It’s why I don’t use engines!

I couldn’t imagine using an engine for a jam game and getting what I want out of the jam.

But I can respect that decision, because for some folks it’s the vision, for others it’s the marketing, for some it’s making the assets.

There are a lot of pieces that go into making something that stands out.

I don’t think it misses the point at all.

Playtesting with an LLM is just another way to feed the process, with it’s own set of tradeoffs.

Look, it’s the ban the Internet guy calling into letterman in the 90s.

Yeah, people were saying the same thing about internet use in the aughts and we’re all here still and doing fine.

It managed to achieve the lofty quality of 10,000 identical uninteresting mobile RTS games before it.

It’s cute and these little jam games are important but pretending they’re the same as what studios do is fairly delusional.

I have dire news for you, itch.io is hosted in the cloud! In a data center! The horror!

• A game jammer who always codes their own engines during the jam because using a pre-built engine is cheating.

By who? The game is playable.

It’s not like your average play tester making 20 bucks an hour is some kind of artistic genius, mostly they’re just working the bugs out.

The guy made a thing with a computer. So what? Get off your high horse like clicking a mouse a few times is some kind of proof of the ‘creative process at work’.

So he spent his time differently, great. If he decides to be an indie, he can spend the next 8-24 months going to conferences and begging for reused art assets and small checks to pay people on fiver or buy models on the unity store, he can spend the same amount of time going to conferences and begging for creative feedback and small checks to pay people to work on the design.

This is not where it is. It’s when the next person really does have a great idea, and doesn’t need to beg a publisher or spend thousands of hours honing an unrelated skill like blender to build a prototype.

It is a reductive view, but at least I have a point.

Bad things happening to people is a social problem which should be addressed. You making it personal is a political problem, and the Internet is the enabling technology. The Internet didn’t make you or I into assholes by itself.

Of course.

The US is filled with chavinists who can’t tell the difference between a social issue, a political issue, and an emerging technology.

There is a lot to unpack here, finance is interesting.

Investors spend money to build companies on the expectation that those companies will be worth more money than they spent in the future.

One way they spend that money is on the acquisition of bonds, which are firm guarantees against future debts. Bonds are often part of other financial structures (you’ll see them a lot in a hedge, which is a way to limit liability on an investment in exchange for some upside).

If I’m reading the article correctly, those bonds had a condition where they could be converted to shares at a certain price, so the investment and the hedge were part of the same instrument.

It’s not accurate to say that the money could have been deployed otherwise, one way to think about this is that large banks have very large, often self-issued, credit limits. Companies also have self-issued credit limits, related to the banks.

In this case specifically, some amount of this money is going to come out of the IPO, the 80 billion doesn’t exist in any other way.

tl;dr The 80 billion that ‘vanished’ here wasn’t actually spent on anything, it’s valuation against those bonds. It’s also an exciting headline.

Anyways, I hope this was helpful, these companies are definitely getting a lot of investment (running up their credit cards) in the hopes of a big payout, but this doesn’t have anything to do with private equities current running speculation on data center construction or power consumption, or any of those big problems.

Compare the resources used to the alternatives.

Unfortunately, we will never enjoy the fruits of prosperity, because our system is designed to squeeze first, ask questions later.

Instead of being reduced, human misery will be redirected, and little will change.