akrotkov (u/akrotkov)

akrotkov commented on Evidence that AI is destroying jobs for young people derekthompson.org/p/the-e... · Posted by u/duck

ENGNR · 6 months ago

Anecdotally I saw a post on reddit about a senior SWE in the USA who was laid off and couldn't get any interviews, with their old job outsourced to eastern Europe. And then this month the people he hadn't even got a response back from started requesting he apply for their jobs. Only one data point but the market might be coming back.

akrotkov · 6 months ago

Anecdotally in the past month or so, I've started seeing a large uptick in recruiter reach-outs. I had none for the past year (aside from directly reaching out), but there have been 4 cold contacts in the last couple of weeks alone now.

akrotkov commented on An analysis of recent multithreading improvements for a smoother game dev.arma3.com/post/oprep-... · Posted by u/diggan

dustbunny · 9 months ago

Another model may be that all actors read from frame N-1 and write to frame N. Then there's not many copies, just one.

akrotkov · 9 months ago

Two, surely? The previous one still being used and the new one being written.

(Note that this is how most rendering artifacts were fixed long ago - the on screen and the off screen buffers were swapped, so nobody would "see" in progress scenes)

akrotkov commented on People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies rollingstone.com/culture/... · Posted by u/wzm

ChrisMarshallNY · 10 months ago

Nope. Don't especially mind, not remembering them.

I have since learned about schizophrenia/schizoaffective (from having a family member suffer from it), and it sounds almost exactly what they went through.

The thing that I remember, was that I was absolutely certain of these “revelations.” There was no doubt, whatsoever, despite the almost complete absence of any supporting evidence.

akrotkov · 10 months ago

I wonder if that's a similar mental state you have while lucid dreaming or just after waking up. You feel like you have all of the answers and struggle to write them down before your brain wipes them out.

Reading it over once fully lucid? It's gibberish.

akrotkov commented on Real Time Chess – A physical chess board without the concept of turns github.com/misprit7/real-... · Posted by u/dschuessler

akrotkov · a year ago

I spent hundreds of hours 20 years ago playing Kung Fu Chess[1], which was the (first?) online version of this concept. That was a fun time.

The physical board and magnets definitely add a cool factor to it as does the physical dexterity element. Nice project!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung-Fu_Chess

akrotkov commented on What Is miniKanren? minikanren.org/... · Posted by u/Bluestein

will_byrd · a year ago

Hi! I'm one of the miniKanren peeps. Happy to talk miniKanren and relational programming!

akrotkov · a year ago

Hello!

miniKanren was my introduction to relational programming (SQL aside!), and I had hours of trying to wrap my head around the Reasoned Schemer.

Were you aware a miniKanren-inspired language was the foundation of a large chunk of Amazon's retail data aggregation stack? I'm no longer there, but it might be one of the larger deployments out there. We spent many many hours trying to figure out the best way to run the relational engine at scale and with acceptable performance.

akrotkov commented on ACF has been hijacked anderegg.ca/2024/10/13/ac... · Posted by u/GavinAnderegg

gwerbret · a year ago

Aside: each and every post about Wordpress on HN over the past couple of days has been downweighted basically to oblivion (I expect this one to vanish from anywhere near the front page very soon). Is there a reason for this? The topic is rapidly evolving and is relevant to the HN community.

akrotkov · a year ago

I believe the comment-to-upvote ratio is triggering an automated down-weighing on most of them.

akrotkov commented on We built the extension that blocks ads, trackers and third-party cookies ultrablock.org/about/... · Posted by u/dotcoma

akrotkov · 2 years ago

I'll ask the question that I'm sure many are thinking but I don't see answered on the page:

Why choose this extension over uBlock Origin, which has years of trust built?

akrotkov commented on Show HN: I built an indie, browser-based MMORPG alpha.reconquer.online... · Posted by u/onemandevteam

onemandevteam · 2 years ago

Thank you!

I think, like you said, a good strategy will be to keep it fun and hobby-like as long as possible. I can definitely see the business-side of it sucking all my time and energy.

I think doing some educational materials will be a worthwhile way to market and gain interest. Community building with something like a Discord server will also help. Competing as a business with something like Jagex is 100x harder than just making a good game.

akrotkov · 2 years ago

To be clear, it's not Jagex you're competing with. It's the 20+ other indie MMO solo developers who are trying to do the same thing as you, including but not limited to: RetroMMO, New Eden, Valorbound, Carth, Eterspire, Omuri, Shadefell, Cookie Dragon, Cinis, Cinderstone, Legends of Etherell, Legendarium, Mirage Realms, Aether Story, Ethyrial, and so on. There's more that come and go every month.

Unfortunately, the #1 lesson that I've learned is that while nostalgia gets some reception, there's a reason no big companies are really making MMOs, even at a smaller scale. There's just not that large a viable market for them.

akrotkov commented on Show HN: I built an indie, browser-based MMORPG alpha.reconquer.online... · Posted by u/onemandevteam

onemandevteam · 2 years ago

Do you have any suggestions? Your game seemed very popular. Anything you wished you had focused more on?

akrotkov · 2 years ago

Set your expectations accordingly.

Coding is the fun part, but it's less than 5% of actually launching and making a successful product. If you don't think you want to spend most of your time not coding, don't try to make it a business!

Marketing is more important than making something. You will get a small boost from things like this (I was always too embarrassed to post here!), but it's an endless pit of time and money! To do it right, I've heard all sorts of numbers, but a good rule of thumb is every dollar/hour you put to making your game, put a dollar/hour to marketing it as well.

From a technical perspective, your stack is fine. You want to make sure you host all your assets behind cloudflare/s3 or similar, the $5 server is fine for gameplay but if you also try to make it send all the stuff, it's gonna die. (As evidenced today!)

Most of my other experience and advice is about how to run a team and set budgets and goals. If you're going about it as a hobby (and that's probably the best way to go!) then just keep doing what you're doing, write some blogs and foster a community instead.

akrotkov commented on Show HN: I built an indie, browser-based MMORPG alpha.reconquer.online... · Posted by u/onemandevteam

akrotkov · 2 years ago

Huh, this is fun!

I built Genfanad (http://genfanad.com/) as a browser based game with similar inspirations to yours a few years ago. A lot of the technologies you mentioned are very similar. It's surprising how easy getting something up and running is these days!

We ended up shutting down a few months ago as I couldn't figure out how to take it to profitability. Do you have plans for that, or is it just a fun side project?