The only thing I really don’t agree with is SaaS. There are numerous benefits to the end consumer as long as you phrase your thinking in the right way. Take Adobe, what most people consider to be the most gratuitous SaaS. I want photoshop in 2006, so I buy elements for $100 and get a shitty outdated version for the rest of my life. Or, I spend $8/mo on something that is constantly improving and adding new features, and get other programs too!
My workplace uses indesign, illustrator, and photoshop. But because the whole package was made available, we started messing around with premier and after effects and ended up adding a couple of skills to our design repertoire that we never would have fucked around with otherwise.
Plus, games that have SaaS last longer. Granted, skins are kinda lame. But think of a game like Helldivers 2, where the “battle pass” is earnable by in game play OR you can skip ahead with money. Great game, option to support the developers leads desire to keep development going instead of abandoning a game right after launch because “their work is done”.
Quality user experience in things that are core functions of use, and specifically them not getting bogged down (or potentially “bricked” by) the need for luxury, or ads, or ease of use.
In a car, the driver seat should, in my mind, be manually adjusted. Why? Because if the motor breaks because it has to adjust each time you sit down, and the last person to use the car is my mother or girlfriend, I literally cannot drive my car until it gets fixed because I am too tall.
But something like heated/cooled seats is perfectly fine to have as a luxury, because if my seat cooler fan breaks, I just have a sweaty back as if I didn’t have a seat cooler.
Same with manual transmissions: if I ever have my transmission start acting up and I don’t have the money to bring my car to the shop, I could probably fix it, albeit with a lot of difficulty and cursing. But an automatic? No way in hell.
Plus, my manual lasts longer, stays cooler, tows more, is more fun, provides more control, keeps me more aware and focused while driving, and is a theft deterrent.
You can apply this logic to anything: if the object becomes useless without it, it should be as basic, durable, strong, resilient, and/or foolproof as possible, but when the object would not break without it, it can have as much luxury as desired.
I know nothing about the fundamentals of “old computing” like what Mr. Atkinson worked on as I am only 27 and have much more contemporary experience. That being said, I still very greatly mourn the loss of these old head techs because the world of tech I use today would not have been possible if not for these incredibly smart and talented individuals. To learn to code without YouTube is truly a feat I could not imagine, and the world will be a lesser place without this kind of ingenuity. Hopefully he’s making some computers in the sky a bit better!
In the modern sense, this is very much a “I don’t want to do labor” issue. If all of the WFH jobs get sent overseas, the only thing left to do here is stuff that cannot be done on a computer from home, like construction, fabrication, forestry, food service, etc to name a few. A lot of us coder/designer/techy types are somewhat privileged in the idea that we can get paid a reasonable to high wage for doing something that is physically non-demanding and essentially only commands its price tag because of schooling and brainpower.
I can imagine a lot of us are going to get very angry if we suddenly have to haul Sheetrock for a living.
My boss recently sent me from 5 days in office to 3, and on those two days WFH I get basically nothing done. Not because I don’t try, but my position in a small company is structured in such a way that I essentially work with my boss as her right hand, so if she isn’t there to guide me or give me tasks I essentially don’t work.
I am not sure if that is a failing of her management, the job we are doing, or the industry we are in, but the lack of being able to bug her about things is essentially cutting into my bottom line.
I love work from home, but I can’t help but feel like its only real benefit is removing a lot of the overhead from jobs that are already considered overhead. Agree with this next part or not, it isn’t really debatable: to the average person (which we aren’t), basically anything that can be done on a computer from home is overhead.
Coding in the office? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Finance department? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically anything HR related? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Middle managers? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Graphics designers and the like? Takes up a lot of office space and commute time and energy.
Basically every job that has been moved to WFH should have been that way since computers became widespread, and it is essentially a problem that they weren’t WFH already. If it can be done entirely on a computer, it should be done from home. Leave the office space for housing and jobs that can’t be done from the comfort of one’s underwear.
Yes, we would. That's why most of us are okay with proxies. But the fact of the matter is that when all of the good cards cost a lot of money, and you need to play good cards to win tournaments, and you cannot use proxies in tournaments, spending money to win nothing at all feels really bad.
If all the cards were free and we were competing for $500 instead of decks cost $2k and we're playing for a $600 card I wouldn't care. I probably would enjoy it. But we live in a society and as it is, I would rather modern cards have more value than none.
This happens in every industry once that business is opened to the stock market. Larian is great because its private. Steam is great because it's private. Facebook used to be great then it went public and went downhill fast. Same with basically any company that doesnt have 2 vectors of VERY solid competition (AMD v Intel v ARM, nvidia v AMD v Intel, Micro v Samsung v hynix, Ford v GM v Dodge, etc). Companies that exist only to drive profits will do shit to ruin their brand in the name of profits, because stock profits make more money than being a good company.
I do almost exclusively by singles. That doesnt mean that a) winning packs from tournaments and LGS FNM doesnt feel satisfying or fun or valueable, and b) it wasnt fun to gamble on getting good value out of all pre-Throne of Eldraine sets, or c) that draft doesnt feel like a complete waste of money considering it is usually $30-50 buy in and winning gets you like 3 packs ($50 for 6 packs of cards each worth under a dollar feels bad). There used to be a lot of fun to be had in paying $10 for an FNM entry, getting a pack from entering, paying an extra $10 to get 2 more packs and rolling the dice. Sometimes you got trash, other times you got $50 worth of cards, but it was at least fun because there was a chance of good cards. Now, even if the card is very playable it still has no value.
