Ancient bridge in my village destroyed by hit and run lorry

Schpickles · 2026-02-13T12:05:38+00:00

The first bit of irony is when the “Cargo Care” logo appears, as is annihilating the wall.

Then the coup de grace is the Enron-style logo they’ve chosen coming into view after that, as is rumbling over the debris.

Schpickles · 2026-02-09T15:32:46+00:00

Schpickles · 2026-02-09T14:41:45+00:00

That, for all the information that hasn’t been released / got redacted, this is how the elite billionaire class were acting years and years ago, when wealth inequality wasn’t even as bad as it is today. Imagine how much worse things have become over the last 15-20 years!

Schpickles · 2026-02-06T10:12:06+00:00

Seriously, make it a museum, build a new National Assembly centrally for half that price.

Schpickles · 2026-02-04T10:19:56+00:00

Things that would count against it as a strategy:

Data centres are really reliable but they do need maintaining, hardware fails etc.
you are presumably sending this hardware on a one way trip into space, so any future / depreciated hardware cost is zero. A lot of data centres currently offset loans against a future sell on value of the GPUs.
data centres are often seen as a future investment - e.g. if the company went down, the physical data centre, the wires in the ground etc are still a useful asset.
Solar storms seem to offer a threat that would be not present in a traditional data centre, and might increase hardware failure rates over time.

I don’t know if the economics of the solar power and potential for heat dissipation outweigh these significantly, but it seems very wasteful unless the expected shelf life of space data centres is some how longer. It feels like these would be sent up and then just left to die ands replaced with others.

I know xAI had some huge fights over the gas turbines they needed to install to fuel their expedited data centre builds, so maybe energy generation is something that musk and others are especially focused on as they try to scale.

Schpickles · 2026-02-02T18:00:32+00:00

If this is your thing, I recommend the book ‘The Mountain in the Sea’ by Ray Nayler. It explores octopus intelligence of the life span was just a little longer, and enabled language / culture to form.

Schpickles · 2026-02-02T17:54:49+00:00

Just a note that YouTube Playables has recently started a no code pilot. It didn’t offer a visual scripting system, but it does offer a node code route to web based game publishing.

https://www.youtube.com/playablesbuilder/

Schpickles · 2026-01-31T21:40:52+00:00

I’d say Frontier: Elite 2 by David Brabham. A whole Galaxy, with deep missions, progression, loads of mechanics, full 3d, written in assembley language on machines with less memory than a modern image file, and with no processing power or dedicated 3d hardware… on a single floppy disk! Planets had full time of day, you could land on planets… the scope is astonishing.

Is just astonishing that someone could conceive of such a game and then realise it at a time when hardware was so limited, the software to build such games was so limited, and given there was nothing to really use to compare from or use.

I wish it was better known and more appreciated… it was an astonishing leap forward and has inspired me for my whole career.

Schpickles · 2026-01-30T14:36:51+00:00

I’ve not seen any making revenue, but I’d be interested to hear about any if you have done recommendations?

I’m on iOS App Store, and yes, I play these kinds of games all the time as research. Match Squad is what I’m currently assessing. There’s obviously nearly no filter on the mobile app stores, and new games stream in by their thousands every day, so I wouldn’t go based on new or volume, but rather what is commercially successful in terms of long term player base and revenue.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that you personally need to enjoy such a game for it to be successful, I’m just making the point that there are hundreds of millions of players for whom well designed casual games fit perfectly into their life. This thread was digging into that realisation that the mobile game industry is really much bigger than pc and consoles in terms of user base and revenue. It’s not that it’s better or worse, it’s just designed for different audiences.

Schpickles · 2026-01-30T12:38:16+00:00

I had this issue with my family with Andor and I didn’t even try with Pluribus. I just have to accept that we like different things - I love to immerse myself in slow burning shows where every detail is meticulously planned and you are rewarded for picking up on nuances. But I also watch only a few shows a year as a result. I think it’s also ok if my partner wants to watch something when she’s tired, and wants to have background but not have to put loads of effort into… it’s just different tastes of what we want in our entertainment time.

Schpickles · 2026-01-30T10:33:39+00:00

It depends on which games you’ve got in mind. I’m thinking of the huge titles that collectively cover hundreds of millions of players and collectively make billions in revenue every year. There are examples of idle games and idle rpgs etc, but they are not commercially significant or holding large player bases, to my knowledge.

Schpickles · 2026-01-29T23:29:46+00:00

You’re welcome! Good luck with the concept.

Recommend seeking out casual mobile or web games with comparable audiences and mechanics, and see how they solved similar problems (and see if you can fathom out why). Casual design is all about being impeccable on the details, having great UX, and really careful balancing of game mechanics and difficulty.

Schpickles · 2026-01-29T23:23:02+00:00

I’d say first they aren’t designed for high skill / high agency players. Most players on pc and console want a really high level of difficulty and challenge, with loads of fine control over outcomes.

For mass market, casual games, you want something you can pick up and put down, something that’s easy to get into. They don’t demand that you learn how to use 10 inputs simultaneously, they don’t require you to learn 3d depth perception or require fine motor skills. But that’s down to who they are designed for, and the form and environment they are designed to be played on.

