This study is garbage and I suspect there is some culture war bullshit going on here.

This is directly from the study:

4. Limitations and future work

This study had several limitations and was built on many approximations for which there could be errors. For example, the volume of email sent by richer nations like Canada would be expected to be much greater than poorer countries. In this way the calculations for the number of premature deaths would be underestimates because the Canadian fraction of the population would undercount actual email use. There are headers on emails that contain metadata that is sent with every email, which includes text with information, such as the sender, receiver, route, timestamps, addresses and more. Thus, even an email with no information if sent and opened there would be a transfer of data, energy used and thus emissions. This metadata was not considered in this study. The size of that metadata varies widely and the impact on these calculations is left for future work.

Future work can: More carefully quantify the impact of meta data on email emissions along with investigating ways to minimize this information. •Perform surveys to obtain more accurate values for Cp-e(x) and Cla-e(x) by obtaining more accurate values of the percent of the population that amends additional information to their email signatures. •More accurate values for the number of words most commonly used for pronoun identification will perhaps slightly improve accuracy from the 3 estimates used here, however such surveys will be far more important for the number of words used in land acknowledgements.

The carbon emitted per email will also vary with time and location based largely on what type of energy is used in the systems handling that email. More green grids will have a lower impact, while those that are powered with coal will have a worse impact. These can be carefully clarified with a granular future full life cycle analysis.

Finally, there is also clearly potential errors in the 1000-ton rule, as all the values going into it are order of magnitude estimates. It should be pointed out that there may also be life savings created by using pronouns in emails that may for example reduce suicide rates among transgender associated mental health issues. There is no evidence in the literature of this protective role of pronoun use available at the time of this writing. In fact, the greater public virtue signally in relation to transgenderism appears to be inversely proportional to considered and attempted suicide rates among transgender people in the U.S. over the last two decades [44]. It is not clear why this is the case, although based on the data available email signatures are expected to play an extremely small role in these rates in either direction.

These are huge limitations. The metadata in an email header is often enormous! Significantly larger than most land acknowledgements and several orders of magnitude larger than listing preferred pronouns.

On top of that, email signatures are typically only found on emails that are letter-style communications that have been sent manually by a person. I think it’s dangerous to assume that the bulk of emails being sent are in that category. I believe the vast majority of emails sent are marketing style messages, with embedded style-sheets, headers and footers, and links to images if not the images themselves. All of this adds up to far outweigh the impact of listing ones pronouns.

After saying all that, the author of the study persists in saying that the results represent useful guidelines.

With all of said the limitations of this study, the results of this study still provide useful guidelines for reducing environmental impact at the individual, firm, and national level. There are clear guidelines that can be given to email users to reduce the environmental and human impact of email use. In addition, by switching to a purely sustainable source of energy for our IT infrastructure and ensuring it is reusable/recyclable the impacts of email signatures can have a substantially reduced ecological and human mortality impact.

I am suspicious of the author and the website this is hosted on. Why would the author single out “pronouns” and “reputation signaling” as a problem here? They are claiming expertise in the area, but should know that they have picked a very small portion of a relatively small category of email. They are making claims about various numbers of people dying each year because of this “problem”. That’s a wild claim, designed to engage people emotionally instead of intellectually.

That’s a great synopsis of the study. Did you write that yourself or use some tool to derive the summary?

Either way, I’m sure folks here appreciate the effort. Thanks.

It’s crazy to me that the games in this collection are so good!

I rarely see people talking about Mini and Max. I think most people aren’t sticking with it very long. The game is much, much bigger than it looks. There is a ton of adventure to have there. There’s an old man in a pot to the west that is especially important to meet.

You’re both totally right here. The article you linked was well written and had a bunch of good ideas about what players in the handheld market could do to make their products competitive and consumer friendly. I don’t think many of the people commenting here actually read the article, which is too bad.

And yeah, I think Nintendo has and will continue to make hardware that is compelling to gamers of all kinds. There’s plenty of room in the market for PC and Nintendo devices.

That sounds like a fun project! And it seems to have turned out great. Well done.

This is an excellent piece of writing! Thanks for sharing it.

Absolutely agree with this. The product could have had fewer games and each game could have been much more shallow and it still would have been “good”. But there’s honestly a ton of bangers in this collection and the variety and creativity is astounding.

Their video about how curved spacetime causes the effects of gravity is also very well done.

Mini and Max is so strangely awesome! It didn’t have to have nearly as much content as it does. It’s huge!

My understanding is that the steam version released with no ASCII tileset, but there is one now after an update. I bought the steam version but haven’t played it much at all, so I haven’t confirmed this myself.

The video above has the ASCII style graphics I was talking about. This video shows a dragon attack using a different tileset. (This video begins with some loud music).

https://youtu.be/9ejgsGgH__M?si=RFsdfaKLiCgjhr7p

You can see in this one how the flames billow and spread.

So you’ll have to imagine what the combination is like. You’re already in a headspace where your brain is filling in details not supplied by the ASCII and then the world just explode into flames.

These other tilesets have their advantages. But I’ll never give up the text-based rendering of the world - I’ve had too many great experiences to give that up.

So like, yes, I totally agree.

I want to take a second to tell a story though, about the graphics in this game. I hope to explain why this game actually has the best graphics ever.

