Just the reverse, you discourage adoption by turning a currency into an investment.
If bitcoins had constant or decreasing value through time then people would be more willing to trade them. This is why deflation is so economically dangerous.
It did encourage mining, but that doesn’t driving long term adoption and has nearly purely negative consequences.
The ideal long term strategy for adoption would have mining to provide a consistent reward in real terms over a long timeframe, low costs and high transaction volumes, and for unused accounts to be charged a small fee. Bitcoin failed all of those which is why it’s never had significant adoption as a currency.
> Bitcoin failed all of those which is why it’s never had significant adoption as a currency.
Yet there is no more successful digital currency on the planet. If you think you can make one with "better" rules please go ahead!
> This is why deflation is so economically dangerous.
The idea that inflation and constant spending are the only thing that makes an economy work is faith-based, and bitcoin was intentionally not started that way. So far I'd say it has worked quite well.
Back when people used precious metals for currency many different economies would all be tied to the same shifts in value. I don’t know all the details but there’s real world support for significant deflation being detrimental not just theory.
That said trivial levels of deflation aren’t harmful, but bitcoin had very extreme deflation.
> I don’t know all the details but there’s real world support for significant deflation being detrimental not just theory.
The problem is that the "real world support" is usually taken from fiat money economies that are entirely built on inflation, and for historical examples there usually was an economic crisis at the same time that was accompanied by deflation. It's hardly conclusive.
High levels of inflation are also harmful. +/- ~0.3% per month is fine, outside of that range and you’re hurting adoption.
> an economic crisis at the time
In non fiat currencies you also get deflation from economic growth. Where you can study the effect is when the growth occurs outside of a given economy. Again, outside of my expertise it’s just something I have read.
Life is a meaningless crawl towards the heat death of the universe. Childish behavior is the most appropriate attitude one can have towards most things.
I totally agree with you, and there are definitely more whimsical ways to go about it than goatse. Even if I personally can find whimsy in getting randomly goatse'd I'm not gonna say that someone who finds it really disturbing deserves what's coming to them just because they are insufficiently chill.
I found a link on HN a while ago that shows you just that, it's a randomizer (like the old StumbleUpon) that sends you to random "old internet" webpages: https://wiby.me/surprise/
It sent me to a 1998 page about phrenology, the 'science' of determining someone's mental traits based on indentations in their skull: https://www.phrenology.org/index.html
If you were on forums in the aughts, it was unavoidable. I think every very online millennial knows what Goatse is. The youngest millennial is 27. Which begs the question: is Goatse what spreads Zoomers and millennials apart?
The Apple Card is a great credit card for people that aren't optimizing points for travel (most regular people).
The software is solid and Apple prevents them from reselling your data to third parties. The cash back is super easy to use and visible (and the extra percentage on Apple purchases is a nice bonus).
I have some cards I use for perks (Amex Plat/Gold, United Club, used to have Chase Sapphire Reserve) but I used the Apple Card as my sole card for a while and I kind of miss the simplicity of it. With Amex I feel like I'm fighting against an Army of Amex employees trying to make it as hard as possible for me to use the card's perks where as with Apple I feel like they're genuinely trying to make the software usable for me, the incentives are more aligned.
Every time I have to use Amex's site to 'enable' a perk and then read the fine print to make sure I actually get the benefit it makes me angry at some invisible product manager that hates customers.
Yeah, I just can't spend my time on that stuff. I got a card that just gives me 2% on everything and I'm calling it a day. no fee.
Airport lounges sound cool, my friends sometimes get a deal on travel/hotel. But they also can't use points in some situations for weird reasons. Another uses a spreadsheet to optimize his poins. I just can't devote that kind of time to that stuff.
The points can really be worth it though. In 2 years, over 3 cards (between my wife and I), I've racked up nearly 400,000 Aeroplan miles, which is valued somewhere around $8,400 (2.1c per mile). And this is regular spending, and pretty basic cards (AMEX Cobalt and TD Infinite). These aren't the $700+/year cards, all are $1xx/year.
