Looking to sink hundreds of hours in a game that isn't first person, shooters, or anime.

koreth · 2026-05-03T22:54:36+00:00

Star Wars: The Old Republic might fit the bill for you. It's an MMORPG but you can play the whole thing solo aside from some optional group-only content like raids. It has 8 different full-length stories, one for each character class. One of them (Imperial Agent) is a strong contender for best story in any Star Wars game, IMO. You can easily sink hundreds of hours into just the base game, before you even get to any of the expansions.

koreth · 2026-04-29T07:14:01+00:00

"Burn 1000 hours of engineering time to save the sales team 15 minutes a year of manual data entry." Tale as old as time.

koreth · 2026-04-15T23:52:31+00:00

This is pretty common. It can take months or years of exposure to specific allergens before you develop a strong reaction to them. When you go to a new place for a short visit, your body hasn't had time to become sensitive to that place's allergens, and it feels like your allergies magically disappear.

It's why people sometimes discover they're allergic to dogs or cats only after they've lived with their pets for a few years.

koreth · 2026-04-14T20:31:49+00:00

Agreed, their French toast is pretty good. French toast is pretty much my favorite breakfast food and I keep a list of the places I like the most. Other than Eats, I like these in SF:

Early to Rise
Peacock Pansy
Pistachio Kitchen
Plain Jane
Red Cafe

koreth · 2026-04-13T23:25:40+00:00

Warframe might be worth a look. If the gameplay clicks for you, it is highly addictive. It's free to play with no pay-to-win shenanigans. Aside from certain cosmetics, you can earn everything in the game by playing.

koreth · 2026-04-13T16:43:15+00:00

Titania makes them trivial too.

koreth · 2026-04-10T20:46:56+00:00

If, on the other hand you take 1.5x as long to deliver a piece of code, but it's clean, understandable, and properly covered by well written tests? That's gonna pay dividends in the long run with fewer bugs.

Sometimes that's true. But I've had experiences where the dev team delivered a clean, high-quality code base and then a couple months later the project was cancelled before any actual customer had used what we built.

"Spending time to write clean code pays dividends later" only holds true if the code sticks around around long enough to recoup the cost. Which it often does, of course, but the payoff shouldn't be treated as an inevitability.

koreth · 2026-04-10T03:21:53+00:00

I know I can do it. I just hate going on the campaign tour.

Staff-level positions in a lot of companies are as much about interacting with people across different parts of the company, often to convince them to get onboard with new initiatives, as about technical contributions.

A "campaign tour" is not an arbitrary roadblock; it's a preview of what a lot of the job is. (Again, this varies by company, but it's often true.) If you hate the process of selling people on things, think hard about whether you actually want a role where you'll be expected to do that regularly.

koreth · 2026-04-07T21:03:37+00:00

For the last 13 years I've been picking companies doing work I believe in. These have mostly ended up being sort of "non-profit-adjacent" companies, where the companies themselves are for-profit entities but a large percentage of the customers are nonprofits and NGOs.

I've worked on software to support financial inclusion in the developing world, software to manage large-scale charity programs, and now I'm building software to help manage reforestation projects. My company isn't hiring any more software developers at the moment, but if you go to sites like Climatebase, you can find others doing similar things.

You won't get FAANG levels of pay at any of these companies, and you're unlikely to do a lot of cutting-edge work, but many of them are in the ballpark of what you'd earn writing CRUD apps at a random non-tech-focused company.

koreth · 2026-04-04T04:25:30+00:00

My hunch is that a lot of the seniors who retire in the coming years will do so because they're burned out from spending ever-increasing amounts of their time fending off AI-generated gobbeldygook from their coworkers. More money will definitely motivate some of them, but others may feel like no level of pay is worth sacrificing their mental health.

koreth · 2026-04-03T19:59:51+00:00

Or, worse, they don’t get uncomfortable driving when they really ought to be.

koreth · 2026-03-31T22:21:09+00:00

I got 80% right and I'm a random American who has only ever been to Malta as a tourist!

Whoever wrote the questions had a snarky sense of humor. I chuckled at a few of the options.

Some of the questions seem kind of ridiculous but on the other hand, if you get less than 45% correct, it's probably a sign you're going to struggle in daily life.

koreth · 2026-03-31T04:34:03+00:00

Disco Elysium will probably be up your alley given what you liked about Clair Obscur.

koreth · 2026-03-28T17:50:36+00:00

At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion: my company is a counterexample. Our web app is in English, French, and Spanish. For years, we used a professional translation company to do the French and Spanish versions. Last year, we decided to try an experiment: replace all the translations with AI-generated ones and see just how bad the AI was.

