Did ShackTac for a while. I agree but also in so many ways it's not immersive at all.

Like all the years the physics were just busted and tanks would flip over and explode because the engine couldn't handle the terrain geometry. Really sucks the fun out of your all-night commitment when that ends your mission for the night "because realism".

Getting a vehicle squad assigment was pretty much an 80% chance this was going to happen to you at some point.

Very eye opening experience though. It's disturbingly easy to mess up your navigation and radio comms and start having friendly squads shooting each other when obscured by trees... The wrong squad leader (and/or inattentive teammates) will get you killed as fast as anything.

If you want to learn rigid comms discipline, that is the right place to learn it.

yeah vehicles can be fucked even today. we avoided vehicles for the most part unless it was extracts/air support, cos we were doing vietnam sog recon team stuff.

> If you want to learn rigid comms discipline, that is the right place to learn it.

military style comms are so damn efficient compared to normal workplace business speak it's unreal. i have tried to bring some of the stuff i learned from arma runs into work with mixed success.

The team is still there. BISim was sold to BAE Systems now and they go by OneArc (onearc.com).

Did you not know what you were getting into? Most folks I know in Seattle have pretty commonly talked about wotc being an absolutely abysmal company to work for going all the way back to the early 00s.

The only reason to be there was for the love and the buying access/perks. That access & perks are long gone.

Had a friend whose dream job was to work on D&D. He's got a fairly high profile in the TTRPG space and developed one major product/book release for D&D. The experience spun him out of Hasbro and the TTRPG industry entirely.

I knew the publishing and game industry weren’t known for good treatment of their labor, but WOTC had a fair reputation in that regard. This has apparently degraded prior to my joining the company and has continued to do so. A big motivator for organizing for many was the steady erosion of pay, benefits, and the lauded perks despite a workload that has and continues to grow tremendously.

Nobody playing commander ever made a stink about peoples alters at the table

People are trying to rationalize their behavior based on their hurt feelings

The average duration that anyone is actively playing a TCG is something like 2 years. There’s also way more players than ever. Most of the new players never engage in online community around their game.

So you may not hear a lot of excitement but that’s still the minority opinion. Universes Beyond sell like gangbusters.

I remember multiple players at my local’s prerelease for TMNT saying that was the most fun they’d had playing a prerelease in years. And none of these things have really sunk in the secondary market after they’ve gone out of print.

Heck my Warhammer 40K collector commander decks are up several hundred percent post release. And I’ve made a small fortune buying up all the things the online MTG community seems to hate…

Not only that but not clearing with your management that you're not working on something that is actually being worked on as a product.

Definitely they put some manager and/or team in a very uncomfortable position releasing this.

Management literally announced it for him.

That's a gross misunderstanding of corporate life.

_A_ manager boosted it on twitter. It's not an announcement in the sense that companies announce things. You're also assuming that one team knows what the other is doing.

This is literally the reason there are standard procedures for doing things like this.

> With enough of a token budget you can now wrap loops around an LLM and have it try things until the program appears to work. Ask it to do a code review and then submit the PR without having understood what it was doing. There are a lot of workplaces where there isn’t a good mechanism to push back on this and the tech debt just keeps growing.

I'm not making an argument in favor of people using LLMs for this, but people were doing this before we had LLMs it was just usually a bit slower. I can't even say it usually doesn't work out long term because I worked with a lot of guys who did this and took a ton of Adderall while working practically around the clock. Every incentive structure in the organizations rewarded it along with social credibility from more junior engineers. (The last cowboy I worked with who pulled this shit ended up becoming the most senior engineer in the company, a multi-millionaire and worshipped like a god by 90% of the mostly fresh grads we were hiring).

The problem is when invariably these people burn out eventually and leave, they leave a massive vacuum in their stead. Not from load they were carrying but creating.

I think the larger the organization I've been at, the more they reward the people making huge commits on nights and weekends. Worse, they could get away with TBRing their shit and merging it without review.

LLMs are often all of the bad habits and organizational problems that we already carryied just being speedrun. There are some places doing it right, but they already were.

> There are some places doing it right, but they already were.

Could you be more specific what "right" is?

> I can't even say it usually doesn't work out long term because I worked with a lot of guys who did this and took a ton of Adderall while working practically around the clock. Every incentive structure in the organizations rewarded it along with social credibility from more junior engineers. (The last cowboy I worked with who pulled this shit ended up becoming the most senior engineer in the company, a multi-millionaire and worshipped like a god by 90% of the mostly fresh grads we were hiring).

I'm having a tough time believing this, it sounds like you're trying to backwards rationalize more productive engineers were "on drugs" and they delivered but "did it wrong"

And that's over 30 years since the company was founded and a full decade after the US Gov sued Microsoft on antitrust grounds going into the process with every intent on breaking up the company...

Also saying they were the first is laughable. Warrantless telephone surveillance by law enforcement began all the way back in 1895...but really in the way that you would recognize today all the way back in 1994.

>Warrantless telephone surveillance by law enforcement

Not a part of PRISM. Microsoft was the very first PRISM partner, as I said.

I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook.

They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.

Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.

That's because they don't want you to use the web application

My experience is a bit different. They constantly update it and make it more unusable. At this point it's totally broken. Occasionally I open it, it loads for 30 seconds, I have a notification icon for a post I saw a month ago, then my feed shows the same picture of a guy I follow driving his rally car, which was posted several months ago, then I log off. It's truly bizarre what they've managed to do.

That's back end. With the money they make they could have rewritten the front end so it doesn't have to reload everything whenever you upload an image.

Nomad, Consul and Vault all running on VMs that you manage with Terraform.

The problem is that when you run this long enough you want K8s features anyway.

And your starter “production” deployment of the Nomad/Consul/Vault stack is literally 12 VMs, comprising three independent Raft clusters. There is no decent way to do zero-downtime instance replacement without building your own orchestration layer, but also they’ve had a years-long track record of shipping bad upgrades and following up with only manual remediations or workarounds instead of a fix.

As someone who has productionized and maintained truly hundreds of those clusters across several jobs, it is hard at this point for me to recommend Consul, Nomad, or Vault to anyone serious about building reliable applications. Too many broken upgrades and manual click-ops tasks just to keep them online. (…and I’ve said nothing of the actual product!)

This is a timely post. We are going to use Consul to replace the need for Internal Load Balancers. What issues do you have with it?

I'm in a similar boat and only somewhat agree. The gist of my post was that this exists but maybe just use Kubernetes anyway.

I don't entirely agree with your statement about zero-downtime instance replacement though. We built our terraform around doing one-at-a-time instance replacement and removing/adding nodes in Hashicorp Raft clusters is pretty much the easiest thing I've ever done with infrastructure.

That's really always been the biggest selling point around Hashicorp's stuff for me. They made bootstrap and maintenance operations easy enough that a caveman could do it. Even recovering from problems isn't terribly hard unless you're already doing something stupid (Roblox outage).

I also have deployed and managed _hundreds_ of these over the last 8 years or so and I'm not really having the same problems that you do. But we don't upgrade to the latest and greatest because it _does_ take them a few versions to get their feature launches correct. This is mainly a Nomad problem now though -- consul and vault are pretty brainless to operate.

Still though, we _also_ use Kubernetes and I prefer it. Most of our software engineers don't though because they don't actually want to take the time to understand it, they just want to run binaries and forget about it.