I'm super curious about this project because I am currently trying to deeply learn music, but it is very difficult to get to a meaningful point of really "understanding" music and theory if you only have the time of a modern adult to commit to it. However I largely agree with you about this unfortunately. Do you think this person's project, where they use colors for relative notation is better?
I couldn't say. I only know that my personal experience of using Rocksmith to learn guitar meant I couldn't bust out a song perfectly without looking at the screen, even if I could get 100% in expert (no visible notation) mode for some songs.
The 60hz refresh visual input was 'expected' by my brain to be there in order to coordinate my body with correct timing, intonation etc. i.e. it seemed to be mixed in with my so called 'muscle memory'.
One other thing that was most noticeable is the gamification noises (e.g. the noise you get for reaching the 25x multiplier) became part of my mental model, and when I recognised this and turned them off in the options, my inability to play that part of song nearly as well became extremely evident, although persisting with the option set to off allowed me to overcome it.
This is kind of conjecture based on various things I've read over the years, but I feel like there is a strong tie-in between memorization and visualization abilities. I think many great chess players actually have trained their visualization abilities and are great at this. This in turn allows for easier memorization of games, sequences, etc, because it feels like they're only half-memorizing it at this point. It's easier. Some great Chess players utilize the memory palace technique as well, which feels like it ties into their visualization skill abilities.
This thing has always been a treat to look through; it's made with so much effort and care. I haven't read through it in a bit though and don't plan to read through it again currently so I may be off in some of the rest of my comment.
I think Valve's flat structure strategy has mildly failed and they should try something else. Unless they still desire to all-in on the strategy of creating products and hoping to land a another billion dollar baby, then sure, this strategy is good for that. However Valve kind of advertises itself as a video game company, and if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve, simply because it seems so unlikely for them to actually ever release a video game.
And the bonus structure that I recall also seems dated. iirc it was setup in a way such that delivering new projects would land you a bonus. But this incentivizes creating things, but there is no incentive to continue supporting or updating or iterating on it. In my opinion the bonus structure should be done in such a way so that if you deliver something new, you would land a bonus, and then you'd get larger bonuses at the 1 year mark, 2 year mark, etc, if that thing has been updated and improved.
Many things these days are not just a single product that you release and that's that. They continually live on, they're a service, they're interacted with for years. Valve has fallen behind in this regard. Even smaller things like mini-features in Dota 2 for example would be released, which likely earned someone a small bonus, then left by the wayside to fall apart.
I love Valve conceptually but I really wish they'd iterate on their company design instead of thinking they've "solved it" I guess. I wish they were more video game focused. Obviously I don't know how it actually is in there these days, but things like this manual and other hearsay / rumors are the best I have to go off of.
> I think Valve's flat structure strategy has mildly failed and they should try something else.
I see this echoed relatively often, and I have to wonder by what metric people consider valve have "failed" when they're the largest video game distribution platform on PC, raking in money hand over fist and constantly trouncing their competition such as EGS, Galaxy, Origin and UPlay. People don't just use steam because they have to, they choose to use it because it's the superior product.
> I wish they were more video game focused
I suppose a lot of people look at Valve and think because they haven't made a hit game in a while that's why they're a failure? Personally I couldn't care less if they never made another game again; there are thousands of video game companies making great games every year, and no-one else is doing what Valve are doing in regards to Proton and other Linux desktop work. The steam deck isn't a particularly novel idea, but it's definitely one of the best examples of a handheld portable gaming device running a desktop OS.
For someone who used to be a diehard GOG fan due to their no DRM policy, my entire library is now on Steam due to their Linux efforts, not just because it's the best client, but because I want them to keep doing what they're doing.
> I see this echoed relatively often, and I have to wonder by what metric people consider valve have "failed" when they're the largest video game distribution platform on PC, raking in money hand over fist and constantly trouncing their competition such as EGS, Galaxy, Origin and UPlay. People don't just use steam because they have to, they choose to use it because it's the superior product.
I think network effects play a bigger role (no user wants to have to juggle multiple game launchers and developers mostly cannot afford to not be on Steam) but yeah their competition being overly greedy and/or incompetent does help as well.
