The project is cool! It’s a simple visual graph layout system for making your own clock.

We have to draw the line somewhere with art, of course, and that usually comes down to a combination of what consumers value, and broader perceived cultural merit. Nobody really cares about the well-being of artists who specialize in making pretty paper airplanes, or drawing pictures using only the MSPaint pencil brush.

I think the audience, not the tools, deserve the most scrutiny here. Look around at this very thread, and all the people defending what the LLM wrote. Their feelings can't be argued with. But they make me feel sad and alienated, because I see a vast difference, so vast and so obvious, and they see none at all.

In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.

Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us, and they cannot quite believe that we have not lived up to the little they have demanded. They think too well of our generation.

Without defending the quality of the rest of the essay, it's a great start. LLMs today could never match it.

Unlike other consensus "bests", it's relatively unknown to the public (which is understandable for many reasons). It's very likely that if you're a puzzle game devotee, you will fall in love with SSR; but at the same time, if you don't have experience with puzzle games, you'll very likely hate it.

As a result, I've always thought it's an interesting window into how we value "taste" and "mastery", how too much mastery can actually distance us from one another, and what meaning there is in designing games for an ideal world shaped around ourselves, versus the world we actually live in.

It's well-known that puzzle games sell badly on Steam, and I think part of that is that difficulty and struggle is an acquired taste. Most try to paper over that gap with nice soundtracks and graphics, "hooky" mechanics, and narrative. SSR is so interesting because it contrasts so violently: it's ascetic, has no obvious hook, and offers nothing but difficulty and struggle, and the best feeling in the world if you decide to push through it anyway.

It seems like the author is studying “disorder” in an array by restricting themselves to looking only at local differences. They make up a lot of reducer functions, many of which relate to each other. But I don’t see the usefulness in playing with them — as none of the individual functions are ever useful. The author even says in their article about Amp that it doesn’t really work.

Basically all the functions only observe local behavior, but to measure “disorder” in a sensible way you need to take into account global relationships; the disorder of 2-3-4-5-6-5 is different than that of 2-3-4-5-6-1. There doesn’t seem to be a proposed way around this, but maybe I missed something.

Re: value propositions: Steam's 30% reduces to 25% after $10M made, and 20% after $50M.

Plenty of digital services have the ability to do this, but don't. Honestly, I think the primary reason is that it's extremely offensive; it feels like saying "we're charging you more, for no reason, other than that we think you'll pay it".

Not related, but one thing that’s comforted me in the past is that one’s brain physiologically responds to these changes like an addiction withdrawal — and one has to endure a cocktail of hormones and awful feelings but those will subside, with time, even if you make no changes to your life at all.

It goes without saying that some new groups to socialize with would help, but that’s a lot easier said than done :) It’s also important for you to believe — emotionally, not logically — that things will get better. This is difficult. Depression can lead to black-and-white thinking in areas that it doesn’t belong, so I feel it’s essential to combat this if it’s something you’re seeing. One thing that helps a lot is trying to have your expectations violated in a pleasant way.

Specifically — rather than tunneling on a hobby you’re interested in, I think it’s surprisingly valuable to join a group around something you think you might kinda like, but don’t like too much. (D&D would be an example for me.) Things will rarely turn out the way you expect, and I think if you go in with a lower bar for success, you leave more room for yourself to be pleasantly surprised and feeling hopeful and open.