Zach

Anyway, Wild Dark Shore was a really fun read, enjoyed it quite a bit

Discord communities with dedicated book channels have filled that void for me more recently, but I'm at the whims of these particular strangers having read the book I just finished, not the entire internet of fellow readers, and that bums me out

I used to go to Goodreads after finishing a book to find a sense of fleeting community with others who enjoyed a book, and it's really a drag to see so many self-serving, excoriating reviews in an attempt to "build a brand" as a critic

cohost being gleefully eviscerated and now itch as well – single digit teams are going to make mistakes. they should receive feedback when they do, but treating them like faceless corporations will ensure that only the faceless corporations will stick around to provide these services.

An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed

(late disclaimer + bias: I had two friends laid off from 1047 yesterday and I'm a little miffed!)

I'd really hope that your game server processes could host more than one game each (I chose c6g.xlarges for these!), and that's already capacity for 600 players: Splitgate 1 peaked at 450 players over the past 3 months - there's absolutely no need for this many boxes

Some hasty projections: with 100 machines (each hosting a single game server process, I'm assuming 6 players/game server) + 200 machines for services (authentication, matchmaking, etc) + 100 TB MySQL database, I'm getting $35k month

"Between the game servers and 3rd party dependencies, Splitgate 1 is costing us about $40-50k per month"

"3rd party dependencies" is doing some legwork here, because I don't know if I could spend $40k/mo on game server cloud compute if I tried

Your honor, the WSJ said they were monogamous

"A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world.”

This was Vin Scully's call of Henry Aaron's 715th home run. Tonight Major League Baseball cut off the first sentence, starting it with the "What a marvelous moment" part because they don't want to anger the white supremacists who run our country and of whom Rob Manfred is an ardent supporter.

Walker's sample size is nearly double fwiw - this isn't to discredit Walker but rather vent about Schwarber

A neat #mlb fact: 44.4% of Kyle Schwarber's hits against the Padres are home runs (48.7% incl playoffs).

Noted Dodger killer Christian Walker is 35.8% hits as home runs vs Dodgers for comparison (36.5% incl playoffs).

Please let us never pitch to Schwarber again thanks

23/ This thread was composed using blueskythreads.xyz

22/ There's certainly lots of easy wins we could get towards that goal while figuring out to what extent live service needs special attention.

21/ But I think that Stop Killing Games as an initiative isn't a "let's get it 100% right from the get go", but rather a "let's make progress towards ensuring games can't be ripped from paying customers hands".

20/ are custom games allowed too (how are we deciding what islands are supported? how do players access/downloads those islands after we sunset our services?)?

19/ I do think live service is another beast entirely that warrants further discussion and well-reasoned legislation. I don't know what "functional but unsupported" means for Fortnite - just games against bots (no friends, as Fortnite has no peer-to-peer)?

18/ I shutter at the thought of some dev-only testing path being used by real players resulting in console crashes (very bad), especially in regards to what players are expecting out of a product that is in this "functional but unsupported" state.

17/ That is absolutely "security" from a company's perspective.

16/ Players might not view that as "security", as they are opting-in to a potentially unstable experience, but companies won't want their name being associated with "this game crashes when you get a DM" and the inability to fix it.

15/ New attack vector: sending a message to another player can crash their game.

14/ A contrived example: I make a game that shows in-game text when the player receives a direct message from an Xbox Live friend. Xbox then changes the protocol such that the game can no longer parse the message and crashes.

13/ There would be substantially more effort in completely disabling network communication and ensuring the game works properly, as network communication is where the security issues are.

12/ Compared to a singleplayer game being left unsupported, a multiplayer game is absolutely implementing the platform's social SDKs (Xbox Live, PSN, Steam, etc).

11/ Devs roll out minor updates all the time, many that go undocumented, to fix issues for players, and leaving previously online software in a state where we're explicitly not updating it gives me pause.

10/ One thing I'd criticize about the current Stop Killing Games FAQ is the blurb on security: this would absolutely be a security risk for companies.

9/ (This is extra poignant considering the amount of times I've heard "we'll just get QA to test it" rather than investing in automated testing, yet those same QA folks were treated horrifically in terms of compensation + respect in voicing concerns about the project, but I digress)

8/ If there were legal requirements introduced to make that happen, very feasible on the backend in my opinion.

7/ At least in my experience, modern production processes and "stakeholder" pressure means that robust mock testing frameworks weren't as high priority in sprint planning meetings as player-facing deliverables.