indigochill

As someone with both AAA and game jam experience, you just put my vague misgiving about the AAA process right into words. This is exactly it.

At least my game jam teams have always focused on what the core game loop is first, built that, then iterated, and my AAA teams have always tried more of an assembly-line approach where there's no game at all until everyone's already feeling the pressure. Because supposedly it's more efficient to pre-plan everything and just trust that it all comes together perfectly (art, level design, system design, engineering, sound, etc) first try rather than leaving time to iterate.

Which kind of makes sense when much of generic management takes its cues from automotive manufacturing (assembly lines, Kanban, etc).

> Maybe with laser cutters there's a new market for wooden construction toys.

At least in my very limited experience, merely the cost of quality wood makes it an expensive material to build toys from.

For example: https://www.communityplaythings.com/products/play/block-play...

I think we're agreeing.

> But even there, what you need is a persistent identifier with which to build a reputation, not a government tracking number

The persistent identifier is all I mean. I agree that tying it to a government-issued identification is problematic since it then gives the government the administration/moderation power. As long as there is a persistent identifier (and one the community owns so it can take meaningful moderation/administration action when necessary), then we're good.

By "anonymity" I mean the absence of a persistent identifier (for example, someone uploading something to BitTorrent is anonymous by default, as far as I know).

> To have community standards you have to have a community, and each community will have its own standards. Which means the standards belong in the community

Also agree with this. This is where federation really shines in my book, as it lets each community apply its own standards while also enabling networking across communities with sufficiently compatible ideals while retaining the autonomy of each community.

> worth compromising the design of a network

That depends on what the design of the network is.

In my mind Freenet is too free for reasons discussed in sibling comments (but in short, literally no safeguards against Not Safe For Life content, by design).

For me, practically, federation provides a far improved middle ground. People can still freely distribute content without being beholden to any particular middle man, but there is more visibility afforded to node operators about what they're hosting and they therefore can both remove content that they don't want to be hosting and remove users from their network who are making problems.

Gossip protocols are another solution which also works for similar reasons.

Ultimately, anonymity is an anti-pattern in the same way that the hot new zero-trust stuff is in the blockchain world. Humans, social beings that they are, fundamentally operate on trust, which fundamentally requires identification. Removing either of those creates more problems than it solves.

> You are not going to solve a hard math problem with average IQ no matter how much persistence you throw at it.

I'm inclined to disagree, but there's an important piece here that I've found when solving problems that were at least hard for me: sometimes I can get hung up on making a particular approach work when it's not going to and what I need to do is back up and find a different angle of attack.

For example if you're solving a hard math problem with little math knowledge and average IQ, if you're really passionate and persistent about it, then you'd realize you first need to learn more math to build your understanding of the domain. IQ/persistence in this case is not really about the problem itself, but more about the problem-solving process itself.

Sorry, I meant it as an example specifically of this (similar to the Hobbits "outsourcing" their defense):

> There's not a lot places in the real history of the real world where a society had no defense burden

I'm certainly not making an argument that it has signs of long-term stability.

Iceland is one example. They have a coast guard but no standing military. On the other hand, their independence is formally guaranteed by the US (and maybe others, I don't remember), so nobody's gonna be trying to annex them any time soon. On the other hand, Iceland's only been "independent" since slipping out from Denmark ~WW2.

I'll take a stab at it, since I'm one of those privacy advocates (and also prone to making sweeping statements like this).

Let's say Alice and Bob are doing life and emailing each other about normal life stuff. Charlie runs their email server.

Charlie also runs an advertising business to fund his email server. He somehow reads (not necessarily manually, but the details don't matter) the emails coming through his server to learn what people are more likely to be interested in buying. Everyone benefits, right? Alice and Bob get free email, the advertisers get well-targeted ads, and Charlie gets paid by the advertisers.

Well, along comes the Police. They know that Charlie is able to access contents of emails going through his server, because it's how he funds his email server. The police would need a warrant to search Alice and Bob's communication for something that might incriminate them in an investigation, but Charlie doesn't need a warrant. The police strike a deal with Charlie of mutual benefit. Information for another revenue stream. But still, the police are upholders of justice and only use this "email tap" for good.

Time goes on and our glorious democracy erodes into an autocratic state (ask Germany - it happens!). Suddenly our justice-loving Police have become the Gestapo, but money talks and it's in Charlie's interest to stay on the Gestapo's good side, so the email tap remains in place and we have Alice and Bob, good people that they are, collaborating on how to resist the autocratic state, which gets funneled straight to the Gestapo. Bad guys win.

