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I'm Leaving Mojang

notch.net

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Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#211

Post by toomuchtodo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #204
TeMPOraL wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but for the first time ever, we've reached the theoretical capacity to change that. What's funny (for some definitions of fun), we will actually need to do that - given how our current economy pushes automation to replace humans everywhere, we can either accept that people should be allowed to live and thrive without having to earn for the living, or we'll see a massive increase of poverty.

> What's funny (for some definitions of fun), we will actually need to do that - given how our current economy pushes automation to replace humans everywhere, we can either accept that people should be allowed to live and thrive without having to earn for the living, or we'll see a massive increase of poverty. Most likely, such a realization will occur, if at all, only after (1) we do see massive increase in poverty,…

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson

This software/robotics/automation transition (a second "industrial revolution" if you want to call it that) is going to be terribly painful, but it need not be. We just need to reflect on what our values are as people.

Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#212

Post by Anderkent »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #136
jedmeyers wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the beginning of humanity people have been slaves to the necessity of survival.

Yes, but for the first time ever, we've reached the theoretical capacity to change that. What's funny (for some definitions of fun), we will actually need to do that - given how our current economy pushes automation to replace humans everywhere, we can either accept that people should be allowed to live and thrive without having to earn for the living, or we'll see a massive increase of poverty.

And the way you'd work on implementing that change, would be, wait for it... Make a ton of money, and sponsor relevant research / lobbying efforts.

You definitely won't make it happen by being a fisherman.

Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#213

Post by nwenzel »

lem72 wrote: post #195
chasing wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. Parables can be used to demonstrate just about anything. There once was a fisherman, much like the one you describe in the parent comment. One day a businessman approached him with a proposal that would require more work, but would, in the end, result in much more financial freedom and stability. The fisherman declined the advice and went about his life, happily fishing for the days food and spending the rest of…

In this situation, It sounds like he got more out of life by following his original goal of hanging out with his family since they all die in the end anyways.

We all die in the end anyways. Optimize for happiness.

Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#214

Post by TeMPOraL »

dragonwriter wrote: post #180
cperciva wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bruce Wayne's character in batman is always thinking big. He tries to push things in the direction he thinks is right. No, Bruce Wayne is incredibly myopic. If you have billions of dollars and you want to fight crime, the last thing you should be doing is developing fancy equipment so that you can personally go after criminals one by one. If Bruce Wayne truly wanted to use his money to reduce crime, he would be donat…

> If Bruce Wayne truly wanted to use his money to reduce crime, he would be donating it to preschools and after-school sports programs. To be fair, Bruce Wayne does, in most versions of the Batman stories, incredibly vast amounts of local charity of that type (and others), as well as personally going after criminals one by one, and there's probably limited capacity to productively absorb those funds (Wayne's pump-pri…

So we could say that Bruce Wayne knows well how to purchase fuzzies and utilons separately [0]. He spends a lot of his resources to help effectively by donating to local charities, and he gets the fun and good feelings from helping people by chasing criminals himself as Batman.

[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa...

Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#215

Post by chris_mahan »

cmdrfred wrote: post #206
chris_mahan wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minecraft's my favorite game, and my son's. We also both like Dune2. He's 9. (I'm not :)

I just checked out Dune2, looks good thanks for the recommendation.

Watch out for the big harkonnen missile on the maps with the castle. Enjoy!

Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#216

Post by clavalle »

scottjad wrote: post #86

The other day there was a post about some Doom map viewer Notch had written in Dart. One of the top comments said something along the lines of "This is why we all need to be rich, so we can work on stuff like this." I thought the comment was so sad because honestly, almost no one is going to benefit from a mostly broken Doom map viewer in Dart that's abandoned after a few days. Same with the numerous games he's start…

I hope he means 'abandoning it to people who will develop it further so more people can enjoy it: I'm not going to deal with that aspect anymore'.

But I could just be optimistic.

Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#217

Post by mikeash »

scottjad wrote: post #86

The other day there was a post about some Doom map viewer Notch had written in Dart. One of the top comments said something along the lines of "This is why we all need to be rich, so we can work on stuff like this." I thought the comment was so sad because honestly, almost no one is going to benefit from a mostly broken Doom map viewer in Dart that's abandoned after a few days. Same with the numerous games he's start…

I get the impression that Notch may not actually be all that talented. I mean, he's probably more so than the average Joe, but not super exceptionally talented.

It seems like he got lucky, and was good enough to leverage his success into more success and was good enough of a businessman to profit handsomely from the whole thing, but that's about it. I understand that he hasn't done anything on Minecraft in quite a while. His attempts at something new don't seem to have gone anywhere. (That weird space programming game from a while back got a lot of attention but never resulted in anything.)

So, maybe that was it. Notch is a one-hit wonder. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm sure he's already contributed more to the world than most of us ever will. But that doesn't necessarily mean that we're all losing out on anything significant if he doesn't keep trying to make more big things.

And from the other side of things, it seems like Minecraft came out of one of these ridiculous idle amusements. If you had described Minecraft to people before it was made, they would have thought it was ridiculous. Oh, a volumetric 3D world with a 1990s-era renderer. Great. Sounds about as useful as a Doom map viewer written in Dart. Yet it turned into something huge. So if Notch does have another hit in him, it will probably come about the same way, through more strange messing about.

Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#218

Post by TeMPOraL »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #211
dragonwriter wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's funny (for some definitions of fun), we will actually need to do that - given how our current economy pushes automation to replace humans everywhere, we can either accept that people should be allowed to live and thrive without having to earn for the living, or we'll see a massive increase of poverty. Most likely, such a realization will occur, if at all, only after (1) we do see massive increase in poverty,…

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson This software/robotics/automation transition (a second "industrial revolution" if you want to call it that) is going to be terribly painful, but it need not be. We just need to reflect on what our values are as people.

> We just need to reflect on what our values are as people.

That's the hard part. Automation is coming whether we like it or not, because is being forced into our throats by the combined mechanisms of our economy (or by The System, or Moloch, call it what you like). But "reflecting on our values" requires coordination of the whole society. Which is hard. We might coordinate eventually, when the going by gets too hard, just like people eventually fixed the industrial revolution - but it took riots and revolutions and communism spreading over half of the planet to get there. If we want to do this before blood gets spilled, we need to find a way to coordinate sooner.

I'm still not sure how we can approach that.

Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#219

Post by mcguire »

"If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately."

That is a very nice option to have.

Re: I'm Leaving Mojang

#220

Post by corbinpage »

Instead of pulling a Wozniak, why not pull a Sergey Brin?

Use the incredible resources you gained from your first success to finance all the cool side-projects you ever dreamed of?

Notch could start any web experiment he wanted, and when he got bored, pass it along to an army of coders to refine and finish.

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