These are things I’ve found interesting between January 19th through January 20th:

• Four Lessons From Evernote’s First Week On The Mac App Store –
• Building with HTML5 Tech Talk –
• Amazon Web Services Introduces ‘Elastic Beanstalk’ For Easier App Deployment –

These are things I’ve found interesting between January 17th through January 18th:

• Who is a bad customer? – Here's the cool thing. You can measure all of these 3 factors with metrics and design paths for each. It is worth your while capture and hold onto both whales and super spreaders.
• Why We Need More Women Developers –

These are things I’ve found interesting between January 12th through January 16th:

• Asmyco: Each iOS Device Has Downloaded More Than 60 Apps –
• Hunter Becomes Hunted: A Fox Shoots a Man [Animals] –
• The Power of Games –

These are things I’ve found interesting between January 2nd through January 7th:

• The world, virtual –
• California Bill Criminalizing Online Impersonations In Effect Starting Today –

These are things I’ve found interesting for December 23rd from 14:23 to 14:32:

• Functions vs. Loops [Finding Fun] – What Games Are –
• C64 Remake Specced – Oh, my. Nostalgia + additional power, a thing of beauty.

These are things I’ve found interesting between December 16th through December 17th:

• Unlocking the Mayor Badge of Meaninglessness – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review –
• Facebook Uses Face Recognition To Help Tag Photos –

These are things I’ve found interesting between December 14th through December 15th:

• The Dangers Of Externalizing Knowledge –
• Understanding Video compression & codecs –

These are things I’ve found interesting between November 29th through December 9th:

• Epic Games Launches ‘Infinity Blade’ – an Unreal-Based Game for iPhone and iPad –
• Google’s Chrome Web Store goes live with over 200 games | News –
• How Germany Got It Right on the Economy –

These are things I’ve found interesting between November 25th through November 27th:

• Lessons In Becoming An Expert –
• 15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics –

These are things I’ve found interesting between November 23rd through November 24th:

• FarmVille No Longer Most Popular App – "Phrases" has 54m users and it isn't even accessible within the US? Wow! (and yuck — I want to see what all the fuss is about.)
• A Visual History of the Credit Card –
• A Third Kind of Freedom –
• Analysis: AI Fallibility And The Chick Parabola – I find these discussions fascinating since there are is always the assumption that AI is necessary.

  Three ideas shape my AI design:
  1) Turing's Fallacy: "Any opponent described as an AI will be seen as an AI to another player. Even if the opponent is in fact a human."

  This suggests that no matter how good your AI gets, it will always fail.

  2) The best games are ones with clear cause and effect. If players see AI as an environmental system (not an opponent) then it is better to give them something they can learn and master rather than presenting them with a fuzzy, confusing gameplay landscape. This is why Goombas are more memorable opponents than 99% of all AI ever created.

  3) Humans make the best opponents. In a networked world, AI is at best a crutch or learning tool. Why not put your effort into making a great multiplayer game instead of wasting it on an AI that is less effective and prone to failure?

  These philosophies changes the type of game that you make. It relegates decades of design to the waste bin. I recognize this and embrace it.

  take care,
  Danc.