SeriousGamesKit

I've made a habit of regularly ordering in out-of-print business books when I see them recommended by people whose writing I have found useful. Some highlights have been 'The Rickover Effect', which details the construction of the first nuclear power plants, and 'Selling Microsoft', which discusses the day-to-day life and structure of enterprise technology salespeople in the 90s.

By far the best has been 'Managing the Design Factory' by Donald Reinertsen, which I strongly recommend to software engineering managers. I really appreciated the exploration of how organising teams and tasks impacts development speed, cost, performance and unit cost in different ways. Even though it was written in the 90s, I don't think I've seen as good a discussion on how architectural decisions impact corporate strategy.

I'd suggest 'The Rickover Effect' by Theodore Rockwell. The author gives a firsthand account of what it was like to be part of the teams who created the first nuclear-powered submarine and civilian nuclear power plant (perhaps counterintuitively, in that order). There is a fair amount of discussion about people, culture and leadership, but it is very grounded and very detailed about the mechanics of what went into these projects and how the former made the latter possible.

Congratulations on your success so far! My thoughts as someone who has worked in real-time graphics but not the VJ niche;

1. If you are looking to create custom visuals as a service, I'd suggest creating a specific page on your site which outlines what you offer and ideally some testimonials from VJs or clients who have used your service.

2. I wonder if there's a line of business in creating slick motion graphics for business conferences which could compliment the custom visuals work? I had some gigs creating AR visuals for pitches and presentations a while back.

3. On the subject of networking, my experience has been that regularly doing lunch/coffee with other creatives is valuable for generating business- so long as you can clearly state what you do and what kind of client you're looking for in a way people can remember when they come across it. If you do everything and you're looking for any client, people won't necessarily let you know when they find someone relevant to introduce you to.

All the best!

From an entrepreneurial lens, I was often tempted to think that computer science would be the best lever which could resolve some of the environmental issues close to home for me. As an example, I spent a long time trying to invent sampling tools which could help pinpoint the broken pipes which I imagined were contributing to the contamination of a major waterway near me.

While the solution was interesting, the background research revealed that not only was the river I was concerned about significantly less polluted than nearby ones, the source of the pollution was actually known- agricultural runoff from hundreds of farms. This would become a somewhat depressing theme- the problems were actually well understood, the solutions long available, but the actors with agency over the problem have chosen not to act. Through this lens, the sad revelation was that these issues which appeared to be technical were actually purely political.

It's kicked off a broader fascination with perverse incentives. I can recommend David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs' to speak to another aspect of this problem. In terms of the high-wire act of political influence around ecological decisions within major engineering projects, I'd suggest 'The making of an expert engineer'.

I do still think there's a significant amount for engineers to contribute. I'm often surprised to see and hear of solutions built by software engineers with little or no regard to operational cost, and I suspect the same is true of energy efficiency. Nowadays, I try to bias towards lightweight, shared cloud resources to deliver my projects. I think that Stripe's goal of shaving off some percentage points off the world of e-commerce to kickstart a market for atmospheric carbon removal is absolutely worth a go. And I'm still fascinated by engineering megaprojects for cleaner energy distribution, such as the Sun Cable.

Hi HN- I'm cross posting my early analysis of 900+ email newsletter ads over the past year as I thought it'd be relevant for this crowd. Please AMA- I'd be keen to hear suggestions for further exploring this data.

Thanks SimonW! I've really enjoyed your series on this problem on HN and on your blog. I've seen suggestions elsewhere about tokenising fixed prompt instructions differently to user input to distinguish them internally, and wanted to ask for your take on this concept- do you think this is likely to improve the state of play regarding prompt injection, applied either to a one-LLM or two-LLM setup?

Interestingly, this expectation isn't universal in the Western world outside of the US. In Australia, the banks don't expect to see previous credit card management, and in fact the presence of an open credit card will significantly reduce your calculated borrowing power for a mortgage.

The myth of US-style 'credit score' requiring a history of card use does persist here though, and I've known several people who have had to close one or more credit cards in order to get their mortgage approved.

  Location: Melbourne, Australia
  Remote: Yes (hybrid/in-office from Melbourne also OK)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Unreal Engine, Unity, Azure, Node, Javascript/Typescript, Python, ML/AI
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-kit-mackenzie-52a2b1b9/ 
  Email: (On request- please reach out via my Linkedin above)

Hi! I'm Kit, and I'm a generalist full-stack engineer with experience delivering projects for FAANGs and across games, simulation, cloud and AI/CV since 2011. I've worked both as an IC and as an engineering leader, and I'm currently open to full or part time contract roles from Melbourne.

Really excited to see this after first learning about NWNs two years back. Great to see progress on these new 'hardware' techniques for AI. Well done to Alon & the team!

Really appreciate this- it's been on my mind for some time. I've been off the convention circuit since COVID hit, but before then I found myself awash in lanyards, stickers, pamphlets, t-shirts, plastic and canvas bags, etc. and it did weigh on my conscience.

I think some of this is purely cultural, insofar as startup tech companies see other startup tech companies do this and want to emulate as a kind of legitimacy-builder. I can attest that making custom shirts/hoodies for your team can actually be more fun and morale boosting than it might seem before you do it.

It's very cheap to produce merch compared to the money you might spend on conference attendance, which is another early sales/marketing driver for young companies- if you're spending tens (or in some cases hundreds) of thousands of dollars setting up booths or flying internationally to be somewhere, what's another couple of hundred to give your logo a bit more visibility?

One thing which isn't widely known is that some popular alternatives to swag i.e. food or coffee giveaways are often strictly controlled/monopolised by convention centres- so you'll often be forced to use their services, which can run into many thousands of dollars.

From my perspective as an attendee, the disposables do get really tiresome. I've joined the ranks of the business-card-free and don't think I'll move back. I'd like to see more eco-friendly manufacturing for this space, which probably starts with moving away from plastics and towards more paper. I do appreciate T-shirts and hoodies I've collected and wear even the old ones to this day.