Archipelagia (u/Archipelagia)

Archipelagia commented on Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source ramatak.com/2023/09/15/un... · Posted by u/TMM2K

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

The difference in conversions between free and $1 is not a matter of price. The hard part is getting someone to pay in the first place.

That's why a model of free game with paid addons/extras/pay-to-win/etc. works so well – once someone already tried your game and gets invested in it, they're more likely to spend anything.

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

And in mobile gaming there's also the matter of looking for "whales". Basically, while majority of people will never spend anything, there's a minority willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars. Then, the difficulty comes from showing your game to enough people to find whales.

(Whether that model is ethical in the first place is a whole different matter. I don't think it is, so maybe eliminating it will be a net positive in the world.)

Archipelagia commented on Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source ramatak.com/2023/09/15/un... · Posted by u/TMM2K

phkahler · 3 years ago

Why not charge $1 for your game? Problem solved. If you're making a game with a fancy commercial engine I would hope what you're offering is worth a buck. Let's get some quality in this world.

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

The difference in conversions between free and $1 is not a matter of price. The hard part is getting someone to pay in the first place.

That's why a model of free game with paid addons/extras/pay-to-win/etc. works so well – once someone already tried your game and gets invested in it, they're more likely to spend anything.

Archipelagia commented on Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting? · Posted by u/imadkhan

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

At my last job, I had a little bit of experience on the other side of the hiring table – our founder walked me through our hiring process, and it was really eye opening.

Any posting we had immediately got a lot of responses. We heavily tailored our postings to appeal only to people we actually wanted (e.g. were super clear about requirements, or talked extensively about company culture), and we still got dozens of applicants almost right away. And IIRC that was just through Linkedin, I hadn't even seen how many applied through other channels.

Granted, most of them were mass-sent resumes, but that still crowded any good-fit applicants and made it a pain to look through.

For positions at bigger companies, you could easily be competing with hundreds or thousands of mass-sent applications. Even if a human being ever looks at your resume, she'll most likely make a decision on whether to throw it away in a few seconds before moving to the next one.

At this point I think applying to postings is pretty much dead. Instead, I'd focus on contacting your past colleagues asking if they know of any openings at their companies.

Instead, I'd suggest: - Contact your past colleagues if you hadn't done so yet. - If there are relevant conferences or meetups in your area, consider attending. - Also, look into meetups for groups that might look for someone like you. E.g. if you go to a front-end meetups, you're just another guy in the crowd, but at a marketing or local chamber of commerce meetup there might be only a few people with the same skillset. Granted, this one often works better for freelancing, but still. - A friend of mine found his previous job by contacting people in the field and asking for advice. He moved to a different city right after university, so had no local contacts – I told him to look up people in the companies he wanted to work for, and just message them asking for a short advice call. I think the third person he spoke to recommended him to someone that was hiring. Though the key here was that my friend was only asking for advice on how to get into the industry – but once he spoke with people, it was easy to make a good impression and they kept him in mind next time they heard of an opening.

Archipelagia commented on Successful Founders – Did you/do you ever feel unemployable? · Posted by u/Southworth

rgbrenner · 3 years ago

Serial start up founder here...

If you're trying to find a job, you're not applying for "anything and everything". You're applying for a specific role. What you want to do with your life is a question you need to ask yourself.

Once you've answered that question, you can then tailor your resume to that role. Remember a resume is just an advertisement that highlights related work experience. You can leave off stuff that's unrelated, and bring more attention to stuff that shows you can deliver value in the type of role you're looking for.

And then I would suggest crafting a (true) story about why you're looking for a job and how your experience has led you to working on the specific problem the role addresses.

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

> If you're trying to find a job, you're not applying for "anything and everything". You're applying for a specific role.

Strong agree.

I'd only add that you might have way better chances reaching to people personally rather than using traditional channels. It might sound obvious, but it's easy to forget that you can use the same skills you've built as a founder to find a job. Just messaging a few people working in the industry you care about and scheduling some calls can go a long way.

Archipelagia commented on Tips for better coding with ChatGPT nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/isingle

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

Eh, I might be a whiner, but I seeing that nature.com, I expected something better than a Malcol Gladwell level article.

Okay, the tip with anthropomorphisation is okay, and reminding people that you can't believe in LLMs output is always good... but, like, I'd assume an average Nature reader is smart enough to not need tips like "iterate" or "embrace change".

Archipelagia commented on AI used photographer’s photos for training, then slapped him with an invoice diyphotography.net/ai-use... · Posted by u/mikece

Eisenstein · 3 years ago

> but that's not how AI works, right?

What this organization is doing is making a database of links to pictures with metadata that includes what is in the pictures. AIs can use this to train. The organization is not using it to train AI nor do they host the image.

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

I didn't realize that, thank you

Archipelagia commented on AI used photographer’s photos for training, then slapped him with an invoice diyphotography.net/ai-use... · Posted by u/mikece

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

It kind of seems like an intimidation tactic. Not too many artists will be willing to claim copyright infringement, if they can get hit with a suit in response. And in the meantime, they cab happily continue training their model on whatever they want.

Archipelagia commented on AI used photographer’s photos for training, then slapped him with an invoice diyphotography.net/ai-use... · Posted by u/mikece

anotherhue · 3 years ago

This is almost like the "penalty for false DMCA" argument that is often made.

It's not clear they were wrong to do so, the photographer did cost them legal fees for something that is explicitly legal.

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

Is it legal though? Article mentioned forbidding the use of crawlers. Besides, it talks a lot how they only link to the image... but that's not how AI works, right? Maybe after incorporating the photo into its weights the model no longer needs the original, but it doesn't seem like an explicitly legal thing.

Archipelagia commented on European privacy watchdog creates ChatGPT task force reuters.com/technology/eu... · Posted by u/Bender

spaceman_2020 · 3 years ago

The last time they came up with a regulation, we got that GDPR awfulness. Made zero impact on anything, just forced me to click multiple buttons before visiting a website.

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

Yeah, the annoying notifications are the visible part... but as far as I know, GDPR has a pretty serious impact if you're European. It allows you to ask private companies to delete your data, which to me seems like a pretty huge privacy win.

Implementation could definitely be a lot better, but I think it protects Europe from the privacy hellscape that's currently happening in the US.

Archipelagia commented on In the battle between Microsoft and Google, LLM is the weapon too deadly to use theregister.com/2023/04/0... · Posted by u/rntn

aftbit · 3 years ago

IMO there is too much gnashing of teeth over AI safety at the moment. LLMs are not (currently) AGI, and their "alignment" is not yet critical. Of course new powerful tools will have both positive and negative impacts, but this is not different from any other tool. Unlike atomic bombs, there are a plethora of legitimate uses for these tools that do not involve destroying anything or killing anyone.

One does wonder what the analogy to "radioactive fallout" will be from LLMs. The obvious guesses (greater propaganda and internet spam) are likely shortsighted.

Archipelagia · 3 years ago

I think the entire idea behind safety is to start worrying before it becomes critical.

Similarly with Covid, the right time to start worrying (on a societal level) was before the disease becomes widespread. The tragedy of that means that if you take the correct action at the right time and succeed, you will always look like you were overreacting.