The annual Game Awards ceremony awarded this year's "Best Direction" award to Naughty Dog studio's The Last of Us Part II — provoking a strong reaction from Kotaku's staff writer. "I think it's pretty obvious that no game that required its developers to crunch, like The Last of Us Part II did, should be given a Best Direction award." It's no secret that Naughty Dog subjected its workers to unbelievable levels of crunch to get The Last of Us Part II out the door, but that's hardly an innovation when it comes to Naughty Dog or game development in general. Over the years, the studio has seen constant employee turnover as developers crunch on games like The Last of Us and Uncharted, burn out, and throw in the towel. Relentless overtime, missed weekends, long stretches of time without seeing your family — these things take a toll on even the most passionate artist. "This can't be something that's continuing over and over for each game, because it is unsustainable," one The Last of Us Part II developer told Kotaku earlier this year. "At a certain point you realize, 'I can't keep doing this. I'm getting older. I can't stay and work all night.'" Let's be clear: the existence of crunch indicates a failure in leadership. It's up to game directors and producers to ensure workloads are being managed properly and goals are being met. If workers are being forced to crunch, explicitly or otherwise, it means the managers themselves have fallen short somewhere, either in straining the limits of their existing staff, fostering an environment where overtime is an implied (if unspoken) requirement, or both. And as ambitious as The Last of Us Part II director Neil Druckmann and his projects may be, "questionable experiments in the realm of pushing human limits" are not required to make a great game... I feel like the industry, now more than ever, is willing to discuss the dangers of crunch culture and solutions to eradicate it. But lavishing praise on the way The Last of Us Part II was directed feels like a tacit endorsement of crunch and only serves to push that conversation to the backburner again. A popular online statement, first coined by Fanbyte podcast producer Jordan Mallory, says, "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding." The message from all those who share it is clear: No game, not even industry darling The Last of Us Part II, is worth destroying lives to create.

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Reuters reports that "a sophisticated hacking group" backed by "a foreign government" has stolen information from America's Treasury Department, and also from "a U.S. agency responsible for deciding policy around the internet and telecommunications." There is concern within the U.S. intelligence community that the hackers who targeted the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration used a similar tool to break into other government agencies, according to three people briefed on the matter. The hack is so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Saturday, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

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Remote work "is here to stay," argues a new article in Silicon Valley's newspaper The Mercury News (also re-published in the East Bay Times). But they've also asked industry professionals around Silicon Valley whether this will hurt our ability to innovate. Software engineer/entrepreneur Joyce Park (who's worked in Silicon Valley over 20 years): "Fast feedback is what we're all about in this town. That's what's gone away... If you have a dumb idea or people hate your idea then you don't have to spend more time fleshing it out, and that means you don't have to spend more time defending it. When you're trying to do really innovative work, it takes so many meetings. Zoom meetings are different than normal meetings because they're much more performative. Most engineers aren't really in the putting-on-a-show business... Pretty is the death of innovation." Park also worries about young tech workers, who represent the future of innovation and aren't in offices absorbing knowledge. "Who's going to mentor them, who's going to make them successful? A lot of the craft is just seeing problems and seeing how they were successfully or unsuccessfully solved." Tarun Wadhwa, who's taught new innovation methods at Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley outpost, most recently this spring: "The sparks wouldn't fly," Wadhwa said. "The students were just as brilliant as they've always been but the class wasn't as able to help them advance that brilliance as it once was." What was missing, Wadhwa suspects, was the free-flowing, back-and-forth-and-sideways exchange of ideas that happens in person, especially during extra-curricular gatherings such as when students from different teams and different backgrounds go out for coffee together after class... Another perspective from a long-time Silicon Valley veteran: Mike Strasser, whose mechanical engineering career and current employment as general manager of Campbell med-tech startup Imperative Care straddle the hardware and software worlds, believes a reduced ability to develop a rapport with colleagues when working apart poses problems across both sectors. However, the problem is worse in hardware, where teams can't pass a prototype around a table, and easier in software, especially with collaboration apps supplementing video meetings. The move to remote work has forced technologists to find new solutions, Strasser noted, such as relatively inexpensive 3D printers that can make prototypes at home. Bay Area venture capitalist Peter Rojas, a partner at Betaworks Ventures: "We have this historic opportunity to reorganize working life and to rethink where people live and where they work...." Successful companies will be those that can nurture talent and build a strong culture while taking advantage of the opportunities remote work presents, he said. "This idea that you can only get a sense of a person in person, I think we're really getting away from that now," Rojas said. He said his firm has money in more than 100 companies — including one that makes video-conferencing collaboration software — and none appear hurt by the shift to remote. "Everybody adjusted," he said, "and figured out how to get their stuff done."

