Entire companies have been built around synchronizing the WAL with ZFS actions like snapshot and clone (i.e. Delphix and probably others). Would be cool to have `zpgdump` (single-purpose, ZFS aware equivalent).
I could believe that 90% of code will be generated by LLMs, because it takes almost no effort to generate some common boilerplate using an LLM. It's kind of like saying that 90% of code is BSD/MIT/GPL licensed because many people compulsively fork repos on github.
This just means that a smaller percentage of code will be useful/must-have/must-read code. Kind of like the market for films and books and games -- many more get made every year, which means that many more will get ignored every year.
> Sadly this won't be the wake up call that we need to bring back some sort of meritocracy to American society.
Genuine question: are we 100% sure that this society was ever meritocratic? How would we measure `meritocracy` so that we can compare year-to-year and decade-to-decade?
Of course not. It’s impossible. Take the presidency. Let’s say a very meritocratic person gets elected. There would be a hundred equally meritorious people who do not hold that office. Same for many things.
Meritocracy is a measure and some sort of idealized concept used for comparisons.
that's a utopian vision. we don't need a perfect meritocracy. majority of parents would do anything to put their kids ahead of others. i would help people I know and have relationships with first. it doesn't work out all the time.
The possible perspectives that strategy games offer to players is vastly under-explored. Most assume that you control a drone-like army of soldiers, for the sole purpose of defeating an opponent. The Paradox games add much more nuance to this formula, but there is still a vast domain-space in the genre that is unexplored. For example, I'd like to see a game designed primarily around espionage and class warfare -- you cannot control or deploy armies directly, but you can build a network of allies, and use it to (attempt to) bring about changes in policy and dynamics.
Victoria II and III are headed in that direction with the POP mechanics, and modeling the ever-expanding reach of media in the 1800s (there is a reason that most countries centralized on a single national language for the bureaucracy).
But yeah, the only reason we haven't seen a credible Cold-War-era strategy game (aside from that one ancient Mac OS game) is because the era involved very little direct military conflict, and game-publishers have not yet figured out the mechanics of how to model a very nuanced conflict like that in a fun way.
You are referring to Balance of Power? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game) A very interesting game. The multipolar level of Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition is another great idea but flawed - it's possible to win just by doing nothing and letting your enemy antagonize the world. (Unless perhaps this is ironic commentary by the designer...)
Yep, that's the one. If you read an interview with the designer Chris Crawford (can't find it at the moment), he mentions that the mechanics/dynamics were inspired by a book/paper called The War Trap by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (game theorist who wrote some popular books). So a _very_ interesting game. Probably deserves to be revisited/remastered at some point.
> Siboot was never intended to be a game; it’s interactive storytelling. The emphasis is on character interaction, and it already offers interesting dramatic character interaction. But people aren’t looking for interesting dramatic character interaction; they’re looking for the things that make great games: challenge, a smooth learning curve, impressive graphics, catchy little tunes to accompany their play. Above all, a game must be winnable. Yet stories aren’t necessarily about winning and losing; they’re about drama.
> No matter how good Siboot turned out to be, it would not create the splash I had hoped for. It would not go viral and trigger lots of tweets and viral videos on YouTube. It would certainly attract a small comradeship of people who recognize its importance. Everybody else would be unimpressed.
[...]
> it will take centuries for civilization to embrace the concept [of algorithmic thinking]
[...]
> Even worse is in store for us: deep learning AI.
[...]
> You will NEVER see anything like literature coming out of deep learning AI.
[...]
> That will stop us dead in our tracks for a few decades.
But I can understand that the prospect of "genius only acclaimed long after his death" is not particularly attractive...
(Also, I'm not certain that computers able to run interactive fiction are still going to be economically viable in centuries...)
You might want to check out Terra Invicta. I only played the demo a bit, but it's basically espionage and politics against competing factions to prepare the world for an alien invasion.
The game, while good (i'd rather play Terra invicta than a lot of 4X games right now), feels unfinished and have some part that are either too easy or take too long.
It needs balancing to be clear. But i like that it isn't too micro-intensive.
Vicky3 is my new favorite 4X game now. 3rd playthrough, i really like it.
> But yeah, the only reason we haven't seen a credible Cold-War-era strategy game (aside from that one ancient Mac OS game) is because the era involved very little direct military conflict, and game-publishers have not yet figured out the mechanics of how to model a very nuanced conflict like that in a fun way.
I think the legendary board game Twilight Struggle comes the closest to modeling the push-and-pull feeling of the Cold War without actually degrading into war.
Never played Twilight Stuggle, but it looks like a lot of fun! There seems to be large-ish international community of players (according to Wikipedia).
It's a fantastic game, I highly recommend it. There is a Steam version if you'd like to try it out. You can play against the AI or match up against a human being.
Strictly speaking, not Paradox Interactive (which is a publisher, not a developer, releasing games pretty far out of the usual PDS fare, like the Magicka series), but fans of Paradox Development Studio games that started their own studio : BL-Logic.
In the boardgame world, the importance of Twilight Struggle in its conceptualization of the Cold War cannot be understated. It's digital adaptation is top notch as well.
"It always bothers me when people say 'why reinvent the wheel', because the wheel is an _amazing_ invention. It is almost perfect -- or quite possibly perfect -- for what it does. It perfectly turns static friction into dynamic friction for moving objects. It is something that so elegant and beautiful, that if you were to ask why we would want to reinvent it, I would say _of course_ we do not want to reinvent it. It has worked for thousands of years, and has been unchanged for thousands of years. _Nothing_ we have developed in the past 30 years of game-development, is a wheel. In the future we will have so much more powerful tools for game development, that people will laugh at the things we did to make games. If we want _to get to_ a wheel, we need people that will _attempt to make the wheel_."
> The most "interesting thing" (happened in computing since the shut down of Xerox PARC) has been the contrast between appreciation/exploitation of the inventions/contributions vs. the almost complete lack of curiosity and interest in the processes that produced them.
> Alan Kay
In a similar vein, Age of Empire 2 had a very interesting resource-balance that few other games have managed to replicate. With 5 resources (food, wood, gold, stone, population), and each of those resources being good for very different things (i.e. gold for stronger attack units, and stone for static defenses), and with the population being capped at 200, it presents the player with very interesting choices that have ripple-effects down the line. The sequels didn't quite manage to pull this balance off. And the dynamic is very different from other classics like Civ or Humankind, because those games about geographic control instead of worker-management.
Hoping someone undertakes a formal study of game-balance and economics in various strategy games (to help us make better games).
Definitely. Also there are four ages in AOE, each one increasingly expensive but opens up a lot of technology. It is a big investment and doing so without much control can you leave you very vulnerable and is a key window for your opponent to attack. It’s a unique mechanic that adds a lot of strategy to the game
Yep, which creates a first-strike/second-strike trade-off. If you have enough resources to click-up an age (or to research some tech-upgrade), you have to choose whether to do _that_, or to build up your military. If you choose the latter, you are implicitly trying to cripple/destroy your opponent before they attack you. If you succeed, then well played. But should you _fail_, you have a huge problem.
The interesting thing is that the first-striker's failure implies that the opponent had built himself up enough to survive the first strike. Which implies that their economy was not vulnerable to the first strike, and might also be capable of launching a second-strike soon.
As a kid, I never really _understood_ decisions like Pearl Harbor -- classic first-strike/second-strike tradeoff example -- until I played this game.
