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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I started self-hosting a bit prior to when Docker took off, and getting multiple services running was much harder. Service A wants a certain version of PHP installed with certain plugins while Service B wants a different version. You’d follow a tutorial for installing Service C and desperately hope that it wouldn’t somehow break Service A or B. You installed Service D for a bit despite all the installation pain and now want to uninstall it - I hope you tracked exactly what config changes you made throughout the system so you can undo it.

    Docker fixed all of this by making each service independent through containers which made self-hosting 10x easier. I’d also add that I love how easy it is to transfer my setup to a new server - I keep all of my container volumes in a specific directory and my docker-compose files in another and that’s all I need to backup / transfer. Without Docker you’d have to specifically handle each & every configuration file and database location, and if you later upgrade to a newer version of the OS or a different distro you’d have to handle possible conflicts between your versions and what the distro expects.






  • Sometimes a game just takes off like this and then dies back down to reasonable levels. Remember when Valheim was released? It dropped out of nowhere, everyone and their friends played it for a month, and then it decreased down to a lower level. Sometimes a game just scratches an itch people didn’t know they had and explodes for a while, which can explain why no one hears about it until the day it releases and people start telling their friends to play it too.





  • Barely related, but this kind of relates to my fear of increased automation and unemployment this time around. In past periods, like during the Industrial Revolution, the jobs lost by automation were eventually replaced by new jobs as people used the lower prices to consume more. Making clothes needs less labour and so gets cheaper, so consumers buy more clothes, which needs more labour - this but on the scale of the whole economy. Of course it wasn’t this simple (jobs created in other industries, switching industries is hard, new jobs take a while to form, displaced workers never recover, etc.), but given enough time it worked out.

    The difference this time is that consumers now spend a ton of money on digital goods for which there’s a weaker relationship between increased consumption and jobs. Unlike physical goods where increasing consumption requires new factories & jobs, digital goods are a zero-margin product. If you doubled the number of gamers in the world you wouldn’t have a ‘game shortage’, you’d still have the insane amount of selection you find on Steam. Yes there’d be more opportunities for profitable niche games but you wouldn’t double the number of game developers as the generic mass-market games would also double their revenue despite not needing to hire anyone new.

    Add onto this that:

    • As the world gets more developed there are more gamers coming in but also more game developers, often able to work for lower salaries.
    • Older games can stay competitive long after they’ve been made. How old is Skyrim and it’s still selling well? How many game developers are being paid to work on it still?

    To tie it all together, basically I worry that this time around we may not create enough new jobs as a result of automation. The current number of game developers is more than enough to satisfy market needs and making games cheaper isn’t going to result in people buying enough new games to make replacement jobs for game developers. I used gaming as my example here but this also holds for music, TV, movies, software, etc. The one silver lining that keeps me from despair is that this can be solved by shorter workweeks which would both help spread out the remaining jobs while also giving consumers more time to consume digital goods.


  • To summarize for people who don’t want to click in, different gamers are willing to pay different amounts for the same game. If you keep the price high then you earn a lot per customer but on a small customer base. Set the price low and you earn a little per customer but on more customers.

    Price discrimination is basically finding ways to charge each customer the most they’ll pay - that way you earn a lot for the customers willing to pay the inflated amount while not losing the customers looking to save money.

    There are a variety of ways businesses do this - sales are one way. Grocery stores often use coupons, as higher income consumers often won’t bother to deal with clipping coupons. Sometimes the exact same manufacturer will make both a brand name product and then the generic brand with a small tweak. For business to business sales, some companies do pricing per customer based literally on the most they’ll pay.