Pyramid schemes are defined by the price and structure. A business that sells knives is a fine business. A business that sells overpriced knives by promising that you can then find someone else to sell more knives for you at an even higher price is a pyramid scheme.
Selling tulips is a fine business. Selling tulips at an insanely high price by promising that the market for tulips will keep on expanding and increasing the price of tulips is a pyramid scheme. (Well, maybe not quite a pyramid scheme, the structure isn't right. But it certainly wasn't a sustainable business model.)
At least for my software job in the US, and other salaried jobs I’ve seen, there are explicitly no hours listed, and it’s supposedly based only on your output. In practice though, if your butt isn’t in the seat 40 hours a week or so, and usually more, the boss will be mad.
> The figures were almost universal across all categories: 62 percent of those surveyed across the five European countries said they favored or had considered replacing US data storage and payment services, while 59 percent of respondents said they would back a change from American video-conferencing companies like Zoom.
(Technically only five countries in the EU in this survey, but the five most populous countries, and presumably other countries generally agree)
thanks for sharing .. given tech policy press's editorial perspective, i'd take the result with a grain of salt. … also tbh .. the existence of the poll is almost as interesting as the outcome .. reminds me of taleb's "wittgenstein's ruler" from black swan .. before using a ruler to measure a table, you should probably know whether the ruler itself is trustworthy.
the poll may be telling us as much about the priorities and assumptions of the people asking the question as it does about public opinion… in fact, the need to run a poll on this specific question arguably says more about the agenda behind it than the resuglt itself ..
So, before October, they were lousy at tracking downtime issues for 2 years (no downtime from 2016 to 2018), but in November, Microsoft came and gave them the technology to correctly track downtime, and they had their first downtime logged in November.
If you want to do it occasionally, sure, whatever. I have a coworker who solely communicates in the form of screenshots of him asking Cursor my question, even when they’re questions that are interested in his motivation or plans, not the code base, and that Cursor does a bad job answering. I’ll ask a Slack channel “does anyone have experience with tools A and B, so they can suggest which matches our use case better”, and he’ll respond with a screenshot.
I don’t need him to pass on LLM answers. I can and do ask them myself. I’m asking questions because I’m interested in the experience my coworkers have beyond what AIs have trained on.
This is Java, but recently I had a case where one library depended on a version of an Apache Commons library, and another library depended on a different version of the same Apache Commons library, and neither version worked with both libraries. In my case, I was able to upgrade one of them to a newer version so that I could use just one Apache Commons version, but I got lucky there.
It's a lot. Us parents joke how insane it all is but realistically it will taper off soon as kids start having smaller birthday celebrations. At this age it's kind of a "invite everyone in your class/grade" and has naturally reduced a bit already as boy/girl only parties started. I think next year or two it will become more common to have "invite 3-5 good friends to an event" type of birthdays and that will reduce it a lot further. Usually that's also the beginning of "drop-off birthday parties" where us parents don't have to attend with our guest. There was only one this year, my son was picked up and a group of ~10 went to a sport event.
Oddly enough, there are practically none in summer. If you have a summer birthday you either don't have a big party or you have a half birthday or something similar where the party occurs during the school year. Too many people travel throughout the summer and kids are doing different camps and things so it would not get well attended. Our group of parents kind of have unspoken rule to not do anything that feels required when school is out. That goes for fall/summer/spring breaks and holidays too.
The logistics part probably sounds crazy but probably only ~10% of these parties are at someone's house. We've never hosted a party at our house, well when he was 1-2 for family only, but not these huge parties with so many kids, parents, siblings, etc. Most people rent out a venue. Arcades, trampoline/slide parks, skating rinks are popular with the girls, sports themed places are popular with boys, chuck-e-cheese was popular for a bit, those kinds of things. It's too much work for a 2 hour party to have that many people in your home.
