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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • Well my approach is:

    • Mark off every candidate who did not bother to provide a statement
    • Mark off every candidate with no listed volunteering experience in the little section for it
    • Mark off every candidate whose statement claims they will do things their desired office is not empowered to do
    • Mark off every candidate with a platform that doesn’t claim to be aiming for any kind of change or improvement in particular. (I don’t support chair warmers.)
    • Mark off every candidate whose email is a personal one listed as [email protected] or something else similarly unprofessional
    • Mark off any candidate aligned with the party that supported the coup attempt in 2021

    After this quick pass, which only takes a couple of minutes, I’m typically only left with two or three offices with more than one remaining choice to compare. I then read their platform and pick the candidate with the platform goal that seems most relevant to my or my community’s interest.






  • I don’t, because I find that as soon as I do, the game feels permanently pointless. It’s like grinding to get some random chance item, and then someone gives you a magic menu enabling you to just put any items you want in your inventory whenever you want. Items mentally become zero value. And then any game mechanics built around scarcity and the intended emotional impact of that scarcity become permanently meaningless too.

    It’s pulling back the curtain. You can’t unsee what’s going on back there. Any further interaction with the game just leaves me feeling “this is just a video game, the rules are pointless and with that menu I can get it to do whatever”. Even partial cheats, like infinite ammo with no reloading needed, break the illusion for me permanently and leave further gameplay even without cheats feeling unsatisfying and pointless.

    For me, it’s rare that a game can survive its mechanics or overall gameplay loop being destroyed by cheats when those are what make games…games. You’re left with either a creative mode sandbox, or a movie, neither of which I care for in a video game format.







  • IMO it’s sloppy, or at least a code smell, to be merging changes that still have comments like that into commercial software main branches to begin with. But it’s still not a security issue or anything like that.

    The future engineer who picks up whatever ticket that’s referenced is going to have no idea that comment exists in that file unless it’s called out in the ticket anyway, or people just know to globally search for references to whatever ticket they picked up in a given day for some person’s old notes. At that point, just share a source code line link in the ticket to however many lines of code are relevant. Quite irritating to see an old comment in the code saying something like “TODO: Remove once PROJ-1234 is done” and PROJ-1234 was marked done three years ago. Does it still need to go? Why was it left in?







  • The problem they describe will self-correct; the “market” will drive that. But it might not be pretty. The things below are already happening, but will be further instigated:

    New AAA non-franchise titles will be less common because return is less likely amongst the sea of new games coming out. Investors will continue to gamble on them, but they’ll be fewer and further between.

    Mid-budget AA games not in a niche will disappear. You’ll still have your city builders, your milsim squad shooters, your competitive RTS games, but you won’t be seeing many new AA action platformers, multiplayer CoD style shooters, block puzzlers, adventure RPGs, etc. They’ll either be bare budget / indie or mega budget.

    You’ll see dev cost continue to be driven down to mitigate this risk, making quality suffer. Asset flips, AI, and outsourcing will increase for most studios that don’t get recurring revenue from live service games.

    Indies will continue to be random breakout hits, but their studios will die fast because followups to their breakouts often drown in the sea too.

    Being an employee in the industry will probably mean jumping from company to company where you might only stick around for 1 - 2 titles before a major layoff. Contracting will get more common.