One of the best write-ups on dithering that I've seen so far! I worked on the b&w dithering for Return to Dark Castle.
We wanted to use Atkinson dithering, but it was hard to do in a shader because of how neighboring pixel values trickle into each other, and I was super stressed and tired at the time. I don't think it occurred to us to pin the pattern to the offset of the scene, so I think there is twinkling on scrolling levels like the catacombs and helicopter pack. But maybe we did? I wish I could remember. Anyway, kudos!
I upvoted this because it's perhaps the most important research being conducted currently. But the seriousness of the issue is misleading.
CRISPR is revolutionary technology. Any side effects of its use require evolutionary improvements. The two are not the same.
With the decades of experience we have dealing with code and information, as well as the arrival of AI, I wish that people would stop obsessing about the difficulty of solving problems. The difficulty is gone. All problems are solvable now, it's just a matter of time, effort, and a tiny fraction of the money that used to be required.
But FUD seems to dominate these discussions. That's probably my biggest disappointment with, say, the rich and powerful who gatekeep funding and the media. It's even easier for them to solve these problems, or encourage healthy debate. But they seem to go out of their way to do the opposite. Like, if it weren't for wealth inequality, we could have been working on this stuff, and found the answers potentially years ago. I'll just never understand the so-called realists and how they hold us back in these times out of fear, which leads to false equivalence and generalization.
I've had sleep walking episodes for most of my life since I was about 5, probably driven by sleep apnea. I've also had experiences that are as real as this waking life while meditating and especially back in my party days.
The real awakening for me was when it finally clicked that we are always hallucinating everything. The mind separates our conscious awareness from the 3D world, like in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. So what we see and hear isn't what's objectively real, but what our mind interprets it to be. Even though everything is real in our subjective reality, based on the contextual state that we've built up from the sum of our experiences.
Some examples of mass psychosis:
* Many people don't know that their boss charges more than they're paid in wages.
* Many people work administrative and loss-leader jobs and perceive their work as a cost on the organization (programmers, engineers, most people outside of sales).
* Many people think that those around them are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than they are, and don't realize that their manager or boss is mostly winging it based on a probabilistic estimate of the best course of action.
* Many people think that they are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than everyone around them (egocentric people working in IT/tech, doctors, lawyers, billionaires, etc).
* Many people think that everyone else shares their spiritual worldview, everything from a man in the sky to we're all one in universal consciousness.
* Many people think that others don't share their spiritual worldview (Christianity and Judaism may not see parents giving up their meals for their starving children in a bombed out Islamic community).
How can we have civilized society, including free and fair elections, under such mass hysteria? When people have so many delusions that politicians can pit half the population against the other merely be selecting sides from a short list of wedge issues?
My personal feeling is that western culture can't really endure spiritual awakening. And that we are seeing the breakdown of western society under late-stage capitalism with societal psychoses like much of the working class having to pay 50% of its income in rents. And corporate-greed-driven inflation rising unchecked without updated tax brackets for progressive taxation. And social safety nets being shredded to create a desperate working class dependent on service work while corporate profits are at an all-time high.
I just wish I knew how to wake up from The Matrix, whatever all this is. The points above have concrete solutions like a national tenant union, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing unrealized stock gains the same way as property taxes on homes, etc. But those obvious solutions assume a level of lucidity that will probably never exist while the powers that be lobby the government and engage in regulatory capture while handing out million dollar checks at random to voters who selected the candidate that promises to cut rich people's taxes. All to keep most people worried about the price of groceries and immigrants stealing their jobs.
But hey, I'm the delusional one.
Edit: the best answer I've come up with so far, after suffering for a lifetime under self-imposed limitations driven by many of the psychoses above, was to quiet my internal monologue entirely, acknowledging each thought but not indulging it, just being consciously aware of the process of living, without attachment or expectation on outcomes.
This is probably the most detailed analysis of retry techniques that I've seen. I really appreciated the circuit breaker and deadline propagation sections.
But this is why I've pretty much abandoned all connection-oriented logic in favor of declarative programming:
Loosely, that means that instead of thinking of communication as client-server or peer-to-peer remote procedure calls (RPC), I think of it as state transfer. Specifically, I've moved aware from REST towards things like Firebase that encapsulate retry logic. Under this model, failure is never indicated, apps just hang until communication is reestablished.
I actually think that apps can never really achieve 100% reliability, because there's no way to ever guarantee communication:
Although deadline propagation neatly models the human experience of feeling connected to the internet or not.
Also this is why I think that microservices without declarative programming are an evolutionary dead end. So I recommend against starting any new work with them in this era of imperative programming where so many developer hours are lost to managing mutable state. A better way is to use append-only databases like CouchDB which work similarly to Redux to provide the last-known state as the reduction of all previous states.
The real problem is how to prove identity while also guaranteeing anonymity.
Because Neo couldn't have done what he did by revealing his real name, and if we aren't delivering tech that can break out of the Matrix, what's the point?
The solution will probably involve stuff like Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), which are hard to reason about. We can imagine a future where all user data is end-to-end encrypted, circles of trust are encrypted, everything runs through onion routers, etc. Our code will cross-compile to some kind of ZKP VM running at some high multiple of computing power needed to process math transactions, like cryptocurrency.
One bonus of that is that it will likely be parallelized and distributed as well. Then we'll reimplement unencrypted algorithms on top of it. So ZKP will be a choice, kind of like HTTPS.
But when AI reaches AGI in the 2040s, it will be able to spoof any personality. Loosely that means it will have an IQ of 1000 and beat all un-augmented humans in any intellectual contest. So then most humans will want to be augmented, and the arms race will quickly escalate, with humanity living in a continuous AR simulation by 2100.
If that's all true, then it's basically a proof of what you're saying, that neither identity nor anonymity can be guaranteed (at least not simultaneously) and the internet is dead or dying.
So this is the golden age of the free and open web, like the wild west. I read a sci fi book where nobody wore clothes because with housefly-size webcams everywhere, there was no point. I think we're rapidly headed towards realtime doxxing and all of the socioeconomic eventualities of that, where we'll have to choose to forgive amoral behavior and embrace a culture of love, or else everyone gets cancelled.
>where we'll have to choose to forgive amoral behavior and embrace a culture of love, or else everyone gets cancelled.
I think it's much more likely that humans would fall into a religious cult like behavior of punishing each other with more byzantine rules and monitoring each other for compliance. Humans are great at creating systems of Moloch.