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Nathan Myhrvold is a former CTO of Microsoft, co-founder of the equity company Intellectual Ventures, and the founder of "food innovation lab" Modernist Cuisine (which among other things resulted in book of remarkable food photography). But he's now photographing the intricate designs of snowflakes, reports Fast Company: Over the span of 18 months, Myhrvold built a camera with a microscopic lens and then shot in the freezing locales of Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. All to capture individual snowflakes — millimeters across — in sparkling, high-res detail. Myhrvold captured his snowflake specimens by setting out black foam core when snow was falling. He then used a tiny watercolor brush to grab individual snowflakes and place them on a "cooling stage" under the camera. Cold is key — even the camera itself and the plate he places the snowflake on must be left outside and chilled in order to photograph the snowflake before it melts. But that's not the only element to keep those snowflakes cool: He also uses special, high-speed LED lights that don't generate as much heat. The cold is also important to a snowflake's shape, says Myhrvold, who shot his specimens at temperatures between -15 and -20 degrees F. You might call this the snowflake sweet spot: They form into the "best," most complex designs between these temperatures. The results are simply dazzling... "Sometimes to see nature's beauty you have to travel to the Grand Canyon or get up late at night to see the stars," Myhrvold says. But with snow, all you have to do is pause and look down at your mitten. "It's a beautiful thing."

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Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shared this report from Reuters: AstraZeneca is to start clinical trials to test a combination of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine with Russia's Sputnik V shot to see if this can boost the efficacy of the British drugmaker's vaccine, Russia's sovereign wealth fund said on Friday. Trials will start by the end of the year and Russia wants to produce the new vaccine jointly if it is proven to be effective, said the RDIF wealth fund, which has funded Sputnik V. AstraZeneca said it was considering how it could assess combinations of different vaccines, and would soon begin exploring with Russia's Gamaleya Institute, which developed Sputnik V, whether two vaccines based on a common-cold virus could be successfully combined... Sputnik's Russian developers say clinical trials, still under way, have shown it has an efficacy rate of over 90%, higher than that of AstraZeneca's own vaccine and similar to those of U.S. rivals Pfizer and Moderna. Some Western scientists have raised concerns about the speed at which Russia has worked, giving the regulatory go-ahead for its vaccines and launching large-scale vaccinations before full trials to test Sputnik V's safety and efficacy have been completed. Russia says the criticism is unfounded.

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Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shared this report from Reuters: AstraZeneca is to start clinical trials to test a combination of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine with Russia's Sputnik V shot to see if this can boost the efficacy of the British drugmaker's vaccine, Russia's sovereign wealth fund said on Friday. Trials will start by the end of the year and Russia wants to produce the new vaccine jointly if it is proven to be effective, said the RDIF wealth fund, which has funded Sputnik V. AstraZeneca said it was considering how it could assess combinations of different vaccines, and would soon begin exploring with Russia's Gamaleya Institute, which developed Sputnik V, whether two vaccines based on a common-cold virus could be successfully combined... Sputnik's Russian developers say clinical trials, still under way, have shown it has an efficacy rate of over 90%, higher than that of AstraZeneca's own vaccine and similar to those of U.S. rivals Pfizer and Moderna. Some Western scientists have raised concerns about the speed at which Russia has worked, giving the regulatory go-ahead for its vaccines and launching large-scale vaccinations before full trials to test Sputnik V's safety and efficacy have been completed. Russia says the criticism is unfounded.

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CNN accuses Fox of lack of proportionality. I've been watching CNN the last few weeks. I find it mind-numbing. (A good thing, for now, I play video games and watch Twitter while CNN is on.) They repeat the same two stories over and over since Election Day. Literally the same words, over and over.

Here's what's really going on imho.

Both Fox and CNN are paralyzed.

They are prepared for hurricanes, earthquakes, even another 9/11. But they have no idea what to do with a pandemic.

Similarly the Trump rebellion is on a scale they have no concept of how to deal with.

These are people who do not improvise.

As Chris Hayes said, they all did very well in school. Rose through the ranks. Lots of book learning and discipline. They can make looking like a maverick as tame as a lamb, which is good for the cash flow of the network.

But they can't improvise. They can only do what they were taught to do. They weren't taught how to do this job. So they are stuck. Paralyzed. Going round and round trying to catch a familiar beat, but they can't because it doesn't have one.

Garry Kasparov: "Don't dare say "But the system worked" when a majority of Republicans in Congress support the overturning of a free and fair election. You don't celebrate a cancer not having killed you yet. You celebrate when you're cancer free."

