Please clap

This weekend I got a chance to attend Roguelike Celebration: a small conference put on in SF dealing with the design and history of roguelike games. This was a fantastic experience and I wanted to jot down a few notes from it. All of the talks were recorded so if you’re looking to watch them yourself, which I highly recommend, the first stage stream archive is here and the second stage is here.

Permadeth shouldn’t be a painful thing

This came up in numerous presentations. For me, the interesting part was that it wasn’t seen as a difficulty thing by the developers. Instead, it was seen as a way to make choices more weighty. Lots of developers looked for ways to make past games affect future game worlds. The dwarf fortress developers, specifically, presented this as a logical extension of the top scores lists that were in the arcade games that they grew up with.

One great example of this is in Binding Of Isaac, a game inspired by rogue-likes. Each play-though of that game has a pretty good chance of unlocking additional item pickups/characters. Enough “wins” will also make the game harder/longer, which is a great way of adjusting difficulty/not overwhelming players.

Spatial navigation is the hardest thing to make accessible for people without sight

Alexei Pepers gave a fantastic talk on the research she did on making rogue-likes accessible.

Alexei Pepers on Twitter

If you missed my talk at #roguelikecel about roguelike accessibility for visually impaired players, direct link here https://t.co/NdzaPn9SaG

Lots of great a11y points here that are not game-specific. If you make interactive products and this stuff matters to your work (it probably does) I urge you to listen to the talk. One of the interesting points made in this talk was that the text-based nature of these games make them much easier to adapt to an audio interface, which ties in nicely into…

Sacrificing graphical fidelity allows developers to create incredibly deep game-play interactions

In their talk Zach and Tarn Adam, creators of Dwarf Fortress, brought up a bug that was causing cats to throw up. The flow goes something like this: a dwarf throws beer on the ground, a cat walks over the beer and gets it on it’s paws, the cat licks the beer off it’s paws, some bad math (the actual bug) causes the game engine to think the cat just drank an entire cup of beer, at which point the math that calculates the BAC for the cat decides that the cat drank too much and should throw up.

This is an incredible amount of game systems all interacting with each other! And it would never be possible with AAA games today. Modeling this behavior would be completely infeasible if each one of those steps needed animations/models/sounds.

The cutting edge of procedural generation involves a human component

I got to witness a play-though of the Bad News game. This was probably the most interesting part of the presentation for me, personally. The “engine” of the bad news game is composed of man and machine. The closest thing I can compare it to would be centaur chess.

A quick summary: the player is a mortician responsible for notifying a next of kin of a death in an unfamiliar procedurally generated town. The town and all of it’s inhabitants are generated (with backstories, personalities, desires, and relationships) for each game. The inhabitants are played by an actor who talks with the player face to face and has a display telling them the relevant information about the person they are playing and what they know about the topic they are discussing with the player. The player goes from location to location asking people questions and tracking down the next of kin.

The part of this I fixated on was how the responsibilities of maintaining a coherent game world were divided between the human and mechanical parts of the engine. The machine handled what everyone in the town knew and where they were. The humans handled the in-person interaction and the construction of the narrative. As the player plays, another person queries the database of the roughly 300 people living in this town to try to create a compelling narrative that the actor can lean on to provide a cohesive experience.

There is probably an entire blog post in here about how the human mind craves a narrative and how we tend to create them out of nothing to make sense of information in a way that’s wholly different from what a computer does. (Why haven’t we created narrative-based databases?) Buuut… this post is already pretty long.

Originally published at Alex Zelenskiy.

