Some links you might like 9

Alternate title: I was sent to another world and all I got for it was these 5 links?!

Luke Plunkett: Trying To Get A Job In Video Games Right Now Is Like Crawling Through Hell

I am not a game dev person, but my own experiences with trying to find a job in the tech job market are pretty similar. (It never worked out. I work in education now.) You put in a lot of work only for the companies you're trying to get a job from to not even give you the courtesy of sending you a rejection email. It feels like what's going on is that companies are, in a way, dropping the pretenses. If you want to read another story about the hellscape that is the game dev job market, there’s more where that came from.

Peter Welch: Programming Sucks

You are an expert in all these technologies, and that’s a good thing, because that expertise let you spend only six hours figuring out what went wrong, as opposed to losing your job. You now have one extra little fact to tuck away in the millions of little facts you have to memorize because so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots.

So true dude. Programming does suck. It's also great but you really have to build on top of the culmination of some really bad decisions.

Bharath Natarajan: vercel vs cloudflare: two philosophies of building for developers | thinking out loud

Normally, sharing an article by someone who works at not one but two AI companies should be signal enough that I have been replaced by a doppelgänger and should be killed on sight, but there’s something here I want to dig into more. What I find most interesting is the comparison between Vercel and Cloudflare’s backgrounds. My site is hosted on Cloudflare—it is significantly cheaper to use than Vercel—but I used to use Vercel in the past. From my own experiences, the assertions made in the article are true, but I disagree with the conclusion that these two monoliths need to prove that you should stick with them. Consolidation on this level is itself a red flag, and is maybe a sign to reduce your dependency on one of two giant companies. I'm slowly working out what it'd take to make the move away from hosting my site on Cloudflare, and while I'd recommend hosting your own site on Cloudflare if you're starting out, it's always good to learn how to move away from depending on the kindness of a large company offering a free tier.

Ysengrin and Safer: In Search of a Flat Game State

The thesis of this video is that, fundamentally, Netrunner has this problem where it is, by default, this flat game state. Where, without card effects, the Corp always loses.

This is a talk explaining what the concept of a "flat game state" is in the game of Netrunner, and what that entails in its card design and interplay. This is a video that's opened my mind to new ways of looking at board interaction in Netrunner, and is the motivating force for some new posts that are in the works on game design in Netrunner. Good game!

Jonathan Zellar: Book Review: The Great Gatsby by the Xerox 914 Photocopier

I wanted to end things off with another dunk on AI. Sure it's so easy and everyone is doing it, but there's some really incredible writers dusting off their keyboards to sit down and complain.