He didn't need to finish it in order for it to have an impact. Makers of FilePilot and Animal Well both attribute Handmade as being big inspirations for them to go the way they did. They said, they got the most value from the first 50 eps or so. You'll hear lots of them on the Wookash podcast.
So for your opinion to carry any weight, please enlighten us as to the games you have shipped that qualify you to comment on their take on programming practices.
Not really. Let's reverse the situation on you - why should we take your opinion seriously, we have no idea how much you have shipped, if anything at all, so by your logic, your ragging on the other programmers practices is ridiculous.
I've shipped a few things over the years, but doubt I have strong takes in programming, besides 'the "properness" of a variables name is dependent on the amount of lines between it's definition and usage.' Doubt anyone will take my considerations seriously.
I'm not making any claims about programming practices
If someone comes out saying "you guys are all doing this wrong" and yet they can't finish their own project then why would I take their advice seriously?
If you suggest a way of doing software development and you can't even show it working out to completion, what does that say about your proposed methods?
I had a larger rant written, but this is the only part that had any value:
Yes, one can argue that lack of produces results does not give big plusses towards their work processes, but it does not necessarily negate the value of the concepts that they preach.
The value of a thing is not only defined by who is spouting it, one must evaluate the argument on it's own merits, not by evaluating of the people yelling about it.
There are plenty of concepts in this world that I cannot make work, that does not mean that the concepts are bad. It only means that the failure reflects on me and my in-capabilities.
And this might be something that you are not noticing: You are making claims about programming practices indirectly by stating that THEIR practices are not worth considering due to lack of shipping anything.
It's not really the same. Casey is suggesting people that don't spend 10 years crafting everything from scratch are somehow "lesser than." The user you're replying to is pointing out that Casey has set a completely arbitrary rule for game quality that conveniently leaves out his inability to ship something, and that's funny.
We're not saying games taking longer than a few years are failures, we're saying good games can encompass both approaches. But Casey, and his followers, are doing purity tests to feel good about themselves.
And this is assuming the games they ship are even good or noticeable to the user. I don't much care for Braid or The Witness, and I don't want my favorite dev studios to suddenly write everything from scratch every time. I would have a lot less fun things to play.
the context for "How the top %1 communicate" here is: "in our current media environment".
I made it all the way down, and I think it's not a bad way to start. If you're allergic to fluff, here's the core separated into three levels of skill (OP's levels, not mine):
Beginner:
- Problem – state a relatable problem that you’ve observed or experienced before.
- Amplify – illustrate how that problem leads to a negative outcome if it is not solved.
- Solution – state the solution to the problem.
Intermediate (kinda like the high school 3-pronged essay):
- Start with the main idea (the key conclusion or recommendation)
- Support it with key arguments (usually 3-5 key points)
- Provide detailed evidence (data, examples, analysis)
Advanced:
- Problem and amplify – your introduction should state a relatable problem
- Cross-domain synthesis – note patterns or concepts from your other interests that help support your argument.
- Unique process or solution – give a list of ideas or steps that best solve the problem you introduced at the beginning, solidifying the transformation.
If I had to sum it up, it's this: beyond knowing your audience, people like stories. Stories are the affordances of information, like the handle of a door. Stories have arcs, and in many domains they go something like this:
- Here's a problem.
- Why it matters.
- Here's addressing your objections.
- Here's a solution.
All the different levels have an arc. It's not the only arc out there (hero's journey is another one), but this one is pretty typical. All in all, it's pretty basic advice for communication and storytelling. But it's the basics that are so crucial that most of us don't practice. I meet lots of people who don't really have a structure when articulating anything, even topics they know well. A bit of structure, and can probably go a long way to help them in their careers. Anyway, this is a nice reminder. Just ignore the preamble fluff.
It's so weird to me there's lots of people saying the page is hard to read. Isn't this the same font on the original Apple Macintosh? I don't remember anyone ever saying that about the original Macs, back then or now.
I'm not saying that they're not experiencing it. I'm just not sure what the diff is between then and now. We're used to higher resolution screens and spline-based fonts, so reading pixel fonts is jarring?
The titles are in the Mac font (Chicago if I'm not mistaken).
And the bulk of the text are in MS Sans Serif, the bitmap version, not the true type one, which indeed makes it jarring on high-res screens (and wasn't so in its age).
My general impression of kids from elite colleges are that they're very good at finding some sort of loophole in the system to exploit, and they get lauded for it. And if they balk, for whatever reason, they feel like they're falling behind those that do. So then there's a feedback loop for everyone to take advantage of some kind of exploit to stay competitive. "You'd be stupid not to do X also, if everyone else is." with no consider to morals or character--because they're not easy to measure.
You just described Sam Altman to a T. Never forget "Founder Naughtiness," a quality pg prizes in founders, which he originally ascribed to sama:
> 4. Naughtiness
> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
Loopt, BTW, eventually became a shady gay hookup (not even "dating") app--the digital equivalent of the men's rooms in the Port Authority Bus Terminal--before getting acquired for barely more money than it raised in VC funding, and even then, only because one of its VCs was also on the board of the acquirer (Greendot). None of this is mentioned in Loop's sanitized wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt
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