If I were a rich kid who got accepted into college because my parents paid my way in, I'd be embarrassed. But that's the problem today - the wealthy have no shame.
These laws are necessary because it's self-evident that elites controlling the status quo can't police themselves.
> If I were a rich kid who got accepted into college because my parents paid my way in, I'd be embarrassed. But that's the problem today - the wealthy have no shame.
At face value, entitlement was never burdened by the concept of shame.
>If I were a rich kid who got accepted into college because my parents paid my way in, I'd be embarrassed.
I don't think the stereotype that the "rich kid" who got in was a C student who's absent parents just paid the right people is accurate. A lot of these wealthy students are more than qualified, the schools themselves don't have enough seats. On paper, they are mostly identical students, credentials-wise, and the legacy got in because Dad donated last semester.
At Harvard, there are two styles of pseudo-'legacy' admissions: standard legacy and z-list.
The z-list is very small (on the order of tens of students per year) but matches the stereotype.
The typical non-zlist legacy student is qualified to attend and has test scores well above the admission median. I am not sure they even consider past donation history for these admissions. A more important factor is that they feel that legacies are more likely to attend vs go elsewhere (the 'yield rate'), which lets them lower their admission percentages further.
The blame here mostly goes to schools and system. If you are rich kid, you're still a kid and you see the world they way you were taught to see the world.
In some ways it applies to rest of the community as well not just rich people. For example the whole school district thing in US; where you get to go to a better public school if you can afford to live in better neighborhood.
Same here, this has been the central crisis of my working adult life for 25 years. Unfortunately it never gets better. And I've taken 6 months to 1 year off for severe burnout with physical symptoms like adrenal fatigue twice now.
My feeling is that this problem is intractable alone. We need groups working towards liberation, and societal change to support healthy work/life balance.
What that looks like in practice is that wealthy people, especially those who won the internet lottery, should start giving something back. At the most basic level, that's paying one's taxes. Beyond that, they should start setting aside ego-based goals and start accepting requests outside of their attention so that the most pressing problems facing humanity can finally get solved.
Give a billionaire $1 billion and a year later they'll turn it into $2 billion. Give one of us $1 billion and a year later a form of cancer will be cured. That's why they have the money and we don't, and why it takes so long for things to get better, if they ever do.
I thought the "Al Gore flies first class so let's not do anything about global warming" trope was dead, but I guess not.
That said, it would be refreshing if public figures led by example. So if we're serious about changing public perception, maybe we should create viable alternatives to jet airline travel and encourage them to use them. Here viable means getting there with comparable travel time and cost but fewer CO2 emissions.
Until then, without viable alternatives, criticizing environmentalists for traveling the way everyone else does is not a great look, and I think we're entering an era where we'll be seeing influencers and politicians called out for it in real time.
>maybe we should create viable alternatives to jet airline travel and encourage them to use them.
What if alternatives are worse? Slower? More expensive? What if alternatives will only be available after we get a steady supply of biomass driven by clean fusion?
What if "encouraging" doesn't work?
Then what -- keep flying, pumping CO2 and sleepwalking into disaster we all know is happening?
> keep flying, pumping CO2 and sleepwalking into disaster we all know is happening?
Focus on solveable problems. If you plot on the vertical axis amount of CO2 emitted and on horizontal public enthusiasm, flying is in the bottom right. It's a stupid thing to lobby against because for each unit of effort expended you're removing comparatively little CO2.
> What if alternatives are worse? Slower? More expensive?
Just like the sacrifices they expect the rest of us to make? They want me to give up my car for one with worse range or no car at all, while they still get to own cars and fly on jets because "there aren't many rich people, it's only logical that we are given a pass for everything we want you to stop doing."
> What if alternatives are worse? Slower? More expensive?
You're talking as if air travel isn't the slowest and/or most expensive option in some cases. See for example high-speed rail for travel distances under 800km.
To the contrary, "sacrifice for thee but not for me" is not real leadership. They can't advocate that the work of common people is less important and can therefor be done by Zoom.
To your point, I don't think people take umbrage with creating or advocating for compelling alternatives. But there's a difference between that and playing the blame game.
Innumerable private jet flights around the world every year to attend circlejerk conferences in exotic locations, or hermitage. Those are indeed the only two choices.
>Here viable means getting there with comparable travel time and cost but fewer CO2 emissions.
That's the rub. It's rarely comparable travel time except some point to points. Even in Europe. I travel by train within Europe (mostly) whenever I can. But it usually takes longer, costs more, and may involve sleepers on longer routes.
Not just refreshing, but absolutely crucial. If there is a critical shortage of something in 2024 politics, it is integrity and trust. Everyone can hold speeches, but few can do it in a way that doesn't make them instant hypocrites.
Why fly at all? Why not hold meetings over the internet like other working people? Or organize the conference in Bradford or Blackpool, instead of some tropical paradise, and see how many people are still motivated to fly in?
> Why fly at all? Why not hold meetings over the internet like other working people?
Speaking as someone who flies for high-value meetings, I will beat the guy literally phoning it in about three times out of four solely because I expended the effort to meet in person. Partly because it's a social gesture, showing I'm willing to expend time and resources for the person [1]. Partly because we're human beings who connect better in person than virtually.
When the stakes are international relations, the CO2 impact of the flights is peanuts.
Meetings of the G7 probably have a real impact on international relations. But in this comparison, the UN is cargo cult politics (they pretend really hard to be doing it) and Guterres' travel to Tonga a barely masked vacation at someone's else's dime.
The donor had 2 copies of the CCR5 gene, which resulted in HIV not being able to enter immune cells (like T cells) as efficiently, giving them time to fight it off.
This post really resonated with me, as I have between a dozen and a hundred abandoned projects, mostly games, since I started programming around 1989. Most of them written for the Mac Plus or Mac LC. And many of them following a similar mechanic or art style to the ones in the post.
I think of the few shipped projects I've released or been part of as a shadow of who I am. Same with my resume and work experience. They're a fingerprint of a whole being living a dream life that never manifested, because I never had an early win to build upon. That's why I think UBI might magnify human potential by 10 or 100 fold, to get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization, producing our own residual incomes.
I do have a different opinion to you, and it was formed during the pandemic when there were UBI-like circumstances for me and my friend group. Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working. And it changed my view on UBI. Maybe in your friend group that was different or your country didn't follow such an approach?