You are gambling that the airlines let you spend those points or miles on something that you would have bought anyway at a conversation rate of $0.021 per point or mile, but there is no guarantee. They hold all the cards and they can devalue those anytime they like.
To me, if I have to spend any extra time figuring out how to spend those miles and points, or if I have to make even a single extra stop or adjust my itinerary to make use of them, then it is not worth it compared to a simple 2% cash back scheme.
You’re 100% right. I had 800k points I was sitting on for years because it took weeks or months of advanced (in both senses of temporal and complexity) planning to try to spend them optimally. No one is getting optimal rewards under constraints. Sure, it is possible to get round trip business class SFO to SIN for like 60k points in some edge cases. But the more typical scenario is that only on certain flights at certain times that are scooped up immediately by people who are in the know and religiously checking for exactly these deals.
What really happens is you hope you can do that but then get frustrated and either sit on your points for years or spend 2-3x the “optimal value” amount for something basic. Don’t get me wrong I like points, and it feels good cashing in on international business class tickets, but spending them in any way close to optimal is a stressful mess of transferring between airlines, calling service reps to get hidden seats and deals, gambling on upgrade availability, etc.
Finding great deals is not something accessible to someone who is only willing to spend 1-2 hours looking for a flight. You really do need to make it a hobby. I asked on r/awardtravel a few months back where all the deals were for an international flight I was trying to book 5 months in advance and got downvoted to oblivion because “everyone knows those deals are gone by now, you need to look at least 9 months in advance”.
I'm about to book business class tickets over to Lisbon -> Amsterdam -> Vienna, for 140k points and $300 in fees. All it cost me was a few hours spread over a year as I signed up and churned through 3 different credit cards.
Easily worth it IMHO. If I'm spending that money anyways, putting a bit of effort in to maximize the rewards seems logical.
$8,400 over three years is about $230/month. And aside from the opportunity cost of your labor to optimize that, you should also theoretically account for any purchases that you wouldn't have made if you weren't trying to optimize your points (if any; I'm sure it's hard to attribute).
With current interest rates of around 5%, one could get the same stream of income ($2.8k/y) by just plonking $50k or so into a high-yield savings account or money market fund.
I have likely spent 1 hour applying for cards, loading them into Apple Wallet over 3 years. If you are doing the math on opportunity cost for something you spent 1 hour over 3 years, you are already wasting your time.
To be honest, the $50k argument isn't comparable. It's like saying "Oh you have a side gig making $10k/year, why don't you just invest $200k in a money market fund instead?" First, someone could do both. And second, it's not even a logical comparison.
Best consumer cash back card is 2%. I'd have to spend over $400,000 to get $8400 in cash back. I definitely haven't spent close to that. So if I value the $8400 at cash value, it's better than any cash back credit card available.
It's been like 10 years since I looked into the options but at the time I was getting my first cards I was doing the math on various points cards to compare to cash back and what I found was, unless you were really gaming the system, the best you could hope for is roughly 1-2% returns. And the system, whether you're gaming it or not, also requires you to then play in the system so any given card might work out to like 5% if you spend those points on air travel... with a whole host of restrictions including but not limited to a specific airline. I don't have the time in my life to game the system so I can fly marginally cheaper with a specific airline and therefore restricted set of airports and scheduling options.
Travel cards haven’t been that restrictive in the time I’ve been using them (since around 2016). Chase Sapphire Preferred/Reserve and Amex Gold/Platinum don’t have any restrictions on what earns points, it just needs to code as travel (flights, rides, or hotels) or restaurants and while there’s some benefits from using the Chase/Amex portals to book even that’s not required. Similarly points can used towards anything that codes as travel.
Of course there are airline/hotel specific cards and those may be more restrictive but I’ve never seen the point in those.
I used to have a sapphire preferred, which promised 1.25x point value or something when spent on travel. When I went to book via the chase portal, everything was magically .25x more expensive when compared to the airlines page.
