I thought Frozen Synapse’s ability to let you simulate your opponent’s moves was super cool - surprised I didn’t end up seeing it in more strategy games (obviously not so much applicable to the normal real-time stuff though!).

Rise of Nations (originally released back in 2003) had/has some interesting ideas to reduce some of the busywork:

• Worker units will automatically try to gather/build nearby after a short (configurable) delay if they’re not doing anything.
• Cities (the main worker-producing structure) has a rally point option that’s essentially “all nearby empty resource gathering”, so you can queue a dozen workers and they’ll distribute themselves as they’re created.
• Production buildings can be set to loop over their current queue, letting you build continually without intervention as long as you maintain enough resources each time the queue “restocks”.
• Units that engage in combat without being given an explicit target will try (with modest success) to aim for nearby units which they counter.

For the most part, none of the implemented options are strictly better than micromanaging them yourself:

• You will always spend less time idling workers if you micromanage them yourself.
• The auto-rally-point doesn’t always prioritize the resources that you would if you did it yourself.
• Queueing additional units is slightly less resource-efficient than only building one thing at a time.
• Total DPS is higher if you manually micro effectively.

But the options are there when you need them, which I think is a a nice design. It doesn’t completely remove best-in-class players being rewarded for their speed as a player, but does raise the “speed floor”, allowing slower players to get more bang for their buck APM-wise, and compete a bit more on the strategy/tactics side of the game instead.

There are types of time management which I think can still be interesting. For example, are you able to afford – in the resources of time and attention – optimally micro’ing this important fight? Or are you going to have to yolo it a bit so that you can do multi-task economic tasks at the same time?

Some (much?) of the problem is that (for better or worse) skilled players can and will squeeze the game to optimality in terms of win rate, and that tends to collapse viable tactical and strategic choices. Once those choices have been optimised (the game is largely “solved”), the main way to get better is by being faster, not by being smarter.

Archive Options Failing

This one worked for me, useful if wanting to share the story elsewhere:

https://archive.is/20231224184755/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-openai-protected-by-silicon-valley-friends-f3efcf68

I wonder if patch support being pulled after 2 months is down to lower-than-expected sales; it’s certainly earlier than I would’ve expected on both the dev (HBS) and publisher (Paradox) side.

Edit: related news from October that I didn’t know about.

Thanks for the extra context!

I’m not sure if the image has since been updated, but the horn-y boy before/after isn’t the same image twice despite looking very similar. The left image has light-colored areas on the horns and some other similarly minor differences which are more noticeable when flicking between them but kinda hard to spot in a side-by-side.

The advertised “regular device upgrades” will never happen for anyone as part of Pixel Pass, even customers who battled Google’s servers to order a Pixel 6 the moment they became available (it’s me; I’m one of those people) because there’s still more than a month to go before the very first customers in would cross the two-year mark and be eligible to upgrade.

So a core part of the premise of Pixel Pass (device upgrades) is being lost, even to existing Pixel Pass users.

Original marketing from 2021:

Pixel Pass brings together the latest Pixel phone with Google’s best mobile services, device protection and regular device upgrades — all in one easy subscription. (emphasis added)

I agree that that would be frustrating except that:

1. They don’t have to pay (there’s an ad-supported version, in line with e.g. Gmail’s free service).
2. That isn’t the part that they [the quoted complaints] complained about.

Users will keep their exisiting email addresses on this service, and would get it free for the first year. After that, there will be options of paying for a service, or an ad-based free service after that.

This makes me not understand many of the complaints?

“It’s a nightmare trying to change logins at many places.”

“I’ve got to go to all of those and say I’ve changed my email address.”

Just… keep using the same email address?

A number of these alternatives exist but the reality is that if a creator advertises Patreon vs advertises Liberapay (or another alternative) you get more people signing up for the Patreon because it has better name recognition / marketing / whatever. In my opinion they got to their dominant position mostly* because “we” let them, and they also stay there because “we” let them.

*And partly because they were one of the earlier platforms (but by no means the first option for crowd-sourced financial support for creators), and they also started with lower fees than they have these days.

Sorry, can’t say that I have anything specific to suggest that hasn’t already been mentioned in the comments! As the original article shows, getting a search experience that’s good, privacy-conscious, and financially sustainable is evidently extremely difficult. If big tech companies continue to implode it might get a little easier to compete though.

This just seems equivalent to e.g. bing’s AI search. The only thing that stands out to me are the names of their investors, not the product - they’re not advertising themselves as privacy-respecting, for example.

GPT-4 is included in the study and is not free though lol. It’s actually kind of expensive to use it for lots of queries.