Doesn’t know the lyrics. Just goes meow meow meow.
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It’s a prototyping tool. You use it to whip up something quick and get proper feedback before spending efforts on developing the actual thing.
Adobe XD and Figma were direct competing products. That’s why XD’s discontinuation by Adobe coupled with Figma’s acquisition is seen as a sort of reverse killer acquisition.
That’s terrible. Wishing you the best of luck to find a fulfilling job.
(For those curious like me) ブラック企業
A black company (ブラック企業, burakku kigyō), also referred to in English as a black corporation or black business, is a Japanese term for an exploitative, sweatshop-type employment system.
While the term “sweatshop” is associated with manufacturing, and the garment trade in particular, in Japan black companies are not necessarily associated with the clothing industry, but more often with office work.
While specifics may vary from workplace to workplace and company to company, a typical practice at a black company is to hire a large number of young employees and then force them to work large amounts of overtime without overtime pay. Conditions are poor, and workers are subjected to verbal abuse and “power harassment” (bullying) by their superiors.[1] In order to make the employees stay, superiors of black companies would often threaten young employees with disrepute if they chose to quit.
Further proof that the electric car is gay. A manly man rolls coal.
What a horrible decision all around.
- Generates e-waste as controllers are bricked for no reason.
- Kills costly custom built accessibility controllers. No consideration for marginalized users whatsoever.
- Retroactively screws all customers over.
- Goes as far as breaking peripheral compatibility with a discontinued console.
Is it to kill cheating devices used on competitive titles? Is it a money grab? It probably won’t achieve either. From a customer protection standpoint I’m wondering if this position can be attacked legally.
Nevertheless it reminds me that other time when Spencer was daydreaming about buying Nintendo and it feels like Microsoft is being a little unhinged as of late.
Yet, in a redacted copy of an internal email chain released on Friday, Jim Kolotouros, the vice president of Android Platform Partnerships, wrote: “Chrome exists to serve Google search, and if it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).”
So Chrome’s whole point is bringing users to Google Search… and Google Search’s whole point is Google Ads. I’m Glad I use Firefox.
I love that phase of Bowie. The Earthling’s “Look at the Moon!” tour had this amazing cover of Laurie Andersen’s O Superman.
The youth is doomed, it’s been known since the dawn of time.
Biological evolution of our species has been on hold for a pretty long time already and I don’t see it changing any time soon. There are two univeral factors:
- the drive to reproduce away from your immediate group, further enabled by the tendency to migrate all over.
- the family societal structure, as opposed to a strict alpha male hierarchy.
These two things block the sharp rise of mutations and promote a wide diversity of individuals instead. It helped us to remain a unified species despite our spread all over the planet.
We evolve mainly through our culture, which complexifies at a spectacular rate. The downside is that a catastrophic collapse could wipe all our progress, even if we do survive it.
Spotify’s success is heavily qualified, though. It may be the Netflix of music, but it’s never posted a profit; in 2022, with nearly a half-billion users around the world, around 200 million of whom pay for the service, it lost 430 million euros (the company is based in Sweden).
How does one get to repeatedly lose hundreds of millions of dollars on and on and somehow endure? Some stockmarket shit?
Another thing: let’s not forget that when music streaming showed up, the music industry was already struggling. The CD era was over; everybody and their mom were sailing the high seas on P2P networks.
A couple of points you might find interesting:
- Biden was supposed to meet Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas cancelled his presence following the hospital bombing, then Biden discussed with King Abdullah and they agreed to call it off.
- Biden was not complacent with Israel in his address at Tel Aviv. He urged Israel not to give in to rage, drawing a parallel with USA’s mistakes following 9/11.
- During his trip, Biden finally managed to convince Israel to let humanitarian aid into Gaza.
I might be overly optimistic, but I feel that countries (including the US) supporting Israel are in the process of diplomatically clarifying that their support is not really unconditional and that peace is the only acceptable objective. In that sense I don’t think his trip was all bad.
I don’t know how long, but I’m still hopeful. Humanity has gone from small groups of nomadic family groups, to early city states housing thousands, to countries uniting millions. The mediocrity of modern capitalism makes us forget what we’ve achieved through the millenias.
The radical transformation we are provoking on our ecosystem will humble us and push us as a specie to adapt yet again. It’ll be quite a ride and who knows what’s on the other side.
When my kid was younger he had a “garbage games on tablet” phase as well. As others have said, paid games are the way to go (Play Pass sounds cool). Looking for indie games for Android, or PC games ported to Android gives some good results. Stardew Valley’s an obvious one. I haven’t played Ordia, but it looks gorgeous.
What worked really well for us was to teach him about some dark patterns in simple terms and spot them with him in the freemiums he was playing. “Fear of Missing Out” events/notifications and “Progression Paywalls” are typical ones. It made him realize the game wasn’t built to give him a good time as much as to frustrate him into endlessly spending real money in exchange for some phony currency. In the end he was happy to switch to saner games. It’s a good opportunity to work on their critical judgment basically.
I work at a small non-profit publisher and our clients respecting copyright is basically what decides if we continue existing or not. I struggle as well with the general “end all copyright” sentiment. There’s this idea that circumventing copyright means sticking it to corporations, as if their creative employees making a living don’t exist.
Furthermore, I feel that generative AI is just the latest tech bro venture based on siphoning revenues out from under existing businesses whilst escaping the laws that apply to the sector. Advertisement revenues were siphoned from under the press, hotels are facing competition from business subverting residential housing, restaurants are being charged exorbitant prices to get their goods delivered. The ambient cynicism serves to maintain indifference towards these unethical tactics.
Wrong question, in my humble opinion. A bubble is speculative at its core. It’s about traders, the stock market, investors, speculators and shit placing much more value on a thing than what it’s worth. The distance with reality grows massive, until everybody wakes up and “pop!” all that sweet sweet wealth (or savings, for the peasants) vanished into thin air. Think housing market or beanie babies.
The question here is if indie game dev can remain sustainable. It’s like restaurants: the more there are, the harder it gets. The risk is not nearly as sudden and explosive as a bubble though. If there are too many, some shops close, others shrink.
Furthermore, the tools and knowledge required for gamedev keep getting more readily available. It’s an art too, so there will always be someone somewhere with the overwhelming drive to do it, profitability be damned.
TIL too!
About vinyl sales going down, I don’t think so though. This article says it’s up 20% in the US in the first half of 2023, compared to last year.
The strongest argument against AI art is that it is derivative of the copyrighted art it is based on. A photo of a copyrighted artwork would be similarly difficult to copyright. In this sense, AI art is more akin to music sampling in that it uses original material to make something new – and to sample music you must ask permission.
It’s fascinating how so many musicians gravitating around Knower (Louis Cole / Genevieve Artadi) are unique artists doing their own crazy thing. Mononeon, Sam Gendel, Fuensanta, Rai Thistlethwayte, Thundercat…