You’re not wrong but there are only so many game designers out there who have a distinct style and an art director who is a bit unhinged. Moreso when it’s a style that isn’t obviously trying to sell you something, which is unfortunately a pit many indie games fall into as they race to be a better version of what they saw other successful indie games do. It was already a saturated product before AI
HOMM was niche when it came out. The genre was always petite and a few studios here and there is all that the market could ever support. This is why a well-executed game like HOMM 3 for example has such a high stickiness factor. The brand loyalty is almost built in given the type of audience it attracts.
Surprised to see this take. Even musicians want money and the decision to do pop electronica, which is what daft punk is, was calculated. You wouldn’t have heard about them nor would they be a global hit by some mysterious force of good vibes. To go even more blunt than that, RAM itself was a cash grab album. It sounded like phoning it in and selling out. But I was never a big fan of the band to begin with. Cheesy all around.
I don't deny musicians their share of wealth, but most musicians who do get wealthy off their art, do so through a mix of releasing music and touring (mostly the latter these days). I just wish DP had toured a little more to get that sweet dough rather than selling LEGO figures years after disbanding but maybe that's just me being sour for being too young to be able to have seen them live.
And I wouldn't call RAM a cash grab album, their goal was to make an album with great musicians they looked up to, and I think they succeeded. You don't make a cash grab album being famous already and collaborating with industry veterans like Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder.
Daft Punk's music itself is mostly composed of samples from other tracks which are not credited. They don't even play instruments really, they play samplers. And their music is quite mid, I really never understood their popularity.
Every time I’ve brought this up I was told some variation of:
1. Things have always been this way.
2. Read the guidelines. They have always been this way.
3. Follow the guidelines. You are off-topic.
4. Email us at hn@ycombi etc.
Been here for much longer than most, frankly.
I mean, I guess we all just pick up our ball and go to lobsters? HN has turned to dregs and every time we call it out we are warned. So of what use is it than to mindlessly ramble with burner accounts and nothing to lose? The old “even Reddit is better” holds true. Oh no, I guess I broke the guidelines by comparing to Reddit. That’s a paddlin’.
Try fucking moderating the site once in awhile, ffs.
Tomhow getting into a back and forth with me, ignoring what I’m saying and without at all reading the room is on brand. Hold on let me email you instead, Tom. I wasn’t clear the first five thread levels. Yeah that’ll do it.
For the amount of marketing and praise this book has gotten, I’m very unimpressed. I don’t mean it to come across snobbish. I just don’t see a take that’s in any way out of the usual.
While I don’t expect one book to teach it all, I would like to see how it compares to the current crop of books and why is it better. The sample chapter left me very unimpressed and the book looks like it’s meant to be more for a coffee table and less for actual hands on usage. I don’t see a way that someone would put this into practice without an accompanying practice/lab book. Otherwise, it reads like trivia that showcases how much the author knows. Great, I guess?
Speaking of covers, Open Circuits: Inner Beauty of Electronics has a much more honest yet intelligent cover to it. Each page is both informational and extremely well done. Someone who has no knowledge of electronics or electricity can walk away learning something because it shows how things physically work with photos. The visual itself is almost self explanatory as a still image of different materials and how they are arranged. In other words, it has information density that’s both attractive and impactful.
My actual picks, are the likes of Floyd or Melvino, the Charles Platt one that has loads of circuits to build, and of course the clumsy but informative Forrest Mims series of books. Then you can get into Elicia White’s Embedded or any other assortment of more advanced books on power electronics etc.
Open to be proven wrong but yeah. I would have expected more because I don’t know of any book on this subject other than Art of Electronics and maybe Microelectronics by Sedra (or Razavi) that gets this much praise. Yet it started getting this praise before it was even released.
Bashing AI is fun except even good old Sam Ben-Yaakov is coming around to appreciate how useful it is to pedagogy.
The art of electronics is something you keep as a reference. The secret life of circuits is more pedagogical, and reads more like someone kindly explaining stuff instead of sending diagrams and formulas your way.
Other similar book in tone are “The C Programming Language” and the IT Mastery series by Michael Lucas.
I love my reference books, but they’re not usually great for pleasant reading. And books that relies on projects often don’t motivate you on doing said projects. I’d rather something that makes my curiosity grew and make me explore on my own.
Ah "The C Programming Language" the only programming language book that my feeble mind was able to read all the way to the end and (at least it seemed) understood every single thing!
I understand and agree with what you just said. What I’m gauging is where is the praise coming from? Who has it taught, and what did they get out of it? Art of Electronics is not one book, it is three - main book, lab book, x chapters. It has taught many people how to think about circuits. It has mileage of many many years that warrants the praise. Also, it was a composition of notes from a full course that had labs, that went into a book format. Meaning its very existence came from teaching students working circuits rather than, as one might assume, “sending diagrams and formulas [their] way”. But it does seem that way if someone tries to open it for the first time. It is a slog and a half.
Take Troubleshooting Analog Circuits by Bob Pease. He throws something janky at you to see if you can intuit what could the culprits be. He then elaborates the ways in which things can go wrong. This is an introductory chapter. Many books do this, it’s not perfect but it works. It’s a book about troubleshooting that starts with asking you to troubleshoot, and then helps you to do so by explaining how and why. Hard to argue with that.
I’m not against the book, but it does seem mostly like trivia. The accompanying blog posts are insightful, though the author spends a lot of time showing how much they know rather than explaining a concept to the student - and yes, there is a difference between the two. There are a number of instances I came across of this, and other texts are better written in this regard. If I didn’t already know the stuff the author is talking about, I would need to read up another resource on it. So then what is the point? Even Dave Jones’ videos have more use because he’s right there with an oscilloscope and voltmeter to show you what’s going on. Tricks tips for “young players” etc.
