My Amazon account was recently limited to digital goods.
Supposedly it was caused by too many returns. I've checked and I have 2 orders returned during 15 years of purchases.
There was a way to raise concern, but the email was ignored.
The list is amazing indeed, from the top of my mind: DMA Design (Lemmings and later GTA series), Frontier (Elite series), Bullfrog (Theme Park, Magic Carpet)
Bullfrog has that wild legacy of becoming Lionhead, then getting shut down by Microsoft.
It's interesting to see Playground Games now taking over Lionhead's legacy by building a new Fable game. They probably get overlooked as a strong (current) British developer because the Forza Horizon series has been an interestingly subtle niche for them so far, so hopefully the new Fable game will bring them some more (deserved) attention.
The Lionhead legacy goes even deeper, as I remember the lead up and hype for their first game Black and White. You'd have a creature that you didn't control but rather you "taught it" what you wanted it to do. I can't remember if the words neural net were mentioned in some of pieces I read in PC Gamer, but I feel like it might have been. It was going to be a revolution in game AI because it wasn't just a bunch of if-statements or state machines. And who was the hotshot young programmer behind this wizardry? A young Cambridge graduate named Demis Hassabis, who'd previous done level design and other work for Bullfrog as a teenage before attending university!
Of course on the meagre PCs of the day this revolutionary AI didn't quite pan out and you couldn't ever really get your creature to do what you want. And what became of our young AI programmer? Well after a few more years in the game industry he went back to school and continued his pursuit of AI and neural nets and founded a little company that you might have heard of, Deep Mind, aka Google's AI division creating things like AlphaGo and generally kicking off the machine learning revolution we currently find ourselves in.
And to think, you could have had a preview of all of this, like I did, back in 2001 on a janky underpowered PC, cursing at my neural net powered ape creature as I tried to get it to stop crushing my village.
I also assumed every single frame was fully painted (but also thought why, crazy effort.. why not just do it with overlays like the classic cartoonists?)
So still, impressive effort.. but still "first ever painted": What is the difference to classic cartoonists? Just the technique that we call this painting, and cartoonists just drawing, or the more complex pictures, or what else?
My understanding is that they make the distinction on this being painted on canvas and not cells.
But things like Snow White was of course colored using brushes, so it would be reasonable to refer to them as painted as well, although we usually call them “drawn”
That is why I went for totally stupid-silly automations.
I don't write "reusable" automations - I don't write scripts with parameters. I write a lot of scripts where I open it in notepad to edit and fill in variables.
Most of the times I just put copies of these scripts on specific servers and have variables filled in.
Variables need to change only if I change server or really change config of a server which is almost never.
This way "Automation" xkcd "Theory" fits reality.
Because then instead of rehearsing commands and what was the configuration I just go to the server and run the script and instead 30mins simple task takes me 2 mins.
XKCD 1319 gets the economics of automation wrong because it makes the assumption that you value the time spent on every activity the same, in particular that you equally value drudge work and programming.
The reality (for me at least, and I’m sure for others) is that I’d much rather be writing a program than doing drudge work.
XKCD 1205 is completely wrong because it fails to account for the fact that manual work tends to introduce random errors into the mix which are difficult to reverse. Whereas if automation is well designed, it's often very possible to correct any errors you made in the automation, and once you get it right it will always be right.
The other thing is that a task that takes 30 seconds doesn't just take 30 seconds, the context switch is actually quite a burden and even just having to remember to do the thing.
You should be fired if your automation is breaking 10% of the time.
All I'm saying is that the true costs of manual work usually isn't accounted for correctly. I see these costs spiralling into so much wasted work that it starts incurring more and more risk. Preference for gradual decay over Big Bang collapses isn't nessecarily rational, people tend to prefer living next to coal plants than nuclear plants despite the fact they're far far far more likely to die living next to the coal plant. It is in fact that irrational bias which needs to be resisted.
Tally-ho! I actually get many personal sites with my web searches, but maybe that's because they are both narrowly targeted and expressed in keyword form?
I do this too. And each time I mention my hard copies I also have to explain there are actually 3 copies, physically isolated, etc. Hope you're doing the same.
You can store the TOTP seeds in more compact form by converting QR code screenshots to alphanumeric using zbar barcode tools.
In my experience it has difficulty parsing some QR codes created using CSS due to tiny borders between blocks. Those can be fixed by applying a small gaussian blur followed by sharpening (use imagemagick for maximum automation) to fill out the borders.
since the qr code is just the totp seed, i simply print the seed in huge font on a sheet of paper. chance of enough degredation to inlegibility is pretty slim if stored correctly
Screenshot the QR Code and print it? Put it in a vault or store somewhere safe. It’s a standard practice for securing enterprise accounts (AWS root acc. for example)
I'd say that B2C apps are designed by small commited team while huge apps for B2B are designed by committee and developed by many separate teams focused on different aspects of application.
There was a way to raise concern, but the email was ignored.