There are older structures and artifacts than 250 years, they're just not European in origin. Like Cahokia Mounds in Illinois: https://cahokiamounds.org/
Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.
Also if one expands it to the Americas more broadly it goes back pretty far. Earlier this year on a trip to Central America I stayed in a home that dated to the mid-16th century. Still not as impressive as what Europe has, but was neat!
> Executive pay might seem astronomical, but it is often commensurate with the level of stress and responsibility involved.
I call bull on that. Employees often have just as much stress, often imposed on them from those higher up, where if they don't do well they could get fired and it could mean they can't put food on the table.
Several times I've worked in environments where the stress was incredibly high, and once it even put me in the hospital after a long stretch of working 70 hour weeks to satisfy the insane deadlines my CEO boss wanted (this was at a startup).
Whereas if an executive screws up they just golden parachute to another cushy gig elsewhere, oftentimes, because even if they screw up, they're still valued as having experience running companies by other companies. And even if they cannot, they still likely got paid enough that they won't be struggling financially if they go through a period without a job.
- Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on original Game Boy
- Proximity (old Flash game I made, but I've played hundreds of times, and it's the only game design of mine in which I've done that, out of several dozen)
Board Games:
- Legendary: A Marvel Deckbuilding Game
- Marvel Champions
- Lord of the Rings - The Card Game
- Aeon's End
- Ashes Reborn / Ashes Ascendancy (they rebooted it under a new name recently, but the other content is still compatible)
I've been a software nerd all my life (and there was a time where I worked 60 hours a week at a startup working hard to make mobile games), but there's just been so much extra crap associated with it (especially web development, and especially corporate web development, what currently pays my bills) over the years that it's worn me down and I'm happy to let A.I. churn through the hard or frustrating or endless amounts of boilerplate bits, and let me focus on other things.
Part of me still wishes we were making websites with just HTML, CSS, PHP, and a little Javascript here and there (before AJAX). I'm still not convinced all this extra SPA functionality is really needed for most corporate website needs (something like Google maps or real-time chatting, sure, other things not so much), but I do it because they insist.
I also really like game design, and I had a fairly simple game idea that I prototyped a physical version of and playtested a few times and thought, 'yeah, this is pretty fun'.
But I don't have the energy to code it in my spare time anymore. Was curious how close to a working MVP it could get with me writing up a specification yesterday with the help of ChatGPT (after I brainstormed a few aspects of the design), and dumped that spec into a new repo on GitHub, and about 20 minutes later, it had a fully functional game that worked exactly like my physical prototype.
It was still missing other features, like tutorials and stats and sharing abilities and the like, and I'd like to adjust the presentation some, and the computer opponent A.I. was a bit weak and could have been stronger, but it was fully functional and even looked pretty good, kind of like a Wordle presentation, which was what I was going for anyway.
Something that would have taken me probably 40 hours of dedicated work at least to get everything working and looking as nice as it did.
So yeah, it's kind of like 'well what's the point of me manually coding this anymore'.
What I really like about software was solving puzzles, but now I can focus on the more interesting puzzle of what makes a good game design and 'how best to present this to players' instead of how to get five different libraries and/or APIs to play nice together and learn how it all works.
If coding hadn't become some labyrinthian monstrosity and got out of your way when coding, I probably would want to keep coding more.
Some languages/frameworks get close to that, Lua/Love2D is pretty smooth except when it gets to you wanting to distribute it on platforms other than PC/Mac/Linux, or integrate with external libraries, or for me work with shaders since I'm still pretty weak with shaders.
But even then, it was hard to deny how much faster A.I. could code a feature and I've started getting more hands-off there as well.
That being said, work has gotten less fulfilling, since I'm not doing any actual design work really, just implementing features and making them look according to Figma specifications or fixing bugs, so that's gotten less fulfilling without the busywork of solving coding puzzles (now it's 'how to say this to the A.I. to get it to fix this right, which is still a puzzle but a much weaker one). I'm starting to get tempted to make a go of starting my own business so I can have more autonomy again.
I've definitely had a lot of these same experiences (in fact I've been fighting it on one particular issue the past couple of days and I'm pretty much just giving up and going back to solving it manually now).
But it still seems to get it right (or at least close enough to right that I keep using it) more often than it gets into these traps.
I would. I don't sell on eBay because it's a hassle to manage all the rest of it. So I end up taking it to a place like Half-Price Books instead and get hardly anything, but at least it gets out of the house. 30-40% cut would be a significant step up compared to what I get from those places.
Yeah I work from home. Except for 1-2 short zoom calls a day or talking with my wife, who also works from home, I can go pretty much the whole week without talking to anyone. I try to make sure I go out with friends at least once on the weekends, though, to sort of make up for it.
