CM30

This just feels unreal to me. Like, the very idea of a 3D platformer running on the SNES just didn't seem feasible beforehand. If this had been a real game in the 90s, it would have genuinely changed the industry.

Does it run as well as the original? Of course not. Are the graphics as detailed? Absolutely not.

But in a world where the original Star Fox was revolutionary, this would have just blown everyone's minds.

I still remember the days when Google saw it as 'cloaking' when you showed different content to users and search engines. And to be honest, I'm annoyed they don't seem to do that anymore.

Like I get why they probably changed that. I suspect all the attacks from media outlets on Google for requiring their articles to be paywall free to rank in search likely had a big effect here.

But it should be simple. If you want to rank in Google, your pages should be visible to guests. If they're not, those pages don't rank at all.

Not a secret example by any means of the imagination, but th talk of using a comments section as a group chat reminds me of a small website I came across which did exactly that. The people running it were on free hosting (so couldn't set up a forum script), but did have comments on their pages through Disqus or something like that. So, they basically treated the comments on each page as a forum, with comment subthreads as the equivalent to topics or discussions.

It was surprisingly active too. If this was a 'typical' forum, it would have been a really active one.

But yeah, if you don't have a forum, group chat or chat room, a comments section will do in a pinch.

Yes, I think people should still learn to code. Why? Well, a few reasons really:

First, if the AI is unavailable, you at least have a backup plan. You can make changes to your website or web app even if Claude or Codex or whatever else is available. That's useful if you're using third party services.

Secondly, it lets you delve into the code and understand where things have gone wrong if the agent gets stuck in a loop or keeps making poor decisions. If you let the AI handle everything, then you're up a creek without a paddle if said AI gets stuck and can't make any progress.

Finally, it's sometimes quicker and more efficient to make a change without using AI, especially if it's a small scale one. Lots of times I've wanted to add a new form field or tweak some random CSS rule, and being able to do that myself made things a lot quicker.

Don't media companies do something like this to track which employee might have leaked films/TV shows/video game trailers/etc online?

I recall they had separately watermarked versions of these to make it easier to figure out how things were being leaked.

There is one thing worth pointing out here though. Being smart doesn't necessarily mean you've got the ability to make money from said intelligence.

Like on average it probably helps, but if your interests don't lie in what makes money in the current economy, then even being the next Einstein won't really change much. If you're a genius that wants to help teach people in a school or university, you're going to make a lot less money than if your interests lay in setting up a business or getting into finance.

AI can help you do things faster, but it won't make you financially successful if the things you're interested in don't have a lot of economic demand.

Not just news stories. This is a huge problem with social media and forums in general too. Lots of people making bold claims about random things, lots of stories they say are based on a third party source, but very few actual links to said sources in question.

I still remember a recent example where one of those trivia accounts on Twitter posted an interesting story about some guy whose life completely changed after an accident, but neither linked to a source or named the person in question.

The only way I was able to verify it was true was through someone in the comments asking the platform's AI chatbot, and the chatbot providing context that I could research and verify...

The biggest issue is that they put the AI/HR filtering before the technical screening. I suspect it'd be a lot less painful if candidates were at least given the chance to show their tech skills before instantly filtered out by AI.

It's all over a lot of niche subject areas and industries. Lots of mobile apps that go viral for a bit turn out to be AI coded, and there has been an explosion of vibe-coded software in the retrogaming scene (for mods, recomps, PC ports, ROM hacks, etc).

But there are reasons that well known software isn't being replaced with AI coded alternatives.

First, the network effect is pretty strong here. Even many longtime competitors to things like Photoshop and Office struggle to get noticed, let alone some fly-by-night deal someone coded over a weekend. It's possible these alternatives exist, but you haven't come across them because they haven't blown up online yet.

Secondly, the type of software you mention is incredibly complex, and packed with features that hard to replicate regardless of how you program. An AI written 'alternative' to Photoshop written in a short timespan would be incredibly barebones compared to the real thing, and it's genuinely debatable whether an LLM could structure it in a way that it wouldn't collapse into an unmaintainable ball of mud.

AI just does better with simple tasks and software whos features are well defined, and neither of those things describes the likes of Microsoft Excel.

