🎮 Jonathan Blow’s Decade-Long Journey to Craft 1,400 Intricate Puzzles
A fascinating look at the rare freedom in indie game development—where time, vision, and perfectionism collide to produce something both experimental and uncompromising.
Indie developer Jonathan Blow dedicated nearly ten years to creating ‘Order of the Sinking Star’, a game built around 1,400 interlocking puzzles. Enabled by the financial success of ‘The Witness’, he used the time to explore deeper, more abstract game design principles and to refine his approach to playtesting and player experience.
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💧 Iran’s Vanishing Water: How Mismanagement Drained an Ancient System
A sobering reminder of how technological overconfidence and policy inertia can dismantle systems that once balanced ecology and human survival.
Iran’s escalating water crisis has reached a critical stage, with experts warning of ‘water bankruptcy’. Decades of overreliance on dams and deep wells have destroyed the ancient qanat network—a once-sustainable irrigation system. Mismanagement, overuse in agriculture, and climate change have caused aquifers to collapse and rivers to vanish, forcing the government to even consider relocating Tehran.
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📊 How Getting Richer Made Teenagers Less Free
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🤖 Microsoft Retires IntelliCode to Push Developers Toward Paid Copilot
A defining moment in developer tooling—where innovation meets monetization, and AI convenience increasingly comes at the cost of autonomy and data control.
Microsoft has sunset its IntelliCode suite, redirecting developers to the subscription-based GitHub Copilot ecosystem. IntelliCode’s local machine learning features are now deprecated in favor of cloud-hosted Copilot services, signaling Microsoft’s consolidation of AI-assisted developer tools under a monetized, cloud-centric strategy.
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⚡ lightning-extra: PyTorch Lightning Plugins for Cloud-Native ML
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