invader

You are not deciding for the entire gaming community. They can vote with their wallets, and the industry should better listen to them or going to end up on the wrong side of the bubble. It is not in its best shape anyways.

[flagged]

My 2015 Chromebook Pixel didn't even live that long.

First, it looked amazing - solid aluminum body, powerful i7 inside, 16G RAM, high-resolution touch-sensitive screen. And that amazing Google-styled LED strip that showed the charge when double-tapped.

Then the hardware started to fail. First, the shiny chrome letters saying "Chromebook" slid aside, revealing a glue-filled depression. I struggled to properly glue it back ever since. Then, the hinge mechanism seal failed, and a sticky substance started to leak from the back. Then the battery started to fail even though it was maybe 2 or 3 years old. And finally, the screen backlight started to fail, and bright spots started to appear from the edges to the point that it can no longer be used. Dead in 3 or 4 years.

For comparison, my also 2015 MacBook Pro 13 still works perfectly, except for the software - Apple also stopped updating macOS, and I'm considering just installing Linux on that otherwise fully functional hardware.

It should be illegal to force software obsolescence on otherwise functioning hardware, increasing the global e-waste footprint.

Yes, they are used as air raid shelters, but they were designed like that in the first place. Some of them lie really deep - especially the ones in the city center.

Kyiv metro is one of the deepest in the world. We have one station that is 105 meters deep. So even with fast escalators, it feels like an eternity to go up and down there.

The slop theory tells us that (slop * slop) = doubleslop.

Sadly, the hype is real and that's what's happening in many places. Businesses are eager to bet on AI cause they'd been promised x100 productivity = fire 99 or 100 devs = huge profit.

I expect one day some slopware will succumb to one of these weird production bugs, no LLM will be able to fix it, and when the biz guys ask me for a fix estimate, I'm going to say "3 years".

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a cakewalk compared to what is going on today. 15k dead in 10 years, and the USSR was twice as big as modern ruzzia, so it is more like 7k dead for ruzzia alone. Now compare that to 4.5 years of the invasion of Ukraine - these wars are on a totally different scale. The Afghan affair was a remote low-profile endeavour; ports and oil refineries weren't burning all over the Soviet Union.

Can't ban the truth, heh?

Did Gilfoyle hack Jian Yang's smart fridge again?

Have we delegated writing code to "AGIs" so we can write code to proof that the slop code works? I have a vague memory of pre-AGI era, when we wrote things called "tests" to verify that our code did what it claimed to do.

Well, it's certainly not completely dead - there are many tools out there trying to implement visual learning from first principles. But I feel the "constructivist" core has been lost over time. Like we forgot the "why" of the equation while still keeping on building things.

Maybe it is not even about the tools themselves, but how they are used. It is like a cargo cult of constructivism that praises mechanical results instead of celebrating creativity, inspiration, spirit of exploration, and confidence that it is possible to build something new.

Yes, like Destroy All Humans, Alien Hominid... Not arcades, though.

I consider Logo an undeservedly forgotten technology that showed the world a glimpse of what computerized education really is, and Seymour Papert is a misunderstood genius ahead of his time.

The whole point was a very visual way of learning with immediate feedback, where you build stuff in order to understand it.

Papert based his own ideas of constructionism on children's cognitive development theories of Jean Piaget, a famous Swiss psychologist with whom he worked in the 50s - early 60s.

Logo pioneered a whole class of tools and languages built around constructivist ideas (e.g. Ozobot, Scratch, EToy, Processing, Design by Numbers...) and I hope these ideas will not be totally forgotten in the era of slop, when people prize ignorance and no longer seem to appreciate the concept of "build to understand".

Not Blizzard. A French game developer and publisher that has been defunct for many years now. But even then, I remember talking to colleagues from other studios and many used Alienbrain - primarily for art assets. We used SVN and later git/mercurial for code.

Since Alienbrain was quite popular back then, I assume they are still around now. Given that git still has no out-of-the-box facilities to handle large binaries and asset previews conveniently.

> Virtually 100% of non-indie devs use Perforce.

Not really. There are better products out there.

When I worked at Triple-A studio, we used Alienbrain, which is specifically tailored for huge binary versioning with previews and stuff. We had terabytes of assets, and Alienbrain handled it well, including seamless integration into pipelines - something a stock git or Perforce would never achieve.

Yes, it had that problem.

But it is hardly unique, and it concerns the community more than the platform itself. Many communities with anonymous access end up toxic. It is nothing new and dates back to early BBSs and FidoNet, where a hostile attitude reached unbelievable levels.

Sure thing, the LLMs will be more polite than humans. For now...

Step 1: Here emerges a platform where everyone can ask, answer, or discuss questions on software development.

Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.

Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.

Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.

Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.

Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?

Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?

So, the developers have finally found their Silver Bullet?

I've seen so many of these already. It would be hilarious to see Brooks proving right once again.

If the author hasn't bothered to spend time writing the article, why should I spend my time reading it? Let agents do it for me!

Maybe it is, given that the classical AI definition is so broad, it can mean almost anything. But for me, there's a fundamental difference between something that "tries to be intelligent" and something that "tries to appear to be intelligent".

