Bookwyrm is a Fediverse alternative to Goodreads. :)

If you know C++ already, Unreal is a much more natural starting point than either Unity or Godot.

Unreal is what gets used in many AAA shops - it’s not a monopoly by any means but it is the most common off-the-shelf engine in the industry. Unity’s main edge is that it’s easy to learn but if you are comfortable in C++ then there’s no real benefit to Unity.

Godot uses GDScript, which is a custom scripting language that’s meant to be easy to learn. It’s FOSS so you don’t need to worry about being screwed over - but it’s a lot less mature than something like Unreal which can ship on everything you can think of.

But my advice is to make small things. Don’t hyperfocus on a dream game. Just make things that will take a weekend (maybe a week at most). Then move on to something else.

When I was getting into game dev, I made a couple simple projects then jumped into my dream game. I spent so long making that one game that I never finished.

When I got hired in the industry, they cared more about what I released than what my education or job experience was. Because that one big game was never finished, I wound up with my smaller “just getting started” games on my resume; stuff I had made but wasn’t proud of. But those games were at least finished and available to the public… and they were what got me hired, not my magnum opus overscoped unfinished indie game I never completed.

One thing I found especially dumb is this:

Jobs that require driving skills, like truck and taxi drivers, as well as jobs in the sanitation and beauty industries, are least likely to be exposed to AI, the Indeed research said.

Let’s ignore the dumb shit Tesla is doing. We already see self-driving taxis on the streets. California allows self-driving trucks already, and truck drivers are worried enough to petition California to stop it.

Both of those involve AI - just not generative AI. What kind of so-called “research” has declared 2 jobs “safe” that definitely aren’t?

This guy is always super duper clickbaity and has this holier-than-thou attitude all the time. Thank you for summing it up so I don’t give him the clicks.

I have a Pixel. The Pixel Launcher that comes stock on the phone has a Google search thing that is not removable except via switching to another launcher. It looks like a widget, but you can’t remove it. It exists on every “panel” of the screen, below the app shortcuts.

I do use it quite a bit when making searches, but only because it’s there already and can’t be removed. If I could remove it, I would.

I’m a little sad. My last studio was literally next to a Gold Line station here in Los Angeles. I could bike to the Gold Line and make it to work, and the Gold Line ran frequently and late.

My current job is a mile away from a Metrolink station. On the one hand - at least there’s a nearby station! On the other hand - the Metrolink trains are running the wrong direction for me, I’d need to make a connection at LA Union Station, and the latest one that goes the direction I need it to go (while still allowing me to make my connection) leaves at 5 (which is still considered core working hours for me).

The schedule is like… impressively bad. I’d use it if they ran it later, but they don’t seem to think anyone could possibly be headed in any other direction other than “towards LA” in the morning and “away from LA” at night.

Benefits matter, too.

I’m in the AAA gaming industry. EA laid me off earlier this year, and so I wound up looking for work elsewhere.

I’ve learned that really - the pay doesn’t matter if you hate your life every day. If I wanted good pay, I would learn COBOL and write software at a bank. What matters the most is the quality of the team you’re working with (primary), and what benefits your employer has (secondary).

If Meta were to call me up and say “Hey, we want you to be on a team with the greatest coworkers you’ve ever had,” then I’d at least hear them out. What is their culture? Do they believe in crunch? How do they handle sick days? Vacations?

And yes, WFH is part of that, too. But if they were willing to pay to relocate me, buy me a house near a metro station… yeah, I’d take it.

But if they were to offer me that exact same deal - except there’s no guarantees about production schedules/timelines, there’s the “bus problem” (where the project couldn’t survive someone important being hit by a bus), there’s a lot of crunch (or just bad experiences from friends who’ve worked there… Blizzard offered me a sweetheart deal and I said no because of that history)… I’m less likely to want to bite.

And everyone has different preferences. I’ve known some people who love the office. I don’t mind it myself, with the right group. But everyone has to make their own call.

