Well, it’s a movie about making movies, I think that choice is fitting.

We stopped developing quality self-hosted forums and somehow now everyone is all over live chats. Chat is the worse form of communication to create permanent records of support issues. It’s the flipside of Wiki’s problems. They use hidden wikis to host discussion of wikipedia articles, moderation and other topics and the thing is a nightmare because it is not suited for conversation. FOSS development needs something that can do both. Live group chat for general discussion, with a static discussion forum for single issues, and a wiki where it can all be archived as structured articles. There’s currently nothing popular that fills the bill.

They all fall for turning KPIs into goals. When KPI become targets, they stop being KPIs. They often forget that KPIs are supposed to be used for informing the evaluation of desired outcomes, they aren’t outcomes on themselves. At most they could be activitie’s outputs. There are also many more stats and information that can feed the evaluation of outcomes that aren’t KPIs, and qualitative evaluations are most definitely a must.

1. Yes, you can share location, the widgets aren’t as fancy as Google integration with everything.

2. Not feasible without the constant data harvesting in the background, which it doesn’t do. It doesn’t log your every move as Google does. Privacy vs surveillance, will always be at odds.

3. Depending on the area. In my country public transportation is way better on OSM than on Gmaps. Oftentimes Gmaps won’t even have large structures like train stations or bus terminals. It depends on users and contributors.

It’s already pretty much a rich people hobby. There are many facilities and heavy assistance from locals. It’s dangerous still. But it’s not even among the top 5 most deadly, dangerous or difficult climbs. In really good weather you can pay for a helicopter ride to get you even further up from base camp thus making your climb shorter.

Ffs, this is why I never engage with you. You’re so thick skulled, nuance is always lost on you. It’s like “bad faith argument, the person”. Enjoy your strawman, you built it, you can keep it.

Yes, any proto-whatever theory is colonialist in essence. It’s a very heated argument in anthropology, sociology and social psychology. The current consensus is that it is only valid for the indo-european migration, and a version exist for the proto-sino-tibetan migration. But, we understand that it can only be claimed to apply thus far, and with all sorts of modern ideological biases and caveats. Both language and religion are extremely complex social phenomena that have independently appeared all throughout history. And every time they have their very unique and distinct qualities. There’s no unified tree of languages that has enough evidence to be authoritative. And there’s no such linear derivation equivalent for religion. It is all just pop-sci feefees.

This is colonial thinking. “Civilization just happens to be the natural evolution of what I am doing. Your ways are barbarian backwards savagery”. It is the same logic.

There’s nothing natural or linear in religious belief. Catholicism itself is fragmented into hundreds of sects, and so is every single religion ever to have existed. Adapted to the particular capricious vanities of the local clergy and the established local customs. Christians taking some Jewish elements was just a manipulation tactic. I’m also sure some Islam sects would behead you for suggesting that Islam is a derivative of Christianity. The theory of a proto religion is also wrong, we know for a fact that not all of modern religions started from the same proto-belief, but ancient religions are actually quite varied and distinct.

It always complete the picture to understand that the creation myth used in the Bible was not Jewish or Christian in origin. It was an appropriation of a pagan myth of the era. Like most Christianity, it is just a syncretism to make the cult palatable to the newly recruited. “Oh yes, that thing that you already believe in was totally our god”.

It is a sync, it’s exactly what is supposed to happen. In cloud computing there is sync and remote back up. Each behaves differently, there’s also sync directionality, archival metadata, snapshots, etc. Always make sure you understand how the storage solution works before committing your files to someone else’s custody. And as the old adage says, at least two independent mediums, at least two distant locations, at least one restore rehearsal a year, or else you don’t actually have a back up.

I don’t agree that they don’t care about story and only do it for marketing.

I never said that, but sure, you’re free to disagree with the thing I never said.

halflife’s episodes are all about an attempt at continuing that story.

And, as I said earlier, they got bored, found it to not be a satisfying thing to do and stopped and never did it again. Episode 2 was 17 years ago. There will never be an episode 3 or half-life 3.

I think that the Cave and Glados bits of portal are a large part of what made those games

That part sold those games but funnily enough they aren’t even half of the game. Most of Portal 2’s content is on the multiplayer coop puzzles. They have more levels and a play through runs for more hours than the single player portion.

I think the only way to know would to be an insider

We have them, I’m not making shit up. There are dozens of interviews, documentaries, in-game commentary and books written by Valve staff themselves saying exactly what I have been summarizing in these comments. This idea isn’t mine, I’m just repeating what people at Valve have publicly said about game development.

And the first Defense of the Ancients was originally a mod for a completely different game. The common theme is polishing gameplay. Team fortress existed and was popular, but between the release of TF classic, with the announcement of TF2, and the actual release there were almost 9 years and a complete rewrite between two radically different versions of the game. At one point people compared it with Duke nukem, claiming it was vaporware and would never release. Truth is, it was in development hell for a long while. They didn’t like what the game was at that time. TF classic and TF2 only common thread is class based team death match. Everything else is different. The producers have said that TF2 was resurrected to perfect the netcode, lighting, facial animation rigging, particle system and shading tech for the source engine in anticipation of the visual and gameplay improvements they wanted for HL2ep1 and 2. All three games were produced by the same guy and Gabe noticed what he experimented with on TF2 was worth developing into a finished game. Specially because they dropped all the ideas they didn’t like and stripped down the gameplay.

The other side of the coin being that Valve had learned the importance of visual packaging and marketing with Ricochet. With pure gameplay, although wildly acclaimed for being super fun, it didn’t reach the mass appeal and cultural impact of half-life. It had great repayable value, but no eye candy or lore to hook people long term. So, when TF2 was a success with its character based marketing narrative, it became the test bed for a myriad of things we now take for granted. Matchmaking, micro transactions, cosmetics stores, etc. (All things that were made to develop the Steam store social features, which was produced by the other guy who made the TF mod originally) Valve only goes hard on things they think are innovative or interesting tech, or at least plain fun to do. If the internal sponsor of an idea get bored or loses support from colleagues, the project just halts.