Some Thoughts

• Super easy to set up. Logged in to FB in the battle.net app and went for it. App does a great job making sure game is streaming even when you’re alt-tabbed out.
• Privacy options for me as a person FB account (as opposed to a page) were “friends” or “only me”. I was able to make the stream public using the app on my phone after I started it though.
• Very minimal but useful settings. Friend let me know that my mic was too quiet and I was able to quickly fix the problem.
• No way to read comments that I was able to find. Had to pull up the post on my phone and glance at that to read comments. This will probably be a lot better with windowed games like hearthstone.
• Given that this is a Facebook stream and I had 10 viewers max, it would have been nice to see who was watching. I couldn’t find a way to pull this info up on my phone (where I was reading comments). This will definitely not make sense for big streams with thousands of views, but for regular people it would be nice to see which of their friends is on.
• I have a lot of respect for Twitch streamers. It’s hard to try to play and think about saying something coherent.

Really fun experience, but I felt some pressure to “be good at the videogame” even though just one person was watching a lot of the time.

(PS. somewhere in the stream I wanted to say Sean Dunne (the director) but I think I said Ryan Dahl (creator of node.js). My brain is weird and I’m sorry)

The steps

Capture

First things first, make sure your iPhone is shooting in 4k and that you have enough storage to be able to handle that and whatever duplicates you create if you’re not grading with iMovie. To turn on 4K…

1. Open Settings
2. Go to “Photos and Camera”
3. There is a “Record Video” option towards the bottom that can be set to “4k at 30fps”

Now you’re ready to burn up your memory.

Grading

iMovie (which we will have to use no matter what) has options for this, but I really like the Chromic app. Chromic was able to handle 4k video, and running the 40 seconds of video through a bunch of adjustments did not take very long. That being said, my phone got EXTREMELY hot.

3/4 of the way through the process I put it down on a bag with some ice cubes so that it could cool down.

Edit

I used iMovie. It had actually been a while, but I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to use and the random utility features it had (like being able to overdub a video).

Export

iMovie again. This step is a little more prescriptive. The YouTube app will only let you upload HD. iMovie, on the other hand, can upload 4K content to YouTube directly without having to scale down or touch a computer. This worked for me on the first try despite taking what seemed like forever.

Conclusion

Really not that bad! About a year ago I had a nexus android that could record 4K and being able to do ANYTHING with that footage on the phone was extremely painful.

This is one of the cases where apple supporting it’s phone with first party apps makes a big difference. iMovie works extremely well as a final editing tool/glue to video hosting sites.

Originally published at Alex Zelenskiy.

The video is pretty bad. It’s probably even worse since I tried (unsuccessfully) to grade it into something better in premiere. That being said, I think there is promise in the format… maybe…

• If you’re doing 360 stuff as a consumer you’re probably better off sticking to photos. The quality is more than good enough for “social media”.

• The theta, with it’s app, is really well set up for the camera->phone photo workflow. You can adjust the image in the app and then kick it over to your photo editing app of choice.
• It is NOT set up well for video. Or at least everything else isn’t. YouTube and Facebook support 3D video, but you can either post straight from the theta app (which doesn’t really let you edit), or you can put the footage into some kind of video editing app which will strip the 360 metadata.
• Free money-losing app idea: a mobile app that adds metadata back to 3D video on my iphone. I have to do this with a python app now that looks like it was made for windows 95.
• You CAN convert stills to videos with apps like roll world. This is cooler than it sounds since a lot of the fun of having a 360 photo is using an app to move around in it, not looking at the still.
• It’s pretty likely that 360 video won’t be compelling from a consumer standpoint until the cost of capturing 4k footage drops and streaming it becomes a possibility. 1080p is still too grainy for my eyes.
• Same for VR. Footage where the camera is moving could easily cause motion sickness, and still camera footage is hard to make interesting without a lot of work.

That’s about it. If you want to see good theta 360 shots, along with a lot of other good stuff, go check out Phillip Bloom’s Insta.

This style of temporary housing is not new. Japanese pod hotels have been offering services similar to this for some time. Expensive cities have a need for cut rate housing. I know plenty of people who have been in communal living situations due to trade offs they have had to make in their lives. I am not begrudging anyone for making the best of their situation (although getting logo tattoos is kind of weird).