That is why I prefer to call them "bots" or "computers" - just to separate them from a shifting mess of definitions of what "AI" actually means. It reminds me of "Destination Void" by Frank Herbert, where the main characters were trying to build artificial consciousness and were struggling to define what it actually means.

Often, but not always.

I hate the term "AI" applied to games, since AI means so many things and usually implies something smart, "intelligent". But in reality, it is more like a "bot" or a "computer player". And the main goal is not to be super-smart, but to be plausible enough and provide an appropriate challenge to the human player.

There are some "fair" bots in games - like in my favorite turn-based Mechanized Assault and Exploration from the mid 90s. Computer players follow the same rules as the human ones - e.g., if something is not visible to the radar, the computer will not see it. The only "cheat" is the resource boost computer players can have on the higher difficulty settings, but it is totally optional. And as an experienced player, you always let the computer have it, since you want a challenge, and without that boost, it has no chance whatsoever.

It was definitely something unorthodox - I remember being confused about how it actually worked.

The first time I played, I thought "It is just like Quake". Then you start to notice that the levels are pretty limited - it is all narrow corridors with rare small chambers and open spaces, no steep elevation changes, no rooms above rooms... Kinda like Doom. But then, father's examination shows sloped surfaces, shelves and bridges - stuff the Doom engine can't do.

Maybe, for level geometry, it is closer to portal rendering engines like Build. Still looks pretty claustrophobic even compared to Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. I feel the Chasm level designers could've got more variety from that technology, but again, maybe that was some fundamental limitation. Or maybe it is just like FPS were designed in the mid 90s.

Monsters, items and weapons are fully 3D, though. With dynamic lighting!

In the storm of Doom-Quake mania of the mid 90s there was Chasm: The Rift by a small Ukrainian company Action Forms. And if memory serves me right, it was created in Turbo Pascal. It was late in development and came out in 1997 after Quake, so it didn't get much traction. But the engine, though pretty limited, could produce 3D enemies with interesting effects not found even in Quake.

So Turbo Pascal (with a whole bunch of x86 asm inclusions) was totally capable of producing Quake-level games. I myself, in the late 90s, discovered the hidden capacities when I learned x86 assembly from Peter Abel's book. Once I got rid of the primitive TP BGI library and switched to VGA 13h, it was an unbelievable level up in abilities to manipulate pixels on the screen!

So they discovered Can-D from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?

Now we just have to wait for a visitor from Proxima with more potent Chew-Z. The grim future is closer than we think...

But art is also going to be severely disrupted by AI, since AI companies have stolen all the art and music on the Internet and now are essentially remixing plagiarized content as new art and calling it progress.

Handcrafting a new version of Collider.JAM (http://collider.land/) - a JavaScript framework for rapid game prototyping. Ludum Dare 59 is coming, and any coding samurai needs to sharpen their katana. And Ludum Dare is a perfect excuse to do just that.

IMHO, Ludum Dare is The Jam for many reasons and it is a pity that it's slowly fading away (the last Mike Kasprzak's post explains some of the challenges https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/$424396/ludum-dare-59...). It looks like we don't have many events left in the pipeline, and this one will be a nice opportunity to participate and still enjoy the sunset of the era and the vibes of the awesome community.

However, to be fair, Desert Storm hasn't resulted in regime change. The Coalition bombed the shit out of the Iraqi army, but never committed to the ground operation deep inside Iraq. And Saddam's regime survived until the next war.

That alone hints that it is very hard to bring a dictatorship down with just aerial attacks - the ground component is also essential. Something tells me it is going to be the same here.

Only a land operation or a total collapse of the government, with the armed police and military joining the opposition, can topple the Iranian regime.

Yes, Descent II OST is on a totally different level compared to the MIDI-only Descent I soundtrack. And by famous musicians to boot - like Type O Negative and Ogre of Skinny Puppy, who created my favorite "Glut" and "Ratzez" tracks. It was the time when games became big enough to bring popular musicians aboard for the soundtrack, Quake with Trent Reznor being a perfect example.

Also, the series was followed by Descent Freespace I/II, leaving a significant impact on the genre of space shooters. Though there are completely different games that have nothing to do with the original series.

Awesome! Brings me back into my teenage years when I was rewatching the movie on VHS hundreds of times, especially the cyberspace surfing sequences - all covered by the epic soundtrack. Orbital still sounds fresh in my ears after all these years.

I was also so inspired by this Gibson supercomputer interface when I created my little game prototype for js13k games contest 10 years ago:

https://invadium.itch.io/cybergrid-13

Now I think I should've used flight mechanics like in flight simulators instead of walking, but the cyberspace and viruses are still there. Maybe I will refresh it one day to give a more Hacker-like ambient flight feeling.

People should also stop using terminal emulators. It is pretty silly to base software around ancient printing terminals. Everyone knows for a fact that only tech illiterates use a console instead of a GUI. Since all great devs use a GUI. Just a fact.

Also, people should stop playing 2D games. It is pretty silly to base your entertainment on ancient technology when modern GPUs can render super-complex 3D scenes.

And don't make me start on people who still buy vinyl...