There is no "us" when we have this level of income inequality and workers are treated like dirt. You have to be a fool now to think your company actually cares about you.
I think the core issue is the younger generation sees that the American Dream is bullshit and they aren't putting up with it anymore.
We're told from a young age that if you get educated and work hard you will be successful. You will be able to buy a house.
So, Gen Z gets a degree and is released into the hellscape that is the current state of American society. 40+ hour work weeks that are incredibly stressful, with bosses and companies who do not care about you at all. Rent, health care, child care, student loans - impossible to afford all these things on their low salaries, and when the business they work for is probably making as much profit in the history of the company, they see it as extremely unfair.
Vacation days? Time off? Barely any, deal with it. Getting called in on your day off? Part of the job.
And the worst part is all around them they hear boomers and older people tell them that this is normal. "Oh you're just weak and complaining. I had it worse in my day. You have an iPhone, Netflix, and Starbucks, you're living in luxury!"
Gen Z looks around and says - wait, is this really it? Is this what I've been preparing for my entire childhood? To just be miserable all week and have 2 measly days off that is barely enough time to do all the non-work stuff that needs doing like cleaning, bills, shopping? I see my coworkers 100x more than my family and friends. I get 2 weeks of vacation EVERY YEAR. I can barely afford to share an apartment let alone buy a house.
And I'm supposed to do this for 40 more years??? This is Life?
Fuck that
Oh, and to top it all off, they're inheriting the mess that is climate change.
Is the American Dream dead though? You can learn the basics of coding in a few months, score your first dev job, invest in your career and live a rather lovely rest of your life in some of the nicest parts of the country, working from either a cushy air-conditioned office with a big monitor, or from the comfort of your home wearing PJs. You don't even have to be that good, to be fair, the industry is infinitely hungry for people able to stitch a few paragraphs of javascript together while also having some basic fluency in English. You first job won't be at Google, but your second or third just might, and then you're practically set for life with that sort of luxury brand name on your resume.
Yeah, you won't have it easy in other industries that have plateaued or shrunk over the years due to technological shifts, but social mobility towards a very acceptable lifestyle is still plenty possible in the US.
Milennial not Gen-Z here: I see where you are coming I think your life experiences may be biasing you.
For example:
I have a computer science degree and I am far from bad off but I am one serious medical illness away from having to blow my retirement fund on medical bills or lose my house. And I pay $14k a year for that shitty medical insurance.
Coding for 20 years, 12 since my college degree... still no Google job.
And for the privilege of being in the top 10% I get to work 70+ hours a week and haven't taken a vacation where I haven't been called by my boss... ever... not even my honey moon.
And I'm lucky, most of the people I know don't own a house or have a retirement fund or safety net.
My father is in his 70s, has millions in savings but medical bills for his cancer will eat through almost all of that before he passes.
I'm pretty sure the American dream was not to rent for the rest of your life, work 60+ hours a week, retire at 80, never take vacation, be called by your boss all hours of the day, and leave nothing to your kids because your entire life savings got wiped out in your last 5 years of life by medical expenses.
And that is the life of an upper middle class family! 75% of the country has it worse.
And that is buying a house 7 years ago. No way in hell could I do that today.. my house is now "worth" $750k... I paid half that 7 years ago but my pay is barely higher than it was then so no way in hell I could afford it now. When I bought $750k would have been a literal mansion.
Real estate is definitely more of an issue for your generation. But the silver lining of Covid is the normalization of working remotely, so you can perhaps live some place cheap. Granted, if you were raised in California, say, that big house in Nebraska is going to be pretty miserable for you come winter time.
As for work? Work is work. That's why people look forward to retirement. In an old Calvin and Hobbes Calvin says "It isn't work if nobody is making you do it." On the other hand, just about anything becomes unpleasant if someone is making you do it and making you do it their way.
I'm in-between, but honestly, young americans, even those with high-paying jobs, have it really hard.
When i told i was on a month-long vacation, the question was "oh, you're on sabbatical or in-bewteen jobs?". I just have 10 weeks a year plus two weeks of training of my choosing. It was a bit more than the bare minimum, but not having at least 7 weeks/year would be really harsh.
