mancerayder (u/mancerayder)

mancerayder commented on The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure technicshistory.com/2025/... · Posted by u/cfmcdonald

ido · 3 days ago

    Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 
    'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense 
    of sameness?

In short, no. There were >19,000 games released on steam this year alone in all possible genres (most of them not FPSs or simulators). Even if 90% are "bad" (because 90% of anything is bad) the top 10% (1,900) still span every possible genre including many that didn't exist in the 80s. I suggest that if you're truly interested in finding some modern gems that you try to search for communities that revolve around your interests (for example on reddit).

mancerayder · 2 days ago

How many of those are puzzle-based classical Adventure Games like the recent Lucy dreaming?

Many of the genres are baloney, at least the stuff that comes back in search results as recent - it's all Work Simulator, a slow grind, the ubiquitous first person shooter, horror or everyone's favorite hack and slash genre.

We're drowning in numbers, is all you're really telling me.

mancerayder commented on The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure technicshistory.com/2025/... · Posted by u/cfmcdonald

fragmede · 3 days ago

Monkey Island. The difficulty of the first game and the difficulty of the last game. The last game was still a game, but the challenge wasn't there. It just wasn't there. We might as well just be playing Progress Quest.

mancerayder · 3 days ago

Monkey Island 1 and 2 have deep memories for me. I'll never forget playing Monkey Island 2 during a cold Christmas when I was a kid. The PC speaker music was great (King's Quest V was my other present and I still remember the opening music). One day I got the Sound Blaster on my 486 SX and it blew my mind.

The Monkey Island that came out a few years ago sadly felt like a puzzle-free story for children and their parents to sit together to play. Elaine lacked humor and cynicism, there was a child's voice in some of the narration, the graphics were strangely cubic and stylistic instead of warm, and the characters seemed caricatures of themselves (like season 5 of a comedy series where the writing devolves into self-referential insider jokes about the past seasons).

I feel terrible saying that.

Will Adventure games come back, or are we lost on the new ADHD world of interruptible short content?

mancerayder commented on The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure technicshistory.com/2025/... · Posted by u/cfmcdonald

ido · 3 days ago

I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.

mancerayder · 3 days ago

Is that true? While there's a much larger overall volume of content out there, many many games to choose from... Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense of sameness?

Nothing feels really novel. Where the innovation is seems to focus on graphical realism, which of course I love.

I'm strongly attached to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and while I'm near the end of the game, I'm dragging my feet so I don't have to go back to the drawing board of sorting through endless terrible FPS and retro hack and slash games on Steam that don't interest me and are copies of 20 year old games.

Adventure games (the topic here) are my favorite though, and it's very rare that anything comes out. The Sierra and LucasArts days are over (RIP). That said a few gems come out here and there, like Lucy Dreaming.

mancerayder commented on The Junior Hiring Crisis people-work.io/blog/junio... · Posted by u/mooreds

eudamoniac · 14 days ago

The biggest question that isn't being asked, "why is a university incapable of training a competent programmer in four years?"

I'm quite sure I could take my cousin who has never heard the word HTML and get her to be a better programmer than the average CS graduate within 4 years of tutelage. Why is this the case? Four years is a very long time, and the universities are wasting that time. I'm certain any driven individual would end up a mid-level candidate if they skipped college and instead trained themselves for that time, especially if they hire a senior tutor for far less than the cost of the college tuition.

mancerayder · 14 days ago

It's been a while, but one of the reasons I avoided getting a CS degree a few decades ago was because it was basically mathematics. To this day, interviews are the only thing this would have benefited thanks to Leetcode.

mancerayder commented on High-income job losses are cooling housing demand jbrec.com/insights/job-gr... · Posted by u/gmays

mancerayder · 15 days ago

40 percent of transactions in NYC were done with no finance contingency ("all cash") in the last year.

That's a record and it's vastly more than years past. We live in a world where people with vast assets are beating out people who rely on job income for things like housing.

The stock market exploded the past year, and there's your bifurcation: those with assets and those without - getting worse.

mancerayder commented on Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff? economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/harambae

protocolture · 16 days ago

>No Jira

If I was trying to attract intelligent applicants looking for work outside of software engineering, that would be in the headline.

mancerayder · 15 days ago

What about also excluding "Scrum Masters" and then "Fibonacci Numbers" and two week "sprints"?

mancerayder commented on Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff? economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/harambae

bluGill · 16 days ago

Renters, make sure you vote. NIMBY really hurts you when the house owners who vote make it impossible for you to get affordable rent. Rental properties get higher property taxes: rent goes up, or the quality of the house goes down. When cheap apartments cannot legally be built: there are no cheap apartments.

mancerayder · 15 days ago

Some of the YIMBY stuff is coming in the form of stricter environment regulations and even union labor rules and high minimum wage. Looking at you, NYC, where building 99 unit buildings and no more is the norm because otherwise the wage becomes $40/hr. It's called 485-x.

There's no escape in the US from the problem. It's either California with weird complicated property tax laws that make no one sell, Texas with unlimited and disgusting urban sprawl, Florida with shoddy construction, or NYC with big headaches tied to strict building incentives for tax breaks.

The answer could be ugly - less regulation, but now you're going red and not blue, which is very much the opposite attitude that many pro urbanization folks tend to be.

I'm not sure, other than I think the issue is that it's not Not Enough Building. It's that we allow investors to buy everything up. In NYC this year, 40 percent of condo transactions were without financing contingency. Explain that one.

mancerayder commented on AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out apolloacademy.com/ai-adop... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

mancerayder · 18 days ago

Has anyone tried asking the exact same product questions to both ChatGPT 5.1 and Gemini? I did this twice today with wildly different results. In one case I was comparing capabilities and suggestions on audio equipment, being very specific in the setup, the models, and my goals. It was completely different in the results. I was comparing objective metrics and product specifications.

I plan on doing this every time now because ChatGPT gets things wrong constantly, apologizes and changes its facts, while Gemini is cheerful and positive like a salesperson.

These things have given me tremendous doubt after one year of usage.

mancerayder commented on AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out apolloacademy.com/ai-adop... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

xgulfie · 19 days ago

If I was openAI or whatever I would be investing in circular partnerships with claude or whatever, claim agentic use should be considered the same as real users, then have each other's LLM systems use each other and finally achieve infinite, uncapped user growth

mancerayder · 18 days ago

That could be argued to be a fraudulent approach to juicing metrics.

mancerayder commented on Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different? crazystupidtech.com/2025/... · Posted by u/speckx

tempestn · 25 days ago

I've always used value-tilted indexes, and am hoping that they will suffer less when the bubble pops. With that and a healthy dose of fixed income (which I chose years ago based on an assumption that the equity portion of the portfolio could drop 50% in a downturn at any time) I'm trying to stick to the plan and not try to time the market. Even though it very much feels like the bubble is near its peak (if not just past it!) I do still believe on some level that market timing is a fool's game, so I'm trying to stay convinced that the steps I've already taken are all one can rationally do.

mancerayder · 25 days ago

What sort of fixed income that doesn't require much research? A broad bond fund?

What are the implications of bond prices in this dubious interest rate environment? It seems no one knows what the Fed should or wants to do, including the Fed. And if the economy is on shaky ground, won't that be bad for bonds if companies can default?