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This is one of the best talks on leading and setting expectations on a creative, collaborative production group that I have ever run across. It was given during GDC 2022 by a director at Obsidian Entertainment who clearly came with years of likely painful learning. I loved this quote:

We must bust the myths that equate ‘passion’ with overwork and aggressive ownership, and we must normalize collaborative, sustainable habits.

As she described the work situations and the martyr and maverick worker types, I found myself finally hearing in words many things I experienced but didn’t know how to express. I have personally seen the destruction of many extremely talented teams by just a few divisive elements. They could even be rockstars, but they end up cratering the whole production and driving people away from those teams. Carrie Patel does an amazing job describing how even well intentioned mavericks/martyrs damage the team. This is true to the point that hiring less technically good people that are good teamworkers produces consistently better results than extremely talented people that can’t work with others.

Are mavericks and martyrs inherently bad? No, but they absolutely can be if they are not managed properly. That requires being aware of how their behaviors affect the long-term success of the team.

As it turns out, this is not new learning. Other organizations have learned these lessons long ago.

Special forces teams as well as Mark Cuban point out these same learnings for business and sports teams. People who work more collaboratively and think of the entire team’s impact when making individual choices produce far more productive teams than rockstars/martyrs do. Special forces teams often do not look for the absolute best person – they look for who works in the team. This doesn’t mean you can’t have rockstars or martyr types, but what you want to find and reward is behaviors and an environment that encourages sustainable and truly collaborative teamwork.

The original Tron movie came out in 1982 – and was a huge reason I became a computer programmer and got into real-time graphics (thanks Sid Mead). Before the Tron: Legacy movie came out in 2010, Monolith game studio came out with the game Tron 2.0. I still have my big box version of this game, and right now it’s only $2.09 and the Steam version appears to work on Steamdeck just fine.

I remember many good hours with this game. It was a really good spiritual successor to the original movie, had a great soundtrack, and even had some interesting early graphics effects like real-time glow.

Links:

• Patches and Killer App Mod

Covid has changed things. Even in 2023, international travel still muted and people have been doing more domestic travel. That means open US attractions are somewhat overrun. There’s been a lot of bad press that Disney theme parks are terribly overcrowded, dropping the annual pass and switching to a much maligned Genie Pass system (dropping a functional but much mutated Fastpass) and have gigantic wait times (with averages for some rides over 130 minutes).

All of this has caused lawsuits and the ousting of previous Disney president Bob Chapek who is largely seen as badly handling most of these problems. It appears that the new/returning Disney president Bob Iger is restoring annual passes and seen as righting the struggling Disney ship.

Now what about avoiding those 2 hour wait lines? Filming is still allowed in the parks and Youtube channels like Attractions 360, DocumentDisney, WDW and others have created amazing 4k ride videos of just about every ride at every single Disney park – in the world. Many even have multiple copies that include seasonal theming. So now only can visit and ride your favorite ride whenever you want – and each of the other versions in other countries. Though some of those other countries have modified the rides in interesting cultural ways.

Here’s a good example. The Haunted Mansion (a personal favorite) is in 4 different locations: California Disneyland, Florida Disneyworld, Tokyo Disneyland, and Paris Disneyland. I prefer these because there is no commentary or cheesy music. You hear everything including everyone is saying – which is just about the same experience as being there.

Not that one? How about the one in Florida.

Not that? How about the Tokyo Disney Haunted Mansion.

Oh, not that one? Then How about the Paris Haunted Mansion?

While world class buildings aren’t being built in the US at the rate they used to be, they are still being built in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and China. Buildings such as Atlantis the Royal.

How are they opening these creations? How about paying for high class stars like Beyoncé and Swedish House Mafia to perform in customized shows. They also invite various movie, music, and other stars to be seen there in red carpet like events. They also bring in high-class influencers as well as having outrageous fireworks displays. In short, they create world class see-and-be-seen events like used to happen in New York and other cities.

