Perhaps you or I wouldn't. But then, many of us here earn well over six figures. And I think you underestimate the power of "free."

You'd be surprised. Money allocated for training? Pocket part of it and do a whole lot less of it for reduced costs. Some mid-level Russian officers have actually hiring their troops out for private projects instead of doing proper training. Deep corruption has proven to be an insidious force that weakens a military.

First, corruption was a massive money sink for the Red army. Wonder why the initial columns ran out of gas? Beyond the fact that their logistics were shit, I mean. The troops in the north had no idea they were actually going to attack, and there was apparently widespread theft and selling of their diesel supplies (reported by Belarusians).

But beyond that, it's been argued that Russia has the fundamentally wrong type of army built for this war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This defense analyst / blogger (Perun) really has some fascinating insights into the war, beyond the usual clickbait-filled headlines and attention-seeking talking heads on YouTube, IMO. He did videogame blogs as a hobby, but after the war started, he started blogging about defense procurement / analysis, which he's indicated may be his actual day job (he's remained anonymous).

I saw a discussion by "Operator Starsky" on YouTube, who is a media officer with Ukraine National Guard, who has started blogging about the war. He was actually part of the initial force that ran into Russian "special forces" during initial fight for the Antanov airport north of Kyiv the first day of the war. He gives a first-person account of the initial stages of one of the first and most critical battles of the war>/a>.

He wasn't very impressed with their "special forces". Fascinating listening from the Ukrainian perspective. Have to take his opinions with a grain of salt as he's clearly not an unbiased observer, but he sits down and talks about his experience in great detail, and it has a ring of truth to it, at least to me.

BTW, the answer to the question of where the trillions of rubles went is not much of a mystery, at least to western analysts. Yes, that's an hour-long powerpoint presentation on YouTube, but the presenter is amazingly perceptive and pretty entertaining. If you're interested at all in the war and why things didn't go the way everyone expected, this answers a lot of questions.

I think advertising works best for a reasonably receptive audience. If I'm a gamer, and I see an ad for a game in a genre that I particularly enjoy, in a location where it makes sense (like a gaming-focused website), I'd probably not consider that a bad thing. "Hey, I might enjoy playing that." A physical sign for a store is a form of ad that most don't generally mind so long as it's not too gaudy or obnoxious, because it's helpful when we want to locate a particular business. Want ads in papers worked well because people are exchanging goods or services. People used to read maganizes like Computer Shopper that were literally nothing but ads, because they're specifically looking for new computer gear, or just like keeping up with the latest that's available. A local restaurant might advertise on DoorDash, which I don't really mind, because I like finding new local places to try out the next time I want a meal delivered.

Where ads fail is when they become so intrusive that they actively annoy the target - frankly, that's most video-based ads, at least for me, because they're literally wasting my time. Same with things like the obnoxious pop-up ads, thankfully mostly gone from websites. And then there are online companies that track you and monetize the living fuck out of your personal information and preferences, which is beyond creepy, which just becomes repugnant, despite how they try to put a positive spin about it being a more "relevant ad experience" for you. Everyone has their own thresholds in this regard, I think.

Anyone who thinks advertising (or marketing in general) isn't important or relevant is just demonstrating their ignorance of the subject. There are loads of great products out there that never really became successful due to poor or insufficient marketing. Product quality helps, but can't guarantee success. Likewise, good marketing can make a success of average products or services. The reason advertising is so pervasive is because it produces results. It doesn't mean we have to like it though.

I think you're over-simplifying the problem of generating side-quests. The most memorable side-quests in games are interesting because the game developers went out of their way to add a unique mechanic, interesting location, or other bespoke content to it. That type of content is expensive and time consuming to create, and most of is (so far) still the kind of stuff you need artists and designers to create by hand. A generated story is not really the bottleneck there. Add a generated story to a bog-standard kill/fetch quest (which are among the few types that could be automated), and you'll just get a page of largely meaningless dialog before and after the quest that your typical player will just click past. No one wants that.

I think AI is going to have a significant impact on game development, but perhaps in different ways than most people imagine. I think we're going to see AI-powered tools that can look at a set of existing world content, then, using the same construction pieces, construct new, similarly-styled world content (like we can currently do for foliage, for instance). But this can be cities, villages, alien ship interiors, whatever. It's going to dramatically reduce the cost of building virtual worlds, and will enable massive open worlds to be constructed much more easily than they are now.

Exactly. In real life, many people like to live in suburbs precisely because they're quiet and peaceful - boring, so to speak, while still not being too far removed from the convenience of a city.

The summary touched on this a bit, but it's also the reason (among other technical reasons) that gameplay worlds tend to be highly compressed in general. As a game designer, you generally want to squeeze a lot of gameplay elements into a fairly small space. Otherwise, it's too difficult for players to conveniently find the bespoke, scripted game content (which is, btw, horrifically expensive / time consuming to create), and instead you'd just create the impression of a huge, empty, and ultimately boring world.

