When people complain about APM in an RTS like StarCraft, they’re really not complaining about the spam clicking done by players at the pro level. They’re talking about multitasking which is an essential skill at all levels of the game.
Not even at the lowest rankings are you permitted to ignore what your opponent is doing and focus on building workers and base facilities. StarCraft is infamous for the ability of anyone to sacrifice their economy to perform an early rush attack (most infamously with a ton of early zerglings).
To combat early rush attacks you need to be able to multitask: send out early scouts to see what your opponent is doing, if they have any hidden building on the map, how many workers they have, etc. You need to be able to do this while building your own workers, base facilities, and units for defence. This is the multitasking that so many struggle with and it’s required to be able to play at the most basic level!
Optimally queueing SCVs and marines and supply depots requires an APM of 11 or so in the early stages of a Brood War game on the fastest setting. Add a couple more APM for scouting, and we'ree still not talking crazy levels of multitasking.
Dealing with your opponent is a fact of every strategy game!
And yet if you watch low level players they’ll be fine with that until a bunch of zerglings show up at their base and then they panic trying to micro marines and repair bunkers while their minerals shoot up to 1000 and then they have no units and lose.
Keeping a scouting SCV alive in your opponent’s base while building more SCVs at home, building more barracks, building supply depots, killing the enemy scouting worker, and actually reading and correctly interpreting what your opponent is doing is non-trivial.
I would also recommend ArtosisCasts [1]. Dan ‘Artosis’ Stemkoski has been a professional StarCraft play-by-play commentator and colour analyst for decades. He’s lived in South Korea (now in Canada) and cast countless professional matches and tournaments featuring the top Korean players.
On his casting YouTube channel he uploads a new commentary and recording of a StarCraft game every day, as well as news about upcoming events and tournaments. He loves to do deep dives and detailed analysis of strategies and the shifting metagame of StarCraft: Brood War, a game that is still going stronger than ever despite closing in on its 3rd decade since release.
The linked short story is barely 5 paragraphs long. You could have just read it instead of writing an insubstantial remark like this. It’s a fun anecdote about a famous programmer (Bill Atkinson).
Yes and reality is the hard part. Moravec’s Paradox [1] continues to ring true. A billion years of evolution went into our training to be able to cope with the complexity of reality. Our language is a blink of an eye compared to that.
Just like crows! People hate crows even though they play a valuable role in ecosystems.
I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society. If PE firms can liquidate those businesses and open up the market while freeing up capital for more productive investment then I fully support them.
I would love to hear some counterexamples though. Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.
> Productive and innovative businesses with really solid fundamentals (balance sheets) that were acquired and dismantled by PE.
You have way too much (unneeded) limiting qualifications. In Netherlands PE have bought loads of companies, then put the acquisition price as a loan on the balance sheet. Plus then sold the assets, made the company then lease those assets. Then those companies often went bankrupt as the leasing prices increased crazily.
> I would argue that moribund businesses who maintain a competitive moat but are otherwise extremely unproductive and inefficient are the real blight on society.
The companies I've cited weren't "extremely unproductive and inefficient". Businesses can be profitable and healthy without all the qualifications you think they need.
Weren't they losing money for years on all-you-can-eat seafood specials [1]?
It's not uncommon in the fast food business to be breaking even or losing money on all aspects of the business while the true value of the company, its real estate portfolio, steadily grows. The fact that investors decided they wanted to cash out should be a surprise to no one.
Private equity are the crows of the economy. They pick off weak / dysfunctional businesses and open space for fresh competition (or for other markets to open up).
As far as I’ve seen that’s as far from the truth as it can be. They in fact consolidate terrible businesses, undercut the good ones and drive them out of the market until only they are left, after which point, they get even worse.
From what I've seen, they take a terrible business and liquify its valuable assets for their investors, freeing up capital to be invested more productively elsewhere in the economy. Of course those investors could take the money and commission a bunch of statues of themselves, but frequently they do something more productive than that.
A lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional. They'll dismantle a business that holds a lot of nostalgic value for people, even though it's long since ceased to be a viable and productive company. But it wasn't their fault that the business was in that situation in the first place! Years of mismanagement and neglect or perhaps disruption from a competitor left the business in zombie-like state. PE came along and put it out of its misery rather than allow it to slowly crumble while depreciating the value of its illiquid assets.
