anonymous908213

> incompetence is always more likely than malice.

"Incompetence" of this degree is malice. It is actively malicious to create a system that automatically locks people out of their accounts with absolutely no possibility for human review or recourse short of getting traction in the media. "No sir, I didn't grind those orphans up. It was this orphan grinding machine I made that did it, teehee!"

> "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time.

This is literally the foundation story of numerous billion-dollar businesses. In fact OpenAI managed to beg their way into a trillion dollars after losing money offering no kind of product for many years. It sounds like it's just a business plan that you don't like very much.

Off the top of my head, I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence. Or more recently there was uv, that write-it-in-Rust Python package manager that had no avenue for monetization but received millions in investment funding a team working on it full-time until successfully getting bought out by OpenAI.

This was mostly a nice read, I do enjoy these kinds of slice-of-life blogs. I think it might have been a bit better without making claims about the economic future and history of rice farming or whatever, if the author doesn't even speak the language it's unlikely they have any real insight to offer and whatever shallow information they got off a random Youtube video is liable to be spreading misinformation that misleads uninformed readers than being actually informative. Farming a rice field does not a rice economist make.

There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:

> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.

I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).

I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.

RIP. VNDB is a truly incredible resource and the world is a better place for its existence.

Now this is an eulogy you wouldn't mind accidentally being published about you prematurely! May we all strive to leave such a profoundly positive impact on the lives of the people around us.

We are not in a post-anonymous world. People who care can absolutely still remain anonymous, for the time being, with enough effort. However, the number of services we can use is being increasingly cut off by these measures. If the trend continues, then we will soon be in such a world, but we are not there yet.

I hate comments like yours beyond belief. "Oh, I'm so smart. It's too much effort to stay private, so I've accepted that a dystopian surveillance state where every action anyone ever takes is recorded permanently and accessible to anyone is inevitable. Look at these fucking idiots worrying about this issue. Can't they just accept it will happen and shut up?"

It is also worth noting that there is a distinction to be made between government and corporate surveillance. Even if it were possible for state actors to de-anonymize specific targets with reliability (it's not, with sufficient opsec), that is very different from a corporation being able to do it. Once a corporation has your data, they will sell it to anyone and everyone, making your entire life public record for anyone to find with a bit of digging. That is a threat model that is much more likely for Average Joe than being targeted by the government, but it is also a threat which is easier to defeat than that of a state actor. This cynical defeatism is baseless.

> by directly letting people modify the source code (Unreal Engine, Godot).

Unreal is not open source, and while Godot is, I would wager 90% of its users never even look at the source code. It very specifically attracts people who want an easy way to make games without prior expertise.

> Players do not care about that.

Users don't care about much when it comes to software quality, honestly. They accept 20 FPS, slow loading, bug-riddled games that consume +20gb ram and +100gb more disk space than necessary. They may complain about a game if it gets bad enough, but they still buy and play those games. My games are significantly more optimized than most. They aren't perfect, but they don't need to be. They don't even need to be as optimized as I have made them, it's mostly just a point of pride and making the kind of software I want to see in the world. I think the only way you lose a player on technical points is if they literally cannot boot your game, but those issues plague engine games too. I had driver issues myself crashing on boot with an UE5 game two weeks ago.

"Modern games" span a wide range of things. I develop solely 2D games, because I prefer 2D games over 3D games. I think that even today 2D games are more enjoyable than 3D games. That doesn't mean Super Mario Bros. That can mean Europa Universalis IV, it can mean Stardew Valley, it can mean Magic the Gathering Online, it can mean Hollow Knight, it can mean Slay the Spire, it can mean a huge variety of interesting and engaging games, none of which require 3D graphics. 2D games can be as complex as you'd like them to be, far more complex in game logic than a 3D shooter even. The more complex you'd like them to be, the easier it gets to implement them if you understand the primitives you're implementing them with. Imagine trying to optimize your data structures when you don't even know what an int32 is? There are real game developers in the world who don't know even that much. It is a great thing that off-the-shelf game engines provide a level of accessibility to allow anyone to develop games, but they do not represent the pinnacle of what can be achieved in software engineering. They are the exact opposite of it, in fact.

> You simply don't know where the bugs and performance pitfalls are because you haven't encountered them, yet.