Not easily, but if you become a game developer you can start to tell at a glance. Unity games have a very specific type of jank and look + feel. (So do Unreal, Source, and Godot games.)

Even if a game is highly stylized, a Unity game always “feels” like a Unity game. Kerbal Space Program, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, Pokemon Go, Cuphead, Untitled Goose Game, Cities Skylines, Valheim, etc. It’s a combination of physics, shaders, and input latency that’s hard to put into words.

The closest I’ve come to seeing a game that breaks out of the “made in Unity” feel is Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, which was made in Unity but pretends to be made in Source (the original Stanley Parable was made in Source).

Unreal has explicit licensing terms that forbid them from doing this. Terms which people are going to pay very close attention to.

Not to mention that Epic gets their money from Fortnite, not necessarily the engine. They have no reason to squander their goodwill like that.

On top of that - if you want to release on a console, you need to write all the console-specific code yourself. This is quite a lot of work, especially for an indie developer.

Godot is a great start, but it’s got a long way to go before it’s a commercial-ready engine.

Does Jellyfin allow you to bring in your music libraries?

Also, does Jellyfin have Samsung TV clients, or do you need to cast from your phone? I’ve been trying to de-Google myself and I don’t want to have to keep investing in Chromecasts, and part of the reason why I’ve stuck with Plex is because their app is everywhere.

Do you agree that retrievers are bred to retrieve things?

Do you agree that herding dogs are bred to herd things?

Do you agree that pointer dogs are bred to find things?

Surely you’ve been around these kinds of dogs before. It’s not something that they learn; they are specifically bred to do a job and they will do that job even without training. You’ve seen or heard of how a sheepdog will herd small children, I’m sure. It’s why the breed exists; they are specifically bred to do a certain thing and genetically their instinct is to do the thing that they were bred for over the course of thousands of years. You can remove them from their mom and not give them any training and they will naturally do the thing that they were bred to do. You don’t have to train a golden to bring you back a ball.

So is it a surprise that a dog bred to kill things will want to kill things?

That’s not simply because of “a poor owner”, although the fact that people refuse to train their killer dogs to not be killers is part of it. It’s because their dogs are genetically predisposed to kill, just like a pointer dog is genetically predisposed to find things.

It is absolutely a bad breed. Killer dogs should be banned worldwide. Every single pitbull, rottweiler, etc. should be spayed/neutered and the breed should end. They’re too dangerous and dumb owners have proven that you can’t rely on humans to keep them under control.

It’s not the dogs’ fault, mind - it’s their instinct. But that doesn’t mean that future generations should have to deal with it.

Hey, that happened to me, too!

I got scheduled for a mandatory meeting with 1 hour notice. During lunch.

I asked my boss what it was. He didn’t know either. I joked that it was us being shut down.

Sure enough, 1 hour later we were both writing LinkedIn recommendations and helping each other find jobs after it was announced that our whole studio was being shut down by corporate and myself plus all my coworkers were all now jobless.

So the problem is that white noise doesn’t compress very easily.

Compression algorithms are generally designed to reduce noise; if you have something that’s extremely noisy it’s really hard to compress because that’s not what the algorithms were designed to do.

This means that these podcasts take up more space, which means they use more bandwidth than an equivalent non-white-noise solution.

A middle ground would be banning these “podcasts” and then having a white noise generator built into the app. The white noise generator would run locally on your device (very easy to make white noise) and wouldn’t cost any bandwidth at all.

Ah-ha! Thank you!

Courts have been blocking them consistently. They’ve been a touch more aggressive, but Congress needs to pass more aggressive laws. Many of these companies are vertically integrated, not horizontally - and the laws aren’t really equipped to deal with that.

Google does the same.

I don’t use Chrome. Every single time I go to any Google service, it tells me I need to be using Chrome. It doesn’t take “no” for an answer; it’s a constant nag.

Google Docs especially gets mad and doesn’t even let you paste without formatting.