Category Archives: Musings

SR&ED A Part

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I worked on Dauntless. I was the tenth employee of Phoenix Labs and built an extraordinary amount of code and infrastructure for the game. I wasn’t the only one–everyone at Phoenix Labs contributed to something amazing.

I was disappointed to hear the news:

What I find most distressing is the vast quantity of great tools and code that will disappear while making games become progressively more difficult.

I won’t discuss what led to these circumstances (partly due to NDA).

What I am interested in is the vast quantity of code.

In Canada, we have SR&ED: Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax incentives. These can be a substantial amount of employee wages. They represent an investment in Canadian technology and innovation. It is tragic to see this technology and innovation be lost to cancelled projects and closed companies.

How SR&ED operates needs to change to continue to foster technology and innovation. The degree of tax credit received depends on how long the company has exclusive access to the technology. The longer they have exclusive access, the less the tax credit. When that time expires, or other circumstances transpire (such as ending the relevant product or closure of the company), Canada acquires the rights to the technology to license, sell, or release publicly.

Instead of reinventing technology (and more SR&ED tax credits), technology can be reintroduced to the ecosystem when time limits (or other events) occur.

The Simulation Hypothesis

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I was twiddling the simulation hypothesis, and it raised questions I wanted to explore. The following is entirely for fun and by no means conclusive.

A few days ago, I was thinking of Cantor’s Diagonal Argument (a proof of different sizes of infinity) and connected it to Shannon’s Information Theory (in particular about encoding information and efficient storage), and the Simulation Hypothesis (that our world is a simulation).

The question that came to mind is: What are the limits for simulations?

I find the question interesting having worked on games, trying to create real-time experiences for players, and the scope and challenges we face. There are constraints on building the assets for games, rendering the environment, audio, streaming data since it can’t be in memory all the time, computing the next frame from the previous, etc.

Simulations are bounded by what substrate (what is doing the simulation) is capable of processing. For example, if we are in a simulation, and our substrate is finite, we are necessarily finite.

This is where real numbers come to mind. If space is continuous instead of discrete, then encoding could require infinite storage to store position. If time is continuous, computing change is similarly non-trivial. An alternative is relying on a proxy representation of the simulating substrate itself (in which case that could be reflected in the simulation).

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Housing Crisis

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I’m painfully aware of the cost of housing in Canada. I’m currently renting after the divorce, which required selling our house to pay for legal fees and equalization. Furthermore, renting for three teenagers requires more space for all our sanity.

I’ve heard several reasons why the crisis is as it is. Homeowners don’t want more houses built as it will slow the rise in home values, and they represent a substantial voting group. Politicians don’t want to upset them. The second is building affordable housing (30% of pre-tax income is spent on shelter) for those who need it. Housing affordable to less affluent groups isn’t as profitable as for those that are. There are further explanations for Australia that also apply to Canada here.

These aren’t solutions; they are just some ideas that came to mind that might spur actual solutions.

A percentage of housing built be ‘affordable’. I couldn’t find a definitive figure for anything like this, unfortunately.

New housing in an area gathers some of its funding from the community itself, and sales of units provide a return on that investment. This makes new housing an investment opportunity for the entire community.

A rough example could be: 5% of your property taxes go to investing in new housing in the community. The first two sales of each unit built with this investment provide a return to those investing based on the contribution percentage. Two sales as the first is not going to have much margin, but the second is more likely. Furthermore, there is a compelling interest to ensure people stay longer and are happy to prolong when that second sale occurs.

There would be challenging details to work out, such as insurance of the investments, transferring when a contributing homeowner moves (which could be reflected in the sale price), etc.

This could also give communities more leverage to drive further improvements, such as parks, schools, and other services.