What's the difference between working on several games or focusing and finished one to you?
Would you work on these things enough to produce finished projects if you had UBI? For more than a while?
I think at some life stages, like parenthood or childhood, UBI makes sense. At others, when you are finding yourself - having a responsibility is useful.
> Those who didn't need to work any more, became rather depressed, quite quickly, compared to those who kept working.
I'm going to be completely honest with you, I really think you need to consider other reasons why people might be depressed in the situation that occurred during the pandemic. I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well, including those working (heck, people at my job at the time were struggling pretty badly with mental health to the point where they started reaching out to us.)
I'm not even saying this as a person that has a strong opinion on UBI, and I am sure some people sincerely believe not having a job was a major detriment for them. I absolutely think it did help me, but the way I see it, it helped because it was something to cling onto for a bit of normalcy, and of course, a bit of social interaction. Outside of the pandemic, a job is not nearly as critical for those two things.
I also do personally think that I still broadly like having a job, and I have had almost no gaps in employment since I started working professionally. That said, if money were no object, I would absolutely take breaks off of professional work for months at a time. For me, I find both professional work and hobby work important in very different ways, and wish I had dedicated time for both. Anecdotally I've definitely known engineers who periodically take months or even a year off of work when they get the opportunity and it seems to be a very healthy thing for them.
The existence of UBI would maybe tempt people to rely on it even if it is detrimental to their lives, but I think it's wrong to draw the conclusion that it's bad because jobs can be a source of fulfillment for many. In the future it's very possible we're going to need to approach the problem from another angle anyways, since there's simply no guarantee there will be meaningful work for us all in the future. (I'm not really convinced there won't be, but it feels unreasonable to consider it outside the realm of reasonable possibility.)
> I don't know anyone who was doing particularly well, including those working...
I and many others did great. I think someone should do a study of the experiences of introverts vs extroverts and you'll find the latter suffered more and many of the former had a better quality of life as a result.
Working from home was simply a huge boost for many. We suddenly found more time to do our personal projects. Got to work less without dropping productivity etc.
I think you are missing my point. Actually, ever since the pandemic, I prefer WFH/remote work. I mean, I actually did like working in an office for reasons, but there's no doubt about it: I am an introvert.
But being an introvert didn't fix anything else. I had to constantly cycle through masks, got harassed by random strangers when going to the store, had my medical appointments delayed for several months, people I knew were dying, there were shortages of basically everything, and the news cycle was full of panic and anger. And the pre-existing problems with the Internet somehow got even worse.
Maybe it's because I live in a rural area, but life here really was great. The impact of the pandemic was really confined to prices increasing. Nobody really got that sick in my community. We all sort of just spent WAAAAYYYY more time with each other.
I'll grant they were a pain. I don't miss them. They didn't make my life miserable, though.
> got harassed by random strangers when going to the store
Why? Not my experience at all (unless you were refusing to wear a mask).
> had my medical appointments delayed for several months
I can see that being a major problem if you have medical conditions.
> people I knew were dying
Same here. It definitely sucked, but I didn't get depressed by it. I think it comes down to expectations in life. If you go through life thinking "people in their 30s aren't supposed to die", then yes, I can see it being depressing. If you go through life with "one can die any time - be it from disease or a car accident", then a pandemic isn't much of a shock.
To give a different perspective: Long before the pandemic, people I knew died in places like Palestine and Iraq due to conflicts. Yet the whole world lived a happy life despite it. Is this all that different?
And go back a century or more, and people around you dying from disease was the norm (think tuberculosis, etc). That didn't prevent people from having a happy life, and did not make them depressed. It's not (primarily) the circumstances that lead to the depression, but the narrative one has around them.
> there were shortages of basically everything
I got lucky. We happened to accidentally buy an extra set of Clorox wipes just prior to the pandemic. We were going to return them and then the pandemic hit. I was never short.
Hand sanitizer shortages sucked. We certainly conserved our use, and were fortunate never to run out.
As for everything else, I didn't deal with any serious shortages. Somehow always found paper towels, bathroom rolls, soap, etc. And things like cars/appliance shortages - these are not meaningful quality of life things for me.
> and the news cycle was full of panic and anger
If this caused you depression, I say this with the utmost sincerity: I hope you learned the lesson not to waste much time with the news. I was a news junkie for many years, and had cured myself of it years before the pandemic hit (and thankfully never jumped on the social media bandwagon). Video news is the worst, and has almost no redeeming value. You can get much, much more from text sources.
At the end of the day, it wasn't the pandemic but the news media that caused you problems.
> And the pre-existing problems with the Internet somehow got even worse.
I guess I'm fortunate in that my Internet never had problems.
The other obvious difference between you and me: You seem to have experience with remote work prior to the pandemic, so your baseline was clearly different. For people like me, the pandemic was the cause of my appreciating remote work.
BTW, I'm not claiming it was great for the majority. Merely pointing out that for many - albeit a minority - it was an improvement on life.
Being able to go for walks on days of nice weather in nice neighborhoods during work hours can be a major improvement on one's mood.
As an introvert who fell quickly into depression at the start of the pandemic, I'm having a very difficult time seeing this comment as anything but gaslighting.
EDIT: Instead of trying to persuade you that the pandemic was a bad thing, I'll just say that perhaps your wonderful work-from home experience was different than a lot of other people.
> Instead of trying to persuade you that the pandemic was a bad thing
Never said it wasn't. I lost people I know to COVID.
> I'll just say that perhaps your wonderful work-from home experience was different than a lot of other people.
I'm not denying that either.
I think you're misreading my comment as saying "For the majority of introverts, it was better than before". I am not asserting any such thing. I am saying that for some, it was better.
You just need to scan HN comments from that time period to find plenty of people who enjoyed their work from home experience during the pandemic.
BTW, I refused to work from home prior to the pandemic. At times I made it a condition of employment that I leave my laptop at work when I went home. So this is definitely not coming from a guy who always liked working from home. When I had to, though, I found the experience to be far superior than commuting every day and dealing with nosy managers.
There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
Whats more, if you drop out of work to live on the UBI, by definition, you are the poorest person in the country, and if that is not a reason to be depressed I don't know what is.
> There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
I've taken quite a bit of time off between jobs and lived off minimal savings (over a year several times now) and I've experienced exactly what you describe - the boredom and depression. However, I also came out the other side and now I wish this for everyone.