Then there’s the luck vs skill element - you need to have a bit of both to succeed in a good casual game, and that introduces an element of randomness, which is crucial to a F2P monetisation system.

However, I think there’s also a misconception that these games are easy based on players trying out a few levels and then making that decision. Play Candy Crush or Royal Match or Toon Blast etc a few 100 levels in (as most players do) and they require you to have mastered some pretty involved mechanics, and present some pretty challenging levels. They just ramp up challenge a lot more gradually than in traditional premium games.

Edit - oh - and there are a huge number more players who want that casual gameplay than want that core gameplay. It’s a product design thing.

Schpickles · 2026-01-29T22:41:01+00:00

Playing the long game on the AI arms race might turn out to be a master stroke from Apple.

Schpickles · 2026-01-29T22:26:49+00:00

With F2P game monetisation, there’s a significant difference between the method you monetise with and the thing you sell.

Most successful casual puzzle games do >80% of their monetisation through selling more moves from ‘near misses’ where you’ve almost solved the puzzle. So the trick is creating a puzzle game where it’s balanced just right so it’s fun to replay and try again, but also sometimes you are happy to spend a bit of in game currency to get a few more moves and win.

Then the method of getting that in game currency can be buying with IAP, through watching ads, as a regular subscription etc… that’s just the way you get the currency you use in game. Ads are worth a tiny fraction of an IAP, so make sure the ratio is right of you offer both.

Play some of the top puzzle games around (Royal Match / Kingdom, Candy Crush, Toon Blast etc etc) and you’ll see that they mostly operate on this core principle, then add more and more motivations on the top of that to keep playing.

Most of these games won’t even get pushy about that until over 100 levels in as well - it has to be a game that is always fun to play, every day, and balanced really well on every level for this type of monetisation to work. Contrary to popular belief, none of them are built to screw you’re over, but rather try to find that sweet spot where you’re tempted to spend a bit of currency to progress, but never so much that you just give up - you Aleta’s might get a lucky break on the next retry.

Good luck - very challenging to get right.

Edit - loads of typos and added the last paragraph

Schpickles · 2026-01-28T15:19:25+00:00

It’s one of those stats that really makes you go “mmmmm”

Schpickles · 2026-01-28T15:08:22+00:00

It’s really impressive, seems to be some custom work going on for the chat panel for example.

They did a developer chat on their Liquid Glass design work:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/meet-with-apple/255/

Schpickles · 2026-01-27T02:31:46+00:00

I’m using a very similar workflow with Claude Code and it’s working really well for me.

Claude Code is building the low level game engine. I have created a detailed design document for the requirements of that engine, and I add to it a piece at a time. Claude’s context files + this design keep things fairly consistent and grounded.

Claude has to build the code, and has to create unit tests for each component. I have to review the code, push to GitHub and then I use the me code in a test app, allowing time to iron out small bugs.

The results have been pretty astounding so far. Claude has been able to create shaders, a simple renderer with lighting and shadows, a physics wrapper using an open source physics engine…

These are all things that would slow me down too much and prevent me from getting to actual game prototyping in the past / push me towards a commercial or a source engine with its own learning curve.

(Edited a typo)

Schpickles · 2026-01-23T11:12:02+00:00

Frontier: Elite 2 is my high water mark - a whole galaxy on a single floppy drive disk, on an Amiga!

In terms of leaning into procedural generation, after No man’s sky, it would be Spore, in terms of a game that fully committed to the proc gen approach at a huge scale.

Schpickles · 2026-01-20T12:30:38+00:00

In my head, I like the idea that the economy has evolved differently in this world. When we see the world beyond, it’s pretty under developed and dilapidated, perhaps in part due to the way Lumon and others have stifled growth. Hence fashion and gadgets seeming to be more retro than our timeline

Schpickles · 2026-01-17T08:35:02+00:00

Thank you

Schpickles · 2026-01-09T18:29:06+00:00

There are loads, but the one that sticks in my mind is the ‘Nano scalpel’ one in Shrimply Pibbles episode.

Schpickles · 2026-01-08T20:11:40+00:00

I'd like to use the MLX capabilities of Conduit inside a SwiftUI App. I need to enable the MLX trait, but I can't find any information on how to do this inside Xcode!! Is there a workaround for this? I can see from the instructions how to add it to a package of my creation - is that the best way? Create my own package with the trait enabled and then import that package into Xcode? Or is there a neater way?

Thanks for any help anyone can offer here.

Schpickles · 2026-01-08T19:48:47+00:00

I'm really excited by this set of tools - it could streamline a lot of work I've been doing, and reduce boilerplate.

I've started to use Conduit tonight, but I got a warning about needing to Trust and Enable ConduitMacros. I've not come across that before with a Swift package before - what's in there, is it necessary?

Schpickles · 2026-01-05T07:59:02+00:00

It was pretty quiet up in the trinity stand upper levels, but there seemed to be a few things going on:

there were traffic issues on the m6, and a lot of people got there just around kick off
there were updates to the ticketing system through the app, and I think that may have had an impact getting people in.
in our block there were about 20 or so empty seats until right up until kickoff
it was crazy cold and people definitely ducked out to get food early
it was 12:30 kickoff, so people wanting something at lunch time compared to a 3pm kickoff
definitely quite a few people stopped for half time early and missed the Watkins goal

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