But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life.
But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat complicated solo card games, in my spare time. So I'm hoping that helps counteract things a little bit too.
I used to think that working from home was the best thing since sliced bread, when I got to stop going to the office due to COVID.
But during the five years that I worked from home, I suffered a precipitous decline in overall health. It is too easy to stumble out of bed minutes before work starts, spend the day on Zoom calls, then spend more time behind the computer wrapping things up, and then veg out on the sofa after a long, long day. Too little exercise, no meaningful human contact.
I have been working from an office for the past year or so, and my health is improving, but it is a deep hole to climb out of.
Interesting, I've had basically the opposite experience working from home since COVID. I exercise more, cook more, sleep better, go for more walks.
Part of it is just time and energy freed up from my commute. I always felt wiped out after fighting through traffic to get home. But if I lived in a small apartment in a place that wasn't good for walking, I'd probably hate it.
I can see that this _could_ happen, but I've had the opposite experience; I spend an hour or 2 every day outside exercising, I knock off at a sensible hour to play with the kids, I have lunch with the wife & kids on days that they aren't at school/work.
I do miss the corporate banter a bit, but organise social events with colleagues in the nearest city periodically that helps.
If COVID had happened when I was young and single, it would have been the end of me. I remember a couple attempts to work from home, and in under a week I was going stir crazy, dying for human interaction. The only reason WFH has worked out great for me now is that I have a wife [who also WFH] and a couple kids. I have no desire to drive into the office any more, but that would change quickly if for some reason I found myself living alone again.
Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job, and not nearly as fulfilling. You get to see smiles and frowns and everything in between in a job and there is no board game that can match the complexity and novelty of random humans asking you to solve their problems.
>Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job
I think one should optimize for 'most intrinsically rewarding' not 'most engaging'. I shudder to picture a retirement spent doing 'customer service' and if a retirement of working on projects, travel, reading and playing video games leads to 'more cognitive decline', well, so be it. I would rather be daft in my old age than miserable
My main card game lately has been the Legendary system of games, in particular the Marvel version (although I did just order the James Bond version this morning too after playing the app version this past week). I like to play it with two players and alternate hands, but you can play it solo too.
Another one I like to play is Ashes, which has solo enemies you can play against. It's entry point nowadays is called Ashes Ascendancy.
And I play a lot of cooperative card games by the publisher Fantasy Flight Games, namely Marvel Champions, Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, and Arkham Horror - The Card Game. Lord of the Rings is starting to go out of print, and the older content for the other two is out of print, but the other two are still coming out with new content (and I have all the old stuff so I can still play them).
All of these have a ton of content with them, so I can play a bunch of games and not get bored of them. I've played each of them over 50 times, and some as many as 150 times, and yet there's still plenty I haven't played for each of them.
Agree with you for my day job (which is coding corporate web app), for sure. I'm still letting A.I. drive more nowadays, but it does feel less fulfilling than it used to.
But for my personal projects, I work on games, and by offloading a lot of the coding work to A.I., my puzzle solving is no longer 'how to fix this stupid library spitting stupid errors at me' or 'how to get this shader working' or 'why is this upgrade breaking all the things' and more 'what does this game need in order to be fun and good?', which I find a lot more fulfilling.
It's also why I switched my focus to board game design for the longest time. I didn't have to fight my tools or learn some new api or library frequently. And if I wanted to try a new mechanic, I didn't need to spend 20 minutes or 2 hours or 2 days implementing it, I could write something on an index card in five seconds and shift mid-game most of the time.
A.I. just brought video games closer to that experience, which actually has made them more fun to work on again, because board games has the immense (financial/logistical if self-publishing or social/networking if attempting to get published through a publisher) challenge of getting physical games published to worry about.
The puzzle thought was mostly me trying to figure out why AI coding was more emotionally tiring when I'm literally doing less and creating more, maybe it's something else.
The defensive code is getting to me (it's adding a ton of bloat) and I'm trying to fight it but I'm not sure how best to word it. What I've attempted hasn't worked too well so far.
How do you get it to not add so much unnecessarily defensive code?
Have you tried Blue Prince? It's got some similarities (it's basically Myst + a spatial puzzle + modern drafting/resource management board game).
And you don't have the time element of Outer Wilds (Outer Wilds is brilliant though, and it kinda needs that time element to work properly).
I mean technically it does in that you only have so many steps in a day, but you only spend a step moving from one room to another, so you can take your time in any given room, and you have ways to increase those steps.
Also you're more likely to block yourself off with your room layout for the day than you are to run out of steps, at least once you start getting better at the game (it can happen though).
Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.
reply