B. Walker

My reply to someone considering starting a video game company: The distribution of possible rewards for starting a video game company are generally not very good today. The market is well served, and gaining a foothold requires strong execution on both business and product issues, along with a substantial amount of luck. Plan to burn through seven figures with a not-great chance of making it back. If you do go for it, some bits of advice: Identify your customers clearly before you start. Not just a broad community, but specific people, and imagine them as you make decisions. Initially, build the smallest, most concise game you can imagine anyone paying for. It will still take much longer than you expect. Once something exists, hill-climb the value. Hopefully you will have some elements that clearly bring joy to people, which you can magnify. There will inevitably be tons of things that people find confusing, frustrating, or just boring that you will need to fix.

(Me skirting around discrimination laws): So, this Rust developer position…you like Fear and Hunger? (Candidate): What’s that? (Me): Never mind. Ever watched Madoka Magica? (Candidate): Madokie whatnow? (Me): Know what a Blåhaj is? (Candidate): Is this even Rust?

There are a few factors as to why Elon Musk used to be broadly liked: 1) Big tech optimism, in the late aughts to the late 2010s the average person had much more optimism about big tech would solve our problems with elon musk being the guy to do it with electric cars and the environment. 2) Attaching himself to the superhero craze. He made a cameo in Ironman 2 and the media promoted him as the real life Tony Stark. Superhero movie fatigue hadn't hit yet so this was an association that worked for him 3) He championed social causes that were popular among redditors and liberals (ie the TV writer class). This is a real tweet by him:

Space launch was a clear case where there was a large difference in efficiency between what was possible and what was done in practice before SpaceX. A large part of that was due to everything being locked in to what (just barely) already worked, with huge risk aversion. WIth national prestige or a half billion dollar geosync satellite on the line, speculative engineering ideas that might result in a public debacle were not welcome. When failure is not an option, success can stay very expensive. You need to experiment to improve, and that fundamentally means being comfortable with failure. If you know it is going to work, it isn’t an experiment. I have long believed that nuclear power today is in precisely the same state as space launch two decades ago, but the even more pressing question now is if semiconductor fabrication might also be. On the one hand, Moore’s Law has been a sequence of heroic miracles of technology at the wafer fabrication level, grinding out hundreds of compounding small improvements. On the other hand, fabs are “too big to fail”, and there are elements of extreme conservatism at play. Intel’s “Copy exactly!” fab development exemplifies that mindset – instead of every new building being an opportunity to explore and optimize processes, it was deemed more valuable to just replicate. While each individual machine may be straining against physical limits of technology, it is possible that the systems orchestrating them all together could be far from optimal. The explore / exploit axis is fundamental to all decision making, but human risk avoidance probably biases away from optimal exploration.

I am all in favor of programmers being enthusiastic about project, but *every* time someone starts making an editor, they talk about all this data structure stuff. None of it matters. This is a trivial problem for any file anyone will realistically want to edit. Just do something, if it's not the best, replace it way later after the editor is good along other axes ... it's a small amount of code. The actual problem is just UI and niceness of the editing process. UI is way slower (potentially) than any of these "edit a string by inserting/deleting" things being talked about here. This kind of thing just pisses me off to an irrational degree, so I had to comment.

You see our visual novel is a little different. Our protagonist seems to be a regular guy but he is actually a bit hornier then the average guy. We also have some characters with memory loss and we talk about such complex topics like Schrödinger's cat.

the amount of alpha lying latent in archival issues of soft talk, wired, spy, the new yorker, etc is unparalleled and largely un-mined and while this might be sacrilegious to say in the age of monitoring the situation, i truly believe that the best way to understand the present is just read a bunch of longform from the 80s/90s and understand the past in a way that most people who lived through it can’t even conceptualize

It's actually very important that ambitious college kids be explicitly told that some prestige careers have low pay *by design* to reserve them for the wealthy, and if you aren't wealthy and want that career you had best believe really hard in it bc you will not be affluent

Is it not somewhat reasonable to feel like things are trending in a bad direction if your neighbors under 40 are doctors and lawyers and your neighbors over 50 are former teachers and truck drivers

What makes Jackass great is you could take the movies in a time machine and they'd be just as funny to audiences from any point in human history. Pratfalls, butt stuff, hitting a guy in the crotch. They were writing about this on the walls of Pompeii

People used to theorize about all these incredibly useful and pro-social things that prediction markets would lead to in the end what we got was hair dryer temperature fraud

I don’t have to be convinced that LLM’s make programmers more productive. But where’s all the stuff? We’ve now had months and months of 100x or 1000x programmet productivity improvements. Where’s all the stuff they’re building?

Zohran Mamdani: “I wish the words of Tupac from the 90’s weren’t still prescient, but they continue to be true for too many which is that we always have money for war and not to feed the poor”

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

> the product is having issues > engineering: we’ve called a sev. we’re swarming to fix. we’re running a retro so it never happens again. > the company is having an issue with a new internal process > the company: shut up. no it’s not. stop complaining. you’re immature. adults are speaking.

Please don’t leave me I scale really well late game

Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf. @caityweaver set out on a monthslong quest to find the best free restaurant bread in America. Here’s her answer: theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

i thought i liked high school debate but in retrospect i just liked purposely misconstruing philosophy i didn't really understand to make other people annoyed

動画生成じゃなくて画像生成 これwebカメラからのリアルタイム画像生成だけど動画生成のフレーム補完と違ってなんか温もりを感じて好き

@managore This is cool. From a friend: "Manifold garden didn't use "falling from above" to navigate enough for example, this game wasn't afraid of it, which was great! It's easy to completely ignore the mechanics afforded by new math, I'm glad they actually tried a bit and succeeded"

proudly presenting PRINT GALLERY OF AN ARTIST, a short platformer exploring recursive spaces, inspired by a video on M. C. Escher's Print Gallery managore.itch.io/print-gallery-… (web)