See a tour of the final project here:

The 90’s Demoscene subculture was famous for building incredible visual demos in astoundingly small executables sizes. Many demo scene gatherings had maximum size requirements – often in just a few hundred, or even a few DOZEN, kilobytes. Figuring out how to get the most amazing tech in the smallest size was one of the great innovation points for these contests.

Once developers had exhausted their technical chops on generating amazing art with miniscule code (using all the tricks in the book they could think of), they quickly found that hand-tuned compression became far too tedious and brittle. So, they started building tools to do this compression for them.

I wrote about a more modern take on this where MattKC tried to fit an entire game into a QR code. Part of his adventure was compressing the executable using an old demoscene tool called Crinkler.

There were others, one of which was called lekktor which was used first on their .kkrieger demo. The story behind the development is a fun read as is an interview he did in 2005.

Apparently it used a form of code coverage as part of the analysis which ran while you ran the application. This had the dubious effect of allowing people to use the down arrow down on menus but not the up arrow – because nobody ever pressed the up arrow when training the compressor.

Links:

• .kkrieger
• Metaprogramming for madmen | The ryg blog (wordpress.com)
• Interview: Frugal Fragging with.kkrieger (gamedeveloper.com)

Having trouble understanding all the knobs in stable diffusion’s webui interface? This is a great website on github that shows what each feature does and gives some examples and tips on getting the most out of the features.

It covers all the big features like outpainting, inpainting, prompt matrix, AI upscaling, attention, loopback, X/Y plot, textual inversion, resizing, sampling method selection, seed resize, variations, and a whole host of all the other options along with before/after pictures to help you understand the features better.

Links:

• https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui-feature-showcase

Sever Part Deals is a website that offers high quality, manufacture refurbished, and warrantied enterprise hard drives. Many of them come with 2 year warranties and come in gigantic capacities from 10-20TB.

While I would never trust a refurbished single drive with my critical data, I run a RAID 5 system with redundancy and find these drives to have been very good in such a setup. If one dies, I can hot swap a spare in and keep going.

I recently did this with some 8TB drives, and they have been working great for the last 3 years without a single hiccup, heat issue, or SMART error. You want to make sure you’re buying reliable drives to begin with (cough cough: massive and long-standing history of high failure rates with Seagate) – but baring that – my HGST’s have been amazing.

“Rest and Vest” is a term that describes some senior engineers at big tech companies. The joke even showed up in HBO’s series Silicon Valley. But with the recent decimation of stock prices, rising competition and rapidly shrinking revenues, those days may be over.

But how does one tackle the issue without alienating the workforce and driving good talent to competitors? Carefully, it turns out – because the best way involves a cultural shift of the company. Implementing draconian and invasive tracking on knowledge workers is not helpful. It alienates workers as well can actually stifle creativity.

Instead, managers can use 2 different social pressures for those in a ‘rest and vest’ mode:

• Reminding a person that their subpar contribution is inequitable may motivate them to pull their weight. We have a deep-wired aversion to being perceived by others as a cheat or defector.
• Second, it’s about belonging. We’re humans at the end of the day. No person wants to be a social pariah, even one who’s talented. Contributing, belonging, building alongside your fellow creators — this can be a strong motivator to get people involved more evenly.

Link:

• https://www.inc.com/nick-hobson/googles-rest-vest-days-for-sr-employees-are-over-says-ceo-its-a-brilliant-idea.html

MSI Afterburner is probably the best known graphics card overclocking software. Unfortunately, it may be dead due to the war in the Ukraine.

The original developer of graphics card overclocking utility MSI Afterburner has warned that the software is “semi abandoned” and “probably dead”. The dev, Russian national Alexey ‘Unwinder’ Nicolaychuk, posted on the Guru3D forums (good spot by TechPowerUp) that due to economic sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, MSI haven’t paid him for his work on Afterburner in nearly a year.

Link:

• https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/msi-afterburner-dev-says-the-overclocking-app-is-probably-dead