Software engineer (video games). Likes dogs, DJing + EDM, running, electronics and loud bangs in Reservoir.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I quite liked the concept a few years back when Apple and Google were talking about a Netflix-style subscription model for iOS/Android… a bit like Xbox Game Pass. The subscription would give you access to a bunch of games, and developers were paid royalties based on a mix of metrics like the game review score, number of downloads, average total time spent in game etc. It seemed like a good idea in that it aligned developers and players in the desire for genuinely good games, regardless of the game style or genre. It threw away the need for each game to find a way to monetize their players (which nearly always ends up in multiplayer endless cosmetic MTX nonsense).









  • The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they’ve captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They’ll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don’t control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What’s left is a “dead” open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.


  • I can’t speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they “handle it” by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there’s an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.






  • What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.

    To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.