I agree with your statement (not with the virtue signaling part, but I will ignore it for now). To me, it reminds me like one of those "I gave $100 to a stranger" youtube videos. That end up making $10k from views.
There is nothing wrong with giving $100 to a person in need, while looking all smug and dressed up, and then... the world congratulates you by giving you a lot more than you gave. Rather than... I don't know, donate the $10k to several people in need to begin with? There is a disgusting fakeness associated with all of these things. A pretense of "Look at me! We are the good guys", while we are filthy narcissistic greedy people under the skin instead. Using somebody else's misery to feed our messiah complex.
Or like those shitty "SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS", will people enjoy being around a hot mom breastfeed in public, but look down on a non-attractive mom breastfeeding in public? Facebook is littered with crap, staged, cheap money-grab, "experiments" like this.
It's like, an action that is acted on seemingly selflessly but contains hidden catches and motives.
It's not bad... just.. icky. I call this the Valentines-day-complex. It pretends to be a celebration of love, but under the hood it's all about chocolates and flowers and spending. It doesn't have to be about spending... but about spending it will be!
I had an imaginary friend. It was a dog. My parents wouldn't get me a puppy, so I just imagined having one.
It was a lot of work because I imagined having to take it for walks (so I would walk around the block), or try to train it. In the end my imaginary dog bit someone (but it was self defense!) and I had to put it to sleep. No wonder I 'm now a depressive adult.
Do not hire people who do this. Most of them will say "over 200m downloads of npm packages". Go and take a look. If you see things like 'is-not-foo, checks if a given string is not equal to the string "foo"', and 0 meaningful contributions, either pay no attention to these claims or pass.
I am going to be downvoted, but this needs to be said.
The problem with the indie developers is that many of them are driven by greed and only greed. But that is hidden behind a veil of "we are the underdogs, passionate people, like you!". In reality, it's just a job like any other, and the "we are passionate", is the equivalent of "we are changing the world by... uhh disrupting!" that startup kool-aid drinkers say.
Let me give you an example. I dated a twitter semi-famous indie dev a while ago. She has a day job but makes games on the side. I have a day job and I make music on the side. I remember I was in a room with her, and was looking in ordering Aztec death whistles (it's a whistle that sounds like a human scream), to use into my music. She asked me "oh and how many people will like that?" To which I answered, "Right now I have 10 listeners. After the death whistles maybe I will have 5" and grinned. I make music for me, not for anyone else. If somebody happens to like it, that's fine. It's a hobby and a form of self-expression, like people cook for themselves or practice archery for themselves. I am not looking into becoming famous. In a sense, I am free to create what i want, and I am limited only but my skills and what I can do, not by what I must do.
She looked troubled... So I stopped and observed. She was looking at how many copies a game sold, and was chatting on FB with another on-twitter-all-day indie dev, about how many copies his game sold. Then she proclaimed that the next title would be different, way more appealing to the masses. I put my guitar down, stopped trying to sing "love will tear us apart" but in tuvan throat singing! And proclaimed, wait you 're selling out? How can you be selling out, the game doesn't even exist yet!!
She replied "So what? There is no same in wanting to make a good living from your art. Not everybody is like you and is happy with just... playing. Never advancing to the next stage. Never making something meaningful.".
I WAS SHOCKED. I still am. No wonder it didn't work out in the end. But... she told me, she had started making games because the game industry was full of stereotypes. Boys are the space marine, and girls play barbie's mini games, barbie pets her horse, barbie goes on a date with Ken, bullshit. That she wanted to make a difference, it was her passion, she wanted to prove that there can be fun games that are not gender-biased and that everyone can enjoy. I thought it was a noble, experimentation, passion project, like music is for me.
No. No, making games is not the end itself. Making games is means to an end. Indie devs are greed-driven. Not passion driven.
I hanged out with a few of them in GDC this year. They all care about money. I felt like I was at a dinner with C* level people that just like gossiping about IPOs and how much money some friends, or friends of friends of friends raised. All about money. "This game sold 700k copies!!! It uses unity assets". "That guy from romania made X million dollars!?!?".