I can’t say I’ve observed that. Checking just now the prices I’m seeing in the Chase portal are identical to those listed on Expedia (which the Chase portal is built on). Some flights are slightly cheaper on airliner sites though.
hmm, maybe it was just jetblue specific, or something about the time I was booking. But it left a bad taste in my mouth, I decided to cancel the card at that point.
The one points card I have actually is a Marriott card which obviously only works with Marriott, but Marriott is everywhere and doesn't restrict scheduling options so it was an easy choice at the time. I used to travel weekly for work and the hotel was on me for reimbursement whereas the airline was on company card, and Marriott was the preferred booking option by my company so it made a lot of sense to get the card. The math at the time for that was like 5-7% when spending the points at Marriott plus a free night for what was an $85/year card. Useful for personal travel.
I’ve derived quite a lot of benefit from a Sapphire Reserve and Amex Plat over the years, though a lot less recently with the pandemic. They pay for themselves very quickly if you do any amount of travel at all, like recently I used the points earned from a trans-pacific flight to cut the cost of a hotel stay later during that trip in half (and booking that stay also netted me a nice chunk of points).
Might drop one of the two at some point though since they both cover the same niche.
I definitely believe it can be worth it monetarily. But to me it seems like such a maze of which cards to get, what point transfers to do. When it comes down to it, I don't even travel that much. Churning cards. One of my friends has a bunch a points that are going to expire, or there's point inflation or something?
I may waste my time on other things (like on hn, lol) but I don't think I want to spend it on that.
Exactly, there are 0 cards that would give cash back equivalent to what I've spent. I suspect it's like $100,000-$150,000. So being conservative, it's a 5% 'cash' back card.
I mostly fall into the 'set it and forget it' group. But, if you travel it can pay to add another card. Also, there's a middle ground between do nothing and track on a spreadsheet. It's pretty easy to have an Apple Card for 3% Apple things, Amazon card for 5% at Amazon, and then something like Venture X (or other travel friendly card) for everything else. One of nice things about the Venture cards is you simply book travel however you want then apply points to the purchase after the fact - no blackouts.
And since you mention lounges - if you travel 3+/year, lounges and TSA Pre/Global Entry really lower the frustration of travel.
I was reading reviews of the Amazon card and it sounded like there was a huge catch with fees and interest making that 5% not worth it. That's the only card I think would be worth adding for me. I don't do enough travel or shopping at Apple to make other cards worth using if I have a regular cash back card.
The amazon card has absurdly bad interest rates if you're carrying a balance, but that's not unusual with points cards, most of them are >= 25% APY.
There is also a weird gotcha if you use the cash advance balance transfer offers. It's 4% transfer fee, 2% APY for a year, but the cash advance pays off first, so, any purchases will continue to accrue at the 25% APY if you make them - but if you want to do a balance transfer just lock the card afterwards.
Other than that it's fine, actually great. I make a shitload of rewards on those amazon purchases, pay the balance monthly, and cash it out every month and don't pay any fees/interest.
You should never carry a balance on any card anyways so I think the high interest rate is moot. I don’t even know the interest rate of any of my cards. The 5% back on Amazon is worth it if you buy a lot on Amazon.
You do have to maintain a Prime membership, but there are no other regular fees. It's trivial to use the earned money on other Amazon purchases. No CC points/cash back are worth carrying a balance on any card.
It really is quite nice. If it weren’t for my SoFi credit card giving a flat 2% back on everything (which can be routed into a 4.5% savings account), my Apple Card would be my primary card. As it is it primarily gets used for Apple Pay since the cash back is the same in that circumstance as well as for Apple stuff for the 3% back.
Wouldn’t be surprised if between the two Apple will be the one to keep the perks going longest though… my hunch is that SoFi will dial theirs down once they’re done trying to aggressively grow.
Apple still beats SoFi in the UI department though. More bank/card apps should be modeled after the Apple Card page in Wallet.