The boredom and depression was because I was operating from the typical mode of being where there was a belief that my only value was that which I could provide to society. This was a belief that's indoctrinated in us from a very young age - through school, grades, parents, and work.
Once this belief fell away, a new kind of motivation has opened up - the curiosity I felt as a kid to create and explore and experiment and follow my interest. The joy of simply being alive, being allowed to live this life without having to perform for anyone, force a persona, or act a particular role.
The thing is, to lose that belief that only a job/work/career can provide us fulfilment, you have to be willing to go through and sit with the depression and grief of realising that that belief was a lie all along.
Yes, it was a lot easier to do this as a single guy without a family and pretty minimal material desires.
Mostly it was just living from savings - the first time was a working holiday overseas doing seasonal work with long stretches of time off in between. Later on in my career I was able to save more by keeping my standard of living low (and not buying a house, perhaps unfortunately).
Ultimately I don't think you need to quit everything to see through these beliefs. Meditation was a big part of the process for me and I didn't spend that long doing it. If you watch the mind close enough it becomes clear that so much of what seems so true and real is nothing more than a belief.
I disagree with your first points. I believe the majority of people are trying to get ahead, not just subsist. Why else do so many people work so hard? I think it goes to the myth that the poor in the US are poor because they don't work hard. IMO, I've known so many people with teo jobs, ut has a lot more to do with making $25k/yr for full time work. The median income is low, pay is low.
OTOH, I think you also neglect what benefit UBI would have to those who are currently the poorest. Child poverty, poverty, are big problems for millions of Americans.
You can just take money from the rich and give it to the poor. That doesn't have anything to do with UBI. And many of us live in a democracy, so if we all get on the same page, we can decide to just do that.
UBI is some bullshit handwaving to try make social safety nets sound fair. (We give the money to everybody!). We should just stop kidding ourselves and build a more caring and supporting society.
> You can just take money from the rich and give it to the poor. That doesn't have anything to do with UBI.
The reason to write that first sentence is because I pointed out that UBI helps those making less than UBI. Of course then it is pertinent to UBI in so far as it is a mechanism to achieve that goal.
Your original claim that UBI would cause laziness and depression is not further supported by making more claims that UBI is there solely to seem fair.
An argument that I have heard for UBI is: UBI is more effective than social safety nets that are doled out by merit, decided by committee. If you recall the so-called "death panels", government committees who decide who gets what healthcare, there is essentially that with various social programs. UBI has the virtue of simplicity, and uniformity helps ensure reach and therefore efficacy.
I am personally unsure whether UBI is the most effective way to build a supportive society, or if it is as good as its proponents claim. Though, neither do I think (respectfully) that your claims about UBI are well supported either
>Your original claim that UBI would cause laziness and depression is not further supported by making more claims that UBI is there solely to seem fair.
Sorry, I was attempting to make two separate claims, both perhaps over generalizations for the sake of impact.
Research doesn’t show the government providing cheap or free money doesn’t inflate prices? We’ve just lived through four years of insane government spending correlated with the highest inflation in over 40 years.
This is an experiment that has been tried and always has the same results: the cost of an item increases by approximately the amount of the subsidy the government provides. UBI experiments “work” because they are elevating the income of a small portion of the population above their peers. It’s not actually universal.
> Research doesn’t show the government providing cheap or free money doesn’t inflate prices?
The post being replied to said:
> There is not doubt in my mind that if we somehow implemented a UBI in a way that would not just result in inflation of rent and everyday goods, the vast majority of people would simply stop working, get bored, depressed, and more likely go looking for mischief before they started working on useful or interesting hobby projects.
So, the response saying that the research doesn't support that conclusion is not about the "that would not just result in" there, it's about countering the remainder of that point. Most people will not choose to do absolutely nothing. (And if some people do, that's fine!)
That's separate from the many arguments that UBI is not inherently inflationary, which neither the post you replied to or the post it replied to were making.
> the cost of an item increases by approximately the amount of the subsidy the government provides.
Vis-a-vis food stamps and unemployment checks, I don't think you can draw the correlation you think exists. Particularly past a certain level of poverty, the state ends up spending more to manage the consequences of unemployment than it saves by refusing to fix it. UBI in this case perpetuates inequity but it also greases the wheels of a down-and-out working population that can be motivated by higher standards of living.
From a net-gain perspective, developed nations investing in themselves like this makes sense. The alternative is letting the middle class rot, which is something that only the upper-class would stand to gain from.
Heck, I'm convinced even the upper class benefits long term from the kind of investment you're talking about, for a bunch of reasons.
To name just two examples: Technological progress happens more smoothly when there are mass markets. Society is healthier and safer when everybody feels like they have a stake in it.
Well, the way I see it, there is a real possibility that we're going to have to figure out what to do after that happens some day. There's no fundamental law of nature that guarantees we'll have enough work to keep the vast majority of people working.
It already feels like many of the jobs that exist today are bullshit, and knowing that your job is bullshit is not exactly good for your mental health, either.
As others commented there can be a dozen other reason to be depressed under the pandemic other than UBI like revenues.
Also UBI does not stop you from doing work. UBI does not want to be a complete replacement of work related revenues, just the basic needs are covered. So if you have a minimum of ambition, you'll go for a job. UBI is just your safety net, so you must not become something that you feel is a slave or stuck in with bad people just to pay rent. Quite different story compared to what you painted here like people just don't work. Also would be interesting to see this unfolding for 10 years. Maybe humans are just lazy but quite the opposite can happen as well and those stories will drag people along. Of course some of us are going to fuck it up that's for sure.
Interesting that I observed the opposite. During the pandemic people I know who had to work were sent into extreme psychological dysfunction that they're still dealing with the fallout that followed. Those that didn't need to work flourished.
I doubt it was the UBI-like aspect of the pandemic that caused the depressive states. Isolation, less active lifestyles, locked inside. Imagine UBI, but with the opposite of all of those!
That's why in the sci-fi, utopian economics of the Star Trek Federation they have a "participation based" UBI, where your ticket to the Federation's generous UBI (made possible by effectively infinite material resources) is contingent upon you doing something productive. You can't just sit on your ass all day and collect it.
Now how they measure/judge what's "productive" and the fact that it works at all is what makes it sci-fi, but it highlights that responsibility is critical, even in a utopia.
Star Trek mostly just kind of handwaves this sort of thing rather than actually explaining how it works, which is probably the right narrative decision because it's usually beside whatever point the story is trying to make.