Essentially it boils down to this: the means for the public to resist tyranny is a necessary prerequisite for freedom. Conversely, the more power (and information is power, especially personal information) is centralized, the more impactful a potential hostile takeover becomes, and the easier to orchestrate (much easier to infiltrate/control one source of information than thousands).

Although a different context, I always find the writeups of cybersecurity CTFs that go through the "What I was thinking, what surprises I encountered, how I pivoted" process both more enjoyable and more enlightening than writeups that simply explain the solution as if it was known from the beginning.

At the same time there might be some editing since there might have been approaches tried that didn't go anywhere, and whether that's interesting/relevant to the reader is probably a judgement call from someone who knows the domain and whether those dead ends might have been natural things to try in that specific context.

I've never heard of a musical group or artist who can make a sustainable living on just a local scene (although maybe that's rather the point, since they stayed local to wherever they are). Even for huge artists, from what I've heard merch is where the money is, not ticket or record sales (or today, streaming, which is _ludicrously_ tilted against the artist actually making any money). Admittedly I last looked into this around twenty years ago and my sample is tilted more towards the folk singer-songwriter type rather than, say, DJs.

That's not to diss local artists, though. Some are incredibly talented, and I loved the scene I was in it. Just, if we're talking about investing, making music looked like 9 times out of 10 a money sink you do for the love of it, not an investment opportunity.

He also designed the Netrunner rules that Android: Netrunner was based on, and that had such a committed community that when Wizards pulled the license from FFG, the fans just kept developing the game.

Just a point here, you're talking about MTG Arena, which is the new online game. There's a much older game still called MTG Online which preserves the gambling aspect, where you buy packs and event entries for real money as well as trade cards with other users (and through a number of legitimate third parties, even buy and sell singles for real money). They even go one step further: if you can collect all the digital cards of a set while they have physical product available, you can exchange the digital set for a factory-sealed physical print run of the set (https://www.mtgo.com/en/mtgo/redemption).

I kinda waffle between the two. Arena's my first love for the reasons you mention, but sometimes it's nice to simply buy some singles and throw together a (Pauper) deck for some fun on MTGO Online (especially since their set selection goes much farther back). I never play that one competitively, though. Feels like playing online poker against a community that's been refined down to 100% professional grinders or wannabes.

I tend to think the answer is to go back to villages, albeit digital ones. Authentication only enforces that an account is accessed by the correct "user", but particularly in social media many users are bad actors of various stripes. The strongest account authentication in the world doesn't help with that.

So the question, I think, is how do we reclaim trust in a world where every kind of content can be convincingly faked? And I think the answer is by rebuilding trust between users such that we actually have reason to simply trust the users we're interacting with aren't lying to us (and that also goes for building trust in the platforms we use). In my mind, that means a shift to small federated and P2P communication since both of these enable both the users and the operators to build the network around existing real-world relationships. A federation network can still grow large, but it can do so through those relationships rather than giving institutional bad actors as easy of an entrance as anyone else.

I disagree that open platforms are always susceptible to EEE. In my mind, their openness (or more precisely, the true openness of their protocol(s)) prevents that.

Sure, there's a lot of DRM crap on the WWW now, but there's also still plenty of plaintext. The mainstream going with the EEE crowd is a given (being money people, they have the motive, means, and opportunity to streamline onboarding in a way the openness true believers don't), but the WWW platform remains fundamentally open despite everything thanks to the openness of the protocols it's built on.

A classic example of EEE closer to a protocol takeover is how Google handled XMPP. Yet people still use XMPP. It's just not huge. But open != huge or mainstream. Usually quite the opposite (see above about money people herding the mainstream to their platforms).

A rather more blatant takeover is the more recent hostile takeover of Freenode IRC. In that case the community revolted against the takeover and relocated (some to another IRC server and IIRC some to Matrix)

Something I'm coming to realize is even independent of the whole "engagement" thing, media in general (that also goes for movies, TV, video games, etc) are manipulating our brains into expecting higher highs and lower lows than most of us will regularly directly encounter in our real lives (and when I say "expect" I mean in the sense that when we don't get that, we experience that as a negative feeling of boredom rather than a positive feeling of freedom to start doing something interesting).

When you get off that diet and start interacting with people more in real life and use "boring" time as an opportunity to try new things (again in real life, offline), it feels good. Like eating fresh veggies after subsisting on fast food for so long you forgot what real food tastes like.

