Thursday, June 02, 2016

Learnings from Marc Andresseen and the Future of Open-Source Game Engines -- What I am Reading Today

The amount of reading that I do each do sometimes astonishes me. I usually do not keep track of what I read. My reading list includes bunch of books from Kindle and iBooks and plenty of blog posts that I find mostly via twitter. I thought it'd be refreshing if I write small summaries of the reading that I do, so when I look back in a day I could use crystallize some of my learnings. Keeping that in mind, I am summarizing from the resources that I have read or listened to:

1. Marc Andreessen's interview on Tim Ferris's podcast:

These are my takeaways from the interview:

  • Smart people should build things. 
  • "Be so good that they can't ignore you" inspires me and I believe in this. 
  • Hedge fund managers are not beholden to their ideas as when they are told where they are wrong, they get excited to hear how so.  
  • Value investing versus technology investing are polar opposite in the type of investing that both do. Value investing bets on the future not changing (e.g. Coca-Cola, Ketchup) whereas venture investing invests in future trend and change (e.g. Google, Uber) 
  • I should read Steve Martin's memoir  Born Standing Up.
2. Saku Panditharatne's blog post on the importance on open-sourcing in Gaming:

Here's what I have learned: In the gaming / graphics world, open-source is not as popular as it is in the tech world. Examples: 
  • For low level graphics APIs, the proprietary library like DirectX is winning against open-source GL in the gaming world. 
  • NVIDIA is acting like Microsoft in the early days when MS was against open-source. NVIDIA makes drivers that are required to be reverse engineered by the open source community to make it work. 
The argument is laid by Saku is two-fold:
  • This practice of not code sharing has to change and the gaming/graphics community should come together to create open standards and protocols if they want to see VR or gaming DIY to flourish much like it happened for the web. 
  • Without the open-source model, there is a high chance that game engines, which are the OS for the VR,  will be too buggy at the absence of the Linus's principle: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" 

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