Take up martial arts. That's what I turned to after a windfall. I only stuck with it a year but it got me in the right frame of mind to continue feeling ambitious.
Exchange value only matters when there's trade. My view of crypto is "wrong in the right direction" because it currently addresses macroeconomic coordination via mimicry of traditional finance. The technologies it uses to achieve decentralized coordination do matter, though. Automated consensus on a large scale is meaningful. But it needs a post-trade, natural-systems view of the world to really make sense.
Nintendo has a different core business model, one which is hard to replicate in another public corporation because it goes against the norm of making the quarterly results look as good as possible: Instead of scoring a hit and immediately trying to line up out yearly sequels, or trying to greenlight productions based on a marketing pitch alone, Nintendo typically rotates out IPs to match with prototypes and marketing concepts that have been on the go for a while. Likewise, they tend not to go the route of filling the shelves with a checklisted set of SKUs(e.g. 1 action, 1 RPG, 1 sports game per business quarter) - they will jump on some trends and occasionally dabble in clones and sequels, but their bread and butter has come from a more gradual approach of making each product focused, coherent and unique versus making it incrementally better than a competitor.
Ubisoft - and most of the publishers - can't do this because they're set up to make games that are large in scope, boast technical excellence(an ever-increasing bar) and are destined to be yearly franchises: quantities of assets and features are given precedence over coherence, which means that you get a trail of papercut discontinuities, dropped balls and lack of focus throughout the experience. Coherence has a degree of power over the game experience that is probably hundreds or thousands of times that of scope alone: it means that the software, assets and design work well together instead of creating "door problems" that dev time is spent solving. This means that a game built around a design that coheres well is automatically more polished since it never had to compromise the experience to solve problems. Nintendo regularly takes design shortcuts to this end, omitting entire categories of assets.
The true polar opposite to a Nintendo-style approach is something more like Bethesda's open world games: the game that's launched is a simulation engine with a large sandbox scenario. It may work and be playable to completion by itself, but the underlying product focus is to use it in a way supportive of tinkering, modding and exploitative gaming - to let the player bring a complicated system "off the rails". This tendency towards simulationism goes all the way back to Bethesda's origins in making stat-heavy sports sims. It makes for a less immediately digestible product, but one that can garner a devoted fanbase because it promises to give you most of the scope of a certain kind of role-playing fantasy, and then you can mod in the last little bit that will make that fantasy complete. So they don't have to worry so much about making it cohere, because the player is using it as a design tool.
The older I get, the more I'm attuned to the limitations of talent like Metheny. It's like how there are great mathematicians, and many of them can be strong problem-solvers and do great work, but can still fall short of "genius", because - and this is my hypothesis - they're too strong at tackling fine-grained details immediately, so they don't actively seek out the kind of abstractions that would lead to a different perspective. It's like trying to explain how you walk: "it's obvious." (even though at some point you did struggle with it) When I hear synthestites talk, they are trying to explain how walking works - it's tapping into neural pathways that are wired into the subconscious, skipping over any preliminary decoding. So they often create things that sound marvelous, bring in tons of techniques, but are at their core heavily improvised with minimal "concept" - elequent baby babbles.
For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us explain our results when we get them, and highlights using structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just "sit at the keys" and get swept away.
All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm, scale or harmony.
Increasingly I agree. It's the Byte Magazine 1981 cover where someone inserts an impossibly small floppy disk into an impossibly small wristwatch computer; Metaverse = VR world is not the literal message, it's placeholder marketing for a complex message. The actual things being built to create an interoperable metaverse are mostly mundane "gonna need one of these" core technologies. The stuff actually trying to directly achieve that immediate vision will falter on the technical and social limits of what people would actually agree is a good experience. (And to know where a lot of these proposals fail, you want the advice of anyone with experience in operating virtual worlds and online communities.)
Remember, the last "VR wave" hit not all that long ago. Many people can recite the limits of that particular tech reasonably well - cost, poor accessibility, space requirements, limits on viable "camera positions". The proposal of a metaverse is not really to double down on that particular bet, but to go back and integrate everything top-to-bottom in ways that weren't being done before. It will be half bullshit, but some of will stick.
There's a longstanding interest in the acadame in finding "clean" closed-form analytical explanations for all sorts of real-world problems, which mostly speaks to the historical lack of computing power to do a complete simulation leading to acceptance of bad approximations. Economics is also full of these kinds of equations, and many of the ones taught in undergrad are barely beyond a working hypothesis.
It all depends on the governance and securing model. Unlike most securities, which have a direct tie to the state apparatus through their legalization, the proof-of-work coins, at least, are governed like their own little consensual nations with ideosyncratic characteristics. Think somewhere in between fandom, religion, and collective and you have many of the more "open" ones. There are also many examples of tokens that are VC plays following the corporate model, where the token is meant to support a core business rather than acting in a national mode. Both are pleasing to speculators for different reasons.