What is your point? I profile my games and have detailed logging systems. If I or my users run into performance issues, I address them as I come across them. Understanding my codebase at a low level makes it significantly easier to dig into problems and investigate underlying root causes than anyone on Unity will ever be able to. If you use Unity, you are putting your complete faith that Unity has perfectly optimized X low-level problem away at the engine level. If they haven't, and you run into that issue in your game, you are completely fucked. I love being solely responsible for the defects in my games. That means I can fix them myself. The worst thing in the world in software development is when somebody else's fuck-up becomes your problem, and you can't fix it, so you have to implement some hacky workaround, if you can even figure out why the closed-source engine code you didn't write and can't read is behaving incorrectly to work around it in the first place. Sometimes that still happens anyways -- our hardware-OS stacks are built with tens or hundreds of millions of line of dogshit code, and you can't get around it if you want to create software for platforms people use, but you can at least remove as many dependencies on bad code you have no understanding of as possible.

To be clear, the framework I built is independent of the MonoGame framework. As for how it was built, it's relatively straightforward. There are three layers: platform layer, framework layer, and the game layer. On the platform layer, I started by implementing a basic hello world-tier game loop using Win32 window/messaging APIs, OpenGL for graphics rendering, and OpenAL for audio playback. Then I wrote tidy wrapper layer functions for calling into the platform layer, with better ergonomics/readability, which the game layer calls. Then, I began adding WASM APIs at the platform layer, with branching #if statements in the framework layer that control whether src\platform\win32 or src\platform\wasm functions are called based on build target. In this way, the game code remained unchanged but support for web was seamlessly added (with some pain in adjusting the wrapper APIs to handle the large differences in Win32 and web APIs). Then repeated this process for each additional platform. The primary csproj is set up to branch into different csprojs per build target, with one using the Microsoft.NET.Sdk.WebAssembly project SDK, etc. Over time, I expanded features of the platform layer and wrapper layer as they were needed.

For the game I had already made progress on when trying MonoGame, I had already written a wrapper layer over the MonoGame APIs even before I had started on my own framework. My new framework wrapper layer was designed as similarly as possible, so transitioning my game code to the new framework was mostly painless, and only required adjusting the shape of some rendering/audio/input calls here and there.

SDL and Raylib are probably the closest C(++) analogues. Or SFML if you strictly want a library written in C++, I suppose.

So too with game engine design, where you have dozens of designs and hundreds of tutorials to learn from in the building of your own. It is seriously funny that no matter how you try to contort the metaphor, it continues to fit perfectly in a way that indicates it is not actually a bad thing.

It sounds like you don't like programming. I am in the process of writing my own language/IDE/compiler on the side of making games, and have already written a dialect of C# with a compiler that transpiles it to legal C# for use in the meantime. I would, in fact, love to write my own OS if not for the fact that proprietary hardware vendors make it virtually impossible for anybody to create a new OS that runs on consumer hardware in the year 2026. If you gave me a trillion dollars with which to build a CPU factory, I'd jump at the chance to learn that too.

People who don't like programming, who wish to abstract it all away and "stand on the shoulders of giants"[1] without understanding anything about the giants, seem to view low-level code as a bogeyman. It doesn't take a lifetime to understand. To the contrary, I would argue that low-level code is easier to work with than working only with high-level code, because you can reason about it. The more you rely on abstractions you don't understand, the more impossible it becomes to effectively reason about anything, because your reasoning is glossing over the details that make things work. But reasoning about primitives, and the things built out of those primitives that you understand, is not actually nearly as hard as the people who just want to plop Javascript libraries together and stop thinking about it would believe.

In particular, when it comes to games, especially 2D games (which are what Godot and MonoGame are typically used for), it's really not that hard. Windows has an API for doing X, Y and Z with graphics. Linux has an API for doing X, Y, and Z for graphics. You write a wrapper that your game code calls that passes through calls to each of those APIs with an #if statement filtering for which OS you're running on. Rinse and repeat the other set of platforms, with a bit of extra finangling for API limitations on web and phone OSes. Rinse and repeat for audio, input, and font handling. It took less than a month of work for me to get a polished cross-platform system working on five platforms. Not because I'm a genius, but because it's seriously just not hard. There are a thousand tutorials and books you could pick from that will give you a rundown of exactly how to do it.

Then, for example, writing your own rudimentary 2D GUI map editor can literally be done in a day. Presumably you know how to code a main menu. Add an option to the main menu that changes the gamestate to State.MapEditor when selected. Set a keybind on this state where your arrow keys increment or decrement X/Y coordinates, a keybind to place tiles/objects, a keybind to cycle which object ID is selected, and a keybind that calls a function which serializes your map state to text and saves it to a file. A little bit more work for a moving camera viewport, but it's not that hard. Want more features, polish it more. When you fully understand the primitives your system is built with, adding new features can be done quickly and easily, because it's so easy to reason about compared to reasoning about code you've never read built with primitives you don't understand.