The thing that hurt my brain reading this is the way the place is presented as an experimental communal living experience. The $30 cements your identity as a diversity loving free spirit as much as it pays for a place to not be cold at night.

PodShare’s site is laden with millennial-friendly tech buzzwords, like the sharing economy, pod culture, nomadic freelancers, access not ownership, and even “Podestrians,” the company’s name for guests, each of whom get profiles on its website.

It is my belief that there is no better way to lose touch with what is truly important than to define your identity by what you buy instead of what you make. Living in a dorm room in college didn’t make me feel trendy. It was just the best housing I could afford. We’re there great parts? Absolutely. Was it a part of my self-image? Nope.

Finally, there is this:

“I started it to cure my own loneliness,” said Beck, “so I never had a night without friends.”

The correct word is ‘customers’.

Originally published at Alex Zelenskiy.

After the IPO, Facebook has been trying to prove itself to the world. It’s two most hyped efforts have been Graph Search and Home. Both have failed to ignite the excitement of the general public.

Each one is a significant technical achievement that maybe only Facebook could have executed and that maybe no one wants. I think that the general reaction to both has been similar:

“I’m sure that there is someone out there that would love this.”

Those people have turned out to be few.

All of the data

I imagine that the experience of working at Facebook must be intoxicating. Facebook is sitting on data that no one has ever collected before, in such immense quantities that few companies have any hope to catch up. It must feel like there is gold just beneath the tile floor, hidden in every suspended ceiling. Every day, they come to work in the Taj Mahal.

The task that remains before them is to extract and profit from their vast riches. The graph is the raw material. From it they must hew a service that everyone desires and only they are capable of providing.

I should add that, in general, people want them to succeed. People will willingly give up their own privacy, a scarce commodity these days, to get a peek behind the curtain.

Facebook will swing for the fences for as long as it takes because we all want to know what the graph can tell us about the human condition. Each failure or fumbled product launch is hard step on the road to inevitable success and glory.

That’s enough sports metaphors for now.

The fear

The monster under the bed is the idea that the graph contains no useful information, just noise. Sure, we have a pretty good way of targeting specific demographics with Facebook ads, but Target can already know if you’re pregnant before you do. How advanced is this technology anyway?

And if there is no grand payoff. If no new insights about humanity emerge. If the graph cannot tell me anything about myself that I did not have to manually type in. If no one can fully conceptualize that one breakthrough Facebook service that we cannot do without because it does not exist. What then?

I don’t think anyone who is really into technology wants this to be the case. It’s boring. As someone who grew up on sci-fi novels, I can almost feel it in my bones that there is something big here. There HAS to be. We just haven’t gotten to it yet.

I think.

Right now

Facebook is a successful advertising company with a well-funded R&D department. I’m not sure what they want to be, deep down in their corporate hive-mind, but it feels like they aspire to something greater.

Becoming that thing would require a breathtaking discovery.

So, they keep digging.

As our society discovers and creates, we must cope with our combined knowledge growing faster than our individual capacity to know things. Our solution - thus far - has been to specialize. When what is known expands, each individual becomes responsible for less breadth and more depth.

Back in the olden days there was only one kind of computer scientist. Before that there was only one kind of car mechanic. And even before that there was only one kind of doctor, who was also a barber. We used to know a lot less about cutting hair.

My job involves pushing bits around in a computer using abstractions that other programmers have provided me with. It’s pretty specific, but with the money I make I can pay Claire to fix my bicycle after I run it into something. The system works: I can spend my time being good at programming and Claire can be good at running a bicycle shop.

I should also probably save some of the money I make for retirement.

Retirement planning progression

I think that it would be reasonable to assume that as time goes on people are required to take a much less participatory role in planning their retirement. The financial market constantly increases in complexity, and is about as relevant to most people’s interests as animal husbandry. What we find is a little different.

Back before social safety nets made us all weak and pathetic, the way you prepared for old age was by having a big family. The idea was that your children would take care of you when you got old, as you had done for your parents. This works pretty well, but there are flaws.