Amazon card is a good option. 5% cashback on Amazon purchases (and often with "no interest if paid within 12 months" type terms on stuff like TVs. 2% on gas and 1% on everything else. Cashback accrues in practically real time and is useable on 99% of products on Amazon, so it's very normal-person friendly as it doesn't require optimization of habits if you already buy a lot of stuff on the 'zon. Super simple since it just rewards flat dollars, no points or annual thresholds or loyalty programs or...
Also doesn't require the insanely good credit of the Apple card.
Yikes. I know it's just an example, but how often do "normal" people buy TVs?
I gave up videogames because I didn't want to spend so much time in my head like that (I'll still gladly play tabletop games with other people, and even couch-coop videogames if I'm invited too, but I gave away my gaming PC), and I sure don't want to spend time fiddling with credit-card points games. It helps that we're mostly unhooked from "retail therapy" or whatever the term is these days.
What are the costs of cc points games? Who pays in the long run?
A TV specifically? Maybe once a decade. But, what if it's a new computer, or a new couch, or whatever? Substantially more often. Their minimum threshold is only $250, although items are specifically elibile, not automatic. They'll happily do the 12 month deal on a $399 iPad mini, for instance, just to name one thing I spot checked).
I don't believe so. The actual card is managed by Chase, payments go through the Chase website, etc. Amazon just links to it and updates your reward balance nightly.
Note that it's better if you don't apply rewards points at checkout - instead, get a payout to your bank account via the Chase reward redemption portal in the app. If you have $100 in rewards points, and use them in checkout, that $100 doesn't hit your card and you don't get the 5% cashback on that $100.
Technically you don't even need to loop through the bank account, you can also do statement credit. It doesn't count against your minimum payment, but it does count as a credit/payment towards the statement balance.
But yes, always charge the full amount and then handle rewards at a lower layer, never "pay with points".
Sure, to get $100 in rewards you'd need to have spent $2,000. It's not life-changing but $5 is still something, and I imagine Chase/Amazon save >1 million a year from people not doing this.
I hate points. There's always a catch, a term and condition that excludes your desired flight, or a time limit, or a horrible website, or something stupid.
The best points are called dollars and are accepted everywhere, all the time, for any purchase.
> The software is solid and Apple prevents them from reselling your data to third parties.
We will see. The Apple Card is using the Mastercard network. Recent article came out which shows MC does their own internal processing of transaction data for their personal gain.
I have requested my data through the GDPR portal — “My Data”. In theory, there should only be data for my other MC card.
I do agree. It’s a nice card for those that don’t care about the “point warfare” (most programs offer 1-3 cents per dollar spent). Side note, GS is very generous with their credit limits. My limit is reaching almost $60K at this point and I maybe use 10% of it.
The one thing I do dislike about the AC is the support. It’s so bad
I'd bet that this is pretty close to 'everyone' at this point. Haven't we been reading stories on HN recently about how airline points are basically worthless these days? I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were essentially true for all travel-related points.
The privacy policy claims that MasterCard and Goldman do not sell or share transaction data from Apple Card. I’d like clarity on how this differs from any other MasterCard but that is what it says.
> do not share or sell your transaction information to third parties for marketing or advertising.
It's not that they don't sell them. It's that they don't sell them for marketing and advertising. I wonder if Mastercard selling pseudo-anonymous data is covered by this.
That's for the merchant. Merchants only have access to the tokenised card number.
MasterCard and Goldman will surely have access to the actual card number. How would you recon they generate monthly statement otherwise?
Goldman surely has access to the real card number and the statement, but not sure if the Mastercard network has access to that as you would think that information just gets routed back to Goldman.
Google and Apple Pay negotiate a card number of them to use. But, Mastercard and the bank both link those to your account and can tell how you spend. They can even tell the difference between using the physical card and the app.
It is really nice once you give up trying to min/max rewards.
And some of the issues are kind of self inflicted - the "always monthly on the nose" isn't a feature I really need, and I would actually prefer to offset that by a few days, so if they offered that as a feature I'd take advantage of it.