Not really, no. I'm not particularly motivated right now, but that's just more due to depression and burnout that the effects of AI. I don't tend to use AI for many of my own personal projects, but I also don't see it as something that kills my interest in coding anything either.

There's a lot of hatred for AI in these communities, to the point half of Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit goes ballistic when they learn the developer used Claude or Codex at some point. Media outlets and influencers are doing the same thing too.

It's a great theory, though it doesn't seem as accurate nowadays. Now, even supposedly 'high-end' brands will be low-quality garbage hollowed out by private equity firms or other corporate acquisitions.

We're not in a world where you can necessarily choose between quality at a high price and disposable junk at a low price, we're in a world where you're often choosing between disposable junk at a low price and rebadged junk sold at a premium one.

Is there a food and drink equivalent to this?

Because my experience is that most popular brands in those industries have really gone downhill, and it'd be lovely to track which ones are even remotely edible anymore.

It really lost something when Chris Coyier stopped writing for it. He just had a way of writing fun and approachable tutorials for this stuff, and the other contributors didn't hit the same style.

(no shade to Geoff Graham, he did good work as well)

I think one look at the flood of vibe-coded projects (like decomps, mods, etc) hitting the retrogaming scene now proves this article wrong already. You literally see a major project blow up in one day, then immediately get 'busted' for AI.

And it's almost certainly hitting other fields too. Games on Steam, mobile apps, websites and web apps, etc.

Yeah, I think this is a bigger threat, at least for the moment. It's not automated systems causing havoc in themselves, it's hostile actors using tech to have outsized impacts on society.

As you point out, AI lets criminals and hostile regimes get access to a level of technical knowledge that was previously reserved for larger and more well funded organisations and nation states, that required experts with years of experience to understand. Things like drones and missiles are available to people that would otherwise be incapable of building them.

And it's not just limited to that really. Online scams and fraud are arguably easier to set up than ever, given you can use AI to make fake sites for phishing services, write somewhat convincing sounding emails or impersonate the voice of a target's friend or relative to trick someone into sending money.

Plus, any weakness in a system that a sentient AI could theoretically exploit can be exploited by a criminal or hostile regime right now. For all the talk of an AI taking over a weapon system, the bigger threat is a cartel, terrorist group, cult, lone nutcase criminal or dangerous regime doing it.

So media outlets, influencers, etc have something to link to, and a way to promote Twitter by including tweets in their articles.

If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.

They're still pretty limited in what they can achieve military wise, or how much impact they can have in the real world. Don't get me wrong, robotics is getting a lot more advanced, and in future something like a Terminator might actually be plausible.

But at the moment, a robot revolution/uprising using this sort of tech would be easy enough to put down in about 30 minutes. And they don't have the capabilities to provide a chain of logistics that would allow them to set up lots more factories or get more resources.

The logistics side of things is really the tough part. If Skynet hypothetically existed, it'd need the following to cause any damage:

- Locations to build factories that aren't already occupied by other people, companies or uses (or a way to demolish the latter) - The ability to construct such factories without the planning inspectors noticing, the neighbours noticing, the police or military shutting things down, etc. - Equipment to construct robots on an assembly line - Access to electricity, water and other resources - Raw materials used for the machines to build said robots. This usually involves either finding a third party supplier or thirty that would sign off on supplying it without asking too many questions, stealing it from someone else without them stopping you, etc - The ability to deploy said robots in a way that's effective for your goals and won't get them immediately shot down.

It could reuse existing factories if there were enough of them, but it'd need dozens or hundreds to cause any real issues.

Honestly, logistics are the problem with most apocalyptic scenarios like this. And for that matter, most stories with intelligent characters creating wonderous inventions in fiction.

Someone has to supply the materials, and the character or force has to be able to both afford them and not spark an investigation. They have to work with companies and contractors that might get suspicious about what's going on, and somehow stay on the down low while making an outsized impact on reality.

Yeah that's a fair point. Best practices and actual practices sadly don't seem to correlate that much in the real world.

As far as security is concerned, things like hospital equipment, traffic control signalling systems, weapons arsenals and bioengineering medical labs should not be connected to the internet and should be designed in such a way that a human is required in the loop at all times. And shouldn't use AI to function in any way.