Raising a big family and maintaining the social mores that require them to take care of you is complicated. It’s also much more viable in an agrarian society than an industrial/post-industrial one. So this inevitably went out of style as we moved into more urban environments and started having fewer kids.

Next up, we have pensions. These are way simpler than that last method. A pension is a contract that entitles you to be paid a certain amount of money regularly, usually until you die. Generally, you earn a pension by working for some number of years.

This ALREADY sounds great. Work for X years, get Y dollars every month. Someone else takes care of the details and I get a regular check.

If pensions were so simple and easy, what replaced them must be excellent.

The current way to retire comfortably

Right now the major retirement buckets my money can go into are an IRA or a 401k. The IRA and 401k both have Roth varieties that change how taxes are applied to them and… maybe I should make a list…

• IRA: Several varieties exist that determine how contributions interact with taxes. The type determines whether or not you can withdraw the principal before retirement age without penalties.
• The maximum yearly contribution one can make to an IRA changes every year - it’s about 5 grand right now - but is significantly less than you need to save to safely retire.
• After my income reaches a certain level, I may no longer contribute to an IRA.
• 401k: Set up by employers who will sometimes match your contribution up to a certain percentage of your salary. Their contribution may vest over time.
• If I do not put my retirement into one of these “tax advantaged accounts” then my earnings can be taxed as capital gains or regular income depending on how I invest.

Picking the right bucket to put money into will involve thinking about what your tax rate is now and whether or not you expect it to be lower or higher when you retire. There are pages and pages more that I could write about the differences between these things, but you get the point: these are not simple decisions.

How much money do I put in?

Do you have a good grasp of compound interest? Good! Get your calculator out because by the time you retire you’re going to want to have eleven times your annual pay saved up.

It also helps to not retire too close to a major “financial event” like the one in 2008.

Not making money yet

Once you have your money in an IRA or 401k, it’s still just cash until you invest it in something. This means that it’s purchasing power - what you can get for it - will be constantly reduced by inflation. Currently, the government tries to get inflation to be around two percent. The FED wants you to believe that what costs $100 today to cost $102 a year from now.

The problem with inflation is that there is not a standard way to calculate it. Goods fluctuate in value in relation to each other as well as in relation to the dollar. The number of candy bars you can exchange for a gallon of oil is not going to be the same a year from now. So, we must take as many things that can be bought into account as possible before we arrive at that one inflation number. As you can imagine, different people have different ideas about how to do this.

What’s important to note is that the government is incentivized to report as low of an inflation number as possible and to keep real inflation as high as tolerable. Why?

• The government sells a special bond that pays out interest based on the current rate of inflation. As the reported rate of inflation rises, so do the payments it has to make.
• The government owes more dollars than are owed to it. By making the dollar less valuable, we lower the amount of things that our national debt represents.

To combat this erosion of my money and secure a happy retirement, I must invest it in something that will appreciate in value faster than the rate of inflation. Significantly faster, preferably. Unfortunately, the things that grow in value quickly are also prone to shrinking in value quickly. Very unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to know how likely some assets are to grow or shrink quickly.

Ok, so what do people usually invest in?

• Mutual Funds: this is pretty common because your 401k provider will give you a big list of these to choose from. These are all managed by some people who take a cut of any profit you make.
• Bonds: You can buy these from a government or company. They pay a set amount over a number of years.
• Index funds: Funds designed to track the performance of a bunch of stocks lumped together. These funds have low fees.
• Individual stocks: people who think they can do better than the overall market sometimes invest in individual businesses. This is very, very dangerous.

There are many more options, but these are the most common.

That bond thing looks pretty foolproof

It does, but the FED is currently creating money out of thin air and using it to purchase bonds. This is called quantitative easing, or QE for short. This might not make sense to you,but you need to know about it to understand this next bit.

