Taylor Troesh

A few thoughts, I tried this on mobile but got a bit confused by the initial "How to play" dialog (besides that it was too large to fit on screen). The dialog says:

How to play. String together factors to answer the question. ... but the dialog doesn't pose a question! It just shows two factors with sliders, and the calculated answer, but no reason why we're sliding these two elements from left to right. I would skip the initial dialog for now, and perhaps make the "How to play" dialog very easy to reach to give a general description of the game, what is asked of the player, and how they could think about answering the question, instead of trying to explain the interface.

For the question I got ("How many people are flying in airplanes right now?"), the influencing four factors were nicely chosen, although I would refrain from guiding the player too much with (too) narrow "x - y" bands. We're looking for orders of magnitude, so you could think about sliders that also suggest thinking in orders of magnitude, say "1, 10, 100, 1000" (e.g. number of passengers on a plane), and "10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hours, 2 hours, 8 hours" (e.g. flight duration).

(Another angle here could be: how many flights and/or passengers does the nearest airport handle during a year, or how many flights/passengers do the global top 10 airports handle during a year, and how does that account for the total amount of flights in a year?). In other words: I don't think you want your players to do…

Wait... so this isn't satire? I read all the way through expecting a reveal, but when I got to the bottom all I found was a link to other chapters of "How to Productize Yourself"... which, again, I thought was a joke but upon clicking that I got a list of articles like this one and zero indication that the author is joking.

I know this person is capable of sarcasm and irony and so on, because I remember seeing their "how to be a -10x engineer" article[0] before... if they're intentionally riding the line of believability here, then props to them, because this is hilarious and definitely sounds like something in the top quartile of unhinged LinkedIn-influencer-posting.

> Create arbitrary rules and rituals. Ask your clients to participate in your personal process. Lead people on journeys.

What's wrong with unassuming and consistent competence? Has the author ever actually worked with another one of these high-output culture-hacker people? It's possible to leave a great impression with nothing but technical excellence and solid communication, and I'd personally take that any day over someone who tries to turn a client meeting into some kind of spooky grindset seance.

[0] https://taylor.town/-10x

After reading the post I kept thinking about two other pieces, and only later realized it was Taylor who had submitted it. His most recent essay [0] actually led me to the Commoncog piece “Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win?” [1], and the idea of sub-games felt directly relevant here.

In this case, running a studio without using or promoting AI becomes a kind of sub-game that can be “won” on principle, even if it means losing the actual game that determines whether the business survives. The studio is turning down all AI-related work, and it’s not surprising that the business is now struggling.

I’m not saying the underlying principle is right or wrong, nor do I know the internal dynamics and opinions of their team. But in this case the cost of holding that stance doesn’t fall just on the owner, it also falls on the people who work there.

Links:

[0] https://taylor.town/iq-not-enough

[1] https://commoncog.com/playing-to-play-playing-to-win/

Doesn't seem like the thing with the best usability for me (how my eyes scan information, in that regard the old site would be better), but it does seem aesthetically different and kinda cool. Plus, good job on not putting a whole bunch of JS into the site and letting it actually perform well without making my CPU sad.

That said, https://taylor.town/android-chrome-512x512.png is about 225 KB and probably doesn't need to be quite that big. The first optimizer I found online turned it into a 55 KB image. There, this time I'm the nitpicky nerd, bwah.

Not to miss the point though: it's cool that people are making things that are different!

I've been reading your blog (https://taylor.town/) and I think ScrapScript is awesome.

Let's engage early and often. (I am looking forward to your email.)

I hope we can build and inspire people to create some futuristic software.

There's Conflict-free replicated data types, content addressable, Val Town, Nostr, scuttlebut, distributed computing, Node Package Manager, merkle trees, Rubygems, Git, ActivityPub, decentralized software, NixOS, repl.it, unison to draw inspiration from.

https://dfinity.org/ (internet computer)
https://nostr.com/