Star Trek handwaves away pretty much all questions about its utopian economics. What's the point in Picard's family owning a vineyard in a world with replicators that can make perfectly aged wine for you in seconds?
I think that almost every episode featuring food from replicators always has someone lamenting that it isn’t the real thing though. So tastes vary. There is tradition. Point enough to have a be vineyard.
It's not a Universal Basic Income if it's not Universal.
It's been a while since I watched the series admittedly. IIRC it's honor, influence, and prestige that motivates the people working for the federation.
UBI is a failure of imagination for jobs programs. Don't get me wrong, as a society we should take care of everyone so that no one dies of starvation or freezes to death, but don't just give people handouts, pay people to do stuff. Even something as simple as planting trees.
I think jobs programs are a failure of society to imagine what true abundance looks like, and how abundant our lives are.
In the US, we produce and throw away so much food that overconsumption is vastly more deadly than underconsumption. Hell, we even put corn ethanol into our petro products just to keep the farmland in use.
We could have “universal basic food stamps” pretty much immediately. Affordably too - society is collectively already paying for a multiple of all consumption needs (just out of pocket instead of via government subsidy). People could work for extra income for their specialty foods.
UBI allows people to choose what stuff they consider productive. UBI means anyone can work on a startup, or try to start a project, or try an artistic endeavor, or do research. UBI means everyone can afford to take some risks and still have a fallback plan.
UBI means you don't have to be productive or take any risks. Just sit back and collect the dole and drink beer and enjoy the sun. Or fentanyl. I'm not against giving people a chance or taking care of people when they're down. I don't think UBI is the way to accomplish that though, and that a well funded, and properly managed jobs programs would do more to improve society, and is more tractable, than giving everybody a magic money fountain.
> UBI means you don't have to be productive or take any risks.
And that's a great thing. My comment is about what it allows people to do and what they can do, not about forcing them to do anything.
If some subset of people choose to relax, temporarily or otherwise, rather than go work a low-paying job, so be it. That's not just an "acceptable negative", that's a positive, that people can do that.
UBI shouldn't be set at a level that makes it comfortable to have zero income forever. UBI should be set at a level that makes it reliably survivable to have zero income. There will always be incentives to work, and there will always be people who choose not to, and both of those things are fine.
> properly managed jobs programs
The difference I was highlighting between UBI and a jobs program is precisely that UBI doesn't require defining what qualifies as a job, and supports trying novel things that don't immediately pay out enough to support you. You don't need make-work jobs, you don't have the problem of people being automated out of a job (so automation is much more often a good thing), you have a massive renaissance in startups and ventures of all sorts, you have lower administrative costs because you don't have means testing or ...
All the cases of people suddenly finding themselves with an obsolete skillset? They'd be able to afford to take a year off to reinvent themselves and become more productive again, rather than having to immediately jump on whatever work they can get.
> and is more tractable
I've seen many cases made that UBI is an easier sell across the political spectrum than jobs programs or welfare programs would be. Lower administrative costs, smaller public sector, net win for the economy, higher likelihood of more people becoming more successful and depending on it less...
> You're describing properly motivated people. Those people, properly motivated, have found ways to do the same without UBI.
Those two sets are not identical; many motivated people nonetheless do not have the resources to take a risk and still have something to fall back on, or to take a long time learning something that will not immediately pay off.
It's been a few years but my recollection is something like:
1. The jobs that are crappy enough for jobs programs are not useful jobs to be done anyway.
2. The overhead involved in having a job (Transportation, childcare, all kinds of second-order negatives on your life) can easily outweigh shitty salaries. Also jobs programs would be worse for people with kids, unless you add more child tax credit to prop up that side of the stool.
3. Having a job takes away free time that otherwise could be used for training or education. Planting trees by hand in the sun is not going to look like anything on anyone's resume. You could put another leg on the stool by having a college grant program or something, but it's another step away from jobs and towards UBI
If you're going to pay people to do something pointless, maybe just pay them to exist anyway?
Why do they have to be crappy? Why wouldn't childcare be a job in the jobs program? Or teaching? or driver? Scott Alexander doesn't think deeply or fully address that in that piece, choosing instead to use a strawman to say it just won't work, but less critically that UBI somehow magically would.
Would you be willing to trust your child to the care of someone who is unwilling or incapable of finding work outside the jobs program?
For any useful job you can think of, ask yourself: What's stopping the unemployed from doing that job right now? They could already be making decent money driving or caring, so why aren't they?
I'm less worried about the current unemployed; that's a whole other can of worms. I'm more worried concerned about a supposed AI job-pocalypse where everyone (including me) can't find a job because AI robots can perform the role I currently perform, for cheaper, and tirelessly.
For the jobs that immediately come to mind, the reason there's no one working then is because I don't have the money to pay for them. I'd love to have a driver and a carer; There's a number of businesses I want to start but I don't have the money to hire people to do things so they limp along with the time and effort I'm able to give them after my main job.
How about reforming the WPA [1] and build free basic housing. Let the for profit house building corporations handle the luxury stuff. Actually, that's all they are interested in doing anyways.
We should stop begging them to build what we need and just do it ourselves.
Your friends are not working because of people are so used to the “rails” that a job guides them and spoon feed them what exactly to do and with what consequences, this is why UBI isn’t gonna be what that commenter fantasies about. Most people does not have the will power to force and give themselves consequences and stick to it, because they are their own boss.
I expect that advances in AI and robotics will make most human labor obsolete (economically unviable) in the next few decades. I expect widespread adoption of UBI as a consequence.
I have also considered the fact that most people just sort of "drift" if there isn't an external system forcing them to stay on track. I suspect we're going to see "fake jobs" subsidized by the system for the sake of maintaining widespread sanity.
Well fake jobs isn't quite the right name, rather they'd be real jobs but a portion of the UBI budget (or wherever it comes from) would be spent maintaining a human economy for the people (most people?) who apparently require such a system to stay sane. I say fake because they wouldn't be economically viable without the subsidy.
Is there an actual reference to the idea that the minimum wage was meant to be a "universal basic wage"? Is this in the original congressional debates, the legislation, comments by Roosevelt? (Searching for references to the phrase, I couldn't find anything from the timeframe of when the legislation was enacted.)
>and it has been corroded to uselessness over time.