But yeah, fair point that a lot of organisations will ignore that in favour of "look how easy internet access makes controlling this thing" or "AI is so cool", forgetting how badly it leaves them at the mercy of their enemies (AI or otherwise).

Well no and that's the problem. Many governments (especially the United States one) are complicit in this. They don't do nearly enough to keep corporate power in check.

If they really wanted to fix these issues, antitrust could be a real thing again, and companies like Google would be forcefully broken up and barred from remerging later down the line. If Google doesn't have Gmail, Chrome, Android or YouTube and all these things are separate businesses, then their power is severely curtailed.

They could also arrest CEOs, board members and other people with a large amount of power at these organisations and charge them for the actions of the business.

Or levvy percentage based fines that obliterate the company's ability to function. Could Google function if it was charged 50-60% of a year's worldwide revenue until an issue was fixed? It'd probably have to cut way back on everything in that scenario.

The issue is that the government has been so thoroughly captured by corporate interests that noone faces meaningful consequences if they earn more than a billion dollars a year.

There is some really good advice here. Honestly, I think this might be one of the most important takeaways you can have as a startup founder/CEO in general:

> It's exciting when you notice users "misusing" your product to do something you hadn't intended. This means there's something they want so desperately that they'll not only use any solution you offer, but even use things that aren't meant to be solutions. When you see something like that, don't be annoyed that your users are using your product wrong; listen for the message they're sending, because it could be valuable.

A lot of very specialist businesses seem to fail this test, and lose out on the potential for a huge market because of it. Like it sounds ridiculous as hell, but I remember when GoAnimate had a huge audience among kids and teens looking to make silly videos for sites like YouTube. I also remember the company feeling uncomfortable that they were getting known for that online, and trying to refocus their product/service towards business users instead.

Maybe they should have not done that, and realised that the periphery demographic was a potential customerbase that could have used a slightly different, perhaps more focused product with features relevant to their usecases.

Similarly, I remember an example of a business creating software meant for designing signs for road and metro systems being surprised that toy train and simulation game enthusiasts were using the software for other uses. Again, feels like they should have treated this as a business opportunity, not a cause for confusion or concern.

> Squeezing every last penny out of customers is a distraction. It gets you 2x returns at most. Whereas discovering some new thing you could make for them could easily get you 10x or 100x returns. They're two different ways of looking at the world, and the O'Reilly way makes more, for those who can do it. [5]

This feels like a perfect condemnation of how a lot of private equity firms manage businesses. These sorts of tactics make them money sure, but a lot of the businesses they buy up would probably do better if they held off on the whole 'squeeze resources to breaking point' philosophy in favour of a much more customer focused one.

Frankly speaking, because no-one is forcing them to stop serving them.

That's the biggest 'trick' companies like Google have pulled here. They've somehow tricked the regulators into thinking that because they're big companies serving a lot of customers over the internet, that any sort of fraud or product liability laws are irrelevant to them.

Because any other company doing this would get sued into oblivion, shut down and the executives criminally charged. If a brick and mortar business let blatant scammers and criminals advertise in their physical stores, that would be seen as a serious crime.

Same with a retailer that sold dangerous or counterfeit products, or one that turned their stores into surveillance panopticons where customer data was collected illegally and sold to the highest bidder.

Google, Amazon, Meta etc are doing things that would get a normal business owner sent to prison.

The solution isn't just technical, it's about being willing to enforce the law for internet businesses the same way we do for offline ones. If Sundar Pichai and the board were looking at 10-20 years in prison for fraud or cyber offences, then Google would fix those dodgy ads real quick...

No, but it's killing a lot of 'glue pieces together' or 'make plugins/tweaks' for a CMS roles.

If you're using WordPress, Drupal, etc, then AI is devastating. Any sort of project that's not a massive site build with tons of bespoke features and heavy performance requirements is almost certainly cheaper and easier to build with something like Claude.

And a lot of small projects seem like they'll be lost to AI in general. It seems like the days of small web agencies getting a team of 3-10 developers together to build simple sites for local businesses are quickly coming to a close.

But front end in general isn't doomed. Just engineering roles dealing with smaller, simpler projects.

