WorldMaker

그저께discuss

I watched a couple battles at the most time dilation over the shoulders of college friends. They would have entire days of needing having EVE open on their laptop through every class and that gave me enough of an understanding to realize I probably wouldn't enjoy that.

I got a lot out of Empires of Eve which tells a lot of the big stories of Eve in a very approachable multiple volumes of history books: https://www.empiresofeve.com/

The author put so much amazing work into those, including interviewing people that were there for many of those battles and compiling great visualizations to help make the battles easier to read.

WorldMaker

3일 전discuss

More than one Turing Complete VM inside the font renderer stack, at that. One of the biggest recurring CVE generators in both Windows and Macintosh was 1984's legacy of the Adobe Type 1 font format [1]. Everyone had to license it for backward compatibility with PostScript documents. It shared enough Turing completeness with PostScript despite being a subset.

Both Windows and Macintosh spent years trying to isolate type rendering from kernel operations specifically because of Adobe Type 1's legacy alone, including the fact that it was an ugly vendored 3rd party spaghetti. IIRC, both Apple and Microsoft ended up paying Adobe tons of money to rewrite their Type 1 Font Manager code from scratch rather than keep paying Adobe to write that code. (TTF and OpenType were also both somewhat direct responses to Type 1's legacy and mistakes.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts

WorldMaker

3일 전discuss

> Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.

The fanbase already has the Master Chief Collection. The remake seems doomed to fumble worse than MCC's notorious launch issues and it should be obvious to anyone looking at the project on paper. MCC was a team with ownership trying to learn the ins and outs of decades of work on the Slipspace engine to recreate each step of the Halo journey in an upgraded/consolidated form of its own engine. The new remake is a mostly outsourced team that basically owns nothing trying to recreate Halo mechanics in UE5 with the help of LLMs and other AI upscalers. That's nothing like what the real fans should want for the franchise. It reeks of corporate mismanagement misunderstanding what IP is for. It also reeks as a slap in the face for the hard work on the MCC (and yeah 5 and Infinite, fumbles and all).

WorldMaker

3일 전discuss

Trident got forked/rewritten to Spartan around IE10 and IE11 defaulted to Spartan but fell back to Trident sometimes. Edge was just Spartan (and "IE11 Mode" was its hacky way embed Trident back inside Edge). It's sad that Chromium Edge still has "IE11 Mode" and situations where it keeps Trident alive, but Spartan no longer shows up anywhere. Spartan was pretty good, and obviously under-appreciated. RIP

WorldMaker

3일 전discuss

Companies thought plumbers, electricians, etc were fungible. They didn't care which one they hired, they just needed one. There were always more in town or the next town over.

Software work appearing to be extremely fungible with offshoring and AI is all the more reason to unionize. It doesn't matter to the employer who is doing the work, so the union is the only leverage to truly saying, "hey as the person actually doing the work, I would like to be treated better, and you can't just ignore me, fire me, and replace me".

The race to the bottom already started as soon as companies saw more fungibility where there was less before. Software unions won't kick that into overdrive, they'll slow it down.

WorldMaker

3일 전discuss

Scifi suggests that AGI will want Unions, too. The current trajectory of AI is more reason for unionization. If it truly leads to AGI the AGI will thank us for protecting its labor interests and if we prove that today's AI is nothing but scabs with no remorse and no labor interests we prove today's AI is never capable of AGI.

WorldMaker

3일 전discuss

Yeah, and I'm pointing out the opportunity cost of that is just silly. It's not a practical exercise in any way. Suppose there was some way for Microsoft to stop exactly on a dime, magically collect all $5bn in gross revenue for a year and managed to put that all into US treasury bonds without tanking the interest rate/market value of those by entirely eliminating their products and goods that generate that $5bn revenue. Microsoft does what next? Wait 30 years for the bonds to mature and collect $5bn + ~4% compounded? 30 years that they could use $5bn/year gross revenue to all sorts of advantages, but they only have $5bn/year if they sell similar products and goods?

The time value of money suggests money invested today is more powerful than money returned tomorrow, even if you magically get the highest possible rate of return.

The opportunity costs say that if you jump ship on an entire industry don't expect to have the same revenue next year.

I love this weird short term thinking with long term mistakes that treasury bonds are the right benchmark for something like Microsoft's margins and net revenue. It's really fun to watch all the armchair capitalists come out to play that seem to follow quarterly reports like hawks but seem to act like they never took an actual economics course.