My birthday was in the summer. I was in the RV away from friends all summer. I never got a birthday with friends, and get this, I didn’t get invited to birthdays because I wasn’t participating in the shared economy of gift giving!
Yep, and I hate it. For our kids we’ve started just inviting a bunch of the kid’s friends and extending the invitation to each friend’s whole family and just having a chill house party. We also invite a friend’s family for the kid not having a birthday so they have at least one of their friends to play with too. Kids running around outside, inside, doing whatever they want while the parents all get to hang out and talk. We order some pizzas and other food, set out a few coolers of drinks and some adult beverages too, and it’s always a great time. It helps that the birthdays are in the fall in it’s usually really nice out still.
We also very clearly specify “no gifts”. We don’t have room for more stuff and they’ll get more gifts than they need from grandparents.
I’d say a majority of the parties we get invited to also are asking people to not bring gifts.
I think it's more scary than impressive. What kind of adults are all of those children going to grow up to and become, where multiple parties are the weekly norm?
Maybe you can clarify because I don't understand your fear or what you think it means for these kid's future adulthood?
The kids just see it as a fun 2 hour playdate with lots of friends in an interesting setting with dessert. It's the same friends they see at school, sports, etc. so it's their time to have some less structured play time, which - not sure if you've heard - is in rare supply for many children these days.
When I was a kid, even at this age, I was roaming all over town on a bike with my friends, I basically had the Stranger Things childhood experience, and I feel very confident there was a lot more to fear in that timeline of childhood.
Playing (and roaming) is great, non-stop parties is not.
Excessive partying can foster a mindset in children that equates fun with extravagance rather than simple enjoyment.
Frequent extravagant parties can foster a mindset in children that equates fun with material possessions and lavish events, rather than personal connections and shared experiences.
Not sure if the picture I painted originally was unclear but these kids are already living a very comfortable lifestyle by most standards. Most outsiders looking in would say they are all spoiled brats which is basically what I feel like you're trying to say more politely. But, this is just their norm, it's very much a part of their interpersonal connections and shared experiences which is exactly why we try to attend as many as we can. We try to engage in the community and support these kids as a group by celebrating their milestones and achievements; birthdays are one such example. What you fail to consider is these kids do not care about the material possessions at all. They've never had a shortage of that so they have no want for it. That is not special. I've never seen a kid even look at the presents during a party. They get loaded up and opened at home. I know my kid often doesn't open them for days or even weeks after the party. At this moment, he has a shelf full of toys he got as gifts half a year ago that are unwrapped but unopened. He's never even played with them. Some of them he already had and so he'll probably donate them at Christmas. However, the idea that they got to pick a theme and an venue that represents their personality/interests and share it with their friends during a day of fun is what they thrive on. Being the guest of honor at such an event has plenty of social-emotional benefits (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6130922/).
There's nothing lavish about these events unless you seem to think so. A $20/day trampoline park is not lavish. A 2 hour arcade card at D&B is not lavish. I don't know what your frame of reference is but this is what we do on a normal weekend if we have no plans too, just with a smaller group and withot birthday cake to eat.
Speaking as someone who is a bit more familiar with your site, the variety of content you post is really valuable. I know multiple people, myself included, who have either gone from EA to Contra or Contra to EA thanks to both being on your blog.
More broadly, I love it when an author I trust in one area writes about other topics.
That’s exactly the benefit of a law - it’s a forcing measure to require businesses to invest in processes to understand open sourcing, and to go forward when otherwise no one would make a business case for approval.
And makes it more expensive. There is the seen benefit and then the unseen cost. Every game released will have to account for the possibility of it, and will create issues for people who really didn't want those issues. After awhile people will forget there are associated issues and costs, but they will still be there.
Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture. It's not like this is going to hurt the little three-man teams making games on shoe-string budgets. Yeah, it's going to make big budget games a little more expensive, just like how cars with seatbelts are a little more expensive to build, and like how it's a little more expensive to do proper waste management instead of dumping sludge into a river.
> Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture.
Huh? Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. And you (usually[1]) do it in service of multiplayer, not because you're big budget or just want to complicate things.
Among Us was literally a three-person team.
[1] I find there are some major benefits to it, especially in post-LLM-world, and have been strongly considering it for some of my solo-dev single-player projects.
Remember back in the old days when you could just run your own game server, even though it wasn't open source? That would work too. Or peer to peer LAN gaming, why is that not popular any more?
Designing a game to use developer hosted servers is a choice they made. Probably to squeeze money from microtransactions.
> Or peer to peer LAN gaming, why is that not popular any more?
This. I mean, modern game companies could setup a common (for every game) Headscale or similar solution, let group of friends create their own private VPN between them punching through any NAT and host their own distributed multiplayer game. Yes there is still some involvement server aide from the company but it could be easily shared between games. And if support ends, you still leave players with the option to use their own LAN/VPN system.
Currently one of the features Valve's SDK offers is free use of network relays for P2P gaming without revealing each others IPs. Big and small games have used it. The main downside is if a game wants to offer cross-platform cross-play.
Timing and scalability are probably the biggest issues with realtime P2P applications. Scalability is becoming a bit less of an issue; with mid-splits becoming the norm on cable internet services and 5G SA rolling out, there's just a lot more bandwidth to go around.
Timing issues can be worked around and GPS modules are cheap.
NAT problems aren't usually that bad. Only a minority of networks use symmetric NAT implementations, with most seeming to be using port-restricted cone NAT (EIM/APDF), which can still communicate with any other NAT implementation using endpoint-independent mapping (EIM). Most CGNAT implementations that I've encountered use EIM, with some also doing endpoint-independent filtering (EIF). Between UDP hole-punching, UPnP, NAT-PMP, and IPv6, it's usually possible to establish a P2P connection between 2 endpoints.
A game could use a hybrid client/server and P2P model, with the option to run entirely P2P while accepting its limitations.
A lot of games have tacked-on online features to excuse the existence of the server to enable DRM, and a lot of multiplayer games arbitrarily don't offer a way for clients to double as local servers like in the heyday of arena shooters.
Sure, but the existence of such annoying things does not mean that's the only reason to use a client-server architecture and that it would only affect those games.
Among Us is also incredibly simple compared to the services required to support some AAA games and even then, their networking code was riddled with exploits that no professional would have written, including RCEs.
Didn't stop it from being a fun, successful game but there's no comparison to the work and complexity involved in larger games.
I'm countering your argument that it's "not that bad". If that wasn't your point with mentioning the three person team, what was?
Recap:
> Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. Among Us was literally a three-person team.
The scope of the discussion extends beyond simple games like Among Us and some games require highly complex networked architectures that would be non-trivial to open up.
Ah, I see. Well, the post I was responding to reads to me like a denial of the existence of games like Among Us when it says it wouldn't affect three person dev teams making games on a shoestring budget, and gives off the weird implication that it would only affect big budget games.
That said, I don't mind a tangent, and I have built services for large multiplayer games and it really is not that bad.
I've also worked on MMOs and the architectures there can get quite hairy, particularly when they're deeply plumbed into shared services and infrastructure that they couldn't operate without. Those layers occasionally have closed-source licensed tech mixed in there.
Untangling the entire lot to make the game available upon closure would be a nightmare in some cases.
I've also contributed to game server emulation (pre-professionally) to keep them alive, so preserving games is a cause I support, even if I don't think it's necessarily always going to be trivial.
> Untangling the entire lot to make the game available upon closure would be a nightmare in some cases.
This is only true if the game wasn't architected with open-sourcing in mind. Which affects how this kind of law should be structured.
For example, it makes sense to require the server code to be submitted to an escrow service from the beginning. Part of that process would be a license evaluation, which acts as a forcing function already during the development process.
