Johanx64

> none of this is going to improve people's lives.

I have some old borderline senile relatives writting apps (asking LLMs to write for it them) for their own personal use. Stuff they surely haven't done on their own (or had the energy to do). Their extent of programming background - shitty VBScript macros for excel.

It also helps people to pick up programming and helps with the initial push of getting started. Getting over the initial hump, getting something on the screen so to speak.

Most things people want from their computers are simple shit that LLMs usually manage quite well.

Good question whether or not this (outsourcing their thinking) actually just accelerates their senility or not.

As someone who likes to solve hard or interesting technical problems, I've long before LLMs often been disappointed that most of the time what people want from programmers is simple stupid shit (ie. stuff i dont find interesting to work on).

> That the game development industry requires a new programming language. So far, the evidence for that is slim.

I love how you one hand acknowledge your severe lack of ability and achievement. And yet at the same breath you confidently put forward to know better - than JBlow no less - what the game-dev-industry or world at large needs. Or that you'd even have the ability to gauge evidence for it(or lack of it).

What evidence would even qualify as proof that game-development-industry (or world at large) requires a new programming language?

What is the exact threshold of "suck" that you have to cross before you go "yup, we need something different"? Does such threshold even exist?

And how do you measure it?

> There are a lot of musicians and actors more influential than JBlow, does that mean I won't be a fool if I listen to their opinions on anything more important than what to eat for breakfast?

Is John Blow making bold opinionated statements about fine-dining or something? No? Then what are you even talking about?

Why are you constantly making shit up to discredit the guy?

This is NOT rational behavior, its some sort of ego defense: "like how dare he say bad things about C++, who does he think he is (just some one hit wonder game-designer, just got lucky!)? He has no idea what he's talking about!"

Except, he making statements about a language that he has used extensively for more than 25years at this point. And used it to ship large, intricate, largely succesfull hit-games all with their own engines where he has done bulk of the programming work.

That is to say, you can HARDLY find anyone more competent and suited to comment on deficiencies and shortcomings of C++, and how to improve them and fix them.

Now, just because he makes astute observations about various defects in C++ doesn't make him special, after all C++ is extremely badly designed mess, and it is very easy to do so, and thousands of people have done so.

What makes him special - is that he - has mostly delivered on this (stretching himself thin in the process), whilst also making a large game at the same time. This is very rare and exceptional.

> metaprogramming with #run is cool, I'm also fed up with cmake. But surely we don't need to throw away all of our C++ tooling for that? Nah, we probably need something more incremental.

Who is this council of "we" you're refering to? A council of average Joeys that haven't shipped anything of note and is more concerned with whats "cool"?

You have roughly zero idea what the actual painpoints of making and shipping large games are. His latest game does full rebuilds in 2 seconds, so he can iterate and make changes quickly.

There are no "incremental improvements" that can be done to C++ to suddenly make builds not take MULTIPLE MINUTES.

> JBlow is an entertainer, first and foremost.

This is what you have got wrong, JBlow is an exceptional programmer first and foremost, who also happens to be a pretty good at thoughtful gamedesign, and pretty good at doing public speaking, among other things.

> a notable part of the success of Braid was thanks to a contract with Xbox Live Arcade

Notable part of success is that he made Braid interesting enough to win "innovation in game design" at IGF. Winning IGF ment he got contract with XLA (interested in making money and promoting platform) This is a deterministic process, there's no dice rolls or lottery draws involved here. If you're exceptional and you make exceptional things you succeed sooner or later, statistically speaking.

The whole thought process that if you spawned another much younger JBlow in 2026, he would be attempting to make another verbatim Braid, instead of something completely different - way more attuned to current market conditions is not very bright. He (the young JBlow clone) might not even choose to do games in these market conditions, he might chose to do exceptional, highly influential work in a completely different domain.

What however is highly likely is that he'd be highly, highly successful at whatever it is. Because highly exceptional hardworking people just succeed (unless they are born in Mumbai or Karachi)

I mean, if you're born as an average Joey, instead of being born exceptional, it is _luck_. After all, who would choose to be average when they can be exceptional and bright?