3D does up the difficulty level, but it's by no means unachievable, either. The content creator Tsoding is currently doing a semi-weekly challenge to build his own 3D game engine from scratch on video, and he's making great progress despite not spending that much time on it, a side project that gets a few hours a week.

The end result of all this is a codebase that is more performant, lightweight, easy to read, and very easy to extend. I think developing your own engine can actually save time in the long run (if you're willing to forego the instant gratification), because it's so easy to fix bugs and add new features when you have a complete mental map of your codebase and the primitives used to construct it. For example, I have a friend who used Godot to develop a game, and they've been plagued for months with a low percentage chance of fatal crashes on a boss that they are completely unable to identify and fix, and it's because they don't have a mental map of the engine code. It's simply not even possible for them to reason about what in the engine could be going wrong because they don't even know what the engine is actually doing.

[1] Another metaphor that is grossly mis-invoked, in my view. Do you think Isaac Newton did not understand the work of those that came before him? The great thing about giants is that by doing the hard work of exploring new concepts, they make it easier for everyone who comes after them to learn them. I think it's a bit intellectually lazy to put off the work of giants as something that should not, or even can not, be learned.

[2] "like J.R.R. Tolkien wrote books, and there's a reason nobody writes books the way he wrote his." It's a real shame more people don't, considering there has never been a fantasy work rivalling his in the nearly century since.

> wasting time reinventing the wheel

It's always funny to me that this metaphor is used to indicate a bad thing, but re-inventing the wheel is actually very valuable. Note that our vehicles do not run on stone wheels. Thank goodness we kept re-inventing wheels that were more suitable for our specific use cases! This metaphor is, therefore, exactly apt for describing off-the-shelf game engines. All of the big open game engines are heavy and make a ton of decisions for you that will not be optimal for your specific game, because they make generalized decisions necessary to support all kinds of games. This does save you time, and you can absolutely make games that are good enough with them, but it's ridiculous to me to describe making your own engine as wasting time. It's spending time to gain a benefit, which is a trade-off that is worth it for some and not necessary for others.

There isn't really a comparison to be made between MonoGame and Godot. MonoGame is for programmers. Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development. Godot locks you into the Godot way of doing things. MonoGame is a thin cross-platform abstraction over platform APIs for sprite rendering, audio playback, input, and font, leaving you to build your game engine yourself however you like.

I think the greatest flaw in MonoGame, however, is that their cross-platform abstraction notably excludes web. Given how relatively thin MonoGame is, I think you're better off building your own framework that supports compiling to WASM as well, if you have any experience as a developer already. It is what I did and took some effort but was pretty well doable and didn't take all that long, and the payoff of being able to share your games instantly in the browser for anyone to play with just a click of a link is so worth it.

The other notable flaw in MonoGame is that the content pipeline thing it has is horrendous. When I tried it, I ended up simply bypassing using that pipeline at all. They are currently in the process of reworking it completely, I believe, but I'm not sure when that's supposed to release.

Maybe the value in MonoGame is that it does support consoles, though; I have no idea what developing for console is like, and only target web/computer/phone OS platforms myself.

Twenty billion in revenue on hundreds of billions in debt is not "making money".

> Shopify SimGym, and Javier Moreno's tech blog about it

The embodiment of what our industry is becoming. A spambot-generated article about a service selling you spambots to visit your storefront, which has literally negative real world utility. There is zero indication that this thing has made any money. It's also completely unrelated to the topic at hand, which is specifically about OpenClaw and the viral marketing trend of people buying Mac Minis as a platform to run their own spambot wrapper. For bonus points, that article is also spambot-generated. There is already a spambot comment in the thread from an obvious spam account with hundreds of upvotes that was already nuked once before but went back to spamming. Marvelous. What wonderful technology we've built.

Venezuela.

It is not based on guesswork. For whatever it's worth, I have gotten 7 LLM accounts banned from HN in the past week based on accurately detecting and reporting them to moderation[1]. Many of these accounts had between dozens and 100 upvotes, some with posts rated to the top of their threads that escaped detection by others. I have not once misidentified and reported an account that was genuinely human. I am aware that other people have poorly-tuned heuristics and make false accusations, but it is possible to build the skill to detect LLM output reliably, and I have done so. In the end, it is up to you whether you believe me, but I am simply trying to offer a warning for people who dislike reading generated material, nothing more.