I suspect that it's not really the case that Another World set out to emulate PoP given that the development of Another World started before PoP's Apple II release(which, if you have read Mechner's writings, was not a huge success until ports came out the next year with a little marketing push).
The games that Another World is drawing on are actually the European action-adventures of the later 80's - the run of games Psygnosis had with Brataccas, Shadow of the Beast and Barbarian were very influential and suggested various ways of thinking about side-view platforming that would influence a "cinematic" approach - Barbarian, for example, really pushes on the idea of having every screen be a self-contained puzzle with major scripted elements. The concept was never entirely new, so much as it was elaborated on from classic arcade game "stages" and transposed from text adventures into graphical ones, at first in a crude sense with lock-and-key puzzles and then gradually with more emphasis on bespoke interactions, animations and environments as the platforms and game engines became more capable. Another World simply took the time to give everything some direction and continuity instead of accepting the status quo on the Amiga of "screenshot games" that looked good on the box but used janky control schemes and filler content.
Mechner, in contrast, was going off the influence of games from his immediate peers like Lode Runner and flirted with the idea of making it more of a construction-kit experience several times through development, before finally settling on a series of set-piece levels. This really shows up in the extremely modular nature of the level design: there are only a few one-off scripted elements, the bulk of the experience is rearrangements of platforms, gate-and-switch puzzles, traps and guards. While his implementation still pushed the limits of the Apple II, this was mostly because it attempted large sprites with detailed animation and minimal pausing for disk loads. A version of PoP with Lode Runner spritework is both easy to imagine and to make fit comfortably on 8-but hardware.
As long as Intel is taking huge risks, they can also look for a blue ocean market. The common factor among all of these customers is that they are centralizing and privatizing their compute - therefore, rather than playing sycophant to the current market leaders, disrupt them. Go out swinging.
Intel has a long history of selling complete platforms, and they had a major role in disrupting computing in the microcomputer era; unlikely as it may seem right now, they have the power to turn the cloud story upside down and support repairability, client compute and decentralized systems through a radical new platform, with their new process nodes used as a hook. They may need to go lobby their case with governments to get some rule-making in place that drives a wedge in the existing monopolies, but they have the pockets to make a run at that, too, and it's a slam-dunk PR win to be seen protecting end users. Their endgame would be to once again sit at the top of the market, holding most of the customers, but it would be a very different market, and reflective of the kinds of broad transformations that are now happening to industry and supply chains across the global economy.
It seems like they would have to do a lot of things just right to succeed in that very specific scenario. In other words, highly unlikely that it will work.
Intel is unfortunately another IBM/HP at this point. They will likely continue to exist in some form but their glory days are behind them.
Wood itself is sustainable, but in making a choice of building materials, we're also looking for total embedded energy cost and impact of the final product. Traditional buildings from a century ago relied on the harvest of old-growth wood with denser rings than the new sustainable forestry, and they were built with fewer features - when built well they didn't fail, but they weren't targeting high energy performance, climate control, dust and mold resistance, etc. We can't go back - we could lower our standards but the stock of old-growth remains depleted. New wood constructions often use processed and glued timbers because the processed timbers can be lighter(good glue is really strong) and they don't experience nearly as many quality control issues(solid wood tends to warp).
The thing is, once we start looking at wood in detail, it's never just wood. It's wood, plus adhesives, paints, and finish. You can't use just wood because it rots - you at least need to add some pigment to block UV rays and drainage to limit water pooling. Each of those additives are a potential source of VOCs(volatile organic compounds, the term that more accurately describes "chemicals"). And each step taken during processing adds energy cost. Paper and corrugated cardboard are not innocuous - they use one of the higher-energy processes relative to the amount of input material.
When you look at what you can do besides wood, you get similar tradeoffs. Stone is great, but it's still hard to work with directly, hard enough to not scale to our industrial population - as it stands, you need an artisianal economy of stonemasons to make those huge ancient constructions. Concrete has a huge climate footprint and the dust is a major VOC source. Steel is high-energy and not abundant enough to be used everywhere.
Thus, plastics enter as a way of getting some of the qualities we want. Plastics are not all one of a kind and have varying VOC content. We can't afford not to use them to have this population and quality of life, which means we have to study how to use them safely. The microplastic issue is a part of that, but it's oversold as "plastic is scary". Wood smoke is also scary, as anyone who has been around a wildfire will attest.
Curious to see some data on these claims. Yes, glue is often made out of "chemicals" — but plastic also is. Is the total environmental cost of plastic lower than wood? Besides, you're not going to frame a house with plastic: it's steel and concrete, vs wood. AFAIK plastic doesn't enter the equation here.
We ready use plastic in decks. I bet it can be further scaled up. At what cost I have no idea though. But I wouldn't count it out as a primary building material