> when they're the largest video game distribution platform on PC
And just adding on to this, they also a have a stable of some of the most successful (and presumably lucrative) games released in the last 20 years: dota 2, cs:go (admittedly, not in-house to start), TF2.
Granted, a lot of these are towards the autumn of their lifecycles, but it can't be discounted.
It depends how you frame success. Game development seems to have slowed in the post-Steam boom world, but it's still there! DotA2, Artifact, Alyx, and currently Deadlock are all examples of relatively recent gaming products.
From a purely financial perspective, they SHOULD continue to focus on marketplace dominance via STEAM. Whatever game is made for HL3/TF3 will ultimately fail to meet fan expectations (Duke Nukem anyone?).
> It depends how you frame success. Game development seems to have slowed in the post-Steam boom world, but it's still there! DotA2, Artifact, Alyx, and currently Deadlock are all examples of relatively recent gaming products.
They have however refocused on cash-cow live-service games rather than the polished single player experiences they were originally famous for. In the 13 years since Portal 2 they've only released one single player game, and that one was driven by their company-wide VR push more than anything else. It's harder to get excited about their games when they no longer want to make anything that can't be leveraged into an infinite money siphon.
They've also had an uptick in disastrous flops with Artifact and Underlords, hopefully Deadlock will be a return to form.
Deadlock is awesome. I'm in the alpha and I've been totally hooked on it. It's the first multiplayer FPS game that my friend group and I have been excited about in probably a decade.
If the reddit rumors are believed to be true, the former leads of DotA (Icefrog?) and TF2 (Robin Walker) are heavily involved in it's development.
It will need to do something very fresh if it wants to compete.
Valorant felt extremely fresh and slick compared to both CSGO and Overwatch while fitting nicely inbetween. They brought innovation and UX improvements to the format that even CSGO ended up copying after it had been resting on it's laurels for too long.
Deadlock is quite different to Valorant in key ways. Rather than Valorsnt, which is essentially Counterstrike with hero powers. deadlock is Valorant plus Dota2. There are creeps and base management and extensive items.
I certainly think Deadlocks ui is unfinished, but the gameplay is certainly something that hasn't been done super well.
I don't love deadlock yet but haven't played it much. Plus, my opinion means nothing, I thought Artifact was a great game.
I very much agree. I just want to provide some evidence of one if your points:
> if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve.
In 2018, valve aquired Campo Santo. They were a 12 person company who made Firewatch and were working on a new game.
Since then, one of the founders worked on writing Half-Life Alyx. The rest have done little to nothing at valve despite being industry veterans who alwys seemed passionate about games. At least half of the employees at the time of the aquisition have left valve. Im too lazy and sick to look up everyone, but the people who wanted to make games left to good companies where they could work on games.
I personally am happy for the Campo Santo team that they hopefully did well financially in the acquisition, but I an sad that a team working on novel narrative games with high production values was disbanded with little to show for it.
> I think Valve's flat structure strategy has mildly failed and they should try something else.
If all your failures are as "mild" as the "failure" of Valve's flat structure, you will have a very nice life.
> However Valve kind of advertises itself as a video game company, and if someone is interested in making video games I feel like they'd actually be a bit disappointed after a while of working at Valve, simply because it seems so unlikely for them to actually ever release a video game.
They've released a game every year or every other year since they were founded. That's more than a lot of studios, and the fact that they also do stuff with steam and hardware makes it that much more impressive.
> They continually live on, they're a service, they're interacted with for years. Valve has fallen behind in this regard. Even smaller things like mini-features in Dota 2 for example would be released, which likely earned someone a small bonus, then left by the wayside to fall apart.
This would be a more valid critique of Valve's management structure if companies with traditional management structures didn't do the same damn thing. World of Warcraft has had dozens of abandoned features over the years, and Activision-Blizzard has a normal management structure. This is just general software industry shit, I can't think of any company that doesn't leave some stuff on the side because the focus moved onto something newer and shinier.
> I love Valve conceptually but I really wish they'd iterate on their company design instead of thinking they've "solved it" I guess. I wish they were more video game focused.