Story is a major parte of the marketing. It’s not like they don’t care about story, just it isn’t the seed they start from.

If you read Raising up the bar, or watch the documentaries they are upfront about it. Half-life was in its inception a loose collection of levels and set pieces of experimentation to push the limits of the game engine they were working with. They didn’t start with a story then made a game to tell it. They had a game then hired writers to help them string together the levels in a way that told a coherent story. Half-life 2 was also made to construct a new physics system for the source engine. TF2 was the result of experimentation with team based death match gameplay. Left4death was created when they were experimenting with game director and mass numbers of enemies and discovered it was fun to mow down huge numbers of enemies. Alyx is the result of developing gameplay for VR. Portal started literally with the portals system. Dota2 was a polish of MOBAs gameplay. Etc.

They work on world building and story writing only once they find a gameplay breakthrough that is fun. When they tried to make the story first (half-life 2 episode 2), they found it boring to develop so they stopped. Hence why there’s no episode 3. Portal 2 was not made to tell cave Johnson story, it was to make fun puzzles with liquid physics.

It’s Valve, their whole MO is finding what would be fun next. They don’t expend money on something for any reason other than, is it fun, is it fun to work on. If either answer is no, then it won’t even see the outside world. There’s rumors they have worked on several games up to relatively advanced levels of development (at least a playable gameplay loop) then dropped them altogether because something didn’t work out, and they never talk about it with anyone unless it is finally decided it will be a launched product. That’s why this closed testing is such a big deal, they’re letting people play it, which means they already played it internally for thousands of hours.

Another interesting pattern is that they don’t make games to tell stories. This has always been a misconception since Half-life has such massive following over the story, and hurt over unfinished plots. But if you check closely, those games where never about the story. Usually Valve makes something with a fun mechanic to play, then they work on writing a creative and cool story/dialogue around that gameplay. Never the other way around. 99% of their games are about gameplay, if you stripped all flavor text, voice dialogue and art from Portal it would still be a solid and extremely fun puzzle game.

If some people are starving due to artificial (economically induced) scarcity of food. As in, there’s enough food and means to distribute it to feed everyone but we don’t. Then it is not post-scarcity. Post-scarcity is about universal access to resources. Not about the material accumulation of the resource in a spreadsheet. As I said, small and circumstantial scarcity can occur under post-scarcity, it doesn’t mean no-scarcity. But gross artificial scarcity is automatically a disqualification.

It’s the same thing. Post-scarcity doesn’t mean no scarcity. The point is, though, that people are not compelled to work under risk or threat of death, hunger, poverty, cold, homelessness or illness. If you can’t or don’t want to work, you are not doomed or socially shunned. Even if you do work, that’s no guarantee that you’ll not suffer from the occasional hardships of reality like there’s not enough chocolate this month due to a drought, or avocados went extinct or whatever, but you won’t die of starvation with millions of tons of food hoarded on a warehouse because a capitalist pig decided to rack up the price of rice.

I agree, this is also a perfectly valid read. Unfortunately Star Trek spends a lot of time with Starfleet and The Federation and almost not at all with Earth to understand the nuances of governance of productivity. But they are still supposed to be several billions of people, it’s hard to imagine there’s only ad-hoc organization going on to keep something as massive as Starfleet and The Federation going. Even the Vulcans had the High Command. Earth must have something akin to a government structure going on to produce a representative diplomatic corpus. The Federation is supposed to be a Republic after all, and that’s not anarchy. Perhaps a system of direct democratic municipalism, but we don’t know for sure.

Post-scarcity is a socialist term. It came about from futurist elaborations on Marxist materialist ideology. The reduction of labour to the minimum necessary in a society is one of the tenets of communism in order to reach post-capitalism. Certainly by technology, but also by diverting the products of labour, not for the profit and enrichment of the capitalist class, but for the provision to the needs of all society via free distribution of goods and services to all. According to Marx socialism is a necessary stage to reach communism, but communism doesn’t mean the disappearance of socialism.

The federation is a post-scarcity socialist utopia. They don’t even have money. Every single human being has ensured healthcare, housing, food, and education of their choice guaranteed from birth. Rise among ranks of the few hierarchical power structures is based on merit, performance, experience and training. I can’t recall anything specific about the productive sectors that allow this to happen, but since they have access to virtually infinite amounts of energy and everything can be done by machines and matter replicators, there’s no motive for hoarding means of production or wealth, so one would assume that most productive endeavors and enterprises are collectivists by default. Same with political institutions as hoarding power doesn’t guarantee anything significant beyond what the average person already posses. They also have wide social openness, tolerance and acceptance as the most common sources of intolerance and bigotry (wealth, religion, power, prestige, etc.) have been regulated or removed. So there’s no logical point on slaving, discriminating, oppressing or exploiting any particular class of people, some classes of people might not even exists, as there’s no concept of poverty, nor race or sexual discrimination in the culture of the federation.

As a result people don’t have to work, but most probably choose to involve themselves in some sort of productive activity as a form of hobby. Members of the Starfleet for example, aren’t doing so for any particular material incentive. But do it because they think space exploration is neat, or because they seek glory and honor on the Starfleet mission, or because they really really like fusion cores.

They are as socialist as it comes.

It doesn’t help that the people pushing the public and the C suite executives to destroy everyone’s livelihood in favor of AI were the exact same people scamming everyone with crypto and NFTs, and the same people breaking online privacy and enshittifying everything online with ad herpes.