Bookmarked! Excited to look into this and potentially subscribe this week.
Our coding meetups [0] are going increasingly offline and I'm looking for ways to exit the feed [1]. So I really want to learn from organizations like The Offline Club and now you.
Lob.com is a powerful tool - I think more people should experiment with it. I know Robin Sloan did an experiment a few years ago that used GPT-2 to send poetry to people via Lob mail. There's something so cool about APIs that create actions in the physical world.
> As an American, I will order this phone as soon as it’s available to me!
It won’t be. From the time of their first phone the company actively made the choice to not support the US market. There’s the obvious spectrum difference and cost to certify, but the real reason they don’t want to touch it is litigation risk on patents and whatnot.
Main problem with this is that Google can end it as soon as they want to as Google effectively controls Android. Tactics like remote attestion will make it increasingly harder for Graphene to exist
This seems like the bigger problem to me the kind of people who are interested in this phone seem like the same kind of people who would be perfectly happy to order it from Europe or Asia.
I don’t think many people who really want this are the kind of people who just walk into a cell phone store and buy whatever tickles their fancy.
The practicality of that may depend on the exact details of the modem. For example, I believe it's possible to get a fairphone in the US, but last I checked it was a poor choice because it had awful support for cell frequencies actually in use. This lists "global roaming modem configuration" which may mean that it has good coverage, but... it also might not.
Jolla is saying they'll try to make it work on as many frequencies as possible for global support. I don't know the brand and how seriously to take that but usually English-speaking countries support are among the top priorities
they did indeed have a crowdfunded tablet that went wrong in supply chain, and basically bankrupted the company. Many funders lost out. That's unfortunate, and perhaps might have been avoidable with better organisation. Absolutely it sucks. They did have a limited refund program as others have noted.
However, they do not have a continous history of not shipping. I personally owned their two previous phone handsets, both shipped. Also I've bought and run their firmwares on third party handsets, they also shipped the software.
They did offer refunds in the form of vouchers for their shop. I can understand if that's not something everyone is interested in, but it's not nothing. I made use of that successfully.
It wasnt offered to everyone. They did the whole thing by trickling out information based on batches based on when you ordered. And for the record I wasnt shipped a tablet, given a refund or offered a voucher and based on comments at the time I wasnt the only one. It was a total writeoff.
It's self-inflicted. The big studios are beyond terrible. The games are more about social conditioning than entertainment.
See Clair Obscur. They got funding from the State of France and the French National Centre for Cinema, and the game is 100x better than the slop the big studios publish.
Your mention of "social conditioning" a propos of nothing gives you away like the "three fingers" in Inglorious Basterds. I would highly suggest not basing your entire personality and opinions on a slack-jawed streamer's meandering rant delivered from his RGB gaming chair for 5 hours straight.
"Let's just all make Clair Obscur/Minecraft/Blue Prince" is not a repeatable strategy (every indie dev is trying to make good games). How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4 guys? Why don't the big studios today with all their money just hire another Beatles?
Same reason why Ubisoft isn't just making another Balatro. Industrializing culture isn't (yet?) a solved problem.
> How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4 guys?
The Beatles did only take a few days to knock out each of their earliest LPs. However, per Wikipedia, "the group spent 700 hours on [Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]. The final cost [...] was approximately £25,000 (equivalent to £573,000 in 2023)."
So, actually, envelope-pushing cultural landmarks typically do require a lot of effort and money to complete.
On the other hand I'm kind of shocked that the big gaming studios never seem to be fast followers. It feels like we've been through multiple waves of Balatro-likes from indie developers already. Where is the Ubisoft Lethal Company or something? You'd think having a studio full of experienced developers with tons of tech they could hop on trends quickly. It seems like they think it's beneath them or something though. Or maybe they're just structurally incapable of moving quickly. It did take 11 years and like 4 redesigns to make Skull & Bones after all.
This is a conjencture, even if I do work in the industry but not AAA, but: Following the trends simply isn't part of their business model. Following current trends is a very unpredictable business. Many try, and many fail. AAA had the luxury of somewhat predictable sales. They can make big bets like working years on a game, since they know they will have millions of players. And they know smaller studios can't compete with them in that business.
But, of course, making games is hard, and sometimes they fail. And now the free tools are getting really good, and smaller studios are becoming increasingly competent. Will we soon see the big ones fall? Their only way to survive is to keep going bigger, escaping the smaller studios to a place they can't reach. Now we have AAAA games. But is there a limit where players stop caring how many As a game has?
The more people you add the slower you get, not faster. Large companies are nutorously slow moving (and particularly slow to change directions) vs small upstarts.
yeah, but at this point it's weird they just don't grab a studio, give them a funding for 2 years and say them 'copy the latest indie trends with a tad more polish' and let them cook to see what comes out.
They tried that, e.g. "EA Originals"[0] is basically that (there are similar programs at other major publishers). I suspect it proved to not be a big money maker at the scale required to move the needle at publishers of that size., and that they are keeping these on as a sort of prestige programs.
In his defence, Monkey Island is Ron’s creation and the ending is probably what he always intended. It felt like a fitting conclusion to me that neatly tied a bow on the whole saga.
I believe that, as far as "The Secret" goes, this is what he always intended. The idea had been floating around forums for quite a while and I have no objections to that.