The federal minimum wage has basically kept up with inflation since the 1930s. In the states where costs are higher, they generally have higher rates.
During the pandemic, my roommate and I built so much shit.
We built a full wooden camper setup with electrical and plumbing. We sketched and crafted new furniture for our apartment. We designed and built our own hydroponics system.
And we skated a lot and hiked where we could. We did also play a lot of video games.
Super honest feedback on UBI. I'm glad we saw it develop before us with COVID, there is something there that may work, but simple UBI doesn't work evidently
I'm replying to you since you got the most upvotes :-)
I take issue with your main point: that not having to work and receiving financial aid cause depression. Did anyone receiving the $1400 pandemic check from the government feel down about it? The notion is frankly preposterous.
From this, we can infer that reducing one's labor burden also doesn't cause depression.
So depression might come from elsewhere: maybe boredom, existential angst, who knows. But it's not pertinent to the debate around UBI.
Now, we can talk about the financial toll of paying taxes for UBI, or the risk of inflation (there is none - that comes from increasing the money supply not incomes - although political machinations tend to preserve wealth at the top), or the collapse of various service industries that profit from underemployment. But those are probably best analyzed in simulation, since like with ventures and startups, there is no way to predict the benefits to society if 1% succeed even if 99% fail or are idle.
My personal take is that sentiment for UBI will fall along political lines. We can use other spectrums for reference:
* female vs male
* positive reinforcement vs tough love
* liberal vs conservative
Since HN is mostly composed of tech workers, I'd predict a male-dominated slant with a preference for tough love and conservative values. It would have an inherent bias towards work over caregiving. So the majority of HN might disfavor UBI, regardless of any actual merits it provides.
-
I decided to get an estimate of UBI support on HN based on the sentiments of the replies here:
please analyze the text from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41638103 (the text follows the news.ycombinator.com forum comment structure).
divide the text into a list of replies.
note that any line starting with ">" is a comment from a parent reply.
determine the sentiment of each reply as to whether it favors UBI or disfavors UBI.
count the replies favoring UBI, the replies disfavoring UBI, and the replies that are neutral/defensive/etc about UBI.
* Favors UBI: 12 replies
* Disfavors UBI: 26 replies
* Neutral/Defensive: 12 replies
Unfortunately, it started saying "I currently cannot access external websites, including the one you provided" so I had to stop at that preliminary estimate.
I also tried changing the first line of the prompt and with manually pasting the page between "<< ... >>":
please analyze the text between "<<" and ">>" that I've pasted after this prompt (the text was obtained from a news.ycombinator.com forum and follows the same comment structure).
That returned similar results.
https://chatgpt.com/ has an arbitary length limit that can't separate prompt from context data, which makes it generally useless for this type of work. https://iask.ai has similar limitations which negate its usefulness also.
But going by the first estimate, it looks like about 1/4 of HN users favor UBI, 1/2 disfavor UBI, and 1/4 are neutral.
It would be interesting to see this analysis on a larger sample size.
-
With 50% of HN seemingly disfavoring UBI, since we're essentially thought leaders in tech, it's highly unlikely that society as a whole will vote to adopt UBI.
I think that's ..sad, for lack of a better word.
We're basically saying that even though we know automation better than anyone, we don't believe that it can lead to a decrease in labor, or that its proceeds should be used to benefit everyone.
I think that's an abdication of our role in working to make the world a better place, and why we got started in tech in the first place.
So without a viable plan of action for getting to UBI, it's probably time to form an independent organization outside of public government and private industry. One that's opt-in, with a commitment to contribute a portion of one's future profits to an even payout of UBI, without means testing.
After a lifetime of struggle with countless losses and no big win, despite hard work on a level that most people probably wouldn't believe, I would opt-in in a heartbeat. And I'm going to make it my life's work to focus on manifesting self-actualization for everyone, starting with bringing about UBI. That's how strongly I believe in its potential to change the world for the better, for us and for future generations.
I realized after sleeping on this that without verifying the sentiments manually, I don't have enough evidence to make a prediction about HN users' support of UBI. So my conclusions may not have enough basis in fact.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, what if we imagine that the votes went the other way, with 50% favoring UBI, 25% disfavoring UBI, and 25% neutral? And what if HN were left-leaning, and wished to work towards UBI, convincing others on the left to join? What kind of opposition would they face?
* women who are primary caregivers wouldn't want UBI because?
- they make plenty of money already, earning the same wages as men?
- receiving assistance would diminish the perceived value of the money they earn being away from their children, elderly parents, etc?
- they've seen how depriving people of enough income to meet basic needs builds strong communities?
* parents practicing positive reinforcement wouldn't want UBI because?
- taking that money as a handout sends the wrong message to their children, that societies are stronger than individuals?
- they work enough hours already that they have all the money they need to spend quality time with their family?
- it's better for kids to have their hopes dashed than know their parents have enough money to feed and clothe them, eventually sending them to college?
* liberals in favor of government programs, agencies and social safety nets wouldn't want UBI because?
- it might interfere with existing institutions like the Department of Health and Welfare, known for their efficiency and effectiveness?
- it might undermine unions, the Peace Corps, etc that already promote meaningful work and fair pay?
- it might help conservatives, which could undermine leftist agendas like making sure that everyone has a fair shake?
Do any of these pass the sniff test?
After writing this out, I think I can safely say that even without knowing the sentiment towards UBI, we can make predictions about who will favor or oppose it and why. It has to do with empathy or the lack thereof, and how traditional notions like responsibility, community and patriotism have been coopted during the Information Age by moneyed interests in the status quo.
I've kind of reached the point in life where talking about problems till I'm blue in the face does nothing to fix them. I'm more interested now in joining and forming coalitions that bring about meaningful change and give people alternatives that pay dividends larger than the way things are currently.
At the simplest level, we can ask: does giving people who are already rich even more money at the cost of those struggling without enough resources (Social Darwinism) build a more prosperous society? Or does using excess wealth to provide for those in need (Social Planning) heal society?
In these matters, I tend to think that the opinion of a 5 year old child is generally more in line spiritually with the greater good than whatever serious-sounding adults preach, even academics. So I know where my sentiment stands regarding UBI.
UBI won't work: it's almost implemented in my country (you can get 600€/month + many other welfare stuff by not working) and what's the result? Highest public deficit in the EU zone, highest tax rate in the world, rampant criminality, difficulty to get money by working because of said taxes, educated people leaving the country in mass, etc.
