The art in question is from 1923. I'm just guessing, but a possible reason the OP posted this is because of the parallel to modern AI tools. This art piece was created by an artist communicating with a technician in a remote factory. The artist conveyed what he wanted to the technician, who then created the piece. This is similar to how a modern Prompt Engineer or AI Conductor works with a tool like DALLE2 or Midjourney or Github Copilot to create a new work by description alone.
Fascinating. As the video says: Art and technology - a new unity.
From 4chan, to Reddit, to meme culture: I don't think it's possible to conceive how large of an impact Lowtax had on the internet. As an entrepreneur, he was a leader in figuring out how to monetize digital content. RIP Lowtax, you leave behind a legacy both IRL and on the web.
Because we don't want to do the hard work. We tried it already. We initially started by managing all our own infrastructure, building our own APIs from the ground up and it turns out that's really hard. If anything we can never match the depth and experience of someone who's already doing it. So it just makes more sense to partner. We can probably provide some nice features on top for caching and whatever else to protect the third party API but otherwise the goal is to bring together a fragmented market.
Looking at it another way. I worked on open source for many years. Seeing what AWS has done to open source projects, it's a really dishonourable thing and while I get they're running a business I think there were better ways to go about it than just lifting a project and running it themselves. So for us it's really about building a trustworthy business that empowers individual devs and small teams. And you can't do that if you try to cut out the people who got you to where you wanna go.
Why do support, q/a, maintenance, performance improvement for hundreds API with thousands of quirks when you can sell shovels as if they were made of gold?
In a similar vein, how much visibility does micro API bring to my API compared to established platforms?
Even assuming it's a lot, why not just publish my API on all of them?
Can you think of a most-popular use case you've seen payment links used for outside the US? Like, are people selling goods, or e-content, or services? And thank you for making e-commerce more seamless.
We've been live with Payment Links in beta to around a hundred sellers for the past few weeks, and we've seen businesses selling both digital goods/services, as well as physical goods. Sellers have been sharing Payment Links on social media, via email newsletters, and in support interactions. And we've also seen some sellers generate QR codes that send their customers to a Payment Link. Excited to see what you use Payment Link to sell!
Yep. The thing to understand is that a huge portion of emerging markets like ours is made up of informal vendors - often young people monetising a side hustle or two - not full-blown businesses per se. For example I have an acquaintance who takes banana bread orders during the week which she bakes and delivers each Saturday; Paystack's links have made the process super straightforward for her.
Most of the comments I see here are people going along with the author's rant, so I'm going to take a different perspective.
Many of the author's criticisms of DreamWorld may actually be viewed as strengths. Examples:
>people with no credentials or history in the gaming industry, and try to get funding for some massive project that multi-million dollar corporations haven’t been capable of producing
Isn't this what YC is all about? This team is attempting to disrupt an industry, to do something that a large, bloated and bureaucratic corporation has trouble achieving. Why be hatin'?
>it’s definitely the first time I’ve seen it done while using the default Unreal player model.
This sounds like an intelligent move to me. If this small, two-person team wants to ship, why would they spend time creating custom models? Using default assets for as long as possible seems like the right move to me, and exactly the kind of attitude you want in a team that delivers.
>the mission statement here as well because it grossly oversells what CORE AEGIS actually creates.
The author fact-checks a corporate vision statement for accuracy, which makes me think he has little experience in the corporate world. Therefore, I wonder, what makes him a credible judge of what is or is not a viable business?
Honestly the biggest red flag to me is no artist or artist background.
Sure MMO's you need competent programmers, but what you also need is artists and someone who can manage multiple artists to create a cohesive whole.
The fact that they have 0 artist on team is just ...
As far as your strengths theory goes.
It's like somebody who has only done some web programming said he would create a better phone than iPhone.
Sure it's theoretically possible, but with no expertise in hardware, logistics, low level OS, legal (patents) ...
My example is just slightly more ridiculous, than what they are purposing.
The telltale sign of an experienced gamedev: someone who appreciates how important an art pipeline is. And how hard it is.
S2 Games had one of the best I've seen. Someday I should do a writeup about it. They were able to deliver a new Dota-style hero in less than a week -- concept, modeling, animation, polish, effects, sound, everything.
>Many of the author's criticisms of DreamWorld may actually be viewed as strengths. Examples:
people with no credentials or history in the gaming industry, and try to get funding for some massive project that multi-million dollar corporations haven’t been capable of producing
Dual Universe's owner NovaQuark listed the SAME "strength" and it is clear by their most recent backtracking and company changes (including replacing the CEO) that NOT having gaming experience is a HUGE detriment.
>> people with no credentials or history in the gaming industry, and try to get funding for some massive project that multi-million dollar corporations haven’t been capable of producing
> Isn't this what YC is all about? This team is attempting to disrupt an industry, to do something that a large, bloated and bureaucratic corporation has trouble achieving. Why be hatin'?
No, YC is not about doing something without experience. On the contrary, YC partners have been known to say that you should work on something where you are a world class expert. The better you know something, the more likely it is you can disrupt it.
In embedded and systems-level programming, something I find indispensable is knowing what values fit in what types (for example, an 8-bit type can represent a maximum of 256 values; a 16-bit type can represent 65536 values).
This comes up incredibly frequently, and having it be second nature will benefit you.
A lot of the time, this gives you a starting place for how your inputs and outputs should look, what your method signatures should be. For example, if your data can can fit in a uint8_t, why waste bytes on a uint32_t?
This isn't the be all and end all, especially since modern architectures use larger word sizes/RAM is plentiful/bandwidth is cheap, but it can be a helpful way to frame the conversation when you're architecting software (especially network protocols).
Also the ability to understand and check the performance impact of these choices. For example at a old job on an embedded motor controller the previous engineer had learned 'floats are slow never use them on a microcontroller' and went and removed them from the code wherever he found them. However in the motor control update loop this meant using longs (or possibly even long longs, I don't remember) in a couple calculations. A quick check with a pin toggle showed this was significantly slower than just using floats.
I'm an ME who went into embedded systems, so I'm not sure what qualifies as low level for a web developer and if checking timing using an oscilloscope or saleae is feasible for the type of work OP wants to do. But even just looking at the assembly would have made things obvious in my example.
EDIT- This made me realize that a rudimentary understanding of the assembly language for your architecture will be very valuable. Doesn't have to be enough to actually write any code in it, but it's great to be able to take a look at what was generated when things are acting weird.
Fixpoint arithmetic is going to be significantly more efficient than floating point in many cases, except where you need to use relatively-uncommon operations/functions (which are hardware-accelerated in the FPU), or in cases where the same value might span multiple orders of magnitude (i.e. a direct win for the floating point representation). The inner loop of a microcontroller is not generally one of these cases, though exceptions might be out there.
I was surprised it was faster, from what I remember to avoid floating point operations several large values had to be multiplied together then divided which required using a long long to avoid overflow. The division operation was quite slow. Thinking back I'm not 100% sure it was in the inner control loop but at the very least it was required to generate the new motor position.
Anyway a bit toggle tells all, and if you're making speed optimizations you should be checking that things actually got faster.
IMO the book "Computer systems : a programmer's perspective [Randal E Bryant; David R O'Hallaron]" provides a good foundation on this and other lower level system details.
RAM is plentiful even on many microcontrollers now, but it becomes much less plentiful when you start storing thousands of data points and need to start bit packing boolean flags and reducing the integer size to squeeze as much as you can in the data structure! Or you need to stream as much of that data over a serial link as possible as quickly as possible!
So I agree, knowing how data is stored is critical.
