Check out the Mistborn and Wheel of Time series for books that are waaay better than Harry Potter. Anything by Brandon Sanderson and Neil Gaiman is a good time.

Also highly recommend any comics by Moebius and/or Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Neil Gaiman. Some incredible mind altering works to enjoy there like The Incal and Sandman.

I think the games industry will start to use open source tools like Blender and Godot more and more. These options have really matured over the years and compete on features and productivity with commercial options.

From a business POV - open source makes a lot of sense when you need a guarantee your investment won’t evaporate because a vendor has cancelled a feature or API your game uses. With open source, if you don’t like a path the upstream code is taking you can fork off and make your own!

Part of the dynamic is also how people are inspired and learning skills. You can learn how to do very advanced stuff in Blender for free on Youtube - why would you pay some private college thousands of dollars to learn an expensive program like Maya to do the same thing?

Here are the number of hours I’ve spent on indie games VS AAA titles, according to my Steam library:

• Indie - Valheim - 435 hours
• Indie - Space Haven - 332 hours
• Indie - Satisfactory - 215 hours
• Indie - Dyson Sphere Program - 203 hours
• AAA - Skyrim - 98 hours
• AAA - Control - 47 hours
• AAA - Far Cry 6 - 29 hours
• AAA - Max Payne 3 - 43 minutes

If we’re talking about value - the amount of playtime I’ve gotten out of games with simpler graphics and unique ideas blows the billions spent by the industry out of the water.

My biggest gripe with big tech is how governments of the world encourage their worst behaviours. Governments and businesses have failed to maintain their own level of expertise and understanding of technology.

Today everything relies on tech but all the solutions are outsourced and rely on “guidance” and free hand outs from vendors like Microsoft. This has caused situations where billions are poured into digital transformation efforts with fuck all to show for it but administrative headaches, ballooning costs and security breaches.

I’m so tired of silicon valley frat boys being the leaders of our industry. We need to go back to an engineer and ideas led industry. Focused on solving problems and making lives better. Not making bullshit unsustainable business monopolies with a huge pile of money. Right now big tech is the embodiment of all of capitalisms worst qualities.

P.s. apologies if my comment is a bit simplistic and vague. didn’t want to write a 10 page rant but still wanted to say my 2c about the state of things.

Ah yes, the original unviable silicon valley businesses! I love how they used their VC money to undercut and kill small businesses all over the world.

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All that matters is the sponsorship tier - will you be flying the judge out to a vacation? Buying their mother a house? The outcome is solely dependent on your investment in the court. Justice.

No sane court? So it has a real chance of being decided by The Supreme Court…

I reckon it’s hard to attach blame to Microsoft because of the culture of corporate governance and how decisions are made (without experts).

Tech has become a bunch of walled gardens with absolute secrecy over minor nothings. After 1-2 decades of that, we have a generation of professionals who have no idea how anything works and need to sign up for $5 a month phone app / cloud services just to do basic stuff they could normally do on their own on a PC - they just don’t know how or how to put the pieces together due to inexperience / lack of exposure.

Whether it’s corporate or government leadership, the lack of understanding of basics in tech is now a liability. It’s allowed corporations like Microsoft to set their own quality standards without any outside regulation while they are entrusted with vital infrastructure and to provide technical advisory, even though they have a clear vested interest there.

OK, but people aren’t running Crowdstrike OS. They’re running Microsoft Windows.

I think that some responsibility should lie with Microsoft - to create an OS that

1. Recovers gracefully from third party code that bugs out
2. Doesn’t allow third party software updates to break boot

I get that there can be unforeseeable bugs, I’m a programmer of over two decades myself. But there are also steps you can take to strengthen your code, and as a Windows user it feels more like their resources are focused on random new shit no one wants instead of on the core stability and reliability of the system.

It seems to be like third party updates have a lot of control/influence over the OS and that’s all well and good, but the equivalent of a “Try and Catch” is what they needed here and yet nothing seems to be in place. The OS just boot loops.

Why is no one blaming Microsoft? It’s their non resilient OS that crashed.