When will journalism stop covering the disappointment of Trump supporters. They lost. They're having a hard time dealing with it. Meantime we're in the middle of a pandemic. Let them get over it on their own. My mother understood this. When my little brother was complaining about something, very unfairly, and loudly, my mother would say if you just ignore him he'll stop. She was right.

It happened sometime in December 2000 in NYC. I met with Adam Curry over a couple of days at a hotel in midtown on the west side. I mention the meeting in a post on December 28, 2000. Here's an excerpt.

• It helps to have a user in mind when you're developing. In NY, when I met with Adam for two days he kept trying to explain what he wanted, but he's not a software developer, so to my ears it came across like hodgepodge. But I listened anyway, I kept trying to feed back what I heard, but we weren't connecting.
• When I got back home I did what programmers do, I iterated, and kept showing it to him. Is this what you wanted? Eventually we got there, this software hits his button. It's also a framework for his vision for last yard connectivity. You can move huge pieces of content without any waiting and using the bandwidth that you don't use. When you're home sleeping in your bed your desktop system can get the big stuff, you won't even know it's there until it's fully downloaded on your hard disk.
• This is how video and music are going to move over the net in 2001. Who would have thought RSS would play a role in this? Adam did.

This was the key idea on podcasting. How to distribute large bits of audio and video without having to wait for them to download. At the time, it was the slowness of the net that stood in the way of what we now call podcasting.

The significance of this is that it was 20 years ago. Some time in December 2000. It led to a new version of RSS which supported enclosures for the first time. I also wrote this up on the blog that month. And the software called MUOTD became Radio UserLand, which was a two-way blogging and reading app for RSS. It's something the software industry hasn't replicated, not because it's so hard technically, it isn't. Not sure why.

I'd love to know the actual date of our meetings. There was also a Scripting News dinner at Katz's Deli on Houston St during the same visit.

Then, it turns out I couldn't find any mention of it in the archive for December because the two-day meetup happened on October 25 and 26. As often is the case, I completely missed the milestone. Oy. All these years, I thought the idea for podcasting was hatched in December 2000 when it was actually two months earlier. It still took a couple of months from there before we had any real demos. It was competing with other projects we had at UserLand at the time.

PS: The Katz's dinner, mentioned above was on October 25.

Long-time Slashdot reader BoredStiff writes: An energy Sankey diagram [where the width of arrows is proportional to flow rates] was published today by the University of Chicago, and shows the history of the American energy system in chart form, from 1800 to 2019. The Atlantic explains: It is the first attempt to put so much information about U.S. energy history in one place. This particular Sankey diagram shows the inputs and outputs for the U.S. energy system, measured in watts per capita. The left side of the chart shows where energy is coming from (coal, natural gas, or petroleum) and the right side shows what it's being used for (transportation, agriculture, or home lighting and heating)... [I]t has a lot to teach us about how the energy system got to be the way it is today — and how it might change, and be made to change, in the future... The half century from 1800 to 1850 saw the country devour biomass, most of it in the form of firewood and animal feed. In the 1870s, biomass gave way to the first fossil fuels: coal and, to a lesser extent, petroleum... By the 1910s, coal was dominant.... In the 1920s, it began to fade from the economy, replaced by natural gas, electricity, and — in the transportation sector — petroleum (in the form of gasoline). This was the age of cars and electrified Sun Belt suburbs — and it lasted 50 years, until the energy crisis of the 1970s arrived and capped energy use. Since 1973, per capita energy use hasn't increased. In recent years, you can see natural gas driving out coal from the electricity sector. It was getting a handle on that change, actually, that led the project's leader to start working on it in the first place. "The changes that are happening in the electricity sector now — changes that are as large as any energy transition we've seen — are difficult to grasp... without animating the data," Elisabeth Moyer, an atmospheric-chemistry professor at the University of Chicago who created the project, told me... Emily Grubert, an engineering professor at Georgia Tech, noted that nearly all of the transitions depicted were accidental or the result of market forces. It's possible that the transition to zero-carbon energy could be faster, she said, because it will be intentional.

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"Cloudflare, Apple, and Fastly have co-designed and proposed a new DNS standard to tackle ongoing privacy issues associated with DNS," reports ZDNet. Cloudflare calls it "a practical approach for improving privacy" that "aims to improve the overall adoption of encrypted DNS protocols without compromising performance and user experience..." Third-parties, such as ISPs, find it more difficult to trace website visits when DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is enabled. DoH deployment is on the cards for many major browser providers, although rollout plans are ongoing. Now, Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH) has been proposed by Cloudflare — together with partners PCCW Global, Surf, and Equinix — to improve on these models by adding an additional layer of public key encryption and a network proxy... The overall aim of ODoH is to decouple client proxies from resolvers. A network proxy is inserted between clients and DoH servers — such as Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1's public DNS resolver — and the combination of both this and public key encryption "guarantees that only the user has access to both the DNS messages and their own IP address at the same time," according to Cloudflare... "The client behaves as it does in DNS and DoH, but differs by encrypting queries for the target, and decrypting the target's responses..." Test clients for the code have been provided to the open source community to encourage experimentation with the proposed standard. It can take years before support is enabled by vendors for new DNS standards, but Eric Rescorla, Firefox's CTO, has already indicated that Firefox will "experiment" with ODoH.