> lot of the negative reaction to them seems to me to be mostly emotional
Mine specifically stems from PE buying up all but one 24x7 emergency vets in a 20 miles radius from me. All of them were thriving businesses. There is only one remaining non PE ones has its days numbered. After monopolizing the emergency vet market, they shut down a few locations, which previously acted as competition for each other, effectively cementing monopolies in those individual neighborhoods as well. Now, you pay $200 to just get your pet checked out and always have to wait anywhere between 6-8 hours in triage if your pet isn’t literally dying, because they are perpetually understaffed and there are no other options. They also recommend unnecessary tests and treatments, present them as “optional” but refuse to treat your pet if you don’t agree to their “optional” treatment plan.
Lots of businesses have big positive externalities [1]. They provide more benefit to their communities than they take in for themselves. Unfortunately, these sorts of businesses are easy pickings for PE.
Artists are a classic example. They generate huge positive externalities for a community while reaping almost none of the benefits for themselves. Artists get severely exploited by the economy for this!
To counteract this problem we need other ways of addressing the positive externalities. In the case of artists, this usually comes in the form of public (and private) patronage and endowments for the arts.
Man, it's horrible people have such an emotional connection to art and businesses that keep their pets alive. If only we could transform these into an asset that extracted wealth, now that would be great for society! Think of all the externalities!
Sounds like a problem with lack of competition. Would you have been happier if it was a publicly traded company that did it? Amazon health or some such?
What you are describing the best-case scenario. They happen.
What also happens is, they take operating businesses with reasonable returns, buy up all it's supply chain or it's competitors to reduce costs or enable monopoly pricing, then load the company up with debt, squeezing it into a terrible company. That is the bad scenario which people object to.
They could do this, but there's not enough targets of this type for the money invested in the sector. They've also proven to not have the advertised & applicable expertise to run companies any more efficiently than current management. Nostalgia had nothing to do with it unless that's one of the company's assets. I've been inside on three PE acquisitions, and 5 sales by PE to new funds. The playbook was the same for them all: predictable, decent cash flow, cut expenses, grow enterprise sales, sell on before long term cracks from lack of strategic investment showed. If anything they accelerated the decline of healthy going concerns, but at each sale the insiders did great.
If only it actually played out that way[0][1][2][3]
Whatever legal and theoretical role they play in the economy does not match the actual, real role they are playing: PE firms are by and large, economic vampires. They have a well documented history of sucking the life out of a sector at the expense of workers and consumers alike
That's not true at all! Funds often look for mature companies with predictable cash flow. They can make returns while also squeezing margins under the illusion of expertise and economies of scale and seek to the next fund for a multiple. They're an alternative to the massive headache of going public and getting a liquidity event, not typically the model for your weak and dysfunctional company.
this would be somewhat arguable as okay except for their introduction into categories like daycare, emergency rooms, drug and alcohol rehab, care homes for the geriatric and disabled, etc. things that probably shouldn’t be profit oriented to begin with yet are and are being snatched up by private equity, worsening outcomes in basically all of them
Except that Americans pay far more for these services than places where they aren't profit oriented. Try again. Reality does not support your assertion.
Nobody in this comment chain was saying it was good for the customers. The GP was saying that they clear out room for new businesses, and if brick-and-mortar-fabric-superstore were still a viable model someone would be doing it.
I am looking for fabric right now and am terribly frustrated not to have anywhere but limited quilting shops available. Online is not an answer, because you can't handle the fabric for weight, exact color, and stretchiness.
JoAnn drove all the medium-sized fabric stores out and left us with nothing.
The lack of customer density over time drove out all the fabric stores - medium sized or not.
At-home sewing has been declining since I've been alive, and it was just barely hanging on when I was a kid. The demographics simply cannot support these stores in most locations outside of hyper-dense cities.
Not to mention the folks who shop for fabric tend to be some of the most cost-conscious consumers around. They are more or less the prototype of a customer who will go to a B&M store and then price match on-line,.
I'm honestly surprised even Jo-anne survived as long as it did.
The "clear out room for new business" argument is as absurd as it gets. If you think the landscape is packed to capacity with brick-&-mortar stores to the point that it needs "room for new business," you don't live in the USA.
Consolidation frees up real estate, allowing new businesses to open. Where I live, old supermarkets are now farmers’ markets, trampoline parks, and health clubs, and an old car dealership is a church.
They pick on the weak companies but the basic model is to pick over the corpse and leave someone else holding the bag. Make it look good on the surface, leverage it to the hilt, extract cash and let it die.