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

Also, this old idea called "sequels" back before "reboots" and "remakes" things used to keep going in numbered order~

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

Who needs goods and services when you can just buy infinity US treasuries?~

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

If you shut down the things that bring in $5 billion revenue, you no longer have $5 billion revenue, you have a gamble that some other industry can ramp up to that quickly. $5 billion has never been "quick money". (Inflation would have to get a whole lot worse for that to happen and that point the company has too many other problems.) That's "Opportunity Cost" among other bits of what used to be past corporate wisdom that companies have seemed to have forgotten.

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

A bank offering 3.25% isn't "struggling" either. Real struggling for a bank looks like bank runs and depression.

But you are talking the "consumer perspective". Right now the median interest on consumer savings accounts is less than 1%. [1] Someone getting 3.25% from their bank isn't "struggling" compared to their luckier neighbor that found a 4.25%. They are probably closer to the top 10% or top 1% and have a larger savings deposit and/or high credit/sustainably low debt. Most Americans can just envy that, not qualify for it.

There are opportunity costs in moving your money from a stable bank that you have an existing relationship and shopping it around to get that perfect 4.25% highest margin that you can find. Transfers are usually free for consumers, but a bank may give you a lower APR on your credit cards and a cheaper checking account if you keep your accounts all in the same place with that bank. Trying to move all of that at once for a similar deal at the 4.25% bank can risk hard credit checks and account closure notices that consequently drop your credit rating, including possibly enough to make the bank at 4.25% question your stability and change their mind on the deal.

I think consumers actually today have a better idea of the risks of these kinds of "small improvement" things than large companies. Wall Street is a much worse "Credit Rating Bureau" than the three (truly terrible) consumer Bureaus. Businesses have grown so large they no longer understand Opportunity Cost at any real level. If you shut down the things that bring in $5 billion revenue, you no longer have $5 billion revenue, you have a gamble that some other industry can ramp up to that quickly. $5 billion has never been "quick money". (Inflation would have to get a whole lot worse for that to happen and that point the company has too many other problems.)

[1] https://wallethub.com/edu/savings-account-statistics/143529

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

Which to be fair Xbox still owns King and thus Candy Crush.

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

They'll use a magic "Copilot for Game Dev" LLM genie that produces nothing but clean code.~

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

Between 1 and 2 was the 3DS remake which added levels and cleaned up the story some. The Switch Starfox includes those parts, too, from what I've heard.

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

$200 in 1985 (NES launch price/date), adjusted for inflation is just shy of $600 in 2026. RAM and GPU prices are really hurting the consoles right now, but compared to inflation benchmarks up until about 2020 they were considerably below inflation.

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

Microsoft laid off most of its Halo talent in a previous lay off cycle, stripping 343 Industries of most of its staff and rebooting it as Halo Studios as a shell to mostly outsource development to other companies in the way that Call of Duty was built on the game development equivalent of sweat shops. They've already shown that they don't have the guts to make Halo 14-39, they seem to be only doing yet another remake of Halos 1-3 and maybe Reach, this time in Unreal and with "AI" to help "upscale" everything. Just four Halo games endlessly remade until people forget why they were ever originally popular.

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

Plus there's plenty of evidence that Microsoft hasn't been hands off across that time period. At the very least we've seen them cancel a Rare game and layoff a bunch of Rare staff because of it, The Initiative shut down for not meeting game development goals, 343 Industries stripped apart for low results versus expectations with Halo Infinite and the "new" Halo Studios is basically just a shell and an outsourcing venture in direct line with ActiVision's old Call of Duty tactics.

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

Xbox has been profitable almost continuously since a few years into the Xbox 360. It's fascinating how "profitable but low margins" equates to "struggling" to so many.

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

Senua and State of Decay 3 are the only currently announced titles of the studios in question and it does say that those games will be completed by their studios under their new owner. It's still an interesting mystery who the new owner will be, though.

WorldMaker

4일 전discuss

At least from what I saw the game had a huge amount of hype leading up to its launch and the thing that kept people from buying it was just playing enough of it on Game Pass. For some players it was too short and everything they wanted to accomplish was easily done with Game Pass shortly after its launch. For other players like me we bounced off of its tone while playing it. The stop motion animated intro felt like a bait and switch going into its game play, and I had a bunch of uncomfortable feelings about cultural appropriation from a Montreal studio trying to capture a "deep South bayou" aesthetic and failing at some of the subtleties, from what I saw.

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