It is about a month that I am trying Apple Arcade on my iPad. During this month, I realized that it made my iPad a totally legitimate gaming platform. I had zero games on my phone and my iPad; now, I have four, and two of them were meaningful experiences. In short: I had fun on a mobile platform after years.

Unlike many, I am usually fine with the subscription model: I understand why it is useful for the developers and I think that, if priced correctly, it is not bad for the users for the vast majority of use cases. However, I often ask myself if the model will be sustainable when the big majority of the apps will be subscription-based.

September has been sweet and kind to me; but also harsh and challenging. Nevertheless, it is October and under pumpkins 🎃 and ghosts 👻, I am still here for a monthly update.

About Life

September has been fun. I traveled to Padua for the CICAP Fest (a series of conferences organized by the main Italian Skeptical association), I went to a couple of nice restaurants, I completed some personal goal and I ate some Banana Pancake. 🥞

September is the true “new year”. Summer vacations are usually over, and we are ready to start a new powerful working season. So why I feel more tired than before?

As we have said before, skill and ranking are never measured directly; instead, they are inferred from the observed performance of a player in previous matches. The idea of building an estimator based on pairwise wins and losses is quite old, but the Elo System represents the most simple and popular implementation.

I dislike Go. I dislike it a lot. Nevertheless, I usually do not bash on it because I am deeply convinced that people should use whatever they want and they like. Many people I respect use Go. I mean, this blog run on Hugo, that is written in Go! How could I be one of “those guys” who always bitch about what other people enjoy?

However, sometimes, I fall into watching discussions in the go community, and they are so absurd I cannot shut up. 

Last month, slowing down with socials and news became mandatory. I “won” Camp NaNoWriMo and but I still have the last third of the story to write. Heatwaves are everywhere.

To hot to think and words order fine screen in! Let’s just look at this month update before I catch fire!

Yesterday I was reflecting about an interesting fact: in the list of “my favorite games of all times,” the top 10 is packed with games that share all a common element. The games are:

• Dark Souls
• Dark Souls II
• Well… every game of the soulborne genre.
• Hollow Knight
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• And more.

Can you guess what they all have in common?

Sure, they all have a decadent setting (the world is falling or is recovering after a cataclysm), but there is a way more common design element: narration through discovery.

This update will be quite straightforward: July will be the month of digital retreat. Summer is not for staying still. Summer is for side projects; summer is for recharging; summer is for everything but the mindless routines of the other seasons.

Seven years and eight months have passed since the release of the first really popular commercial virtual assistant (VA). Yet, seven years later, virtual assistants can do only marginally better.

Sure, they understand better, they speak better, they have learned some new trick; but in the end, they are still a funny but useless experience. After the first fun moments of experimentation when you start talking to them – that is, where you keep asking them silly jokes or dumb questions – they quickly came back to be pretty dumb object. I am pretty sure that the vast majority of user use a VA just for timers, weather and – occasionally – asking for the event on our calendar.