I'm kinda preaching this to myself since I grew up on all that stuff and am trying to maintain the awareness of this different perspective in order to improve my own mindset (I was tempted to say productivity, but raw output isn't the goal so much as using that "boredom" feeling as a trigger for exploration).

Imagine engaging users with a desirable experience they look forward to returning to vs trying to force content on them that they resort to third parties to deflect.

Way back ~2006 or so if memory serves, Facebook was actually fun and the chronological feed actually seemed to work. Something broke a couple years later and it's never been the same since. Which is especially weird to me given Mark was careful (at least last I looked) to retain majority ownership, but seems he has other priorities these days.

Been tinkering with my personal site again for no particular reason.

1. Looked at what it would take to turn it into a sort of "pubnix" for some friends

2. ...which got me looking into how to set up Postfix to manage local emails (allegedly this works out of the box, but I must have screwed something up since I never did get my test messages from one user to the other)

3. Then on to looking at BBS systems, starting from Enigma 1/2. Didn't get too far into that since the theme customization scared me away (and not enough of my RL friends are nerdy enough to get into it)

4. Finally backing away from the pubnix thing again because of insufficiently nerdy friends (although one is humoring me in experimenting with SSB), I then instead set up a Synapse server to have my own identity in the Matrix ecosystem.

> companies might start learning that in 10 years or so after they've replaced a few generations of programmers, nobody knows how anything works, and suddenly software quality starts to actually matter to investors and consumers

I suspect in software specifically, there will never be such a reckoning because compared to maintenance, replacement is too easy.

I've tended to hold that view as well, but a fellow circled-A enthusiast of my acquaintance pointed out that a challenge may arise when it comes time to enforce the will of the small state against the will of larger states.

I see the Meiji Restoration in Japan as a historical example of this. Japan wished to enforce an isolationist policy which the Americans were able to violate with their military advantage. In response, Japan chose to transition from a feudal shogunate to a centralized empire. My understanding is this was so that the military of Japan could be consolidated so they could negotiate internationally on more equal terms than they could when they needed to also manage relationships with the regional daimyo.

But as you mentioned in another reply there are examples of small European countries which have managed to maintain their sovereignty despite having larger neighbors, so there's probably still more to it (which I'm assuming can be summed up as diplomacy and probably some degree of being lucky with which neighbors you get).

Correct (at least insofar as that's the assertion I'm making).

> Party politics were a mistake

Agreed, but I don't see practically how to avoid them in a democracy/republic, even if you started from a totally clean slate and could unilaterally make all the rules before setting it loose.

A successful political campaign requires funding and if you don't want directly corporate-sponsored politicians then let's assume for the sake of argument you can create parties which don't take corporate funding. Can't have them running on public funding or you give incumbents a massive potential for corrupt campaign funding.

And different geography drives different motivations. What someone farming in Kansas cares about is probably significantly different from what a lead engineer in San Francisco cares about, even if you zeroed out all their existing cultural biases. People with similar interests then will naturally gather to campaign for their interests. Those interests will probably fund candidates they want to succeed.

And that then leads into a vicious cycle where the winners (even if they're not actual corporations) get economic benefits they use to fund the next favorable candidate and so on and you end up eventually more or less where the US is now.

That's super correlation vs causation, but also the explanation there seems straightforward to me: regardless of what IQ is or if it even exists, if you produce a standardized test that those who succeed in will be given (all other things being equal) better soecioeconomic outcomes, and it becomes a cultural institution over generations, then it's hardly surprising that you'll produce generations that progressively score better on the standardized test than previous generations, because that's what the society has been optimizing for by way of what it's rewarding. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with intelligence (and this seems to bear with decreasing IQ results in Finland since last I heard they're not big on standardized tests there even though their practical education output is strong relative to other countries).

For comparison, ancient Jewish religious leaders memorized significant amounts of the Torah and culturally Torah memorization filled essentially the role that IQ does for modern western society (everyone wants to score favorably, and those who do extra well get special perks). Was it that their brains were physically wired for better memorization? Or was it that it became a cultural reward mechanism that promised socioeconomic rewards (status and wealth) which motivated generations upon generations to optimize for memorizing the Torah?

Admittedly we haven't quite reached the point of singing geometry puzzles to each other, but give it another few hundred years (or read Anathem ;)).