I am very content with my alliant signature visa, as it gives 2.5% on everything, still has an extended-warranty benefit, and has no international transaction fees.
There are a few downsides, specifically (a) no contactless chip in the credit card yet, (b) need to keep $1k on deposit and have at least one monthly deposit of any kind/amount (scheduled ACH for $10) to get the 2.5% rate, otherwise it's 1.5%, (c) minimum redemption $50, and (d) ACH processing is a little slow/awkward, so you probably want to pay a bit ahead of time. And generally the UX is a little rough etc, they are a small credit union and it's not super polished, but it's functional.
But yeah I'm tired of category gimmicks/etc, they are not usually worth it anymore. BOA Signature Visa has 3% on category of choice (online purchases or home improvement being the good ones) but it's only up to $2500 in spend per quarter, and they count the non-choice categories against your total bonus, so using it for gas/groceries costs you from the theoretical maximum of $75 total bonus per quarter. And they charge international transaction fees which completely negate the online purchase bonus for anything denominated in non-USD (at least it's not charging for international transactions in USD anymore). And they really screwed up on a fraud case that took CFPB intervention to fix - it turns out, the price of my dignity is apparently $75 a quarter.
The costco card has 4% on gas, which is good (especially when I had a nearby speedway I could buy beer at), but it doesn't cash out until the next calendar year (so you can wait up to 14 months for points) so I generally don't use that except for the end of the year (I'll wait 3-4 months, I won't wait 14). But I think this is emblematic of the problem - the costco card (and many other store cards) only gives 2% even in the store, so it's worse than the alliant, on top of the onerous cashout process! Even if you have a more typical 2%-on-everything card, the costco card is pretty much strictly worse because of the cashout. I mostly got it for the 2-year extended warranty, that was the value to me, but they dropped that benefit at the start of 2022, so, it's almost useless to me now.
Notionally I could use amex or something and try to make it my primary card I guess, but I'm not a business traveler, and the alliant is just mentally easier. 2.5% on everything if you keep the $1k in the account and set up a recurring monthly $10 ach transfer, done. No international transaction fees, what you see is what you pay (plus or minus actual currency conversion, which is unavoidable). Use it as your primary card and spend $2000 and you'll cross the $50 redemption threshold every month. Is fine.
The Amazon Prime card is also very good, 5% on all amazon purchases is good enough I'll make a special point of it. If you do most of your bigbox purchases there, it adds up quick. They also have very good cash-advance offers, right now it's 4% transfer fee and 2% APY for a year - but the cash advance pays off first, and new purchases continue to accrue interest at the full rate (25% or whatever), so, you want to lock the card while you're doing a cash advance, so you are also foregoing that 5% (really, 2.5% above the alliant) from amazon purchases, but, if you're mature with it, it's great for consolidating other debt or financing things that need to be done in cash.
I'm also an overall satisfied Alliant customer. Definitely the lack of contactless chip is annoying, and I will echo that their UX could use refinement, but otherwise it's a pretty reliable card and the points are simple and easy. Fraud detection is a little hair-trigger I've found, but I have a few backup travel cards so when something unusual gets declined I can use an alternative.
The tech for this will obviously get better (is the example shown even recent?). The complaints in the Twitter thread are ridiculous imo. Disney is right to be experimenting with this stuff, it’s clearly going to be super relevant in the future.
There’s nothing wrong with calling out a company for putting out shoddy work during a contentious labor strike.
Disney can play with this stuff all they want, but society is going to start asking these big questions in louder and more forceful ways, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. You can’t take away an entire industry’s livelihood and expect them to accept it lying down.
I think the comment is in reference to the comments focusing on quality instead of the jobs impact. The whole debate around quality seems like a red herring in the first place, who is surprised or did not expect a direct to streaming high school romcom to have have the highest quality everything - even for the second row bleachers in a 1 second cut shot? Who is actually bothered by that problem vs the jobs debate you've highlighted?
