Yeah this is a key point when you consider Valve’s strategy. Gabe still owns >50%, and is a billionaire without a tonne of outside ventures, he can afford to play around a bit.
I think this is why they’ve been able to experiment so much the last few years, to varying success.
Russia has a long history of producing excellent programmers and software engineers, I'm not sure where you get the idea this is where they were outpaced by the rest of the world.
If I had to attribute one thing to Russia's downfall, it would be its geopolitical decision to align itself with China and Iran in global anti-Western sentiment, rather than moving towards joining the rest of the West and the EU as some countries hoped they would back in the 90s.
Russians make for great programmers and software engineers.
Russian economic systems and state/societal incentives unfortunately aren't conducive to helping these engineers build world-class companies and products at any appreciable scale.
Russians are a highly educated population that produces excellent engineers. But Iranians too are in this position.
But they are sanctioned off from the technological advanced world and they can't even import modern chips. Add to that that the corruption and lack of freedom are impediments to building a thriving economy.
I think we will see a huge brain drain towards the West. Germany had top notch excellences too, before the Nazis took power.
I was pretty impressed with Yandex when I was in Russia. The maps were far better and the image translations faster and more accurate than Google. Maybe its because they have access to better local data, but it definitely felt like a well-engineered product suite.
As an aggregate, having a largely positive or largely negative feeling about something still provides good information to whomever's asking. It may not be ALL the information, but it's still hugely valuable.
It's not dissimilar to the buttons asking if you enjoyed your washroom visit. Sure, it seems vague and stupid, but if one of your 30 washrooms is suddenly reporting 50% "dislikes", you know something is wrong.
I know people get upset about the political implications of She-Hulk or COVID or Rings of Power dislikes, but surely one would think the positive information for the content creator outweigh the negatives here. There were times when all of Justin Bieber's content sat at around 5%. This was probably an annoyance for his PR team, but I doubt many of them thought the feature should be removed entirely.
I think so too. It’s become a term which means so many different things to so many different people, I don’t know how much value there is in calling someone a “postmodernist” from a political standpoint these days.
Vonnegut, Pynchon, Wallace etc. are what one should think about when they’re discussing postmodernism. People relating it back to gender or race theory is kinda silly IMO.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is generally used in when talking about the state and punitive decision making, not a social norm. If my three best friends accused someone of trying to rob them, I'd be comfortable believing them even if they didn't get the altercation on camera. Would the police? Depends on the country, because as you said, the robber would be (and should be) considered innocent until the state can explicitly prove their guilt.
I don't think we should live in a society where people can be imprisoned by relying on accusations alone, of course hard evidence should be required, but I don't mind living in a society where people are free to use the shared knowledge of their own community to reach epistemological conclusions. If the chess community decides to trust Magnus and his credentials without any proof, that's their prerogative, the concept of criminal innocence doesn't come into play at all here.
What I mean is that the gap between someone who has studied the new opening vs someone who hasn't studied would be huge so players have a much stronger incentive to prepare. And with an engine the new theory comes out immediately, it's not like you're waiting for humans to develop it.
Imagine a match in classical chess between a 2600-rated plyaer who has spent time preparing their classical openings and a 2800 rated player who hasn't prepared at all - the 2800 player will still have a large edge. Now imagine the same scenario for a 960 game where the lower-rated player has spent 4 days evaluating the opening with an engine and the high-rated player hasn't - in this scenario the advantage from the engine prep is much bigger. The mix of novelty + opportunity to prepare is such that from a game theory perspective the whole thing becomes prepare-or-lose if their overall chess strength is reasonably close otherwise.
Mmm, that makes sense. I think it's easy for people (myself) who've only played at a very amateur (casual IRL games and sub 1200 online) level to make assumptions about how chess must be for high ranked players. Realistically if they're able to decide to resign after only a handful of moves and no captures, we're playing a pretty different game conceptually, even if the rules and setup are identical.
It's nice to think of high ranked players playing chess the way my friends and I do: distracted, stoned, and just sort of improvising, but I'm realizing now that for good players it's waaay more about the prep and theory than just playing by "feel".
It's interesting, just a few hours ago, I used the chess openings example to explain why some Magic the Gathering players dislike the now very prevalent practice of "netdecking" (using someone else's list of cards, while in theory, the game started out as one where you compose your own list).
I think the two party system is ultimately to blame for this, though I have no idea what the solution would be. Up in Canada, we have three left-leaning parties, NDP, Liberal, and Green, which represent some very different political views but all have varying levels of representation in our parliament.
After living in the States a few years it's become clear that none of the 3rd parties are taken very seriously, and if you're not R you've gotta be D, and vice versa. For a country where I've met so many sharp and politically sophisticated folks, I think it's a bummer they have one binary choice when it comes to their national vote.
Within each party is where you find the subdivisions. Democrats have within them Socialists to classical liberals" and the Republicans have MAGA to traditional liberals. It's fluid though.
It's within the primary elections where you see the most interesting elections at times. Sometimes you'll get a challenger in a district where it makes sense, like when AOC took on an established classical liberal and flipped it, pushing the representation leftward while still being Democrat.
>Calling people from bay-area hacker spaces to give them a hand in creating something more modern.
Tragically, from the small amount of time I've spent in SF, my understanding is this is unlikely to be their first instinct, even if it's a great idea. Doesn't the SF local government have a testy, if not outright hostile relationship with the tech worker/hacker/startup scene?
I've met people from either side of the discussion who pretty much entirely blame the opposite group (hackers or city workers) for why SF is so different now than 'back in the day.'
This is perhaps more specious than the "cops don't want to do their jobs because people are just too mean to them" song and dance. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it BART is not run as part of any city government, San Francisco or otherwise. You're pretty much tilting at windmills here.
Besides this sort of thing is well beyond the scope of folks creating subscription based fruit juicers.
Gotcha. BART being funded by the Bay Area Rapid Transit District is something I'd forgotten, and does make my point a lot less salient. It's been a long time since I was in SF, so it's possible my assessments here are way off base.
The main observation I was trying to make is that the public/private sector has always seemed to have a harder time working hand-in-hand in the Bay Area than it does in other cities I've lived in, whatever that reason may be.
I felt a similar way after playing and tweaking lots of Mario 64 and OoT mods. Obviously I still love the games with all my heart, but getting to play it at so many different levels of polish and playability definitely allows the 'Wow - Perfection' feeling to fade a bit. I think playing an alpha version or poorly modded copy of a game like Amnesia: Dark Descent would totally kill the atmospheric creepiness which made the game so well received.
I guess it's a bit like watching the BTS of something like the LotR trilogy. When you get to see all the orcs in full makeup just goofing around with the rest of the film crew, it means when you see them later in the real movie, you can't help but be reminded they're just people in great makeup. Keeping up that illusion in game dev must be enormously important.
Wow, I can't believe the amount of skepticism and hate the guy initially got! He posts what will end up being a historically important leak that'll hit the mainstream news, and the first comment is "Sorry bud no pic no click".
I think this is why they’ve been able to experiment so much the last few years, to varying success.