Fortress of Doors is a blog by game designer Soren Johnson-style essayist covering game platforms, piracy economics, and AI's effect on online content.
HN commenters cite his piracy essay as an influential, still-insightful piece, and link his AI lemons essay and Steam follow-up as relevant reading.
But science is about doing your own research! The idea is that science results are based on evidence that is published in serious [1] peer review [2] journals.
At some time you realize you can't repeat all the test at home, because it would be full of mice and transgenic plants and a huge particle collider and ... Also, there are a lot of very hard topics. So you must trust the system, but not too much.
* Big pharma wants to sell drugs and get money.
* The FDA wants to cover they ass and get money.
* Journalist want to publish bleeding stories and get money.
[There is also an optimistic version where all of them want the best for humanity.]
All of them together are making a quite good job, and you can go to the pharmacy at the corner and be quite confident that you will get the cure for a lot of illness with a low risk. In some threads people ask for most tests, in some threads people ask for faster approval. It's a hard trade off, and I'm happy I don't have to make the decision [3].
In 2020 there was a lot of misinformation in both directions. From politicians to youtubers, form individual crackpots to professors in the university. In many cases you realize they may not even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria, in other cases they say that the "control group" is an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.
Science is about doing your own research, but doing your own research is super hard. As a rule of thumb, if the FDA and the European…
I might not be writing code forever, but it's only a small part of my job, and an even smaller part of my identity. I will eventually lose my business to AI, too, but even if that happened tomorrow, it would still have been worth it. It filled my coffers, provided me with a wonderful lifestyle and helped thousands of people.
Perhaps the gravy train will come to an end. I might have to wake up to an alarm, commute to an office and tighten my belt a bit. Or perhaps I can spend less time building things, and more time understanding the people I build them for. My business always hinged on empathy, not technical prowess.
Besides, no matter how bad things get, I will still enjoy riding my bicycle, having tea on my balcony, tending to my garden and painting watercolours.
Even if the online spaces I once inhabited are drowned out by AI noise, we can still grill and have potlucks. We can retreat to the cozyweb, or just log off entirely.[0]
I guess what I'm trying to say is that my coping mechanism is to go touch grass.
[0] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web, https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-the-great-logging-off/
I don’t think many people primarily think of their Web 2.0 content as valuable, even if you tell them it is. The value is a byproduct of use, and this will continue as long as people still enjoy creating content. Content that is deeply engaging will always have value. Content that is simply the upteenth regurgitation of a canonical source (recipes and API documentation come to mind) will be displaced by a source that just answers the damn question.
What could cause a major problem for search engines is the balkanization of the internet from Web 1.0 personal sites to Web 2.0 shared (but still indexable) platforms to mostly unindexable private groups. Discord, and Whatsapp are models for how this might happen.
What might cause an acceleration in that direction? Bots. ChatGPT can create content that is authentic-looking, and if open forums become Markets for Lemons [1] then people will move to trusted groups like smaller chat groups. (The other alternative is verifying identities which will happen but has privacy issues.)
[1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-the-great-logging-off/
I'd love to support this service. They do everything right - they take 0% of the game and give the entire amount to the devs. In contrast Steam takes 25% (earlier 30%). The tools itch offers to devs to package/upload their game are considered to be best-in-class in the industry and they're all open source [0]. There's an excellent article that talks about the difficulties in creating a competitor to Steam, and the kicker is "the service you're thinking of already exists - it's called itch.io" [1].
And yet when I think of an indie game I want to buy, it's not there. Just today I saw an excellent review [2] for a game called Hollow Knight. I couldn't find it on itch, ended up buying it on Steam instead. FWIW, the game is also available on gog.com, the Humble store and all consoles, so it's not like the devs haven't taken the effort to make their game accessible.
[0] - https://github.com/itchio
[1] - https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-steam/
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksexEs7FKf4
1. I helped maintain a payroll system written in GW-BASIC for a year or two. It was designed cleanly and well, with each module of code a separate file chain-loaded in from disk as a de facto overlay system. The variables that each module inherited were thoroughly documented in code comments at the top of each module, so it was clear what it would inherit in RAM and which you needed not to touch.
Just as one can write spaghetti code in any language, one can equally write good clean code in any language.
2. Remember what the _B_ in BASIC stands for. Despite that it was used professionally, yes, but there is in any and all fields a need for easy tools for beginners to learn with.
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/take-the-pedals-off-the-bike/
As discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697467
My favorite recent take on the "why" if you want to dive down a rabbit hole:
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-future-of-games-is-an-instant-flash-to-the-past/
I think the development community would absolutely buy into a proprietary system again. We haven't seen a good 2d vector engine for games to replace Flash, but screens keep getting bigger and denser.
I mostly prototype in typescript/Pixi these days when I tinker on small games, but the workflow is nowhere near as nice as "author assets in Flash -> import directly in AS3." Flash was also a game engine and asset pipeline. I'd be super pleased if someone built a typescript version of Flash's display tree + vector rendering + authoring tools.