[1] Unlike LLM-generated articles, posting LLM-generated comments is actually against the rules.

There are no automated AI detectors that work. False positives and false negatives are both common, and the false positives particularly render them incredibly dangerous to use. Just like LLMs have not actually replaced competent engineers working on real software despite all the hysteria about them doing so, they also can't automate detection, and it is possible to build up stronger heuristics as a human. I am fully confident and would place a large sum of money on this article being LLM-generated if we could verify the bet, but we can't, so you'll just have to take my word for it, or not.

The headers alone are a huge giveaway. Spams repetitive sensatational writing tropes like "No X. No Y. No Z." and "X. Not Y" numerous times. Incoherent usage of bold type all throughout the article. Lack of any actually verifiable concrete details. The giant list of bullet points at the end that reads exactly like helpful LLM guidance. Many signals throughout the entire piece, but don't have time to do a deep dive. It's fine if you don't believe me, I'm not suggesting the article be removed. Just giving a heads-up for people who prefer not to read generated articles.

Regarding your allergy, my best guess is that it is generated by Claude, not ChatGPT, and they have different tells, so you may be sensitive to one but not the other. Regarding plausibility, that's the thing that LLMs excel at. I do agree it is very plausible.

This is an LLM-generated article, for anyone who might wish to save the "15 min read" labelled at the top. Recounts an entirely plausible but possibly completely made up narrative of incompetent IT, and contains no real substance.

I see, you are just a troll. Congratulations on playing me, you got me, for whatever good that does you.

Irrelevant to the current breach, but at the end of the article...

> In January 2023, PayPal notified customers of another data breach after a large-scale credential stuffing attack compromised 35,000 accounts between December 6 and December 8, 2022.

> Two years later, in January 2025, New York State announced a $2,000,000 settlement with PayPal over charges that it failed to comply with the state's cybersecurity regulations, leading to the 2022 data breach.

I didn't hear about this New York case. I'm the first to lament the incredibly sorry state of affairs of data security, to the extent that such security exists at all, but it is insane that you can get fined $2,000,000 for your customers re-using e-mail + password combinations between sites and becoming compromised as a result. I truly loathe mandatory 2FA with every fiber of my being and I guess New York would like to enforce it on the world? Sigh. Everything about the internet just gets worse and worse, continuously.

There is absolutely no world where a judge is going to rule that linking to the full text of a book for people to download is Fair Use for research purposes. Successful arguments for Fair Use are significantly more limited in scope than people think, but this isn't even close. They might be able to argue it for their own use (unproven in court since Anthropic settled rather than taking it to trial, but the 1.5 billion dollar settlement indicates Anthropic had little faith in their odds), but there is no possible way you could argue that giving anyone on the internet downloads of the full book is Fair Use or necessary for research.

Out of curiosity, what would you describe a piracy manual as, if providing information as to where and how to illegally download copyrighted material is not it? What additional information would Microsoft have to have provided for it to cross the line into piracy? The only thing more illegal they could have done would be hosting the files themselves, but linking to files hosted otherwhere is still illegal, otherwise the loophole would make it child's play to ignore copyright laws. The Pirate Bay is the most famous example of attempting the legal strategy of "we don't host the copyrighted files, we just link to them", and it resulted in prison time for the founders.

The title does not shame piracy. It factually describes that the linked article is a Microsoft-published guide to piracy, wherein the instructions tell readers to commit the (illegal for normal people) act of downloading pirated material, while linking to said pirated material (also illegal for normal people), with further instructions on how to use that just-downloaded pirated material for LLM inference (maybe even illegal for corporations; Anthropic settled for $1.5B for using pirated books in its training) and publishing derivative works without license (illegal for normal people).

I hate the current copyright environment as much as anyone, but I do not abide double-standards, with a two-tier justice system wherein a corporation gets to freely enforce the draconian copyright regime against individuals while also getting to abuse individuals' creative works in ways much more egregious.

