Of course tables are hit or miss - but learning how to carry a dead table is a fun challenge in and of itself. My city has a fairly extensive WhatsApp group for timelefters, usually all of the various tables meet up after for drinks and more socializing.
Lovely read. Social health is my number one 2026 priority. I moved into a new city in 2025 and this hits home. I'm lucky to have a great and active group of online friends but it's no replacement for something local.
Some things that I've picked up last year that are a good starting point:
- timeleft dinners. I get dinner with 5 strangers every few weeks. Tons of fun and you meet a lot of interesting people.
- swing dancing: I went on a date to a social dance and immediately became addicted. It has taken a while to learn the basics, and some of the unwritten rules of the dance floor, but now this is an activity I can take with me to many of my city's social dances and meet all sorts of people. It has greatly improved my social skills and confidence.
I think the biggest different this year will be the amount of effort I put into organizing social events: I've found that everyone seems to be waiting for an invite, but no one wants to do the inviting! OP hinted at this in his article.
I went through a loop at Meta that was probably 10-11 rounds. I would have done 100. The compensation is truly life changing and the engineering problems were world-class.
I'm sure OP is correct that this is a signal for a bad org - but from the outside looking in you'll do anything.
In most of my undergrad CS classes you needed at least a C- (70%) to advance to the next course, so really anything below that was basically an "F". In grad school I believe I needed at least a B (80%) to get credit - no pressure!
fairly certain they used this: https://w.dspconcepts.com/, they used to have Spotify listed a a client. I'm guessing they cannot open source for this reason (it's not their code to open source)
Cixin Liu has a great short story 'Cloud of Poems' in which an alien intelligence seeks to write every possible permutation of traditional Chinese poetry, to show up a human poet.
I didn't bother to check the math on this, but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!
Unruly passengers are the least of your worries in this game. If you can manage to get the plane fueled, boarded, and the bags in the hold on time you are are an airport god lol.
I really like games like this. Can't explain why. You just kind of do little jobs and feel like you're accomplishing something. Farming Simulator is my favorite: there are lots of different tasks you can do, lots of ways you can go about doing them, etc. And I learned quite a bit about agriculture along the way.
This game scratches the same itch, it's given me just a tiny understanding of how hard all the ground crews work to turn planes around at the airport. It does not have as much depth as FS and it's hard to play single player (you can't really parallel process anything) but with the right crew it would be fun co-op.
I'm excited to watch this game continue to develop.
wow, this is a fantastic experience to click around in. fun to think about how far (or sideways) we could extend this backwards. And excited to see where it extends to in the future :-)
Of course tables are hit or miss - but learning how to carry a dead table is a fun challenge in and of itself. My city has a fairly extensive WhatsApp group for timelefters, usually all of the various tables meet up after for drinks and more socializing.