Reality #1: Universal Basic Income (UBI) will empower people to break free from the grind of work. They'll have the freedom to start innovative companies, create art, make music, learn to dance, and generally enjoy happier, less stressful lives.
Reality #2: Alternatively, many might find themselves stuck at home, glued to their screens. This could lead to boredom and depression, resulting in online trolling and petty arguments. Some may even resort to crime out of frustration.
What you’re describing isn’t UBI; it’s just traditional welfare. UBI advocates are aware of problems with welfare and believe that UBI wouldn’t suffer from the same issues.
Why not though? The money has to come from somewhere. Why would UBI not tremendously raise taxes and thereby undermine the incentive to work just as GP observes?
There's actually two ways that the situation described above undermines the incentive to work.
The first is that - and this is one of the key distinctions - welfare programs are means-tested whereas UBI is (as the name implies) universal: everyone gets it whether they're working or need it or not. The post above says "you can get 600€/month + many other welfare stuff by not working"; if you lose that welfare by starting to work, this hugely incentivizes not working! Worse still, it incentivizes black market labour - money earned under the table isn't going to be counted against your means-testing. This is at best productive but untaxed, at worst actively destructive or criminal.
The other is, as you've pointed out, high taxation. I believe the UBI advocate's response to this would be some combination of: 1) UBI will supersede a multitude of complex, means-tested welfare programs and will be cheaper to administer as well, so the increase to taxation won't be as substantial as you might imagine; 2) giving people freedom to pursue education/creativity/entrepeneurship, UBI will spur on economic growth that will help it pay for itself (as would disincentivizing black market labour, as described above); and 3) the extent to which taxation disincentivizes productivity is overstated, or is perhaps contingent on the particular taxation scheme, and they support one that they think won't have deleterious effects.
FWIW I personally suspect UBI would be a pretty good idea, but I'm at least a little skeptical about some of these arguments as I understand them; nevertheless, various people who've studied the issue extensively and with a stronger background in economics buy them, so I accept that they're at least worth taking seriously.
Where is that $600/month going to come from? Is it going to be printed (i.e. causing inflation) or is it going to come from taxation?
Let's try some math: if there are ten people in society, and they all get $600/month, you need to generate $6000/month of tax income. So if there are five of them working, and making an additional $1200/month, that entire sum needs to be taken by the government so it has enough money to pay all of them $600. Are you going to be working, just so someone else doesn't have to, with zero additional benefit to yourself? And I'm not talking about "I'll make myself useful doing art", I'm talking about basic jobs that are MANDATORY to keep society going at all, such as growing food, building roads, and repairing sewers.
Who will be repairing sewers, under UBI? Do you believe that people do that kind of thing for fun, and that they would continue doing that if the state takes all of their money through taxation?
Why do you think $600/month is even sufficient to live on? What about people that live in really expensive cities like San Francisco, are they also going to get $600, even though that realistically represents maybe a week's worth of rent to them?
UBI is only cheaper to administer if you look purely at administration costs. In reality administration costs are a tiny, tiny fraction of the total program cost, and reducing administration costs of existing programs would not have any meaningful impact on state finances, making the administration costs of UBI a non-argument.
There's also the matter of fairness: providing everyone with the same amount of money may sound fair, but is it really fair to give someone who has significant additional costs just to stay alive (for example, because of medical costs) the same amount of money as someone who is fully able to provide for himself already anyway?
Your appeal to authority in your last sentence does not convince, and every attempt to make the math work for UBI ends in complete failure. And don't forget: to 'try it out', we'd have to completely restructure all of society, and the opponents of UBI have highlighted the risk of complete societal collapse if it turns out that UBI is an unworkable scheme after all. Are you willing to take that risk?
Finally, UBI seems to share the incentive structure of communism wrt. human productivity. Given how communist societies throughout history have tended to result in mass starvation with millions, if not tens of millions dead, why do you believe UBI is something we should be trying?
> No true Scotsman or appeal to purity is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect an a posteriori claim from a falsifying counterexample by covertly modifying the initial claim.
No one has covertly modified the initial claim. UBI has a long-standing definition that’s distinct from welfare.
Answering your literal question, how could it "possibly" be good:
Minimum wage probably doesn't work because it means a lot of people live in precarity while both emotionally and physically exhausting them. It might just be that minimum wage has stagnated while COL has skyrocketed. If the point of minimum wage is that it provides people with a guaranteed dignified life as long as they are employed, that needs to keep up with the cost of living a normal life in order to keep its effectiveness. That is one reason it might be "failing" although I don't know exactly what you mean by that.
> get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization
This is the thing I think most people have a hard time connecting to "measurable utility" but will probably be the most sweeping effect of UBI or similar. Think about your typical gig worker, minimum wage worker in some high-turnover environment etc. This person probably does not have the financial safety net to pursue something meaningful, or to take the risk reskilling, or to otherwise improve their emotional and financial well-being.
You will probably always have free-riders or people who just want to consume without producing. But is it better to have a society of exhausted, frustrated, barely-hanging-on people, or a society of people with the _potential_ to to be creative, passionate, and exploratory?
Conversely to you, I find it hard to imagine that a society with surplus wealth would be more effective if it chose to subject its people to precarity and emotional strife instead of empowering as many of its people as possible.
Why not just have unemployment benefits or new enterprise grants? Why do you need UBI?
Here in Australia there is quite a bit of money floating around for those people with passions and potential. I've received quite a bit over the years taking chances, some of it as grants, some as government investments.
I've been fortunate and never had to rely on unemployment benifits, but I always knew in the back of my mind it was available if I fail. Soon I'll be able to fall back on my aged care benefits :)
Unemployment benefits and other income-dependent benefits are a strong incentive against working, unless the job pays particularly well. It's common that the effective tax rate for low-paying jobs is 80-90%, if you count lost benefits in addition to taxes. Sometime the rate exceeds 100%. In order to get unemployed people back to work against their own interests, unemployment benefits often come with strict time limits, a lot of surveillance and bureaucracy, and a general loss of dignity.
The "basic" in UBI aims to solve that by changing benefits and taxes. Everyone from the homeless to the billionaires gets the same benefits, while income taxes will make sure that most people won't see any additional money. The differences are only seen by people with low incomes. While the benefits may be a little lower, taking a low-paying job makes much more sense, as your tax rate may be as low as 40%.