QE raises demand for bonds, which reduces how good the payout for bonds has to be for them to be bought. Because QE has been going on for a while, investing in bonds before it’s over is a really bad idea since you will be getting such a bad deal (The FED is bidding against you).

This environment is why a Apple - a technology company - can get investors to buy 30 year bonds with tiny interest. The bond market is that bad.

Well that’s really complicated…

Congratulations for making it this far into the article. That was a lot of stuff, wasn't it? Pretty dry, huh? I've been reading books about this for a while now - I want to have teeth when I’m old - and I can’t honestly tell you I feel secure about the decisions I’m making when it comes to my retirement.

This stuff isn't easy. In fact, it makes me long for the days of pension funds. Unfortunately, those have rapidly gone out of style, and few companies continue to offer them. The reason for this is that pension funds require a safe, steady source of income to form the base of their capital.

For a while, that base was primarily composed of bonds. That strategy is no longer viable. Now that bonds have become such a bad investment - see three paragraphs up - pension funds of big companies are running into big trouble. Goldman Sachs recently gave a great presentation about how screwed pension funds are (link). Parent companies are having to pour more and more money into their funds to keep them afloat.

This is the point where things stop making sense to me. Pension funds have full-time professional investors managing them, but their goals are no different than those of the average person saving for retirement. They are both trying to ensure a steady flow of money to one or more people after those people retire.

If professionals who benefit from the economies of scale cannot reasonably be expected to provide me with a stable retirement without outside intervention, how can I be expected to do that for myself?

Everyone get angry

The occupy movement rallied against what they perceived to be a rigged game: a financial system that required their participation but did not offer them a seat at the table. Then they went home - maybe because the weather got bad - and were quickly dismissed by the collective psyche.

Even so, if any part of that movement should remain, let it be the indignation aimed at any group that takes their sliver of accumulated human knowledge and turns it against all others.

We have arrived at a market where the vast majority of effort goes into playing a less than zero sum game for material excess with risks that no one may fully understand; this is the arid earth where we must plant our dreams of a comfortable retirement.

Fortunately, farming has been around for a little while, and in that time we have figured out what the risks are and how to manage them. Machines can be financed, crops can be insured, and futures contracts can be written to lock in a price for product not yet produced. Additionally, farm subsidies serve to establish a price floor.

Strangely, not once has a person at a party told me about how they just read an article about farming and how awful it is that they missed the boat.

The financial pitfalls associated with bitcoin mining and farming are not so different, however.

Equipment

Mining enough bitcoin to really feel the money you’re earning takes significant capital. Gizmodo has a good article about the kinds of machines people are running these days.

To really get into it as more than a hobby, I could easily expect to spend 7-10k on a rig plus the costs of electricity. The Verge has published an article in which they interview a man who has spent 40k on a setup that generated $2000 every month.

In the article he implies that he financed his setup with credit card debt. If my shoddy math skills are to be believed, it will take him 23 months to pay off his rig (at 13% apr) and start generating profit.

This same article mentions that many bitcoin insiders think that rigs will have to start being updated every year to remain competitive.

How much will he be able to sell today’s equipment for in a year?

Natural disasters

If a miner’s video cards burns up, will insurance cover it?

If the equipment can be insured, how would one hedge against the associated loss in productivity?

What about a government crackdown on bitcoin?

Price fluctuations

Bitcoin, to the best of my knowledge as of this writing, does not have a futures market that is popular enough to exert downward pressure on coin exchange rates.

Icbit allows derivatives trading, but the volume is low and funding an account with dollars is not straightforward.

For mining to be viable as a serious money making venture, miners must be able to reliably lock in prices for coins before they produce them.

Risk and Reward

Of course, bitcoin mining is potentially a lot more lucrative than farming when you consider how much work/capital each require. This may make it seem like a much better idea.

What’s important to remember is the incredible amount of risk a bitcoin miner takes on and, even more importantly, their inability to hedge against those risks effectively.

Your maximum loss is everything you put in.