I think rather they were sold a myth of how easy life would be. For all this “hardship” people are swarming to come here and when they get here, want to stay.
There is also a problem with inversion of cost. “Things” were expensive my parents day - TV, etc. Property was cheaper, so a boomer sees an iPhone and says a person is rich, but looks at his own 3k sq ft house and thinks “nothing special”.
No kidding; I have a couple AUKEY dashcams, one of the removed brands. Searching for an AUKEY DR02 on amazon.co.uk returns an identical model from a brand ostensibly named "ABBB", whose product listing even includes identical images and a description ripped straight from AUKEY's website, for the same price.
That's to be expected as Aukey is also just a brand name for rebranded white label products of varying quality. The difference is a little card in the package promising compensation for a positive review.
This will certainly get appealed and bogged down even more in the legal system, right? What are the chances this actually happens? And when?
Secondly, this is such an easy way to increase your take by 20+% that I would imagine almost every publisher is going to be offering their own payments platform, not just the biggest ones like Epic.
It will be interesting to see how many small companies figure out that tax and general compliance is worth every penny that Apple charges them. Smart ones will opt for a seller of record approach, but many will get burnt.
Stripe provides a lot of tooling ( more than apple) for compliance. Apple is hardly the only payment provider which simplifies payment processing for small developers.
"Tooling for compliance" sounds a hell of a lot more complicated than "you sell my app and send me a check", which is the deal on the App Store, Steam, etc.
Finance and compliance is lot more complicated than send me a Cheque for most businesses.
Stripe ( and others) have products right from incorporation (Atlas?), identity verification, custom reporting, fraud/risk, Charge backs, Tax reporting/ filing and even PoS terminals etc.
Most businesses have to deal with multiple channels (Android, web, iOS and others), custom reporting, and different risk/compliance will need solutions well beyond what Apple is offering
Why would the app store model stop working? Paying through the app store has a direct benefit to usability. Before in app purchases the app store model worked fine.
Even if the Epic lawsuit goes completely off the rails and Apple is forced to allow external app stores on iOS, they can still maintain a profitable app store if they provide the best experience to end users. Building an app store is very hard, and convincing people to install an alternative store is even harder, so I doubt they'll lose much there.
The app store is so ludicrously profitable that the exclusivity they enjoy can't possibly be the only reason it's making them money. This cut into Apple's (and Google's) profits, but it certainly won't mean the end of app stores as we know them.
> if they provide the best experience to end users
I don't think they can. Their DNA on this evolved as a monopoly. They won't be able to compete, they will be slow and boring while clever people will overpower them.
I think they will find a way. The Mac App Store is far from a monopoly yet it still remains profitable as far as I know.
My grandma isn't going to use any alternative store, she probably doesn't even understand the concept of different app stores. I think Apple will be fine, at least until competitors somehow gain a MASSIVE usability advantage.
It doesn't kill it much more then it killed the android store in the past when it wasn't (roughly, in practice) enforcing the same thing.
It's a revenue cut, but at least for the beginning it won't be a problem at all for apple, this might change at some point, but stocks have no reason to majorly drop now they still can do so in the future if it makes sense.
I could be wrong, but I think that "untouched" forest is not really going to be so nice unless you let natural wildfires come by every decade and clear out the undergrowth, or you have a lot of big animals naturally making trails, or you have forestry employees keeping up the forest.
So, if you have a few acres of forest yourself, none of the above things are going to be happening, you actually have to build trails through it and then maintain them. And, you will constantly have fallen branches and fallen trees that need to be cleared. It's a lot of work. I have a few acres of forest in the PNW.
I hear this a lot from a West Coast perspective, but I don't understand it.
Northern New England is almost entirely forested, and it isn't managed or maintained to anything like the same degree as West Coast forests, and yet we don't have the problems with giant segments going up in smoke every year. We don't even really have suburbs. We just have towns that are mostly forests, separated from each other by areas that are completely forests with one road going through.
I'm (obviously) no expert in this, but it seems that our largely untouched forests do a lot better than the ones that are so intensively managed. I have to imagine this has been studied and state maintenance of forests isn't just some giant government boondoggle that leads to massive fires and no one's noticed, but that's how it looks from several thousand miles away!
