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The amount of things you're trying to simulate within the the performance contraints (games push computers to their absolute limits).

An example - a 3d humanoid character. You need code to manage the mesh, the animation (probably skeletal), the animations themselves, all the blending logic, probably specialised code and data for facial animations, and then you need to make sure all of that can mesh with both input driven locomotion and AI driven locomotion - and that's just one problem domain.

And I'm grossly oversimplifying what's involved even in that particular area.

This all sounds great until you've actually had your own small business and experienced things from the other side.

Employees are expensive, good employees are hard to find, and sometimes things need to be fixed outside 9-5 to avoid having an angry client on your hands.

Where did he say not to use LLMs? Oh that's right: he didn't.

Slight pushback - I think there's still a lot more consistency and coherence in a human's recollection of their motives than an LLM.

Sometimes I think we're too eager to compare ourselves to them.

My first reaction to these kinds of outcomes is always: what did you expect?

Because whatever it was it was disconnected from the reality.

Personally I haven't stopped doing things the old way. I haven't had any issues using LLMs as rubber ducks or brain storming assistants - they can be particularly useful for identifying algorithms which might solve a given problem you're unfamiliar with. Basically a variant on google searching.

But when it comes to the final act I find myself unwilling to let an LLM write the actual code - I still do it myself.

Perhaps because my main project at the moment is a game I've been working on for four years, so the codebase is sizable, non-trivial, and all written by me. My strong sense even since coding LLMs showed up has been that continuing to write the code is important for keeping it coherent and manageable as a whole, including my mental model of it.

And also: for keeping myself happy working on it. The enjoyment would be gone if I leaned that far into LLMs.

I'm also biased, but I think millenials turned out okay ;).

The same could have been said to someone who had yet to encounter generative AI. "Wait until you try it, you won't be underwhelmed for long".

But here we are.

Over time and usage the limitations of a thing become apparent.

Just to clarify, here's my actual position - it was only implied in the first comment so I'll spell it out:

1. We shouldn't kill or harass or destroy the property of someone like Altman. AKA, I'm not in disagreement with your take on abiding by the laws of the land.

2. But it's not surprising that such things happen to individuals like him, for reasons outlined. Put it this way - if I was in his position, I would be very wary of my public image, and I'd be very wary of my intentions - am I acting for the greater good, or only for my own good?

Of course it's possible he's actually acting with the best of intentions and is just terrible at presenting himself, which is one of the reasons I'd agree with due process and respecting his rights.

I consider rights a functional abstraction. That is to say, they're useful, we should abide them as a tenet of a civilized society, but we also made them up. And importantly we all recognize that they're conditional - if you cross certain lines of conduct you lose them - and there's actually a lot of debate to be had about where those lines are.

So I disagree with your axiom that you have to believe in them 100% or 0%.

I get the impression dating via games is becoming much more common in general.

Anecdotal example - I'm 39 and used to be an avid counterstrike player, and back in my days (2005-2014) it was 99.9% men. But every so often I play it now and I've been surprised by the number of women I've played with, and doubly surprised by the number of them who have made flirtatious advances. So much so that if I was single I'd almost consider it a reasonable avenue for meeting someone.

Being a somewhat lazy individual myself, I'm wary of this statement. It feels too... comforting. "It's okay that I wasn't productive today, because laziness has merits".

I consider my laziness a part of who I am, and I don't demonize it, but I also don't consider it my ally - to get the things I care about done I often have to actively push against it.

The author's making considered speculations about where things might go. You're just putting your hands up in the air and saying 'we don't know'.

I've found these posts to be excellent - wonderful reads really. Props to the author.

Fun game, though a difficulty of playing it on a phone is your primed finger gets in the way of seeing the ball!

Thanks for the recommendation, the premise of the show sounds great!

One million robots to be manufactured in a year - one million robots which will likely be obsolete within five years (if that, I wouldn't be surprised if they're dead on arrival).

I don't know the figures for Earth's resources and their sustainability, so this may be a naive take, but I'm always left with the impression that these organisations want to speedrun the depletion of the planet.

It's the whims of emotion - in the moment a person says it it can be quite sincere, as that's their genuine mood in that instance, but later on the mood passes and the effort involved in arranging something outweighs the desire.

In that sense it does communicate something: I like and have enjoyed your company in this moment.

Flippant of course, but not too dastardly.

Idleness is something we crave when we lack it, but too much of it can also be its own kind of hell. For instance, post retirement depression.

Read my mind. I want to see what it got right and wrong, whether it's an absolute mess or actually maintainable over time, etc.

Man, I really don't miss working in C++. Used to be my daily driver until I ended up in C# land. I understand why C++ is the way it is, I understand why it's still around and the purposes it serves, but in terms of the experience of using the language... I wouldn't want to go back.

"Prior to possession of a hacker news account, a man existeth not" Ancient Chinese proverb

That just takes you back to the debate about the code being the spec.

I think it's dramatic to say it's the end of hand written code. That's like saying it's the end of bespoke suits. There are scenarios where carefully hand written and reviewed code are still going to have merit - for example the software for safety critical systems such as space shuttles and stations, or core logic within self-driving vehicles.

Basically when every single line needs to be reviewed extremely closely the time taken to write the code is not a bottleneck at all, and if using AI you would actually gain a bottleneck in the time spent removing the excess and superfluous code it produces.

And my intuition is that the line between those two kinds of programming - let's call them careful and careless programming to coin an amusing terminology - I think that line may not shrink as far back as some think, and I think it definitely won't shrink to zero.

A year ago I swapped out a 5800x for a 5800x3d to get more stable frame rates in Counterstrike 2. Made a sizable difference, especially to 1% lows, so these large caches can clearly be a big boon. Granted it's also obvious the game is poorly optimized, the gains look less significant for most other titles.

A bit optimistic I'd say. It's put some software engineering within reach of some people who couldn't do it prior. Where 'some' might be a lot, but still far from all.

I was thinking the other day of how things would go if some of my less tech savvy clients tried to vibe code the things I implement for them, and frankly I could only imagine hilarity ensuing. They wouldn't be able to steer it correctly at all and would inevitably get stuck.

Someone needs to experiment with that actually: putting the full set of agentic coding tools in the hands of grandma and recording the outcome.

Funny - one of those things you don't really wonder about until someone points it out, but which proves pretty interesting once you're aware of it.

You're in luck - it's the first talk at this link, "The Polling Problem": https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018040/Architecture-Tricks-Ma...

Mind you my memory may have distorted it a little beyond what it was, but it's loosely on the topic!

More broadly the dimension of time is always a problem in gamedev, where you're partially inching everything forward each frame and having to keep it all coherent across them.

It can easily and often does lead to messy rube goldberg machines.

There was a game AI talk a while back, I forget the name unfortunately, but as I recall the guy was pointing out this friction and suggesting additions we could make at the programming language level to better support that kind of time spanning logic.

What about the remainder of the top 1%? From what I've heard it has a lot of churn, it's not just people inheriting it.