
Actually now that I think about it, Disney's biggest shortcoming is their video game division despite many wonderful retro Disney and Lucasarts games at their disposal.
We should all appreciate that most homes were not done by teams of professionals back in the day. Multiple things can be true here, 1) building your own home will take a lot of time to get right (so time being used in place of money), 2) the skills involved are all completely learnable and do-able for an able-bodied person who again is willing to put the time in, and 3) its not worth it for the vast majority of people who don't want to learn these skills and would rather focus on their own work and pay someone else to be a professional in the space. And yes 4) I've seen quite a bit of DIY work in homes and sometimes its impressive but usually its questionable and sometimes even horrific.
My general impression with most discourse about the economy and statements like "Inflation to my mind supposes that we have to have perpetual growth" is that it looks at transactions within the economy as zero-sum. And that is a false assumption. It grows and shrinks for myriad of reasons that aren't directly related to monetary policy. The monetary policy is there to attempt to keep things stable and predicable, that is all.
> If we grow 3 times the amount of corn that we need this year, do we need to plan to grow 3.1 times next year? Or decrease the cost by 2%? If all the inputs stay the same, where do you get the gains from(assuming that the process is as efficient and automated as possible)?
I think I get what you're driving at, but let me ask this question. Do you believe the price of corn in 1976 reflects the same market forces as the price of corn in 2026? Not the inflationary number alone, but why that corn costs what it does today versus 50 years ago?
There are microeconomic changes for sure, different farming techniques and maybe a different way of buying and selling surplus corn. But the life of a farm hand has likely changed, the average background of them has likely changed, the ownership model of the farm may have changed. The downstream buyers of corn have likely changed from mostly canned good manufacturers to fresh produce providers. And the macroeconomic forces surrounding everything has absolutely changed.
Capital has multiple forms, I agree that physical goods generally depreciate over time. But there is also land, equity, and bonds and they all have their own market forces to deal with.
I'm hand-waving a lot of arguments and considerations with this statement, but from my perspective one advantage to 2-3% inflation is to incentivize owning capital that will outpace inflation. Land, equity, and bonds all have that potential.
Deflation may incentivize renegotiation of labor, but it also incentivizes hoarding of cash, which itself is not otherwise valuable. The value comes from it being passed around through the economy buying more assets. The more purchases -> the more money to be passed around -> the more opportunity to grow the economy. In a deflationary environment (at least in theory) this slows all of that down and decreases economic opportunity, which we generally don't want.
You get the same vigor against all of those project all the time. Windmills, solar, nuclear, rail, etc. There's a stronger will to oppose than to build.
I feel like that wasn't nearly as interesting as the title promised. The stuff that I find fascinating about modern Europe against the Roman Empire is how it carved out the modern dividing lines in some areas, or seeded cultural roots that would become their own thing over time (the British being a pretty interesting one). But its all so long ago that all of the other influences that happened over time are probably bigger hallmarks than their Roman roots (like the British again, being invaded by the normans and vikings).
I think it makes a pretty good assumption on understanding core chess rules, but yea that would be nice. The thing that did trip me up at first was not realizing the red and blue bishops were the same piece, I was wondering if I was missing something.
Dang, that's really fun! I think its solid all-around and no notes on the core game loop.
If you want to make it more accessible to folks like myself who stink at chess, I'd recommend adding some sort of power-ups so that you can take multiple pieces, jump over obstacles, or freeze enemies in place. And with that you probably have a great little game to sell on Steam :)
If anything the prompt from your phone that your meter is expiring is a huge plus against forgetting about it and getting dinged with an outrageous parking ticket. I'd much rather go through the brief stress of that reminder than a ticket any day. A parking ticket will put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day easily.
Being someone who was glued to this stuff at that time, I thought Doom 3 had that energy, but they were also clearly taking their time to get it right. And that time spent ended up giving Valve the chance to slip in with Half-Life 2 and steal some of their thunder. Otherwise I felt like they were setting out to do some amazing new things with the tech and game design and they (mostly) accomplished that.
Builders will love to do it, which is where the code comes from. Long before robotaxi's were even an idea we would see buildings tout "car-lite" lifestyle buildings, aiming for residents using bicycles and public transport. Residents will (correctly IMO) point out that people grab these apartments and bring their cars anyway.
I'm sorry but the assumption that robotaxis will make parking spots obsolete in 5 years is the sort of thinking that probably keeps Elon Musk a rich little boy. About 10 years ago we had conversations about autonomous driving coming by 2020 and how it would likely make auto insurance irrelevant. That hasn't materialized yet, and granted we are much further along now, but it seems like we're still a long way away from it being the norm to the point where it disrupts city building codes.
If you can save millions in costs every quarter for the degraded experience, I can see why leaders want to take the risk. Really depends on who is making the calls I guess, for the services that depend on customer experience I would think an AI service agent would probably be out of the question.
I think I'm seeing the advantages of using this, but I can't help feel like momentum is going to be strongly against adoption. Already feeling like if I suggested this it would meet a ton of eye-rolls, there'd be all this new plumbing needed just to support something we can already do in similar ways.
You need to retrain managers from seeing a prototype and thinking "yep, ship it" and over to "okay, how do we build this properly?" And I don't think that's gonna happen.