Maybe not a product per se, but I feel like video game mods, homebrew, recompilation projects, etc are seeing a ton of innovation nowadays. People are creating games and software that was thought impossible for years, like 3D platformers on the Game Boy Advance or First Person Shooters on the Neo Geo. Modders have made the SNES run games with a level of animation quality on par with something like Metal Slug, and turned games like Super Mario 64 in generic game engines. Breath of the Wild on 3DS, Minecraft on Nintendo 64, Super Mario Galaxy on DS, that browser based Super Smash Bros game where you can just create any character you feel like based on a picture and import them in minutes... the communities for these systems and games have gone absolutely wild in the last decade or so, and every glimpse on social media leaves me thinking "how in God's name is this even possible?"

It's not without drama; the effects of vibe-coding and generative AI usage in general have severely split the community in many places, with poorly coded, poorly tested projects popping up all over the place now.

But as far as sheer innovation (especially on a technical level) is concerned, older games and computer systems are going through a renaissance period.

Honestly, if there was one point in history that marks when society started going the wrong direction, it was definitely 9/11. To some degree, it feels like it ties into a major problem humanity has in general; the attitude that "something must be done!" whenever a tragedy occurs. Everyone wants revenge after a major disaster or tragedy, or to inflict sweeping changes in the name of 'safety' that just remove whatever freedoms we once had.

That's exactly what the people who inflict these atrocities want. And if people could only understand that and act more rationally, things wouldn't be where they are now.

The funny thing about old IE versions is that they did in fact get one thing right in retrospect; the box model used was a lot more intuitive than the one used by 'default' in standards compliant browsers. Why would border and padding be outside the main element's width? That doesn't match how anyone thinks of a box...

Either way, the end result was that everyone started using box-sizing: border-box when it was added, and now even the folks at the W3C regret the old box sizing model being used at all.

Surprised how many of these I didn't remember though. Filters, yes. Syntax hacks to trick IE into using one CSS value while compliant browsers used another, sure. But I don't think I ever came across 'HTML Components' before reading this article.

Yeah, and it should not be understated how bad only having autonomous cars would be for privacy and security conscious folk.

A lot of the time you don't own them, so they're operating on the terms provided by the companies and government, even when it's directly against your own interests. The idea of a car that can't drive certain places, be used at a certain time or be used by certain people feels like a terrifying inevitability, and one which society should refuse at all costs.

If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go. If you don't drive your own vehicle, it goes where a company or government wants it to go.

Reminds me of how awkward HTML doctypes used to be. Nowadays it's very simple, but in the past? You had to refer to the URL of the doctype declaration on every page

> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

This plus the X-UA-Compatible stuff mentioned in the article meant that for many people, the first few lines of code on a web page were something they probably copied from a tutorial or reference document every time, at least if they didn't have a CMS handy.

Oh video games in general can have crazy development times, whether it's through an open beta/development process or a closed one. Dwarf Fortress is a good one for sure, as is Star Citizen. Also Duke Nukem Forever, and Beyond Good & Evil 2 (the latter has somehow passed the former's record for longest recognised game development time at 20 years compared to 14).

Super Mario Bros X is arguably getting up there too, started in 2009 by Terraria developer Redigit, and now in development by a new group as of 2026.

And while a Doom fan needs to check this, I remember the mod Mordeth started before Duke Nukem Forever was announced, and the later episodes ain't done as of 2026.

Surprisingly common in fangames and mods. Mushroom Kingdom Fusion started in 2007 at the latest, and it's not going to be done for a year or so at the earliest. So, 20 years, maybe 30 if you count predecessor projects.

Brutal Mario started in 2006 at the latest, and ended in the 2020s as far as I recall, so about 14-15 years. Of course, the 2006 demo was technically demo 6, so we have no idea when the first 5 versions were created since they seem to be gone forever.

Super Mario Star World is a remake/sequel to the Mario 64 hack Super Mario Star Road, which was made for Super Mario 64 DS instead. It seemed to start out as a sequel in the Super Mario 64 engine in 2013, then ended up as a Super Mario 3D Land mod a few years later, got retooled as a Super Mario 64 DS hack a few years after that and is currently in development by a new creator after original creator SKELUX got cancer and moved onto other projects.

In other mediums, I guess there's the Thief & the Cobbler. Started in 1964, got an unfinished/messed up release in 1993, and a better recuts in 2013 and 2023.