Context for some folks: the game is entirely rendered using ASCII characters (for the purpose of this story. I know, I’m leaving out detail, it’s okay). So the goblins in Dwarf Fortress look roughly like this

g

A dog looks like this

d

And a dragon looks like this

D

Learning to play Dwarf Fortress can be tough at first because there’s a soup of letters and other typing characters on the screen and your brain needs to convert that into a scene that makes sense. But here’s the thing … eventually that’s exactly what your brain does! You stop seeing the semicolons and hyphens, the letters and the strange formatting characters like “╥”. You start to see rivers and grass, tiny people working hard, a bustling metropolis, an invading horde.

And the creator of this game hasn’t simply cut corners on making the game look good by using ASCII tilesets. The grass (made of commas or single quotes) sways in the breeze. Running water shimmers. Cherry trees gently rain cherry blossom petals during certain seasons. There’s actually a ton of little details there for your brain to pick up and immediately upscale into high def for you. It’s delightful. And sometimes terrifying.

Sometimes something new will happen. A creature you’ve never seen before will approach your little community. It will be represented by some letter and your brain will render that for you in the way it has been taught to do. Your eyes see a d and you see a dog. Your eyes see a D and you see a dragon. It’s bigger than a dog. Most things are, no big deal. But you’ve been deceived.

You watch as a band of dwarfs approach the dragon. The creature is quite still, right next to the round trunk of a tree that looks like this O. The brave warriors are still far from the creature. You’ve built whole dinning halls, with wooden chairs and stone mugs and carvings decorating the walls, that could fit within the space separating the warriors from the capital D dragon. One canny dwarf let’s loose an arrow at the beast. It zips through the air like this -

As it approaches the Dragon, which is surely just to Iike a dog but a bit larger and green right, time begins the slow. It ticks. And ticks. And hell is unleashed. Flames jet from the Dragon. Unending flames pouring like red ink in billows that quickly fill the vast space and enrobe the dwarven warriors in a superheated death that pushes in and flows past and even through the band until flickering flames fill virtually all space to one side of a capital D that you will never, ever, mistake the size of again.

My scalp tingled and it felt like my skull was over heating when my brain spontaneously supplied all the extra graphical details for that particular scene. I’ll never forget it.

I can’t tell if you’re trolling. But if you aren’t, here’s something cool you might enjoy.

If an object has two sides, you can colour each side a different colour. Think of a dinner plate. That has two sides and an edge that goes all the way around. You could use a marker to colour the front side red, stopping anywhere you hit an edge. Then you could use another marker to colour the back side blue, because the backside wouldn’t be coloured yet.

It sounds like I’m explaining this in a dumb, very obvious way. I am. Not because I think anyone reading this is dumb. But because the shape in the photo does something that is not obvious.

Look at the shape above and imagine it without all the keys sticking out. Imagine it is smooth enough to draw on with a marker. It’s pretty easy to see where any edges are. Imagine colouring one side of the shape red, avoiding where the edge is. If you keep colouring as much as you can, without crossing an edge, once you’re done you’ll find that there’s no place left to colour with the blue marker. You’ll have coloured the whole shape. It only has one side and that one side snakes and twists around to be its own backside as well.

If you’re looking to learn more, the shape is called a Möbius strip.

That’s a great point. I suppose one could tell how healthy the relationship is between developer and publisher by looking at how many dev companies on the roster have created a second great game. Of course, that’s tough even with a great publisher, so maybe that’s not realistic.

Wow. I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality. I’m devastated to hear that this publishing company is floundering.

I found a technique that worked well for me. I want to share with you and others, but I don’t want to come across as judging you in anyway. It’s hard to find great candidates of any sort. And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my technique to every company, because it’s just not reasonable in all cases.

I’ve found that the best way to get a good mix of people hired onto the team is to do more than hope that it happens.

I had to get out to workshops, conferences, and meetups. Local universities had groups that I got in touch with. I had to make connections with the communities that I was looking to hire from. It was a lot of hard work.

But once you’ve developed those connections, candidates roll in with surprising regularity for a long time. After two years I had a team of 10 great devs with a 50/50 split between genders and a huge range of background and cultures. It was the most fun team to work with and we made awesome stuff.

I play a lot of board games. And I own a lot of board games. Not all of my games get played very much, so I like to track each play and over time see which games are forgotten gems or which games I’d be best to just trade away.

In the board game community, you might come across people talking about the “Friendless” metric of their collection. It’s a totally made up measurement, invented by a person with the user name Friendless. In that way, it’s like the Elo rating in chess and other games. I find it’s useful to know when I’m “done” with something that doesn’t really have an end, like playing board games. You can always play one more game.

Friendless hypothesized that if you play a game 10 times, you’ve gained 90% of its remaining utility. So after 10 plays, you consumed 90% of the game play that game provides. After another 10 plays, you’re at 99%. By the time you reach 30 plays, you’ve consumed 99.9% of the game.

You can do the same with games. Maybe the number of plays changes a bit. Maybe it’s not the number of plays, but the number of hours. I would say that games of Civ are like games of any other board game: 10 = 90% utility gained. Matches in COD, probably not the same.

That is an amazing acronym and I wish to see it everywhere!

Thank you for this! Lots of people online have pushed forward the idea that Google search results are not as useful as before. This was the first article that I’ve read that did a good job of quantifying what that actually means and providing context as to why it is happening.

Thanks for this! I had no idea about the history of the game.