Having said that, RtMI feels like Ron Gilbert telling me to go away and do something else with my life. The world is falling apart, the game characters don't care, the ending itself gives up on you and, in case you didn't get it, there's a letter afterwards from Ron Gilbert himself telling you that, if you try to recapture the past, "you'll sort of get what [you] want but it won't be what [you] expected".
As far as I'm concerned, I would have preferred it if he hadn't made the game at all.
I thought the ending was lovely as well. We get sincerity, but seems some people can't go to sleep without an epic boss fight and some dramatic reveal of the "secret". This was the better way to do it and for me the best point and click ever made.
So instead you get a sophomoric meta-ending that has absolutely no originality and shits on decades of storytelling? The ending is trash and an insult to the fans' intelligence because the author can't accept he's "just" writing adventure fiction, as if that's beneath him and instead needs to make some philosophical point about the nature of aging, thereby completely stepping out of his skill set. Go read Proust, Ron Gilbert, and leave that silly ambition to rest.
My issue with it was not even the end, but everything else: it felt like a nostalgia tour and retreading of old ideas. Even the themes of the soundtrack were based off the originals. I quit a couple hours in; I wanted a new Monkey Island story, all I got was a game for people that simply wanted to relive their youth.
Self-plug: consider Handmade Cities. We have a simple meetups [0] page if you decide you appreciate our ethos. Hopefully we have an active meetup location near you?
In any case, good luck on finding the right community!
We never associated with Bun other than extending an invitation to rent a job booth at a conference: this was years ago when I had a Twitter account, so it's fair if Jarred doesn't remember.
If Handmade Cities had the opportunity to collaborate with Bun today, we would not take it, even prior to this acquisition. HMC wants to level up systems while remaining performant, snappy and buttery smooth. Notable examples include File Pilot [0] or my own Terminal Click (still early days) [1], both coming from bootstrapped indie devs.
I'll finish with a quote from a blog post [2]:
> Serious Handmade projects, like my own Terminal Click, don’t gain from AI. It does help at the margins: I’ve delegated website work since last year, and I enjoy seamless CI/CD for my builds. This is meaningful.
However, it fails at novel problems and isn’t practical for my systems programming work.
All that said, I congratulate Bun even as we disagree on philosophy. I imagine it's no small feat getting acquired!
Finding this comment interesting, parent comment didn't suggest any past association but it seemingly uses project reference as pivot point to do various outgroup counter signaling / neg bun?
I understand the concern, but really? I found this quote enough to offer proper comments:
> had a vague idea that "Zig people" were generally "Software You Can Love" or "Handmade Software Movement" types
Folks at Bun are "Zig people" for obvious reasons, and a link was made with Handmade software. This happened multiple times before with Bun specifically, so my response is not a "pivot" of any kind. I've highlighted and constrasted our differences to prevent further associations inside a viral HN thread. That's not unreasonable.
I also explicitly congratulated them for the acquisition.
I'm willing to wager that 99.99% of readers do not associate "Handmade" with the org you're associated with, and that most didn't know it existed until this comment. So yes "really", without OP replying, it's understandable that the poster you're replying inferred it had nothing to do with you.
Yeah, I don't think of Handmade Cities when I hear the word "handmade". I think of Handmade Network and Casey Muratori, who actually coined the term and started the movement. I didn't even know about Handmade Cities before this comment, either. This is just shameless marketing/insertion on their part.
Still doesn't change the reality that few people know of this org exists, and fewer people still will associate it with the word "Handmade" in this context.
I think you may have confused parent commenter's "Handmade software movement" types comment to Handmade cities which doesn't seem related to me other than the common word handmade
I'm pretty sure the GP was referring to https://handmade.network as their manifesto made multiple rounds here, was discussed at length and far more obviously related to "handmade movement" remark than your org.
Yes, I was referring to Handmade Network, but check out who you're responding to[0]. Honestly, I wasn't too sure about the Handmade Cities thing, but I recognized his name as someone thick in the middle of my question, so I assumed it was a rebranding or something since I don't follow so closely.
Yeah, I looked the GP up too, because I never heard of this Cities thing.
I took your comment as referring to people who like to manually unroll their loops rather than members of some particular community, so GP's nitpicking on specifics of that interpretation looked out of place.
I might missing some context. Just to check my understanding: HMC and Bun aren't a good match anymore because Bun devs use LLM/AI tooling more than HMC? Basically to really level up a system is incompatible these tools? (IYHO)
Thank you! I appreciated how you wrote up this clarifying.
The notable thing is this author wrote the Mastering Vim book:
> Yeah, piracy isn’t legal, yada-yada. But if $30 is too much right now and your library doesn’t have a copy to spare - I won’t blame you for torrenting it. Here’s my full permission, I hope you enjoy the result of my sweat, tears, and deadline anxiety.
Can you talk more about how it started "shaping my motivation instead of supporting it?" I was starting to aggregate my own sales data for a dashboard, but maybe it's unwise.
Our coding meetups [0] are going increasingly offline and I'm looking for ways to exit the feed [1]. So I really want to learn from organizations like The Offline Club and now you.
[0] https://handmadecities.com/meetups
[1] https://abner.page/post/exit-the-feed/
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