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CNET reports: With the next version of Chrome, Google is moving ahead with a plan to improve privacy and security by reining in some abilities of extensions used to customize the browser. The move had angered some developers who expected earlier it would cripple ad blockers. Manifest v3, the programming interface behind Google's security plans, will arrive with Chrome 88 in mid-January, Google said Wednesday at the Chrome Dev Summit. Extensions using the earlier Manifest v2 will still work for at least a year... Among other things, Manifest v3 limits the number of "rules" that extensions may apply to a web page as it loads. Rules are used, for example, to check if a website element comes from an advertiser's server and should therefore be blocked. Google announced the changes two years ago. Reducing the number of rules allowed angered creators of extensions like the uBlock Origin ad blocker and the Ghostery tracking blocker. They said the rules limits will stop their extensions from running their full lists of actions to screen ads or block tracking. That could let websites bypass extensions — and the preferences of people who installed them... The shift brought on by Manifest V3 will spread to all browsers, to the detriment of ad blocking software, predicted Andrey Meshkov, co-founder and chief technology officer of AdGuard, an ad-blocking extension... Ghostery is working to update its extension for Manifest V3 but would rather spend its time on "real privacy innovations," President Jeremy Tillman said in a statement Wednesday. "We still have real misgivings that these changes have more to do with Google protecting its bottom line than it does with improving security for Chrome users...." The importance of the Chrome team's choices are magnified by the fact that other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi , Opera and Brave, are built on its Chromium open-source foundation. Microsoft said it will embrace Manifest v3, too. "Another Manifest v3 change is that extensions no longer may update their abilities by downloading code from third-party sites. "The entire extension now must be distributed through the Chrome Web Store, a measure Google says improves security screens and speeds reviews."

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CNN reports: U.S. Covid-19 hospitalizations hit a record high for the seventh day in a row Saturday with 108,487 patients in hospitals around the country, according to the Covid Tracking Project. And the number of Covid-19 cases reported in the United States reached more than 16 million after the country added 1 million cases in just four days, according to Johns Hopkins University data. It took the nation more than eight months to reach 8 million cases but less than two months to double that, as the number of new cases continues to soar... On Friday, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use, the U.S. recorded more than 3,300 Covid-19 deaths — the most ever in one day, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 231,700 new cases were reported, another pandemic high... The average of daily cases over the last week was 210,764, another pandemic high, according to a CNN analysis of Johns Hopkins data. Another statistic from CNN: There have been more than 100,000 Covid-19 patients in America's hospitals every day since December 2.

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hcs_$reboot shares a remarkable new theory from Larry M. Silverberg, an aerospace engineering professor at North Carolina State University (with colleague Jeffrey Eischen). They're proposing that matter is not made of particles (or even waves), as was long thought, but fragments of energy. [W]hile the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to make incredibly accurate predictions about the universe, the rules break down at the largest and tiniest scales. Einstein proposed a remedy in his theory of general relativity. Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was able to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox relating to inertia and gravity. But instead of improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and I have demonstrated a new theory that may accurately describe the universe... Instead of basing the theory on the warping of space and time, we considered that there could be a building block that is more fundamental than the particle and the wave.... Much to our surprise, we discovered that there were only a limited number of ways to describe a concentration of energy that flows. Of those, we found just one that works in accordance with our mathematical definition of flow. We named it a fragment of energy... Using the fragment of energy as a building block of matter, we then constructed the math necessary to solve physics problems... More than 100 [years] ago, Einstein had turned to two legendary problems in physics to validate general relativity: the ever-so-slight yearly shift — or precession — in Mercury's orbit, and the tiny bending of light as it passes the Sun... In both problems, we calculated the trajectories of the moving fragments and got the same answers as those predicted by the theory of general relativity. We were stunned. Our initial work demonstrated how a new building block is capable of accurately modeling bodies from the enormous to the minuscule. Where particles and waves break down, the fragment of energy building block held strong. The fragment could be a single potentially universal building block from which to model reality mathematically — and update the way people think about the building blocks of the universe.

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