Might’ve been financed on credit - but even still, it takes a lot more than $12k for a down payment.

Assuming the median price for a home is $500k, you’d need $100k for a traditional 20% down payment. Sure, $12k is 12% of the way there… but it’s nowhere near what is needed for an actual down payment.

This is a third bottleneck, earlier than the 2 we already knew about.

Specifically, this affects the entire human population.

The other 2 bottlenecks were specifically the humans which moved out of Africa - with one being as humans crossed into the Middle East and a second as humans crossed the Bering Strait.

This third one was earlier, and covers all humans, even the ones which never left Africa. These are separate from the more localized “founder events” that we see all over the world.

PeerTube exists (and has for a while). It’s a federated alternative to YouTube that uses torrents to share video, rather than centralizing it in one server.

The problem for creators is that they can’t make money off of PeerTube - thus there’s no incentive outside of making a Patreon.

PeerTube is a federated video service, and one that’s been around longer than Lemmy.

It gets around this problem by using Peer-to-Peer tech. Essentially, when you go on the site it uses your machine to send data to multiple other users, like how torrents work. The server still needs to exist, but load is lessened by offloading it to clients who seed data to others.

TikTok seems to arbitrarily decide if a video has a seek bar or not.

I’m really not sure why they do that. Revanced has a patch for TikTok that puts the seek bar on every video.

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en

Threads can’t be in the EU unless it’s federated, basically. It’s likely Facebook/Instagram will adopt federated protocols as well. Facebook has to allow interoperability on their platform.

Lemmy doesn’t have this feature, but Kbin does. Kbin fixes a lot of the issues with Lemmy.

I swear by Doc Martens.

They’re painful at first but once you break them in they are incredibly comfy and last years. I’ve had my shoes for a decade now without issues. They’ve been with me from my first customer service job, all the way through college and into my current desk job.

It’s about time for a new pair but these guys have seen it all.

Beehaw has very strict moderation, like a traditional forum. They want a small, closed community where they can look out but nobody else can come in. (They’ve even mentioned they would switch to an allowlist if it could be made one-way.)

Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had easy sign-ups and Beehaw said the ease of sign-ups were responsible for a lot of trolls and bad actors. So Beehaw defederated from both those instances until they made sign-ups harder.

Lemmy doesn’t have this feature, but Kbin does.

On Kbin, you just go to https://kbin.social/d/lemmy.world (or whatever instance you want to block) and you can block it. You can also follow an instance it if you want to see every single post from every single community on an instance for some reason.

So! If you don’t have much experience in programming, you DO NOT want to write your own engine. Period.

“I wrote my own game engine” is the kind of thing you’ll see masters/doctorate computer science students (or crazy industry veterans) do. While it may be possible to write a simple text-based game that only uses the command line, it gets complicated fast.

There are some libraries out there like PyGame which let you set up “toy” games quickly (in Python), but no shipping game is going to be built entirely in PyGame.

When you’re out applying for jobs in the industry, having a studio you’re applying for say “We built our own engine” in 2023 is a red flag. There are multiple battle-ready game engines that have made thousands of games. Most places want to build games in either the Unreal Engine (C++) or the Unity Engine (C#). There is a third one I should mention - Godot - which is a flexible FOSS game engine. But most places use Unity or Unreal.

There is so much that goes into making a game engine. Not only are you making a game, you’re making a tool that lets you make a game. You’re making stuff that can read model and animation data. You’re making something that can handle a bunch of different input methods. You’re making something which needs to calculate lighting and collision, parse images, run scripts, save and load data, multiplayer games need a full networking model with local prediction, correction, and latency mitigation, etc.

By definition, making your own engine is untested. You are going to run into issues, whether you have 1 person or 1000. What starts off simple quickly balloons as you want to do more than just show white text on a black screen. Something like Unity has had a bunch of production games (like Hearthstone) use it and find all the issues already so you don’t have to. There is literally zero reason to make your own engine today.

I myself work at a AAA game studio, as a programmer. I’ve worked on the Battlefield series in the past, although it’s not what I work on now.

Let me give you the advice I wish I had 15 years ago, when I was starting out: think small. It is far better to have made 10 projects in 1 year than 1 project in 10 years. The only way to “make it” as an indie dev is to be incredibly talented, incredibly lucky, and have an incredible amount of funding. Even supposed “one-man teams” like Toby Fox had help making their games; it is very difficult to make a game with 100 people working on it, let alone 1.

Make small toy projects that you can do in a weekend. Drop it if you spend more than 2 weeks on it. Don’t be like me where I spent years working on a dream project that I never got in a good spot to show to anyone. When I talk to people now, when I talk to interviewers or coworkers, I don’t really mention my white whale of a dream project I never finished. I mention the little games I made for gamejams, the ideas I had and how I played around with them.

It is so much more impressive to show an interviewer an active GitHub and a bunch of free games you’ve put on itch.io. I’ve literally gotten jobs because of it, but it took me years to realize I was doing the wrong thing and needed to pivot.

With that rant out of the way. C++ is industry standard. Any programmer will need to know C++ inside and out. Even if you don’t work in it directly, you’re almost guaranteed to be working with something that works in C++. But C++ is a hard language to learn.

If you have taken a programming class already, I’d recommend Unity. Unity isn’t as common as Unreal, but C# is easy to learn and somewhat similar to C++ (not that similar, but a lot can carry over). It is code, though, so you need to know syntax.

If you’ve never taken a programming class before and you’re self-taught, then I’d actually recommend Unreal. Unreal has “blueprints”, which is a visual scripting language. This means you don’t need to know the syntax of what you want to do; you just grab nodes and connect them together. It’s very easy to understand and intuitive, and it helps you build the foundation you’d use if you ever delve into the code side. You can make a whole game in blueprint, without touching code - the game won’t be huge and mega-performant, but it’ll be relatively easy to make and doable by a single person working on a very small project.

Bear in mind that there are other disciplines in game development other than programming as well. That’s sort of the best part about making your own stuff - you have to learn to do everything, from art to design to programming. Designers typically aren’t expected to know much about code, but they are expected to be creative, collaborative, and intuitively know what makes something a fun game to play. If you find out that programming isn’t for you but you still really want to get into game development, making all these tiny projects is a great way to exercise your design muscles as well.

Yes, they are still in restricted (read-only) mode and redirecting here.

(Psst… a lot of people broke the rule.)

It was also supposed to only apply if you explicitly went to the subreddit. If you just saw a post in your feed you didn’t have to make a post yourself.

But the rule makes the community very very active in a place where there’s otherwise not much activity.

/r/196 was a popular sub on Reddit, about 500k subscribers. A lot of them were dedicated users who were very active and had recognizable usernames.

196 was one of the first major subs to shut down and point everyone to the fediverse. It helps that 196 was very LGBTQ-friendly and Blahaj.zone is also very explicitly LGBTQ-friendly, so it was a good match.

196 creates a lot of content because their “rule” was anytime you visited the sub you had to leave an image, whether it was a repost or not. This also works very well for a nascent fediverse where not a lot of OC is being made yet.

Thus 196 was pretty much in the perfect position to become one of the biggest places on the fediverse.

It will be corrected over time, I presume automatically. I was one of the first people with a Steam Deck and when I searched for things Google would “helpfully” autocorrect to StreamDeck. But eventually Google figured it out.

We actually don’t have much in the way of sugar. Usually high fructose corn syrup is the substitute in the US, since the government subsidizes corn production. High fructose corn syrup (obviously) comes from corn, so it’s cheaper than sugar due to those government corn subsidies - meaning that not a lot of American food has sugar in it.