Windows NT onward, which went mainstream with XP. Maybe you need to update your 1990's memes.

Was just thinking the same thing. Have literally been using the same keyboard type (MS Ergonomic Keyboard 4000) for 25 years or so. I don't care about the branding, but the form factor is really perfect for me. Hopefully they don't discontinue it.

With regard to the "megacorps", you're probably correct, at least to a degree. I think we need to strengthen many of our privacy laws, for instance. A lot of politicians had a very laissez-faire attitude towards tech for the past few decades, which I think was both understandable and wise. You don't want to kill the golden goose before it grows up, after all. But we've got some well-established patterns of behavior now by these companies with regard to privacy, and the EU's privacy laws haven't spelled Armageddon for tech companies, so I think they're perhaps worth investigating and perhaps emulating. On the other hand, do you really want to follow the UK's example on requiring backdoor access in end-to-end encrypted communication? Not all government regulations benefit the consumer, and so have to be looked at case by case.

For small businesses, I think the story is even more of a mixed bag. Talk to a small business owner, ask them about regulatory burden, and they can probably talk your ear off for the next hour or so. So there's a constant balancing act between ensuring responsibility to society and customers, but not strangling small businesses in counter-productive paperwork due to badly designed regulations, of which there are many. It's one of those things you're likely to pooh-pooh until you're the one trying desperately to comply with all necessary regulations.

Mostly what I'm trying to get at is that I don't feel there are simplistic answers here. Every law or regulation that passes has both intentional and unintentional side-effects, and those can be both positive and negative.

I'm not sure I see the mission in such binary terms. They were successful right up until they failed at the last step, which is still really impressive. "Our engineers will continue to investigate the situation," Hakamada said. "At this moment, what I can tell is we are very proud of the fact that we have already achieved many things during this mission 1."

They probably have a lot of telemetry and other data to sift through. Hopefully they figure out what went wrong and succeed in a subsequent try.

"Real capitalism" is nearly always well-regulated by state authority, and has been since antiquity (see The Code of Hammurabi), since you're correct that left unchecked, it would be horribly unbalanced. Capitalism as a system is amoral, so you need to restrain it with a morality-based set of laws and regulations. I liken capitalism to fire. Incredibly useful to power the "engine" of an economy, but incredibly dangerous if left uncontrolled, just as likely to harm as help.

I'm not sure who really advocates for capitalism without any regulation, which seems like a strawman argument. The issue is usually about the degree of regulation, which I think is more compelling. Too much oversight and regulatory burden can squelch the innovation and power of capitalism. Too little lets bad actors get away with harming consumers, the ecosystem, society, etc, for the sake of profit. And as society itself and it's collective morality and ideals change, so change the laws that control and regulate businesses - minimum wages, more worker protections, child labor laws, accident insurance, stricter environmental regulations, better safety guidelines, etc.

Maybe, maybe not. I could see some small-time wanna-be party bigshot sticking his finger in local business' pies too There are a gazillion examples of the big fish / small pond stories in the US, like some insane housewife becoming a local tyrant as head of the homeowner's associate, etc. I'm not sure why China, or really, any other country, would be exempt from this phenomenon. Although granted, it probably is a bit easier for a small shop to stay under the radar if they try.

I think "authoritarian capitalist" fits them better. There's nothing "mom & pop" about their capitalism. They have massive conglomerates just like other industrialized countries. I think China still calls themselves "socialist / communist" mostly for historic / ideological reasons, not because they really fit that definition anymore. The fact that they have to kowtow to government wishes is more a function of the authoritarian nature of the government, not any socialist policies, although that's admittedly a somewhat vague line.

Oh, there are still plenty of magazines in the US too, but most are pretty mainstream at this point - stuff you might pick up at your local supermarket. Lots of women's fashion, some hunting and sports, or hobbyist. Many people still seem to enjoy the visceral aspect of paging through real books and magazines. But I suspect a lot of the niche or specialty magazines are now gone.

A few I remember fondly are the C/C++ User's Journal and Dr. Dobbs. I was still in college when I was subscribed, and I really could only understand maybe one out of every three or four articles at all back then, but definitely learned a lot. And I was big into PC gaming back then, so I subscribed to a few of those as well.

These days, of course, everything is on the internet. Slightly less nostalgic, vastly more practical. I have to say, though, I do miss many of the expertly-written, deep-dive technical articles you'd find in some of the programming-oriented magazines, though. These days, for any given search, you're mostly going to find StackOverflow quality answers, or tutorials written by amateurs that are filled with terrible practices and outright bugs. The breadth of knowledge on the web is nice, but it's often very much harder to find depth.