Part of it is just different climate. The west coast is mostly what is called Mediterranean, which means we have almost no rain during the summer months. By August everything is dry as a bone and ready to burn. Don't you guys get rain pretty much year round?
There's just so much moisture in the plants that fires don't do that much under most normal circumstances in New England. Storm damage is a bigger concern but that just makes trees ugly/dead or has them falling on power lines and houses. Rotted trees are just wet, gross, and full of bugs -- they're not necessarily fire hazards.
In the northeast we don't have wildfires like that. It's just too wet especially in the river valley in which I live. And 'winter' is basically 6 months long.
The undergrowth just uh, under-grows unless you expressly clear it out to make it more pleasant to walk around in.
It mentions programmers without making any particular claims about it; they don’t actually demonstrate any losers. Outsourcing to India has been a thing for many years, and US companies appear to have every incentive to take advantage of it, but somehow they keep paying pleasantly high wages to Americans.
It's the red queen effect though, as soon as you make the IAP, you quickly advance, but then you will soon hit the next plateau. So you're stuck again unless you keep making IAPs. If a game is pay-to-win, you have to keep paying and paying and paying. It's not like you can pay once and then you're good.
> The Fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away - it's trying to get 100 triangles away.
Maybe this is obvious but I'm not seeing it... Why would an NPC measure distance in triangles instead of meters? Why is it trying to get 100 triangles away?
I wonder if this is just actually not true, but was a hamfisted way of explaining what was happening.
In the low-density mesh which the fox uses, there are more nodes around treasure, and because edges connect nodes, more of the edges in uninteresting space lead towards treasure. So just by picking random edges, or edges away from the player, you are likely to end up near treasure. It's a bit like the is fox moving through a non-Euclidean space which has more volume near treasure.
Because measuring distance by hops would be absolutely daft.
Easiest way to pick a valid random location is to pick the center of a nav triangle. They could have traversed the nav mesh counting distance instead of just triangles but I guess they didn't and it worked out fine for the game.
To avoid the conversion (and more complicated path finding algorithm) and use less cpu, I would think. Game dev is all about the cpu budget in order to achieve a target frame rate.
In particular if you're doing pathing for tons of npcs (as they are) you really want to keep that optimized. In Guild Wars at launch for one of our expansions we had huge CPU issues with our game servers - it turned out designers had laid down really long elaborate paths for NPCs like guards and townspeople and the server was calculating all those paths at once when players entered a new zone, so it was saturating the game server. I had to build an auditing tool so we could scan all the zones for long paths and replace them with simple ones.
Bethesda has been building this specific type of game for decades so at this point things like npcs having complex patrols or other behavior is something they've figured out how to do well.
I played a lot of Guild Wars when I was a teenager with my friends! We were very glad to have a MMO that was fun and had raids, even though we couldn’t afford the other ones with a monthly cost. It was also prettier than other games. I still remember many of the locations :)
The twitter thread isn't super clear about the exact mechanics. But If I had to guess, maybe the fleeing fox randomly chooses the path to follow, and because there are more possible paths in the dense parts of the map the odds of selecting one of those is higher. i.e. if I have 6 possible paths to my right, two to my front, and two to my left, if I randomly pick a path there is a 60% change of going right.
As I understood that is that the fox is looking for the longest path (e.g. distance defined by breadth-first search) and longest paths are usually the ones that lead you to treasure because treasure is hidden deep within levels
That's funny, I understand it as the exact opposite. The fox is tasked with finding the shortest path that hits 100 points. This leads it to the closest high point density area.
> "The Fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away - it's trying to get 100 triangles away."
Breadth-first search wouldn't be possible. If at each triangle the fox has ~2 options that's 2^100 to get to 100 triangles away
But if it did impossibly work out every journey, and then chose a random last node it would end up in camps more often.
Depth-first search shouldn't preference the camps, unless it gets dragged in from afar. But if it can only get dragged in really close to/in a camp, then it's about the same probability as the fox running past/through a camp anyway. And I would assume as a player you would see the fact it's pretty.
it doesn't know density. density is a property of the triangle placement. More triangles in "dense" areas. Pick a random triangle, you are likely to fall into a dense area.