But it is important to acknowledge at which point luck materializes. And the lucky event wasn't XLA at 2008, the lucky event is beign born exceptional.

Most people would call being born rich a luxury. And not - being born exceptional and applying the said talent and hard work to ever more ambitious projects.

> Even John Carmack didn't really succeed in rockets.

He was very successful at engineering aspects of rocketry considering his very small and completely self funded budget. Just not comfortable burning 1mil of his personal funds / retirment money per year (that was still considerable money to burn out of personal stash in 2007/2008)

This is a very bad example you're using here.

>Could Samsung win a power struggle against the Chinese government?

Translation: Could Korean government win a power struggle against Chinese government

>OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.

I honestly think that has way less to do with Microsoft, more of a representation of "software engineering" practices these days.

For example, Gnome shell has bunch of javascript in it, GTK has layout and styling defined in some flavour of CSS, etc.

I'm of opinion if you start writing OS userland in either javascript or python (or both), you should be fired on the spot, but I don't make the shots.

Most technical decisions aren't really driven by what makes a better end-user experience or a better product, it's mostly defined by convenience and familiarity of substandard software developers - with mostly and primarily web-slop background.

> The music indsutry is well aware of a phenomenon of a "one-hit wonder".

He made two hit games, Witness was released 7.5 years later.

> Within a week of release, Blow stated that sales of The Witness had nearly outpaced what Braid had done during its first year of release.

> The Witness is widely regarded as one of the best games of the 2010s. The game appeared on 'Best of the decade' features from IGN,[103] Polygon,[104] NME,[105] CNET,[106] and National Post.[107] Edge considered the game the 22nd-best game of all time in 2017

Calling him "one-hit wonder" simply has no basis in reality. He's at minimum a two-hit wonder.

> it was most likely not as groundbreaking as Braid, considering that he chose Braid instead of The Witness for a remaster.

Now you're making shit up on the spot to make an argument. Think for a second will you, how exactly would he remaster Witness? Braid Anniversary Edition was announced on 2020, at which point Witness would merely have been ~4 year old game.

Braid was also made for a 720p console, the Xbox360 Xbox Live Arcade service, so remake atleast makes some sense.

> The question I'm interested in is: why would anyone listen to what the man _says_ if his own preaching makes him lose money?

What exactly is he _preaching_? Not what you have cooked up in your mind, but actually _preaching_?

Why would anyone pay attention to the man who has made TWO hit games in a row, and a third one in his own programming language (that has inspired countless other programming languages like Zig and Odin), yes, why indeed people would listen to an exceptional guy who has repeatedly demonstrated competency and delivered results, whilst always putting it all on the line?

Can you make atleast one hit, not two, just one? Or anything of note?

No you can't, you can do nothing, that's why you don't have the "luxuries" and people don't listen to you, but pay attention to him. You might not like it, but it is what it is.

And you like to comfort yourself with the thought that you don't have some sort of unearned "luxuries", because otherwise you would do great things.

But the reality is that he's exceptional and you're not.

Paul Graham has this wonderful article on this topic: https://paulgraham.com/fh.html

>But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.

It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence. And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away, because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection" that you so sorely lack.

Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.

There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.

Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.

We've quite shifted the goalpost.

>I don't care about the man's personality or whatever qualities he has.

The only thing I'm addressing is the so called "luxuries" you alluded to, and the alleged "luxuries" he has is directly a result of his personality and his qualities.

The only reason you don't have those so called "luxuries" is because you're not even in the same ballpark as good. It really is as simple as that.

> By providing a result in a way that will be superior to the current status quo.

But he's done exactly that.

> I look at what he does, and so far, he spent 10 years making a game that you yourself admit won't be even that good.

I'm not saying that the game won't be good necessarily, I'm saying the game probably might not sell very well (atleast not to justify the amount of money spent from purely business perspective, etc)

There's a difference.