The crazy imaginative class selection in ToME (special shoutout to the chronomancer) easily makes it my go-to roguelike, but I do find I have trouble really feeling what the impact of my build choices are, although this is a common feeling with roguelikes - I probably feel it more in ToME because it feels like every level-up has a much broader decision space than most other roguelikes. Also that most enemies (at least early game) aren't a major challenge until you hit one that wrecks you.

Most of the time I go with "rule of cool", blaze ahead, and die somewhere around the time I get to the sandworm tunnels.

The farthest I ever got was what felt like the first real boss who just teleports you to <FUN> which came out of left field and my character in that run was _not_ prepared to handle that.

> Why don't Christians want to enter "christian unions" and cede control over the word "marriage" to the state as a legal construct?

Because many Christians to varying degrees don't see marriage as a legal construct (whether exclusively, primarily, or at all, depending on the person), but as a religious one. "Civil Union" is the name that designates the legal construct, as the name implies.

> Alternatively, why does the state not abandon the idea of "marriage" altogether and only recognize domestic partnership?

I think this is something everyone could get on board with. It lets the religious sphere take back the "marriage" term while putting everyone on equal footing in the civil sphere.

...then we get to argue over what qualifies someone to be a husband/wife vs a partner!

> Unless someone has a really new idea how you can make a defensible, healthy 'public townsquare' ...

I think this change is that idea. The thing about a 'public townsquare' is that it's a square for a _town_, not the whole world. Social media today is trying to be a global square and has shown it doesn't work on multiple levels, so the pendulum's swinging back to human-scale communities and I'm here for it.

I'd guess from "It is not a full-fledged, properly maintained thing" in the README, probably not.

> The corner shop is boring if it's almost always empty, and the only people that ever show up are other corner shop proprietors or corner shop enthusiasts.

As a self-identifying corner shop enthusiast, I think the magic of corner shops is that they're an exercise in shifting to a hopefully healthier mindset.

Before: Something always going on, most of it not adding appreciable value but keeping us engaged anyway, often through FOMO

After: Lots of silence and empty space, but people communicate with far more intent. The signal-to-noise ratio goes way up and rather than living plugged in constantly, you can easily keep up with the discussion checking in maybe every few days. It leaves space for a more mindful, deliberate life. (Okay, I'm overselling it a bit, but hopefully you get the idea)

However, it's not just a mindset thing. Beyond the usability challenges of Mastodon in particular, for the best social experience, in my opinion, you really _need_ to either operate your own server (of Mastodon or Pixelfed or whatever) or personally know someone who does (or at least be in some community with them). And that group == bored tech people. I don't really know of a solution for that besides node admins becoming more active as real-life community organizers but that's not the most common intersection of skills/interests.

To your last point, though, I recommend checking out the Tildeverse (https://tildeverse.org/). It's _extremely_ nerdy (hope you like IRC!), but I don't think the tech people there are bored. There's a community radio, various art projects, people making games and other console apps.... Of all the neat places I've hung out online, I think it's the one that's actively inspired me most.

> When I work there the whole time, and nobody ever gets stuck for 3 months, my value is unclear.

Well, a problem that hasn't happened yet is a risk, right? So you can apply risk assessment math to it:

Value = Estimated risk of the problem occurring * Cost if it happens

Isn't it more Pijul vs Git than Git_hub_? There's a massive git community/ecosystem that has nothing to do with Github (e.g. Linux kernel development, at least last I looked).

I've dropped off Github for personal projects since it's trivial to run my own git repo and git version control is built into _everything_ by default, but there are definitely annoyances I've encountered while using git that sound like they would be non-issues in Pijul, so on that level it piques my interest. On the other hand, I would want to be able to do two things before I'd seriously consider switching:

1. Self-host Pijul repos with some web interface similar to e.g. Forgejo/Gitea/Gitlab/etc (i.e. not just source control, but also a bit of project management and CI). Looks like Pijul is developed on something called "The Nest" which looks basically close enough, but the source code for that isn't public yet.

2. Install a plugin in an IDE that would let me leverage it inside the UI (with in-IDE conflict resolution)

> "if you don't like it here, just move to another country".

But that _should_ be easier in the digital world than the physical one. That Github has become such a center of everything _is itself a problem_.

Codeberg is one answer to that: they host open source projects and also provide CI to those projects on an as-needed basis (decoupling the service from financial constraints by limiting their audience and therefore their costs to provide this service). Hosting code forges for particular communities is another way (I think SDF does this for theirs?). It's easier today than it ever has been in the past.

If we just say "I have to use the monopoly because it's too expensive not to" than we're part of the problem.