I refrained from replying to this until now because I felt this thread was excessively pedantic, but Aaron Swartz is in fact one of the cases I had in mind when writing my original comment about "harshly as possible". To say that his case was only "tangentially" copyright-related is whitewashing the copyright lobby of its complicity in his death. It is, in fact, the primary reason he died. The US government was trying to make an example out of him, and stacked every charge they possibly could, because of his act of copyright infringement. Perhaps, with a shallow understanding of the case, you might see the list of felonies he was charged with and come to the conclusion that copyright infringement was only one small part of the case against him. But the copyright infringement was the crux of the case, and the rest of the charges were "throwing the book at him" in the well-defined meaning of the term[1]. His suicide was a direct result of the overzealous prosecution attempting to ruin his life with charges wildly disproportionate to the harm he caused to society (ie. basically none). It is worth noting he had not even shared the material he had downloaded, although the prosecution made a case on asserting that they believed he intended to.

[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throw_the_book_at

Now, as for "the rest of us are prosecuted as harshly as possible if caught". You are correct in your pedantry that this statement not expressed as rigorously as it possibly could have been. There are different classes of copyright infringement; "receiving" and "perpetuating" being two of them [to avoid further pedantry, I am not asserting this is precise legal terminology but rather a lay distinction for the purposes of discussion]. It is the latter case which is tried as harshly as possible when caught, and there are many such examples other than Swartz, and I think it was clear my intent when I said it despite the fact that I did not write about the distinction at length.

That is not to say the situation around the former type of copyright infringement is so kind, either. While in some countries it is mostly overlooked, which I believe to be the case in the US, in other countries it is more strictly enforced, such being the case in my own country. While "as harshly as possible" isn't accurate to prosecution against infringement of this nature, you can still be disproportionately punished relative to the damage caused when downloading pirated material for personal viewing, if caught (and ISPs/rightsholders do monitor for it to the best of their abilities).

There is also a third class of copyright infringement to consider which is highly disfavourable to individuals: derivative works. Strictly speaking, even as something as simple as drawing fanart of a character or remixing a song is illegal, even if the activity is completely non-commercial in nature. This is, of course, absolutely ridiculous. Rightsholders know that copyright law reformation would gain tremendous popular support if they were draconian about enforcing their rights against derivative works, and that allowing fan communities to bloom is actually beneficial to their own IP, so enforcement is highly selective. However, that arbitrary, selective nature of enforcement is itself dangerous to individuals, and is sometimes used to punish specific individuals as harshly as possible at the whims of the IP holder. It is true that not everyone is actually subjected to this, but the threat of it happening looms over everyone who expresses their creativity through derivative works.

None of this sits right with me, especially as corporations are hoovering up every piece of copyrighted material they possibly can and creating commercial derivative-work-machines that mass-produce sloppified derivative works, and are getting a completely free pass by the legal system to do so while individuals are still treated like felons for 'crimes' that are at most marginally harmful, or in the case of the creative production of derivative works, not only not harmful but actually beneficial to society.

Conversely, every person calling LLMs "agents" never had any credibility to begin with. Despite my many attempts to coerce an example out of people here, I am still waiting for one (1) singular demonstration of "agentic software" that is capable of replacing production-grade software at scale. Software created by agents that solves a real-world problem and is used by tens of thousands or millions of people. Candidates include an OS, a web browser, an IDE, image editing software akin to Photoshop, a fully-featured Discord/Slack/etc. replacement, a non-trivial video game, music production software, enterprise-grade database software etc., really anything that isn't just another AI tool to produce another AI tool to produce another AI tool culminating in complete psychosis and detachment from anything people do in the real world. If you would like to be the first to provide evidence that these things are more capable than chatbots in concrete terms, by all means, go ahead.

Why does Europe need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into developing a chatbot that will never be able to pay off its debts? Mistral seems like a much more practical and sustainable approach to LLM development than centering the entire economy around a pyramid scheme predicated on selling the belief that AGI is always three months away.

China's LLM development relative to resources spent is impressive, but it also happened to be predicated on Chinese miners buying into the previous pyramid scheme and having a lot of GPUs on hand already. I don't think the lack of European commitment to the previous pyramid scheme putting it a bit behind in that regard indicates any kind of grand regional failure, so much as an event of pure circumstance that probably has little lasting meaning 5 or 10 years from now.

It rubs me the wrong way that corporations get a free pass on copyright infrigement, while the rest of us are prosecuted as harshly as possible if caught. I think this, together with the morging plagiarism, also indicates a pattern of behaviour from Microsoft that should be reformed. I would prefer if Microsoft were not able to produce AI slop degradations of other people's work and claim it as their own.

I don't believe that title conveys the actual significance of the article that makes it worthy of attention, so I hope HN may forgive me for coming up with an alternative title!