A simple multiplayer game like Among Us would also have a similarly simple server. There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start. In concept, the gameplay is no different from a deathmatch game in, say, Quake 3 Arena. It's a small group of players sharing a level and interacting with each other in various ways.
> There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start.
Yes there was. It was a 3 person team. That's a good enough reason to not have almost any feature that requires any amount of work, including UI work, because there is always a whole mountain of stuff that you're not doing that you'd like to do as a 3-person dev team.
It's more work to implement the server as a separate program that you additionally have to keep running and load-balance than to build the server into the game.
What? This a mandate in law that requires a company to do work in order to comply. Studios will spin out LLCs for a game so that if it fails it doesn't end up as a liability. Unintended consequence: more dead games.
It's impossible for the law to cause more games to die, because already the default fate of online games is for them to die. If, with the law, a studio chooses to use an LLC to create the game to conditionally release sources once it shuts down, that was a game that without the law would have died anyway because the studio wouldn't have chosen of its own volition to release sources.
If a studio on it's last legs is required to service a failing product instead of working on a new one the studio will simply close and not comply. That's what tends to happen with forced regulations like this.
And it's what would have happened anyway without the law. How is this difficult to understand? It's not like it's only a few games that shut down without recourse for the players. Ross Scott already did the research on this. Something like 95% of all online games that shut down do so without providing any way for the players to continue playing in some way or without issuing refunds.
Different person here, it's probably because they defensively reject anything that forces anyone to do anything, or would increase prices outside of market forces. Every argument that's used against this kind of legislation was also used against putting airbrakes on trains. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Seriously. If you ever want to see a discussion thread that demonstrates the difference between “reasons” and “excuses” (by being full of the latter), just propose a law forcing game companies to do literally anything and watch the replies.
If they're closing they have nothing to lose by putting the source code up on the internet and saying sue us if you want. It's continuing businesses who are scared of liability.
Or it could make it a lot cheaper, if the server were developed entirely on open-source infrastructure from the start. Hopefully the actual game logic would be developed entirely in-house, making it easier to audit before releasing.
Most likely the engine providers would spin off their server components as OSS for this express purpose so their customers can easily comply. This regulation could be a huge win for making the game industry adopt more OSS.
The beauty of making it a criminal issue is that those costs go away.
When the library vendor licenses some proprietary crap to a game server vendor, they take on the risk that their library may fall under the open source requirement when the game server shuts down.
At shutdown, criminal law says the library vendor must open source. Since criminal law preempts contract law, no amount of weasel words in the software license change that.
Even if the upstream vendor is out of business or something and did not provide source, surely, the binaries fall under the the open source clause.
Problem completely solved, and no lawyers need to be paid after the fact. (Library vendors might want to pay lawyers to tell them not to license to game servers, or not. Either way, that's not the customers' problem.)
That could change once a law comes out requiring all new developments to be designed differently. Besides, no one is talking about open sourcing the server code. Releasing binaries and patching the client to talk to a local instance is perfectly acceptable. A developer would then just need the ability to redistribute compiled builds.
That was my initial thought as well, but on second thought it does not seem like such a good idea to provide binaries that will never get patched for a public-facing service. Sure, not the company’s issue anymore, but still…
It might make a community rewrite of the server code easier, but that would likely only be attempted for very few games.
It doesn't need to be public-facing. The point is not to be able to continue playing as if the game was still being supported, it's to be able to continue playing at all, in some way. You can set up a box at home and let two or three of your friends in through a VPN. Security is not a concern.
Having a documented API and the game actually abiding by it would probably be way more expensive than ensuring you can dump the source code on the community on end of life. The latter is only (sometimes) costly now because the industry is not built around it.
The costs won't be high if doing things that way are industry standard as required by law so all middle ware is already certified for it.
And its not like its a bad thing for a company to calculate in the full cost from the start rather than offloading it onto society when they drop the product.
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