One thing the business-minded non-creative, non-technical folks can never seem to understand is that ideas, concepts, first drafts, prototypes, etc are the easy part. The polished final products are what take the vast majority of time.

There are legitimate uses for generative AI, but it’s a tool, and cannot replace workers and preserve any quality bar.

Yeah it’s a blog platform that has a variety of functionality built in, including their big one: newsletter-style email subscriptions. Everything can be optionally paywalled by the blogger.

Let them fight.

Less clickbait and more reblogging, but yeah it’s not a good piece. It attempts to set a little context but overall fails miserably to explain the complexities around this and fails to evaluate how much credence should be given to the original poster.

I am so tired of these rags recycling this drivel for clicks. I shouldn’t expect any better of The Atlantic, they’ve been awful for as long as I’ve known they existed.

He used to be. He realized eventually and has massively improved.

Yeah. Students entering college in the last 5 years were in elementary during the disaster of NCLB. Common core didn’t recover us from that disaster entirely either. There are problems in education that need fixing. Sensationalist journalist Rose Horowitch is not going to be guiding us toward a solution.

Overall, this article seems to either misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent a lot. Like they misrepresent/misunderstand what “no zeros” policies are. They don’t address the reasons so many schools stopped requiring SAT scores. Etc

I didn’t dive too deep into the report in question.

I definitely agree on being suspicious of the motives behind the article.

I mean it’s a democratic republic. The words describe aspects of the political system and nation.

The republic is the nation/government itself (of the people etc). Democracy is the political system used to achieve our republic.

But yes both are under attack by Nazis.

I just found a recent video from Chris Wilson that does a much better job distinguishing dark patterns from game mechanics some people might enjoy and shared it here: https://beehaw.org/post/23297295

The core problem here is that the author(s) don’t seem to consider that not every game is intended for everyone, and instead seem to imply that if they’re not for everyone then some of the reasons they aren’t is a “dark pattern”.

I really cannot be exhaustive because there are so many problems. But I will try to give a few examples. Fair warning: As I wrote the below, I began to get a bit irreverent because reading the text is pretty upsetting so I needed to lighten my own mood. I guess maybe the authors here are using some sort of dark pattern? /s

“Some games have special events that occur during specific times. If you want to participate in the special event, you must play during this time window. Players who work or travel may be unable to play during these time windows and will miss out and feel stress.”

Many ARPGs that have fixed-length events that occur over a period of hours, days, or months. Some games (eg. Grim Dawn) even have these modded in by players. Are those players modding in a dark pattern? Maybe the author of this personally doesn’t like the idea that some people may be left out by work or travel requirements, but like, can’t the rest of us enjoy our game without being effectively told that work and travel come first, so therefore it’s a dark pattern?

“Some games use the time of day to change aspects of the game. Maybe certain items can only be collected at night. This forces people to play the game during times when they might not otherwise play.”

Like, don’t play a game during a time you don’t want to? There are game developers that would like to experiment with this type of mechanic.

" Some games use a mechanic called “Harvesting” which can be implemented in many ways, but in general the player starts an action that will take some long time to complete. The player must return to the game at some specific time in the future to collect the reward. Sometimes, the reward is lost if not collected in time."

Welcome to almost every city builder, management game, automation game, and so on. It’s perfectly fine if some people want instant gratification in your games, but some of us really enjoy these types of mechanic.

“Another way that developers implement an Infinite Treadmill is by continually expanding the game and adding new content. It might be possible to complete everything in the game right now, but soon the developers will release new levels and extend the game.”

So adding new content to a game is now a dark pattern? This is just way too general.

“Additionally, if someone is already bored with a game and a new event is announced, the player may stick around to see if the new event rekindles their enjoyment in the game in which they have already invested significant time and money.”

Oh no, boredom, we can’t allow people to be bored in the hopes that they find newfound enjoyment in an old favorite game.

“This is often combined with the Playing by Appointment dark pattern. For example, the team may have a raid or other event scheduled for 10:00am. Because players don’t want to let their team down, they may rearrange their schedule or play the game when they should be at work or doing something else important. A player on vacation may be desperate to find a WiFi connection so they can login and support their team.”

Oh no, some gamers treat their games like a social hobby with meetings and events, this must be a dark pattern.

"If the game allows you to share resources, trade items or send gifts to your friends or other players then it may be using the dark pattern of Reciprocity. The person who receives your gift may feel a sense of obligation to return the favor. They may not have resources to share, and so they may feel bad that they gave something valuable away, or they may feel shame or guilt if they do not reciprocate. These unwanted negative feelings make the game less enjoyable. "

Oh no the game encourages… sharing digital items? I don’t know where to start.

And then, the whole section on competition is a mess. Like yeah there can be problems with competitive games, but again it’s just so overly general. Oh no a kid who lost a game of basketball wants to play more to get better?

"For people who collect things, the collection can have significant emotional value. It may connect them to something that they enjoy or feel strongly about. Some people collect for the thrill of the hunt, others may collect because it gives them a sense of security or control. Others may derive great satisfaction from having a complete set and feel anxious when they are missing a piece of a set. “All of these psychological effects contribute to making you keep playing the game, even if the “playing” of the game is not enjoyable anymore.”

This reeks of “you’re not playing it right”. I’m not a huge fan of collection games, but I am close with people who really enjoy that style of gameplay. Thats WHY they enjoy them. Not because of some other “playing” the game, but because collecting things is playing the game for them.

I’m going to stop there.

I was pretty intrigued by this, because I actively avoid games that try to push me into doing things I don’t want to.

Unfortunately, after reading their descriptions of the various “dark” patterns, I am quite worried that this site could do more harm than good if it gets broad traction.

While it has a few notes here and there disclaiming people’s preferences and fun, mostly it heavily over-identifies “dark” patterns. It doesn’t make it clear enough to the non-gaming friends/spouses/parents of the gamer that these patterns aren’t by default “dark”.

It over-classifies many forms of difficulty, mastery, complexity, routines, socializing, and more as “dark”. I hope this website doesn’t gain traction in its current state, because if it does it could further a moral panic around many games that people enjoy. Based on their descriptions, this panic would likely be even more focused on games that neurodivergent people enjoy, because of course…

Moral panic about video games in the past has been an excuse to bully people, often kids in the past, but more and more adults as well.

He was a decent mayor. Ran as a centrist in SF and pretty much governed as an SF centrist. He legalized gay marriage before it had clear majority support. He’d never make that type of move now. He was less terrible on homelessness as mayor than he is now.

So sorry. Take care of yourself, and those around you.

Never expect journalism from NYT. They exist to manufacture consent for the oligarchs. Have since the Iraq War days. Probably longer.

Very cool. I remember the effects of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone. This reminds me of the that.

It sounds like the problem you describe is not with the concept of using serverless/faas cloud compute and adjacent services, but with the design and implementation done by some engineers you work with. That may be due to time constraints, lack of familiarity, engineering skill, or some other reason.

I’ve seen terrible containers, terrible vms, terrible bare metal servers. I’ve written good and bad myself. And yes, I’ve seen (and done) great implementation of serverless. It’s all just tools to be used.

This reads as if someone doesn’t understand cloud compute, iac, and so on, and just got frustrated trying to learn and explore the paradigm.

That’s fine, but blaming “serverless” or aws lambda is like blaming a multicore cpu for having to learn threads and subprocceses.

Definitely for over a decade. NYT was a major force in selling the Iraq War to the American public on behalf of the Bush administration.

Valnet is a scourge on hobbyist media

Pdf is more flexible than printing a doc. The format supports layers, so it would avoid losing information if it saves as a layer visible in the default view. This certainly matters in some cases.