Writing this one under a shadow: the attacks in Paris Friday night. We have friends there; everyone’s accounted for; not everyone in our extended circles can say that. Facebook’s Safety Check feature, which I’d never thought about, became the most important software in the world for about six hours. Sometimes the stack ships something that matters. Hug your people. Again.
The fortnight’s lighter half, for the record it deserves: Fallout 4 launched Tuesday. Announced in June, shipped in November, the anti-hype-cycle, and it promptly consumed my week. I have built a settlement. I have feelings about my settlement. Bethesda’s engine is held together with duct tape and dreams (the speedrunners already found the seams), but nobody builds a world like them. Ship the world, patch the physics.
Also of record: Match Group (Tinder et al.) IPO’d, meaning swiping is now a public equity, and the Star Wars marketing singularity is a month from perihelion.
TIL: Safety Check’s design problem is brutally hard: when to activate, for which events, without ranking tragedies. Some product decisions are ethics decisions wearing a feature-flag costume. (They’re taking criticism for exactly this. There are no clean answers, only owned trade-offs.)