I would NOT want to meet anyone from here tbh. I fear what people write here are how they are in real life.
Not saying they are bad people just from the bad takes and endless pedantic arguments are something I would quickly grow tired in a spoken conversation.
You can skip over paragraphs but in real life you can't.
Bad takes can be hilarious, though. It's only a problem when the participants and audience aren't chill. Discussions where everyone thinks everyone else is wrong are fun when everyone's chill. I'd wager Redditors might not be the best group of people to have chill conversations with, but it's kind of surprising to me that someone would dismiss HN'ers that easily. But I guess some people just don't appreciate bad takes.
Also, I doubt that most people are going to focus on the pandemic at this point. It depends on where one lives, but even in LA most people have long since moved on from it, and no one wants to hear it at an IRL meetup revival.
It would be a comedy sketch if you had a real meetup, but people using their "Hacker News" tone. Lot's of hot takes, fights. Maybe each person has a up and down vote button on their t shirt? Some boring conversation in the corner 2 people listen to. In 10 years time turns out it was the launch of Bitcoin, Figma or Dropbox or something.
That reminds me of a sports talk show I see on the gym TVs sometimes. A few talking heads, and a host who literally gives/takes points from these old men talking football/sports.
Aren't indie games already dangerously close to the commodity space? Steam is overwhelming these days. There are dozens of games I can build bridges in or new interesting strategy games. How is any one developer supposed to capture enough market share to make any money of their work? I am worried that tools like this will just lower the barrier even more.
Maybe its a good thing because it will allow indie devs to spend less time/money on art.
Yip. I think a large motivation for many games is not to make money but to make something that you personally want that isn't already out there that, where the money is just a nice perk.
"UnReal World", for the most extreme example I know of, was released and has been in development for more than 3 decades. It's still receiving regular updates, with the dev kind of mixing game and life. It's a game about surviving in the Finnish wilds, by a dev who lives out in the middle of the Finnish wilds.
The barrier of entry has been on the floor ever since Steam discontinued Greenlight and started just allowing everyone on the platform. But at the same time they invested a lot in better content discovery: personalized recommendations, the discovery queue, curators you can follow, etc.
If you're building the next rehash-of-popular-concept, this asset generator at best saves you a couple minutes shopping the Unity Asset Store, and selecting the right store-bought texture in blender. But it will raise the bar of what's possible with new, innovative settings, which I'm really looking forward to.
> How is any one developer supposed to capture enough market share to make any money of their work? I am worried that tools like this will just lower the barrier even more.
In an ideal society, everyone has time, energy, and resources to create art themselves just because it makes them happy, as opposed to having to turn a profit.
Maybe finally the pretending-my-programmer-art-is-a-super-opinionated-stylistic-choice-to-go-with-retro-pixel-art-and-not-just-because-it's-so-much-easier-not-to-hire-an-artist fad can be — if not laid to rest — perhaps toned down a bit.
These tools wont replace artists or needing some sort of artistic sense - there are several indie games that had professional artists working on the assets but the developers behind them completely massacred their art.
As an example check out Frayed Knights on Steam - i really like the game and think it is both very fun and a very competent freeform blobber RPG, but despite the author having help from artists (and he even worked in some beloved PS1 games himself so he wasn't an amateur at it), the visuals are downright ugly - the UI even looks worse than the default Torque theme! The fact that the game was shipped with what it looks like a rough placeholder made in MS paint for the inventory background, tells me that the only reason for that is that the developer (whom, do not get me wrong, i otherwise respect, just not when it comes to visuals) is blind when it comes to aesthetics (which is a shame because the actual game is both very humorous and has an actually deep character system - but due to the visuals it was largely ignored).
This wont be solved by AI, at the end of the day someone will have to decide that something looks good and someone will have to integrate whatever output the AI creates with the game.
What will actually happen is that people with some artistic skills will be able to do things faster than they were able before - it will improve several types of games (i.e. those whose art styles fit whatever the AI creates), but it wont let someone without artistic skills suddenly make high quality art assets.
Yes but likewise, the motives and their future intent is unknown by a sub optimal move. So in a sense, it is similar to bluffing when you don't know the actions of the other person, deception is required to make yourself unpredictable.
This is why playing against a maniac (seemingly random and not respecting bluffs or equity) is very difficult because if they get lucky enough times, they are able to "break the game" by getting the opponent to be extremely risk averse OR take on more risks.
I believe this is what Magnus is referring to, its that making yourself unpredictable by questionable moves and no longer playing in a way that has been taught.
For example the common strategy is to go all in with strong pairs like AA, KK but someone beats it with a totally random garbage hand (52o, 37o) and does so repeatedly, no theory can help you win against somebody who is just repeatedly lucky and brash.
No, this is not really what this is about. But the article is terrible in conveying this -- actually I find the comparison with poker to be very inept.
This is less about playing mindtricks and bluffing, but more 'mundane'.
I.e. a decent player will know all the good mainlines of popular openings, and end up in 'comfortable' positions (among other things due to computer analysis).
The metagame is to prepare a non-garbage sideline, that your opponent is not so familiar with. Nobody at a high rating plays 'questionable' variations on purpose, in order to bluff. The resulting positions would be much too punishing.
The article already mentions the cheating accusations surrounding Niemann so I won't touch on those, however there is an interesting example of him explaining this type of move in one of his post game interviews. The move is Qg3 from Alireza vs Niemann in the 2022 Sinquefield Cup.
Post-game thoughts from the players:
Inteviewer: "Let me pull you back; so you didn't understand the position, and so you still felt like you were scared to go into a piece-up situation?"
Alireza: "Yeah so, I just trusted him. (he shrugs) I just wanted to make a move.. and play a bit more you know (laughing)"
I think part of what frustrates (some) GMs about Niemann, is that he is playing like Kasparov and them from before supercomputers. Modern GMs think they all know everything, since they have so much computer training, so everyone is afraid to bluff, which means a bluffer can win again. The meta has cycled back.
It is like a bad magazine, which only has content about B celebs and other trash, some people being fully aware of it being trash, but aside from those, no one but the bottom rung would stick around to be there.
I'd argue it's more about service or API integration.
People are willing to pay for solid solutions as long as you can add value
For instance, let's say PagerDuty did not have Slack integration.
If you decide to build the glue that connects both you already have a ton of potential clients as they don't want to invest money themselves etc.
Not saying they are bad people just from the bad takes and endless pedantic arguments are something I would quickly grow tired in a spoken conversation.
You can skip over paragraphs but in real life you can't.