> So far, he hasn't shown that using Jai is particularly productive for software engineering.

And how would he do that exactly to whatever ungodly standards you are setting for the man?

Many people have criticized C++ in past (which is very easy to do), yet he's practicing what he's preaching in the most direct way humanly possible, he's both (1) designed and implemented a new programming language (that has directly addressed most of the issues), whilst (2) also making a complete non-trivial game in the newly designed language at the same time.

His games have always taken long time to make, and now he's making game + engine + programming language. At the same frigging time!

The only "luxury" JBlow has is that he's an exceptional individual and you're not. He has rare combination of ability, perseverance and work ethic, and by all accounts most people are neither of those things at once.

Most criticisms 99% of time are either misrepresentitive, misinformed jealousy or something to do with politics.

I have no issue with personally acknowledging that some rare individuals are simply way better than me.

And to prevent sounding like a gushing-fanboy, I suspect that his newest game won't sell very well, because his first two games have atleast something to appeal to general public (either visuals of Witness or time travel mechanics (somewhat novel at the time) of Braid) while this game doesn't appear to have the same draw.

This game has too much of a generic-sokoban puzzler vibe to it to appeal to the general public who aren't already ardent puzzler fans (and are there enough of those and can he reach enough of them? etc). And the trailer doesn't help to change this perception.

This really isn't that different from South Korea / Japan work culture isn't it?

Atleast as far as hours clocked in at work is concerned, no?

You are implying that my comment is implying something about "writing everything from scratch", it is not implying anything of the sort.

> Ignoring how misinformed that opinion is

You are making up some random opinion (that I supposedly have, but that are nowhere to be found in what I wrote).

> Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years

Wait, how did they gain this "luxury"? Are they trust fund babies or something?

Or did they earn their big stash of money by producing "garbage" and now retroactively are preaching ideals that they themselves didn't follow or what?

This line of "criticism" doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

After all both in question live off money they've made and/or are making from their (arguably) uncompromised quality work.

That is to say their uncompromised quality work has directly resulted in them being able to not release anything for close to 10 years, and practice their ideals in software they ship even if the "shipping" takes 10 years to do.

It would be more fair to say, that most people don't have the craftmanship and skill (and not the luxury) to be able to produce high quality work and software that enables them the so called "luxury".

TVs are very large, very cheap screens that are subsidized by people connecting them to the internet.

I don't want this "predatory practice" to end, because that's how i get my dirt cheap massive screens.

And all you have to do is to stop connecting them darned things to the internet.

It's not that hard, i'm telling you!

Why are people still connecting their TVs to the internet?

I thought this is already common wisdom for people in tech for decades to NEVER connect your TV to the internet, not even once.

GIMP has god horrid UX, there's no way it could have eaten Adobes anything. There's lineage of FOSS apps that stick by the "we're not X, we're different from X." mantra.

The discomfort, frustration and unintuitiveness you're feeling from using our app? It's just you!

No, that's not bad design and bad UX! its simply because we are different! We aren't X (Photoshop), we just do things differently here!".

GIMP is quintessential example of this.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Nobody is trying to appeal to "pro-AI crowd" (whatever the fuck that even means) when they use AI tools.

If an indie (or even less of an indie) is using AI generation, they are doing so to save costs or work around their very limited budget. Or using it to work around some limitations where voicecasting every line would be infeasible, etc.

And losing the small portion of the miniscule-vocal-always-complaining crowd (who odds are - wasnt part of their audience to begin with), to be able to use AI-gen is not a loss at all.

Data on Steam is telling, these tools are becoming increasingly prevalent.

"Normal" people will just buy the game if it's good.

So it's irrelevant if it uses AI or not. Ie. it's not a sales pitch and not part of decision making process when making the purchase.

There are increasingly more games that use some form of AI generated content, voice lines or otherwise, and nobody could care less, except the people outlined above.