Well if they had traditional management, the game development part of the company would have been deleted a loooong time ago, and Steam would be completely enshittified by now.
I think there are valid criticisms of what they're trying at Valve, but 1) I'm glad they're doing it, I don't want every company to operate the same MBA playbook, and 2) I don't think the problems are really problems for the customer! It seems like it's mostly a problem for _employees_.
Has it not already been shit for like 15 years? It's 2003 shitware with an electron skin on top of it, with a predatory skin marketplace that you can't withdraw funds from and lootbox mechanics included in all their live service games (of which that is all valve has made in the last 15 years excluding HLA).
Valve was never a good company. I would argue their early business model directly lead to the death of game modding in the first place because in their first few years they straight up stole the IPs of successful mods to turn into second rate games internally, usually not giving original developers any cuts of the proceeds beyond a normal position at the company.
You could argue that it has been, but "being shit" and "enshittification" are different things.
I don't think it's been shit. As a customer, Valve is one of the only companies left that I feel good about giving money to.
But it simply has not been enshittified. From Doctorow:
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
Valve hasn't started abusing gamers to benefit developers in any way that I can tell. Compared to the rest of the video game industry, Valve treats both very well.
> I would argue their early business model directly lead to the death of game modding in the first place
Game modding isn't dead or anywhere close to dead, so no.
They're saying you won't know until after a request is already sent, and seem to be implying that this somehow stops someone from learning if data is sent to the server or not. I think they've forgotten the original point of this thread because their replies are missing the point
Let's say you trust absolutely that the network tab would reveal any communications with the server that could happen in the future. By "future" I mean the point where you are convinced that it is safe to use, and now you are using it with real data.
That was a technically sophisticated hack, but there are simpler ones, like social engineering someone to take over their site.
Put putting hacks aside...
Say you have a site and it doesn't mention whether the data is sent to a server and you want to find out. Now let's say that site does a backup to server but only when localstorage has run out of space, but you don't know that.
When you test the site in the network tab, and you haven't run out of localstorage space then you will see no XHR and assume it's all good, it never sends to the server.
You then use the app for a few days, hit the localstorage limit and it sends stuff to the server without you knowing. And yeah you can keep the network tab open all the time if you have the discipline, but you only know once your data has been sent. It is too late.
If you care enough about whether it sends stuff to the server to look at a network tab, then you probably care enough to want to know for sure.
With the web as it is now there is only one way - trust the site and hope they do the right thing, and are secure. Or only put stuff on there you are happy to leak.
So, made up situation: if you are using this tool to edit and release a whistleblowing related video as a journalist. Maybe you shouldn't!
You probably instead want a local app, running on linux, on a machine that is disconnected from the network.
I'm not sure. The impression I get is they're not aware that the tab isn't just a log of stuff before the page "finishes" loading, or not aware that the notion of a static page that can't make network requests at any time without a full reload went out with AJAX in the 2000s.
Any tips on staying for consistent with your project in your free time? I'm torn between pushing to finish my projects vs just accepting that I'm very interested in something else right now and accepting that and allowing myself to enjoy the new thing.
Yeah, I had a similar issue with motivation to build this when I had other ideas throughout building the software. This may seem strange but the way I dealt with it is basically by buying the domain so in my head I would just think that I’ve wasted the 20 or so pounds(the currency) on buying that which would almost deter me from going to a different project. Maybe just put up like a small financial incentive to get it running like the fact that if I didn’t launch it would be a waste of 20 or so pounds. Hope this helps. By financial incentive I didn’t mean like making money, even though that’s the goal for a business, I meant more losing money to costs to set it up.
Not the person you are asking, but I do have GI issues due to the acidity with coffee. It can cause reflux, ulcers, and more for people if they are sensitive to the added acidity.
I think the size of the vibrations is important here. The paper mentions acoustic cavitation, which I believe would only really occur at small frequencies like the ones stated in the paper, not large shakes that you or I would do.
There are many headsets much more expensive than that. They aren't as mainstream but for the hobbyist who is willing to pay more for better, they are definitely out there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442831
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