The tech for this is already better. "Massive" software has been doing CGI characters with AI behaviors for 20 years, including in famous films like Lord of the Rings. The clip in the tweet looks like some NPCs from a PS2 game.
If you haven’t seen the Get Back Beatles documentary that came out during Covid it’s definitely worth a watch.
It’s very long (3 parts, 9 hours?) but it’s the best type of documentary (just observing them create the let it be album).
You see all this stuff, the creative process, humor/conflict, gibberish words before they have the real ones, figuring out the tune, messing around with ideas etc.
It’s probably the best observation I’ve seen of this sort of thing in any recorded media ever.
The blog post is confusing the nature of policy changes being bullshit with the in-office being bullshit.
Star ICs crushing it at remote work doesn't mean star teams; and if their coworkers are avoiding them in reviews it does sound like there are communication issues at play.
Teams avoiding security reviews are common cross-industry.
Incentives everywhere are “dodge” - the expected outcome for managers and engineers is missed deadlines and reschedulings on prior promises, frequent blame-focused meetings and late nights; and low prestige, high effort work unsuitable for making the company money, getting promotions, or maintaining agility in the future, as most security work is extremely mercurial and often only very marginally improves security, if at all.
Most “security fixes” at large firms are built on inscrutable black-box internal tooling which becomes a massive single point of failure and is rarely as hardened as implied, gets re-shuffled on what constitutes “best practices” every 12 months such that a feature team can spend literally all their time doing security work the team will be throwing out next year, are often not intelligently scoped to handle “this issue doesn’t specifically apply to my component”, and aren’t even the weak link when most hacks are
> An insider replied to the wrong email, or put a zip file into a thumb drive then ran off with everything his computer had downloaded, which was a lot.
Most teams grit their teeth and implement, but if the benefit isn’t there, just the requirement, teams remember and get a lot slower to pick up the phone.
I'm not so sure -- the in-concert RTO hardline from FAANG has a very "collusion" vibe to it. Those CEOs probably got together specifically to undermine the labor market's natural incentives. It'd be great if the DoL looked into that like they did when these CEOs colluded to keep salaries and comp down across Silicon Valley.
And don't forget that these companies all have policies of not hiring high-level ICs from the outside. So if you're at that level, your options to jump ship can be quite limited unless your current employer is truly toxic. Again, a practice designed to keep comp at the top IC bands down.
remote-first means hiring the best-fit people for your company at the time and them working precisely when they're ready to be productive, zero commute, zero overhead.
good luck competing with that.
source: 25 years and 8+ companies working remotely.
8+ companies in 25 years? Seems like being remote first makes it very easy for your employees to jump ship, be taking interviews on the job, or even working multiple jobs.
I think it also presupposes that the market is good and the industry has spots available. It's just not that simple though. The advice the blog gives isn't necessarily wrong on it's face but what if you can't get another job quickly? What if the market is bad and people are trying to scramble for a job?
People who can just easily get another job and are just engineer interview ready at all points aren't exactly the majority.
remote-first means hiring the best-fit people for your company at the time and them working precisely when they're ready to be productive, zero commute, zero overhead.
good luck competing with that.
source: 25 years and 8+ companies working remotely, and obliterating competitors stuck in the old ways.
On that note, I also did not understand the post about H1B workers. Ostensibly a primary reason for the existence of the visa category in their first place is to fulfill the need for foreign talent that needs to be PRESENT in the US.
But if the work can be done fully remote, why does the person need a visum to be in the US? Why not work remote from abroad without visa requirements and probably with lower cost of living?
I'll concede this point - it is primarily about communication.
In theory you can resolve this (I'm at a remote company now and think gathertown is a great tool for this), but the lift is high and I suspect the majority of remote companies are operating at a net negative vs. colocation because of this.