[flagged]

For what it's worth it spawned a lot of quality software as a side effect. And served as an educational platform for a lot of programmers that felt that there's something wrong with modern day software and python/javascript low quality garbage they did at their day-to-day job, but couldn't quite put their finger on it.

Turns out you can both fail, and yet succeed in 10 different ways at the same time.

This isn't entirely true.

It's Atmel that derives massive benefit from GCC, or whoever implemented AVR backend for GCC.

Arduino doesn't - strictly speaking - depend on GCC, it could (and does) use any toolchain that is supplied by MCU vendor.

And it just happens so that many MCU vendors do often use GCC as part of their toolchain. Arduino just bundles that with vendor supplied tools for flashing, etc, like avrdude.

Which is to say - it's the MCU vendors that derive the main benefit from GCC.

Arduino will just happily use whatever toolchain MCU vendors provide.

Arduino doesn't directly benefit from pretty much any of legacy unix barf-bag stuff.

It's just a HAL and an IDE, with a truckload of user/third party supplied libraries for various modules, sensors, etc.

Plus, every sizable MCU/dev-board vendor supplies a Arduino HAL implementation (so called Core) for their board/mcu/module (or it's done by enthusiastic community).

All the AAA games will be inherently fucking stupid almost by design. And this is unavoidable - massive hundreds of millions if not billions in budget -> even if you alientate the bottom 10%, you lose 10% of sales. Bottom 20%, 20% of sales. Not gonna happen.

So you have Legend of Zelda games where pretty much all puzzles are so simple you can instantly tell what the solution is the very moment you see them, ie. downright retarded with few rare exceptions. This also applies to difficulty, etc.

As a result, AAA games can only be appretiated or enjoyed for not much else but production values. The soundtrack, the setpieces, the massive worlds and how much money must have gone into it, etc.

> Dammingly, you are forgetting about the cost of the external flash that it requires, when program flash is the main cost of MCUs. It shows you don't have much experience with this stuff.

If you had any experience "with this stuff", you'd know 16mbit of QSPI flash (compatible with rp2040) costs 7-8 cents in volume. 64mbits 12cents or less. And would calm your tits. It is okay.

> Besides how it looks like you weren't one of the early adopters

If you had any experience "with this stuff" you'd know better than to buy reels of mcus on rev1/rev2 that haven't been on the market for atleast a year or two.

> bottlenecked by a core without FPU

Why would lack of FPU impact bandwidth? Lack of FPU is non-issue with fixed point math in most cases.

> I have read the docs, and like I said the point of STM32 is ubiquity

And yet during chip shortages, rp2040 were one of the few MCUs without stock issues or crazy prices... in fact, I've never seen it out of stock. STM32 on the other hand... ouch. Fun times!

>This is what I'm talking about, like honestly what capability does that unlock for you beside party tricks?

So every capability and use-case that doesn't tickle your zoomer sensibilities is a party trick?

Okay.

So the faulty ADC (nonlinearity issues) of RP2040 is the only thing you can list and that makes it "low quality shit"?

I implore you to open up the errata sheet of stm32g4, just the ADC section alone (or frankly any stm32 mcu) (https://blog.mjbots.com/2023/07/24/stm32g4-adc-performance-p...), and that's an MCU series with focus on analog peripherals.

Stm32 chips are plagued with all sorts of issues and hardware bugs that are very easy to run into. In comparison rp2040 has surprisingly few major defects apart from its ADC implementation.

I see no mention of exact part number of inductor requirement in their hardware design guide, are you making shit up now? They are somewhat more particular in oscillator selection, and unfortunately don't include factory trimmed RC oscillator like most MCUs do these days.

> PIO does not unlock much actual capabilities besides party tricks

Ok, so you've no idea what you're talking about.

RP2040 is widely used in many projects because it has insane bandwidth for MCU in its price category. It can do 4 x 32bit reads/writes per cycle (if those ops are spread across 64kb x 4 memory banks), at 200mhz base clock, which gives theoretical maximum of 3.2 gigabytes per second bandwidth. That is pretty crazy.