Many old-school unions oppose UBI because it makes low-paying jobs more viable. They consider it morally wrong. According to them, if you work full time, the employer should pay you enough that you don't need any government handouts for a dignified live.
Id love to understand how unemployment benefits discourage working more than a UBI. Either you need to work to survive or you don't.
I've read some comments here recently that suggests people feel like they have a right to a nice life after being born. As I get older I see humans more like any other animal born into an uncaring universe out in nature. You have to get out of that borrow, hunt and forage to survive. It's not the responsibility of every other human to have food delivered to your burrow.
Look up welfare trap. Many benefit programs are implemented such that they go away the second you start working. This means if I am getting $X per week in welfare but I get an employment offer of $Y per week where Y<X, then I am incentivized to stay on welfare. Even if Y>X, it often makes sense to stay on welfare because you might have to start paying for child care, or buy a second car to get to work, etc...
> You have to get out of that borrow, hunt and forage to survive.
Modern society has put significant constraints on how I can pursue survival. I can't just go and fish in the ocean, because there are regulations on how and what I can catch. I can't just go and farm a little piece of land because almost all land is owned by someone or something. Of the many reasons I think UBI is a good idea, a major reason is that I consider it payment for the loss of "natural rights" that we give up in order to live in a modern society. I think fishing regulations are good thing, but they also curtail my ability to subsist, so I think UBI is a good compensation for that.
> This means if I am getting $X per week in welfare but I get an employment offer of $Y per week where Y<X, then I am incentivized to stay on welfare.
Yes, sure, but this applies to UBI as well. If Y is not worth my time actually doing the work, after you pay for that card and child care, would I bother? Is UBI a comfortable life, or is it bare minimum to live?
>a major reason is that I consider it payment for the loss of "natural rights" that we give up in order to live in a modern society.
I don't mind this argument, but lets remember that in order to assert your natural rights you need to actually work. If you were allowed to fish and hunt, you would have go out and do it. UBI suggests you can just do nothing and be handed a living.
I would much prefer we provide unemployment or disability to anybody who wants it because I want to live in a compassionate and caring society, but we don't have to call it a UBI, give it to everybody, and turn the world on its head.
Then I think we should also guarantee a job for anybody who wants one, with a significant step up in income. (And right now that job should be capturing carbon.)
It does not. THE primary difference between UBI and unemployment is that UBI does not disappear once you are unemployed. So in my hypothetical scenario above, the person would be making Y+X. Assuming UBI is paid for via income taxes, and that those income taxes are applied progressively, at some point up the income ladder you will be paying more in taxes than you receive in UBI, but at the lower income scales it is all accretive making for a strong incentive to work.
> Then I think we should also guarantee a job for anybody who wants one, with a significant step up in income. (And right now that job should be capturing carbon.)
I think we should have a UBI and then combine that with eliminating the minimum wage. Maybe we limit that to just nonprofits, but the goal would be to make it easier to pay people to do work that is currently not incentivized in our current economy. For example, near me, I volunteer for beach cleanups and at the community garden. These groups are well funded, but they need to rely on volunteers because the minimum wage near me is over $17 and the operations are very labor intensive. If you have a UBI, the idea of paying people a few bucks an hour to clean the beach becomes much more palatable. Right now, we need to try to strong arm companies into paying livable wages, but there is only so much economic activity that is profitable at those levels. A UBI that provides very basic subsistence (we are talking squalor levels of assistance, FYI), combined with reducing barriers to employment would go a long way towards resolving some major ills in our current economy.
With UBI, the job effectively pays more, and the incentives to take it are stronger.
A hypothetical example with arbitrary numbers:
You get $20k/year in benefits. You are offered a job that pays $30k/year, but then you have to pay $5k in taxes and you lose the benefits. The job would effectively pay you $2.5/hour after taxes, which is not very attractive.
With UBI, you get to keep the benefits, but you pay a 40% tax for all earned income. Your after-tax income would be $38k/year, and your effective wage would be $9/hour after taxes. Still not very good but much better than the $2.5/hour.
Yes. Moreover, all prices will jump 3-100x, so UBI will be useless anyway: you must go to work or die in poverty. UBI is also known as "true socialism".
If UBI is revenue neutral, whether by increasing taxes or cutting other programs or some combination of both, then it would not increase inflation. You should brush up on your macroeconomics.
Any income, that is not backed up by a product or service, changes the equilibrium, thus accelerates inflation. I saw this multiple times already in my own country.
Who said minimum wage didn't work? It works, provided you adjust its value regularly.
Anyway, I've met a few people who, through a combination of welfare and inherited wealth don't really have to work.
While most are simply living their best life spending time on unprofitable hobbies like photography one example stands out as he's currently busy driving into Ukraine and back with supplies for the people there.
What I'm getting at is that in reality we don't actually know what would happen under UBI. Maybe more children would be born, as another example from my list is currently a father and (to the best of my knowledge) still jobless?
Part of me wonders if this parallels the venture capital approach. Many won't don't anything economically productive with the opportunity UBI affords them, but the ones that do may make the cost worthwhile.
Not sure if that's how it would actually pan out, of course, but I think it's plausible.
>How could that, possibly, be sustainable or even good?
It isn't. Like most magical thinking economic proposals, it's simply a matter of ignoring reality.
"In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die.""
...
"And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!"
We live different lives. I only played part in projects (none game though) where the product should have been abandoned! In the state released of course. A theoretical option could been to finish it properly. However attempting that would have meant the end of the organization (bankrupcy), that's why saying theoretical option.
Looking at the state of software I have the misfortune to work with and use in private time all of my peers live this life... : (
Luckily the users have no choice then, all need to buy the crap or not buying anything at all. We are safe selling crap!
I just call that unfinished stuff "research". I have a bunch of UnrealEngine 4/5 projects I'll never finish, but they were fun from a point of view of testing a game mechanic, rigging and animation, shader development, creating the 3D assets etc.
Can you recommend any resources for writing for system 6/7 on the old 68k devices? I cut my teeth using computers on those but haven't written anything targeted at that platform.
We wanted to use Atkinson dithering, but it was hard to do in a shader because of how neighboring pixel values trickle into each other, and I was super stressed and tired at the time. I don't think it occurred to us to pin the pattern to the offset of the scene, so I think there is twinkling on scrolling levels like the catacombs and helicopter pack. But maybe we did? I wish I could remember. Anyway, kudos!
reply