Sophie Kirschner

AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning After 10 years as an AWS customer and open-source contributor, they deleted my account and all data with zero warning. Here's how AWS's 'verification' process became a digital execution, and why you s...

Oh my god, this is bleak. I need to start keeping backups of my work in multiple places…

www.seuros.com/blog/aws-del...

Flippin gorgeous. Look at those poses

That's a very puzzling statement to me. Who's trying to compel interested players to make their final purchasing decision without being permitted to view a longer description or watch a longer video first?

Your hook is the "HEY!" at the beginning of "HEY! Take a look at this awesome game! It does no fewer than 17 really amazing things: ..."

The goal is not to describe your game with short images and videos, or in one sentence! That's simply not what a hook is. The purpose of a hook is to capture the viewer's attention and make them feel like it's worth their time to hear you out, and *then* you describe your game to them.

And, yeah, GIFs on store pages are great! Showing is generally better than telling, just for communication in general. And GIFs can get an idea across no matter your audience's fluency or literacy.

I really think there's more to this than just short attention spans! (Though that is surely a factor)

I don't think it'd be fair to say it's not hard...but I do believe you're making it harder than it needs to be. You're trying to sell your game to everyone in 1 sentence, but that's not what a hook is. You should be trying to sell your *store page* in 1 sentence. Then you can sell the game with 17+.

I don't agree that it's about attention span. There are so many games out there. Most frankly aren't worth spending time to read their entire store page just to confirm that, yes, this is Shameless Shovelware Game #40,581. The hook is how people know your page is worth their time in the first place.

Once you have their attention, they're not immediately shelving your book/clicking off your game's page, then you can take the time to show off all 17 amazing things. But if you didn't start with a hook, most won't stick around for it.

Your hook isn't your pitch, it's the pitch for your pitch.

But you don't have 17 hooks. In any given place where prospective players first come into contact with your game, you get one. It's not because you're trying to appeal to everybody. It's because time is linear and humans can generally only pay attention to one thing at a time. So hook them!

People are spoiled for choice with books, and with games too. Your hook is simply your first impression, something that arrests the audience's attention and convinces them to stay around long enough to see the rest.

Maybe your hook is that your game does no fewer than 17 different amazing things,

Your hook is like the first page of a book, as viewed by someone perusing in a bookshop. If your first page is dull or hard to understand, a lot of people won't be invested enough to read the second, and will look for something else. Even if the rest of the book is amazing. How would they know that?

I believe this is a misunderstanding about what a "hook" is!

Humans are constrained by time and mental attention, in that information can only be conveyed in a linear fashion. Your "hook" is best defined as the very first piece of info you provide, chosen specifically to entice the recipient.

I've been keeping an eye on Bevy for a while now, and it looks like it's getting quite close to time for me to give it some closer attention, even as someone not especially into Rust. The new UI work looks very promising! And I'm very glad to see that they're already thinking about reactivity.

how did we let fandom replace gamefaqs. absolutely failed civilization.

I learned about Bitcoin and tried to mine some long before it was cool. Really wish I hadn't given up when it was taking much longer than I expected it to. I know I would've held on to the wallet too, given how I backed everything else up from those days. I could be retired :(

Bitcoin $100k 2025

This reminds me of Pacific Drive!

Yeah I don't love your chances on reproducing the sandwich outside of the nordics

I have genuinely decided not to buy games because of this. If you won't get this detail right, what other important details are you neglecting?

hey friends if you put scrolling text in your game, and it does this

Happy birt

Happy
birthday!

then you have fucked up. You have fucked up real bad and i am going to notice every time it happens and i will be so very sad about it

I really do have a signature sandwich. Just had one this morning.

- Rye flat bread bun
- Slab of leipäjuusto
- Vegetarian roast beef
- Tomato
- Cucumber
- Lettuce
- A little mayo
- Salt, pepper, paprika, garlic powder

Pffft. You think I'm in this for good business? For long term prospects? Not a chance. That's amateur hour. I'm here to buy my next yacht, and I'm gonna do it TODAY. I'll deploy my golden parachute into another corp before the piper calls, and then I'll do it all again, and again. Toodles, suckers.

The approach I have in mind could halfway credibly be called "Quantum AI", and that branding alone should be how you know it's a winning idea.

Anyway the idea was inspired by seeing the funny mix of very bad or seemingly good but actually scam projects coming out where an LLM plays a video game. I'm fairly confident I can do a whole lot better than any of them, and that the system would be a valid POC for something with real-world utility.

Anyone have useful suggestions on whether it's worth maybe a month of my focused time to build something like this? This isn't the kind of thing I would do just for the novelty of it. And I don't actually know any money or "AI" people personally. Or how I'd even get in touch with one.

When I was young, what I wanted to be when I grew up was an AI researcher. As a result, I have a relatively strong amateur knowledge of AI tech. The short version is there's an approach I know would demo very well, and that would be extremely buzzwordy, but as far as I know no one has thought of it.

I've got an idea for how to build a prototype/demo for an AI (no, not generative AI, actual AI) that I think might be very impressive to the kinds of weirdos who have been throwing so much money at "AI" projects, but so far I'm at a loss to how I would actually get from prototype to payday.

It's very strange and concerning to me how many replies here seem to find it confusing that milk comes from breasts. Does nobody know where animal products come from?

What would you recommend as more respectful terms to refer to public figures who are actively burning down the world we live in, on account of being apparently incapable of either empathy or rational thought?