I think he's making a sarcastic statement about the revealing of sexist men, who think that, "because they are men, they are superior" when reality is just balancing out the ingrained sexism in all of our societies.

He's not even talking about race, so, not racist?

This just feels like old man yells at sky.

Old splinter cell and other stealth games still used on screen indicators of stealth. It was never "simple lighting" that made the player understand if they are "in stealth or not". It has always been up to the game designers to make visual understanding of what is hidden and what isn't hidden, this has nothing to do with graphics.

The best sneaking experiances I've ever had in games is actually in modern Multiplayer games. Dayz and Squad are fantastic sneaking games, its hard, its fun and there's no need for a "You're in a shadow now" indicator - although I always thought those were great.

The implication is that the reason why you don’t see a lot of people sneaking around splinter cell-style in real life is because the lighting makes doing that really hard

We don't see them because they are so good at it, obviously ;)

Yeah, those stealth games never really clicked for me, with their absurdly imperceptive professional guards standing around everywhere.

+1. At the end of the day, this boils down to a more general problem of conveying state/data to the player (though maybe I should concede it now arises in the new dimension described by the author).

Two examples that immediately come to mind are trying to fight in World of Warcraft when underwater (where I had no eff'ing clue where exactly the enemy actually was, relative to my character) and overly flashy effects in games, often MOBAs (where they were taken so overboard to where I had no idea what was even happening on the screen).

I'm surprised people put up with either of these. I found both of them in and of themselves really frustrating and detracting from the fun of just playing the game.

I'll give an affectionate shoutout to Transistor; one of the mechanics is having to deal with paparazzi-like monsters that are just flying cameras whose difficulty is in obscuring your screen with flattering action shots of the protagonist. Lazy, but clever and adorable!

You're not wrong, but if you consider the fundamental principles of ray tracing, Hocking's point makes perfect sense. I get that 'realistic ray tracing' is a major marketing buzzword and crucial for competitive advantage.

The core issue, however, is that what the player sees on screen must align with the UI. Baked lighting created hard, discrete boundaries, but modern ray tracing outputs a continuous gradient of scattered light. This inherently creates systemic confusion between the visual feedback and the UI.

The only workaround is to design areas of absolute, pitch-black darkness. But doing so severely restricts level design, not to mention that 'realistic' absolute darkness practically doesn't exist in the real world anyway.

I find myself agreeing much more with the game designer's perspective on this one

While I agree Scrum and agile are overkill and somewhat performative for the managers. I also like how OP gets that being an effective manager means understanding what the engineers are doing, as in, you rose through engineering into management, which is also a good thing!

But some teams, and some people, and some work is more effective with regular scheduled human interaction. People who need direction, guidance, or just to feel more physically connected with their work and team.

I'm so glad you are able to remove all "live human interaction" from your management style. I'd miss having a boss that felt like I was worth face-time. This feels like going too far for async work, I don't know how you wouldn't feel disconnected.

> If you experience that paranoia and keep smoking on a regular basis nonetheless—especially with today’s high-potency THC products, and especially if you’re young—there’s a good chance you’ll eventually suffer a full psychotic break; 35% of young people who experience psychotic symptoms, according to another study, eventually have such an episode.

This is such a crappy article. This reads like "You experienced paranoia, you're going to have a psychotic break", but all these articles and studies are people who already have pointers towards instability, or addictive struggles.

I'm having a really really hard time believing this is more addictive than opioids.

Agreed on the crappy part.

But proponents (including myself) do need to acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns with abuse and the possibility of harm to certain individuals.

I advocate for the legalization of all drugs, but that has concerns too. That doesn't mean it shouldn't happen, just that there are negatives to address as well.

Don't believe it, it ain't true.

Makes sense. I mean, in the past people have gotten funny about Assassin's Creed characters sounding too American. It's just about being consistent with your setting really...

It would be weird if a game set in Medieval Spain had voice actors who simply sounded like Modern Mexicans. AFAIK, they have pretty big dialect differences.

I never thought about all of this in relation to animal cognition and I really like the point about animals, mostly because we have been recently learning that animals have far greater mental ability than we like to admit.

And I'm amused that at some point we would have considered someone actively an idiot for believing animals have complex stuff going on up there. Makes me wonder if that guy was tricked by a dog once or something and never really got over it!

Neeva has a free tier (with only access to the search engine, so people can still test the search aspect), but when you pay for it now you ALSO get LastPass premium and Bitdefender VPN Premium as well, along with all their integrations into your system.

If you trust these people are doing what they say, it's a pretty good deal for securing your internet spaces and trying to get away from google, imo.