There was a guy, who put a game on early access, then delayed the game's release for 10 years, because he made enough money to buy a house in San Francisco, and just did... nothing afterwards. Just talks to people with a "holier than thou" attitude. Meanwhile the game aged so bad, it went from a 7/10 to a 3/10 when it finally got out 9 years late!!!! How dare you! All these people who paid you because they believed in you, and you just shit on them when you hit a certain $$$ in your savings account. But I guess... why wouldn't he. He already accomplished his end goal of MONEY.
Early access, what a shitty thing. No self-respecting musician would say; Here are the first 2 tracks of the album. And some drum tracks from the 3rd and 4th piece. Maybe in 5 years you will get the bass track for the 3rd piece too! No movie director would say; we released the green screen version, and when we raise enough money you will get to see the dragons and the elves. Only game devs do that.
The inherent problem I see with indie devs, is that they lie to their audience as much as themselves as well. When I see the new GTA V game, I know what I am getting into. I will pay $60 to run over some people. But with indie devs I am being schooled about the exploration and experimentation. About feelings, about difficult subjects that noone dared to mention in game medium before. I am intrigued, I am captivated, I am in love! And then... you find out that that indie-game, scooby-do-esque pulling the mask off it was Michael Bay, and Michael Bay's 30th transfomers film all along! All about money, all about making investors happy!
Music has forever changed. We musicians accepted that we won't be rich from our music, so we are liberated to scavenge for a few bucks to rent a van and go touring playing in 20-people shows. Usually when I hang out with musicians, we end up smoking weed and committing to jam sessions that may never happen. And then everyone gets really really excited when I pull the death whistle out.
Well, the fact that one of the biggest phone OS supports QR codes natively in the camera, severely reduces the friction that comes from "what's that weird thing, oh it's called a QR code, here's download this app on the appstore. No, not that one, it has a bitcoin miner in it. Yes the free one". Just point your phone to it and it works! Now whether the world outside caught on, or not... where I am from definitely not, however the biggest barrier was the problem I described above.
Nobody has the resources for that. Some companies make OSes, and some companies send rockets to space. Those feats are also powered by thin wrappers over electron. /s
People seem to forget that C++ and opengl is cross-platform. And there are projects far bigger than slack, like ffmpeg and OpenCV that have existed for decades, always had very fast development cycles, with only a subset of the funding and money that Slack has, and stayed native and close to the metal forever.
A better answer would be, that Slack has deemed the benefits that would result from this as not that important. Or that the current team's expertise cannot handle the task. But they always looking into ways of improving the core product and experience.
iOS camera reads QR codes by default. Just point your phone with the default camera app ON. No special mode required. I have a qr code printed on my living room (made to look like andy warhold art, with multiple colored panels etc) so that guests can use the wifi. Pretty convenient.
Problem with alphanumeric, is you have people from foreign countries who do not even have an english keyboard installed on their phone. Default is probably their native language and they do not care to add a secondary or switch.
But... will mozilla or the people behind haveibeenpwned know I am using a pwned password? Basically, by checking if you are under risk, do you leak info to 3rd parties that can be used against you, before having the opportunity to protect yourself? Is there any info aobut the near-zero knowledge protocol somewhere? It's a fascinating topic for sure.
Because it comes off as snarky and provides little value I would guess.
I would say that due to jQuery's explosion, framework writers went from geeky technical people to being looked at as heroes. Back in 2007 there was actually a big javascript framework war between jQuery and MooTools. Technical blogs left and right on why jquery is bad, or why mootools ecosystem sucks. It was weird to behold. I don't think I have seen in any other community such rivalry. Even later, when angular vs react vs ember became a thing, people had overly heated arguments about them. That's so odd. In the non-js world, people usually welcome the new approaches provided by new frameworks or question the usefulness of yet another new framework - and it stops there. I suppose framework writers are not rockstars in those communities :)