This enables you to interface with or easily emulate many highspeed interfaces. And do things like 24ch 400mhz logic analyzers and similar. And this is what they are commonly used for (emulating memory cards, etc)

And that's a 60cent MCU. In this price range MCUs don't have 264kb of SRAM and 133/200mhz much less with two cores, that can push anywhere remotely this insane amount of bandwidth.

rp2040 additionally has human friendly and readable documentation, with truckloads of examples, and API that's pleasant to use. (can't exactly be said about stm32 ref manuals and APIs).

While it is not perfect (rp2040 ADC, and lacks encryption), some of those shortcomings have already been addressed in rp2350, with double sram (520KB at this price point!), floating point, even more PIO, more improved DMA channels and so on.

While cheap py32, gd32, apm32, etc are cool, but they just generic arm32 m0/m4. A 10 cent 24mhz m0 puya with 3kbs sram, isn't particularly impressive when put next to 60cent rp2040 with 80x sram, etc

> Combined with the general culture of people hyping RPi Pico chips, it results in a culture of ignorance and hype.

You haven't opend an errata sheet of stm32 chips even once and you talk about ignorance.

rp2040/rp2350 are unironically one of the best MCUs on the market (esp. in their niche), both in documentation/API and price/perf and features/flexibility in doing highspeed interfaces/bandwidth.

Explain how RP Pico (rp2040) is "low quality shit "compared to "actually good MCU products" (which are those supposed to be?)

I agree that Opulo PNPs are overpriced though, but I'm sure people getting these are aware that it's just a bunch of 20x20 aluminium profiles, 3d printer mgn rails, basic DC pump, etc and parts-wise there's nothing to justify the price, but they get them anyway because of entusiastic community engagement and support aspects - most importantly - in English. And it probably works just fine for the small scale projects they are used in.

Don't tell me what the original claim was.

You contorted it to mean that it's literally impossible to write "quality software" in vim/emacs.

I did NOT claim this. Nobody would claim this either.

I wouldn't make such claim even about nano or notepad or any text editor (of which there and hundreds and thousands) for that matter.

What an insane thing to contest even.

Would I attribute quality of software to - in any shape or form - to the text editor it was written in - whether written in nano, notepad or vim or emacs or god knows what else? No, I would not. That WAS the original claim.

> has been pretty solidly invalidated by GP

How exactly has it been invalidated?

By pointing out that SOME widely used software (mostly web/web infra with unix heritage) has been written using vim/emacs as the text editor?

Now, you can find endless sea of garbage software on github that is written using riced vim/emacs setups - would you therefore conclude that using vim/emacs leads to garbage software?

The only thing you can conclude here is that to write software (either good or bad) you generally speaking need a keyboard and a text editor.

Claiming vim/emacs leads to or directly contributes to "quality software" is the same and about as meaningful as saying that keyboards and text editors lead to "quality software".

Cargo cult insanity.

> facts to counter-argue your point of: "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will".

Your line of reasoning is something akin to - there are some skilled programmers that have shipped high quality software and wrote the code using lubed mechanical switches.

Therefore there MUST be something about lubing your switches and obsessing over clacks and thocks that contributes to quality of software somehow.

It's some weird bizzaro cargo cult reasoning.

Unix/webdevs often tend to use vim/emacs -> therefore this absolutely must contribute to the quality of software somehow (it has to!)

Except there are absolutely no basis for this claim, as there are high quality software that is written using neither vim nor emacs nor lubed mechanical switches.

"Most is software is written using a some text editor."

What an astute fucking observation you've made, mate!

And so it happens, that webdevs and web infra people (which is the extent of your understanding of "high quality shit") tend to use unixes and consequently vim/emacs as their text editor. No fucking way!

Perhaps, you can even tell just by looking at a piece of code - oh, this is beautiful, clean and clear, bugfree, this surely must have been written vim OR emacs?

Or maybe, just maybe, you're just making shit up on the spot and thinking backwards and attributing software quality metrics and outcomes to choice of a fucking text editor and how riced it is.