You stay in this one. If PE wasn't producing value it would disappear. What, you think people dump money into PE because they want to twirl their villainous moustaches?
Most people would say that extracting wealth and concentrating it into an ever shrinking group of elites is making the world worse. They do this both from the companies you and I might work for, but more importantly from the markets that have no defenses.
This is a simpleminded parody of how a market works. Competition isn't concentrating wealth, it's driving down prices. The value ultimately flows to the consumers.
When PE salvages a failing enterprise, it's increasing the overall value of that enterprise, even if that means selling off parts that still have value. Those parts are made available to others at prices lower than they otherwise would have had to pay.
Wealth concentration flows from impediments to competition. There is no shortage of PE firms competing for these opportunities.
Why is this something a Wayland compositor (a glorified window manager) needs to worry about? Apple figured this out back in the 1990s with ColorSync and they did it once for the Mac OS and any application that wanted colour management could use the ColorSync APIs.
Color management infrastructure is intricate. To grossly simplify: somehow you need to connect together the profile and LUT for each display, upload the LUTs to the display controller, and provide appropriate profile data for each window to their respective processes. During compositing then convert buffers that don't already match the output (unmanaged applications will probably be treated as sRGB, color managed graphics apps will opt out of conversion and do whatever is correct for their purpose).
Yes, but why is the compositor dealing with this? Shouldn't the compositor simply be deciding which windows go where (X, Y, and Z positions) and leave the rendering to another API? Why does every different take on a window manager need to re-do all this work?
Turning the question around, what other part of the system _could_ do this job? And how would the compositor do any part of its job if it doesn't have access to both window contents and displays? I'm not super deep in this area but a straight-forward example of a non-managed app and a color-aware graphics app running on a laptop with an external display seems like it is enough to figure out how things need to go together. This neglects some complicating factors like display pixel density, security, accessibility, multi-GPU, etc, but I think it more or less explains how the Wayland authors arrived at its design and how some of the problems got there.
I'm questioning the idea that people should be writing compositors at all. Why doesn't Wayland itself do the compositing and let everyone else just manage windows?
It's like going to Taco Bell and they make you grind your own corn for your tortillas.
Why? Probably better to ask the Wayland developers that. Maybe you're right. That said, whether everyone uses the same compositor and window management is modular, or not and shared code travels as libraries, I don't think the complexity of color management is much different.
I mean, when I hear the word "compositing" I definitely imagine something that involves "alpha" blending, and doing that nicely (instead of a literal alpha calculation) is going to involve colour management.
That's on the Wayland team though. They drew up the new API boundaries and decided that all window managers would now be in the business of compositing.
If I wanted to put it most uncharitably, I'd say they decided to push all of the hard parts out of Wayland itself and force everyone else to deal with them.
Thank you for the Alex Slocum link. I was aware of a lot of those other machinist channels but the engineering course is new to me. This looks incredible. Alex is a fantastic teacher!
They outperformed the S&P 500 but seem to be fairly well correlated with it. Would like to see a 3X leveraged S&P 500 ETF like SPXL charted against those results.
...over the course of 8.5 months, which is way too short for a meaningful result. If their strategy could outperform the S&P 500's 10-year return, they wouldn't be blogging about it.
A law like this just means getting full time employment becomes that much more difficult and the vast majority of people working for a company will be non-voting contractors without benefits. The existing employees would even vote for changes that make full time hiring more difficult in order to avoid diluting their own votes.
It would obviously need to be accompanied with rigorous enforcement of employee classification. I know there would be a bunch of possible ways to game this, so there are a lot of other rules we'd need to add but I didn't want to make my comment too long.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.
I think you’ll find that won’t actually work in practice. Many contract workers are not independent freelancers but actually employees of a different company who contracts the work out as a whole.
For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of its workers but the packages it delivers are for other companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you force all businesses to employ their own couriers then UPS can’t even exist as a company and small businesses that depend on courier services would simply be unable to function at all.
Not even at the lowest rankings are you permitted to ignore what your opponent is doing and focus on building workers and base facilities. StarCraft is infamous for the ability of anyone to sacrifice their economy to perform an early rush attack (most infamously with a ton of early zerglings).
To combat early rush attacks you need to be able to multitask: send out early scouts to see what your opponent is doing, if they have any hidden building on the map, how many workers they have, etc. You need to be able to do this while building your own workers, base facilities, and units for defence. This is the multitasking that so many struggle with and it’s required to be able to play at the most basic level!
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