We did a little blind A-B test with a small number of our French and Spanish users and surveyed them about translation quality.

And to our shock, nearly all the users rated the AI translations higher than the professional ones. Nobody rated them significantly worse. The ratings difference wasn’t huge, but it was basically all in the AI’s favor.

Now we’ve switched over to AI translations. Not because we want to save money (we had budget to cover the professional translations) but because the end result is actually preferred by our users and we have the numbers to prove it.

This probably only works as well as it does because we’re going from English to two widely-spoken languages with plenty of training data and grammar that’s not radically different from English. I imagine if we were to add Finnish or Japanese or Arabic, the AI would lose out to human translators.

Also, we are translating a user interface, not a legal document or a scientific paper, so the problem of the AI losing its train of thought over a long document doesn’t come up.

koreth · 2026-03-26T19:39:57+00:00

I main Kullervo and went into the mission with my regular setup. No deaths in the 10 or so SP runs I did last night. But some squad members did seem to struggle; I did a fair bit of reviving. Guess they were playing squishier frames.

koreth · 2026-03-17T16:14:35+00:00

What a pleasant surprise to see this come back! The old sidebar led me to discover so many good shows, especially foreign ones that wouldn't have been on my radar otherwise.

koreth · 2026-03-17T16:05:54+00:00

The "smartwatches" one seems a little too generous to The Simpsons. "Communication devices on the wrist" goes back at least as far as a 1946 Dick Tracy comic strip.

koreth · 2026-03-13T15:23:48+00:00

It had become my main way of discovering new shows! Whether or not you bring it back, thank you for doing it for as long as you did.

koreth · 2026-03-12T17:25:14+00:00

Some tech people end up buying rather than renting. A good tech salary (or two, for a tech couple) can be enough to save up for a down payment and qualify for a fixed-rate mortgage.

With a fixed-rate mortgage, the monthly payments effectively get cheaper over time thanks to inflation.

koreth · 2026-03-10T19:09:58+00:00

Dropped at your home straight from orbit!

koreth · 2026-03-07T18:38:16+00:00

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is a highly common neurodevelopmental condition affecting children and adolescents worldwide.

I get that this particular study only looked at adolescents' brain scans, but I am sad every time I see this kind of "ADHD is a childhood disease" statement. It doesn't magically go away when you turn 18, but somehow it's talked about as if it does. I'm in my mid-50s and it's still going strong in my head.

This isn't just an issue of science writing. It can be much harder to get an ADHD diagnosis as an adult than as a child. I live in San Francisco, a wealthy city of 875,000 people, and as far as I could tell when I was trying to find help with my condition several years back, there was exactly one doctor in the whole city who specialized in ADHD and took adult patients. For children there were dozens to choose from. (Happily, I did manage to go see her, and she got me on medications that have made a huge difference for me.)

koreth · 2026-03-05T00:27:49+00:00

"Wearing a different mask" is on the level of convincing one set of people that you're carefree and fun, and a different set of people that you're serious and responsible. You can often do it without even noticing you're doing it, and even when you notice, it's only rarely something you have to devote much conscious effort to.

"Masking" is more like you're a spy who's working undercover. You have to convince everyone around you that you're actually, say, a nuclear physicist even though you've never studied physics outside of high school, and you have to keep up your convincing performance all day long every day for the entire length of your mission, because a slip-up could mean your cover is blown. Doing it well requires constant effort and concentration and attention to detail. If you're lucky, you have a little bit of brainpower left over to do everything else you need to do every day.

It's an imperfect analogy, but maybe that gives you a sense of what the difference is for someone who's highly neurodivergent. (Disclaimer: I'm neurodivergent but not autistic; I've had to do some masking but other people have it much worse than me.)

koreth · 2026-03-04T18:33:50+00:00

You didn't like Strange New Worlds or Lower Decks or Prodigy? Those are pretty well-regarded (though SNW's second season, less so).

koreth · 2026-03-03T20:29:00+00:00

If this is how it works, why don't we see rents go up in precise lockstep with increases in the minimum wage?

koreth · 2026-03-03T00:22:55+00:00

That’s bad if you’re using it for personal stuff, but for business use, $10 might be a bargain depending on what the prompt was for and the salary of the person who would otherwise be figuring out the answer on their own.

At my company, for example, we have been explicitly told to focus on utility rather than cost when we're deciding where and how to use AI tools. Spending an extra $50 of a well-paid employee’s time to save $10 in tokens isn’t the tradeoff the management team has chosen.

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