He is somewhat exaggerating, as most of the MOST espensive cEDH decks peak at around 10k, which is frankly a TON of money but comes from 2 or 3 cards. Take Urza for example: the best Urza Poly Kraken deck (uninterruptable combo deck reliably wins turn 3) is like 9k because it has timetwister, tabernacle, and mox diamond, among other $200+ pieces. This deck is a solid 7 cEDH deck, which places it among the best decks ever. However, drop it to a cEDH 5 and the price drops to 2k because you can cut those crazy cards and make other subs. Drop it to a solid budget cEDH deck and you can get it to $500. Each extra insane piece adds only a nominal amount of power.
I mean, I wouldnt care if all of the cards were worthless as long as all of the packs are free. Winning tournaments (esp local ones) currently feels bad and unrewarding because a pack of cards is $5 to buy but contains $0 value. Investing implies buying and selling for the sake of profitmaking, whereas I really like the idea of cards fluctuating in value due to organic changes in the game so that you can trade a doubling season for 2 tutors, and then if for some reason one of those tutors goes for a long time without a reprint, you may be able to trade that tutor for a doubling season and another tutor! Like, Im not gonna go on to TCG player and buy cards for the sake of speculatively investing and holding value, but it doesnt feel good when packs are $5 a piece and contain $0.50 of cards. It feels even worse to draft for $40 and walk away with $3. ON AVERAGE a pack of magic cards should hold its value, and over time eventually go up.
Meaning if I spend $500 on packs of cards, I should get $500 worth of cards on the secondary market immediately (or even slightly less, like $300 would be reasonable), and then if I hold that for 5 years, it should be like $700. This is how it has been for all of magic's history pre-Throne of Eldraine (nothing particular about that set, but that is the last set that I really see this happening on)
Has anyone actually tried the network multiplayer? I won't have a chance to try this out for a while, but if there is now a great way for me to play actual commander with the MTGA rules engine (for speed and accuracy) with friends I would love this so much. Can anyone share their experiences?
I really miss 2016 MtG. I remember when full art lands and full art promos were RARE and with money for no reason other than their collectability. I really liked when cards were rare because of the fact that they were good and uncommon and maybe because they were the same as the regular card but foil, not because they were arbitrarily a different type of shiny, or like when that one card from Kamigawa had a different color neon border that made it spike to 3k for a while, let alone the new serialized cards.
I wish we could go back to that, because I was so excited about collecting cards back then. Nowadays I feel like unless I open a pack with a crazy reprint or a REALLY lucky list card, there are essentially no cards worth anything. I remember pulling some shock lands and even when they were only 8 bucks it felt really great, like it was gambling. Now, I only ever get packs of remastered sets, and standard sets are wholly uninteresting. I do a $40 draft and get $3 worth of cards, and it is to be seen if these EVER go up in value.
I still love the game, and I play it more than ever. But there are three groups of people: investors, people that realize it is a TCG, and people that think all cards should be worthless. The first is greedy, the middle is realistic, and the latter is idealistic. But I am solidly in the middle, and there is so much pushing on both sides that the middle group is demonized for wanting to play a game and have cards have relative value too.
As far as my inspiration, I use Craigslist and google as my inspiration. I try to get a sleek and simple look like google pages, but maintain the “old school” functionality and layout ideas of Craigslist .
As far as actual development is concerned, I use oracle ARM servers that are grossly overpowered for a webhost, cloudflare nameservers OR CDN, and I keep as much of the development as possible server side with as little JavaScript as I can. An example was a simple blogging system I made. The entire system is set up with a MariaDB table that has “title, date, image url, and content” as the data bits for it, and then each function works on one of two pages: a backend using php session that has all of the functions with get request, and a front end that has all of its content on a page with post requests. There is no JavaScript involved on either page, which means the stuff transmitted over the internet is lesser, the stuff done on the client computer is lesser, and the number of outside calls is lesser. This does make it “less responsive”, but does the blog really need image zoom in on hover and shit like that?
I have found the best way to develop for speed and simplicity is to curb the enthusiasm of the client from “looks as good as possible” to “simple, cheap, fast, and robust, while still looking better than average”
The final suggestion I have is to develop with security AND accessibility in mind first. If you want to put aria links of all of your stuff, it is much harder to go back later and 1) determine what the link does, and 2) write an aria for it than it is to just include it in the first place. Always follow proper form for mitigating risks like SQL injection and XSS, and do as much as possible on the server before you resort to JS.
If you are looking for a couple of sites that I didn’t build, but get the point of what I am trying to do across, check out
Smashingmagazine.com
Hacker news doesn’t look the best, but it follows the logic set forth,
Openai.com (this one surprised me because if you remove a lot of the slightly more interactive elements it is fast as hell)
If you have any specific questions, ask away and I’ll do my best
Unfortunately I don’t have a website for myself and I don’t feel comfortable sharing my client’s websites. I operate purely through word of mouth in my local town, and I don’t have any aspirations to “go big”
I’ve wanted to use one of those “gaming focused” stripped down windows installs for the longest time because all of the garbage is removed. It’s like Linux but not a pain in the ass for playing games and doing mundane shit. Too bad I care about security
Adjacent but similar, I am so over all of the animations and corporate bullshit on pages. I run a business making decent and super optimized web pages and people love them. They’re the only website in their town and field that doesn’t take 10 seconds to load and render.
My workplace uses indesign, illustrator, and photoshop. But because the whole package was made available, we started messing around with premier and after effects and ended up adding a couple of skills to our design repertoire that we never would have fucked around with otherwise.
Plus, games that have SaaS last longer. Granted, skins are kinda lame. But think of a game like Helldivers 2, where the “battle pass” is earnable by in game play OR you can skip ahead with money. Great game, option to support the developers leads desire to keep development going instead of abandoning a game right after launch because “their work is done”.