Even with these tools, some natural amount of human communication/interaction is lost. It mostly hurts spontaneous collaboration and junior engineers - the threshold for these (comms/collab) is higher than in the office even in ideal remote conditions. Normal human team bonding/relationship building stuff is also lost (and useful for building a high performance culture).
This is also assuming you're at least within mostly the same or close timezones, add that into the mix and it gets even worse.
Other people replying don't understand what I mean by the market solving this. If remote is truly advantageous then startups that are remote first should out compete those that aren't. Empirically this appears to not be true and at least in SF and AI (the sector with the largest return likely in the next decade) people are going back to being colocated because of its advantages (primarily around communication and cycle times).
Mostly I see motivated reasoning primarily as the argument in favor of remote being better. I get it, I work remotely - there are nice quality of life advantages, but I still think it's competitively worse for companies in almost all cases.
The competitive disadvantage RTO companies have is trying to hire locally.
We have the pick of the best engineers from around the country (in some cases, world) because we pay bay area (startup adjusted) salaries regardless of where you live. The team is top notch - probably the best I’ve ever worked with.
So yeah - a cost to maintaining comms culture, but the payoff can be pretty nonlinear.
My counter argument would be that a lot of the world’s best people move to hubs anyway to intentionally be around other great people.
So being located in the Bay Area gets you the world’s best people without the negative tradeoffs of remote.
That said, I think your point is valid for startups located outside of hubs. If your company would otherwise be located in rural South Dakota (or even a decent sized non-hub city), then yes - remote is more compelling for the reasons you state. Whether that’s a competitive advantage on net given the downsides is not clear to me.
> "The market" is a bunch of rich assholes that act in their own self interests.
For instance, demanding that people commute to the RE they've invested in before their investments fall through the floor in valuation.
Lot of naysayers here claiming illegitimate "bias" when people point out their increased productivity when working from home (just the lack of interruptions and forced writing down of institutional knowledge are worth it), but will they admit there is plenty of bias from corporate officers owning real estate in the downtowns where offices are, or just managers at all levels feeling power to micromanage and lord over people slipping through their fingers?
A vanishingly small proportion of business owners or managers have any investment in commercial real estate beyond the office lease they're holding. Virtually none of them own their commercial premises.
> Virtually none of them own their commercial premises.
Of course this is probably the case; but how many people in higher positions are invested in REITs that invest in commercial RE? I bet it's a fairly large proportion. Hews to the old adage espoused by Buffet and others of "only invest in what you know."
Just because they don't have skin in the game on that particular building they are bossing people around in doesn't mean they don't have vested interest in seeing office space being rented in general.
Usually the dumber thing is the true thing, I doubt this was some three dimensional company strategy (and it doesn't make sense for that to even be the case if you think it through).
I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO gets fired for this given how strategically misguided it was and the fallout it caused, that's the kind of change probably required given the error to help claw back any amount of lost trust they can.
Apple is probably annoyed they became friendlier to Unity (in order to punish Epic), looks like not a great choice in hindsight.
I wonder how much deals and business relationships like the one they have with Apple might have contributed to Unity’s confidence in the ability to make the ludicrous policy changes stick.
Given Unity’s 3d performance is “good enough” but not good enough that most AAA Unity games don’t wind up basically rewriting more than half the engine to get acceptable performance for their particular game… I really was shocked by the big Unity hype with the whole Vision OS apps part of that Apple announcement… particularly since the worst offenders for “under optimised” giving phone warning levels of CPU burn and battery consumption have been pretty 2.5D Unity apps where the only 3D effect is some parallax scrolling and using the built in Z index to control which sprites will wind up in front of others as they move around in an otherwise completely 2D fashion… some absolutely surprising moments over the years as I’ll start playing a “visually good and polished game” only to notice at the end of 5-10 minutes bus or train ride, my phones gotten very warm and my battery is now 10-25% lower…
I learned how shitty Unity can be before I got any experience developing with it and the experiences I have had developing with it and the experiences shared with me by others who develop with it … It feels like a major disconnect has grown over the years between management running the company, project management setting goals for the development/engineering staff, and the multiple classes of end users of the engine, with my suspicion being that it’s hard for them to avoid getting drowned in feedback from novices who easily achieve their goals with the tools in Unity, leveraging their store, some vendor plugins maybe and don’t do much more than build 2D, 2.5D or very basic 3D games… The next tiers above that of intermediate and advanced Unity users being progressively more silent about their problems as they have learned to rely less and less on what Unity provides with the end outcome being some experienced Unity developers I’ve met being pretty honest that they basically only use Unity because it’s a C# game engine and there’s a lot of benefit in using C# like a big developer pool, performant backend systems in the same programming language, etc… and they are throwing away >90% of the engine and either they or their team are doing everything themselves because what Unity gives them is completely useless, or unsuitable, or not just simply not performant enough.
