MichaelEstes's comments

I ran into this situation earlier this year, minus the horrific personal tragedy, I hope he's in a better condition now, I'm deeply sorry about having to go through that.

I called AWS To deactivate my account in May of 2020 because I was going through some medical hardships and wouldn't be able to maintain anything on there for awhile and I wanted to double check that I wasn't going to keep getting charged if I forgot to manually turn something off. I thought all went well and it would be turned off, until I checked my bank around a few months ago and noticed I was still getting charged for AWS.

I spent 3 weeks trying to get support to why I was still getting charged and for much more than I had ever set uo, but they wouldn't tell me anything because none of my emails matched any accounts they had on record. I finally got a support person to slip when I told her the name of my company and she said it was similar to the email on file, but that it was a Gmail account. I've never made a Gmail account for my business and I was the only one that ever had access to the AWS account. I don't know how someone could have gotten into the account and changed the email, but I couldn't log in and the only thing I could do was have my credit card company cancel the charges (which could only go back 3 months) and prevent new charges. I'm still baffled about how this happened, but I've moved to GCP and will never go back, those 3 weeks were insanely frustrating.

I wanted to fight tooth and nail, just because I'm sick of ultra-large corps' ability to get away with stuff like this, but my wife was worried about Amazon's retaliation and not being able to use Amazon to buy things which is half the problem. I don't really have any advice, but maybe if enough people share their stories something will make it to a headline.

That's interesting, because Niantic went from lab to maturity amazingly well, but only after being spun off from Google during the Alphabet restructure.

Oops, I missed a word. How do you find consulting work with that little of a time commitment?

How do you work for the couple of days? If you don't mind me asking.

They make money from selling the better head strap, the Quest 2 elite strap is $50 extra.

I use my iPad for my workflow when I’m away from my Cintiq or when I want to work on my couch. Photoshop and Illustrator are basically the same as the desktop versions and Nomad Sculpt has really impressed me. Art is pretty much where the buck stops though, programming still needs a PC and I’ve had issues with a lot of websites not running properly on my iPad (Google ads, analytics etc..). If your work needs a stylus, it’s great, if not and it’s more than sending emails I’d stick to a laptop.

I'd imagine most first person games use their occlusion culling as their base for network visibility, but I could be wrong.

I think this question is a much bigger than it seems at first. I made a streaming website a while ago, depending on how non-technical you are I open sourced it if you want to browse, it's not well documented, but it should give you a sense of all the pieces needed https://github.com/MichaelEstes/Scrim-TV I used Go as the backend because I knew it well, but you're also going to need a few databases and a CDN. It's a lot of moving parts without a black and white answer.

Depending on how non-technical you are, I'd focus more on finding the services that meet your product needs for the best price. Moving to a new backend is a lot easier than moving to a new cloud service provider in my experience. There's only a handful of them out there so once you have that it won't be hard to find a shop that has a great deal of experience in it and they'll use the backend they have the most experience in.

I don't know if I'd call that objectively incorrect, maybe slightly pessimistic, but do you live in the US? A large percentage of people here were very ok with a smaller percentage of people dying so that their own lives wouldn't be inconvenienced, people have that world view even with their own species.

It's almost comical when you go back and watch their "1984" ad

Between years of getting stuck in a perpetual loop of thinking "if I make money now I can make games later" and 2020 being the worst fucking year ever (as I'm sure it was for a lot of people); I decided just to take a year and spend it doing what I actually wanted to do. So I made the mobile game I wish I had access to in 2020, because ironically enough, I spent a lot of 2020 away from my home pc.

The core loop is still pretty simple: craft, loot, fight. I want to make sure I get that to a point that feels really good before adding more to the colony building aspects.

The game is restricted to certain regions on Google Play so if you're on an Android phone and would like to try it out send me an email with your Google Play email and I can add you to the tester list [email protected]

Probably not going to reach my target audience here, but I greatly appreciate any and all feedback from you all!

I've been around a lot of police officers in my life and I can count on one hand the number that have even attempted life savings measures when arriving first to a scene that required them

It’s surprisingly solid, I’ve made a couple weekend projects in it, but I see it being to Unity/Unreal what Blender is to Maya/Zbrush. I still wouldn’t use Godot for anything I hope to make money from, or if your looking to gain skills that will land you a job at a studio. If you’re new to game dev as a whole I’d recommend starting with Unity.

Video hosting is expensive, like really expensive. I started a site (scrim.tv) to try and disrupt YouTube for the reasons that are often expressed in posts like these and I'm pretty convinced at this point that YouTube basically breaks even in terms of profit.

It's strange to me that people are so concerned about these deep fakes when the National Enquirer has been around for so long. It's been easy to lie to people in mass for awhile now. I don't think this changes the number of people that are open to these suggestions, I think people in general are smarter than a lot of people give them credit for.

That's great input/insight, I think I agree with with most of what you're saying. What I really got from this book is that I was not managing my goals correctly. As a programmer when I'm given a problem the first thing I do is break it down into small, easily achievable pieces that then build up into the final solution.

I wasn't doing this with my goals and a byproduct of that was that I wasn't able to measure to progress of my final goals.

It's really more about how you manage your goals, not what they might be, but even with something as broad as happiness I think this is still possible. If you set "being happier" as your final goal, you can start to set daily, monthly, yearly... goals that fold into happiness. Happiness may not be strictly measurably, but if you know that working out 3 times a week makes you happier you can set that as a weekly goal. You then can set monthly and yearly goals around what working out steadily will improve (lifting more weight, running further and faster) and those things will usually be easily measurable.

There's edge cases for sure, as with most things. I will say it works better in a work environment where most progress can be easily measured (Even though it often isn't), but I think a good goal system is something that can be beneficial for any goal you may set.

However I do agree with #3 & #4, if your final goals are not in the right direction any adjustments to the daily, weekly, monthly goals will not improve that and may have a negative overall effect, but I think that resolves to a much larger issue than your goal management system.

Measure what Matters by John Doerr had a similar effect on me to what you're describing with Freakonomics. I don't remember a lot of details from that book, but the way I set and measured goals after reading it changed almost overnight.