When your “experts” are “throwing away” your product and just “using the box it comes in” because it’s a convenient shape… something is very very wrong and your product’s days are numbered. Their recent attempted policy’s change seems completely ignorant of the current state of their product’s “sticking power”. The users who make it look like anything is possible in Unity and who are effectively creating marketing material for Unity by crediting them as the game engine they used regardless of how much of the engine they throw away in order to get any particular AAA game completed… these critical users who are helping pull in new users are also very close to not using the product at all. Doing anything that alienates them is the marketing equivalent of a massive act of self sabotage, and I don’t think they are going to survive this. For me the writing was on the wall from the merger with the malware pile of an “ad tech” company a while back and the boneheaded comments about monetisation that were made back then… it’s just been a question of how long till it fails… and boy has the policy change and backlash accelerated things…
+1 - I actively avoid games using the unity engine in favor of ones using unreal. It’s a noticeably worse experience for end users of the product (not just the devs, but also the players).
It’s unfortunate because it’d be good to have some real competition in the space, and there’s basically none.
> +1 - I actively avoid games using the unity engine in favor of ones using unreal. It’s a noticeably worse experience for end users of the product (not just the devs, but also the players).
I often wonder how common this view point is. From a player perspective, I don’t think about game engines. If there’s a game that I’d like to play, I play it regardless of the engine.
If you were to see a video for a video game — say Hollow Knight or Cuphead, for example — and think that it might be fun to play but then see that they use Unity, what do you do instead? Do you search for a close analogue made in Unreal engine? Or do you just play something completely different?
From a hobbyist game dev perspective, I definitely think about engine — of course. But usually when I work with other people they want to use Unity. I’m guessing that might change now, though.
I doubt it’s common - almost certainly most users don’t think of it or even know what an engine is.
I just notice it - if I see something is unity I’m less likely to give it a try vs. something unreal. Usually I’m just scrolling Xbox gamepass options that look appealing.
If it was some specific game I wanted to try, unity wouldn’t stop me - but I have a bias against it. Unity games generally feel crappier imo.
It's common enough that it used to be a meme (often pushed by Jim Sterling and other online influencers) that Unity was only useful for incompetent developers to make garbage cash-in games and asset flips. That was when it was much easier to publish to Steam, though.
I definitely remember some people throwing shade in my direction in a couple of game playing friend face to face conversations for my opinions about Unity in this time period… despite the fact my criticism was entirely based on my own subjective personal experiences as someone playing games on multiple platforms combined with my experience as a cross platform software developer…
It was seen as fashionable to hate Unity and there was some pushback from fans of games built with Unity… which since it corresponds to my first developer experiences with unity, was actually about the same time I started to ask Unity developers how much of their games used the Unity provided components for various things as opposed to writing replacements…
I learned a few tricks about arguing with gamers but for the most part stopped mentioning my dislike for Unity in any face to face contexts until someone else mentioned a dislike first… I didn’t care enough to argue over it… I have opinions but I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, it’s not like there’s financial benefits steering people away from Unity … I’ve got no short positions on Unity stock or stock in Epic, etc…
Doesn’t mean I won’t bitch in the appropriate professional context… like this thread. ;-)
