cyber_kinetist

Yup, absolutely! People before us already lived through the Great Depression, people already lived through two World Wars, and despite all that there were still some technological advancements made and some good opportunities amongst the chaos! There's obviously going to be pains from transitioning into a new world order, but humanity will still keep on living. Just don't expect the next world to be the same as before!

I think it's important to know and practice your passion, even if you have to work on something different to pay the bills. You can only be good at something if you really like it, and you never know what opportunity you'll stumble onto if you're ready for it.

I think the bigger issue is not that LLMs are taking away developer jobs, but the current geopolitical crisis (the collapse of the US empire and the end of the neoliberal era) is leading towards an imminent economic catastrophe, and that would be enough to pop not only the AI bubble, but an even bigger "IT bubble" that has been proliferating since the 90s.

Programmers (and other white collar jobs) were able to luxuriously coast along the ZIRP era because capital (replenished twice via quantitative easing) was cheap and plentiful, and because the elites at the top had to pump huge amounts money to create a shared fantasy of the "technological future" that validates the neoliberal era. Now that the reality of the actual "physical economy" (the economy of making tangible things) has clawed back at us because of that forbidden three-letter word (war), we all realize that doubling and tripling oil prices were actually dictating our lives rather than some "Skynet AI" crap, and thus our fantasy simulacra of "virtual" play-things have now come to an end. Oh and we all found out that most of SaaS was actually bullshit anyway. In fact, if it could be completely replaced by AI then it was already pretty bullshit in the first place.

So, for smart STEM people uninterested in programming and only looking for a stable career, I think they would be better off by just doing engineering work that's a bit more tangible, like robotics, manufacturing, shipbuilding, construction, etc. (Or anything related to war, but only if you're able to stomach what you're doing.) If you don't like to sit all day for a salary, then niche blue collar work can also be a good option, since general-purpose robotics (Physical AI?) is still too far away because of many, many issues that's just too long to explain here. I still think if you like programming then you should stick to it in the long run - there will be a very cold winter because of the combination of LLMs, AI bubble pop, and general economic depression, but for those who survive this era there will be an opportunity because of the shortage of skilled programmers (since no-one bothered to hire juniors after the pop, no one will grow to become seniors themselves!) Computing will still be with us forever, just not in a way that investors thought that it's going to "engulf the world".

I think having one or two "software engineering" courses where it's project-based really helps. You get to actually learn how to use Git, work in a team, and architect and finish a project on time - which is going to be valuable no matter if you're seeking a software engineering job afterwards or stay in academia.

The problem with the EU is that now they depend on rare earth minerals / solar panels / etc. for their infrastructure, which means more dependency on China. However, as the war unfolds, I bet the EU will certainly want to cozy up more with China than whatever the hell that is the Middle East and the US (and hell no they don't want to depend on Russia either!)

If you throw away photorealism and limit yourself to stylized 3D, using a custom engine can certainly be a pragmatic choice.

The best examples I can think of are Thumper, Devil Daggers, Hyper Demon, The Witness, and No Man's Sky. And of course, Minecraft!

Note that if you want to go a bit further, you should make your own minimal build system that replaces CMake. That alone will make your project compile much faster!

I've made my own in Python that generates Ninja files only - and it's surprisingly not that much work (especially if Claude Code can help you).

Feels like it was written by Claude... the writing style is instantly recognizable. It's quite fatiguing to read!

The actual linked PDF is not from Gwern, it's a 2003 paper from two sociologists Blake E. Ashforth and Vikas Anand.

I think this was the most important insight in the article:

> I experimented with Rust/Bevy and Unity before settling on Godot. Bevy’s animations and visuals weren’t as crisp, and Claude struggled with its coordinate conventions - likely a combination of less training data and Bevy leaving many core features, like physics, to the community. Unity was a constant struggle to keep the MCP bridge between Claude and the editor healthy. It frequently hung, and I never figured out how to get Claude Code to read the scene hierarchy from the editor. Godot’s text-based scene format turned out to be a huge advantage - Claude can read and edit .tscn files directly.

Didn't expect Godot to be the most friendly game engine for LLM usage! I think it's because of various factors - Godot has been used quite a lot in recent years so there are various code examples on the Internet, and its scene file format (.tscn) is very concise enough for LLMs to write and edit directly (Unity has its own YAML-based format but it's very unfriendly for human consumption, and Unreal stores its core assets in binary files)

Really appreciate how they're publishing failed research. It's much more needed in academia to know why a method or idea doesn't work - which nobody shares since it doesn't help with publishing papers in top journals and earn grants!

The site is making ordinary users (other than developers) shy away from submitting bug reports. Come on, you need to make a whole account in Bugzilla for you to report bugs? The best thing would be to have a "Report bug" window directly in the program that lets the user send complaints without hazzle!

Not a bad choice... since Minecraft Java edition only supports desktops, they don't have to deal with the abysmal Vulkan drivers on mobile.

Though I thought a company large as Microsoft would have the resources to build a cross-platform RHI with the most stable API available for each platform (DX12 for Windows and Metal for macOS)...

I don't think Minecraft's renderer will be PSO-heavy enough to have stuttering issues. It's not a state-of-the-art compute-driven renderer that supports artist-driven workflows with custom materials and shaders... it's just a voxel renderer with very primitive lighting.

I've seen some C++ libraries that implement persistent data structures like immer (https://github.com/arximboldi/immer) - but seems it requires the use of the Boehm GC (which is notorious to be slow, since it is a conservative GC and cannot exploit any of the specific semantics/runtime characteristics of the language you're making).

I think flat structures aren't always bad - if the organization is geared towards maintenance and care work, it's essential to be as flat as possible. Another good example would be research labs, where experimentation cannot happen in hierarchical envrionments.

For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is even more cruel than what should have been.

Actually for me it was the opposite: before I wasn't able to play around and experiment in my free time that much, because I didn't have enough energy left to actualize the thoughts and ideas I have since I have a day job.

Now, since the bottleneck of moving the fingers to write code has gone down, I actually started to enjoy doing side projects. The mental stress from writing code has gone down drastically with Claude Code, and I feel the urge to create more nowadays!

Yup, there is a surprisingly high amount of boilerplate in programming, and LLMs definitely can remove this and let you focus on the more important problems. For a person with a day job, working on side projects actually became fun with LLMs again, even with the limitation of free time and mental energy to invest in.

I think the reality is, if you're too smart than you're going to be easily disinterested in the things that you've been trained for during your entire childhood. Because, you're going to be bored of it eventually!

I remember an interview from current #1 chess grandmaster Magnus Carsen about why John Nunn never became World Champion because he is too intelligent:

> SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ?

> Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise.

> SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever.

> Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too intelligent for that.

> SPIEGEL: How that?

> Carlsen: At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.

> SPIEGEL: Things are different in your case?

> Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.

I think the history of D having a garbage collector (and arguably exceptions / RTTI) from the beginning really cemented its fate. We all know that there's a "BetterC" mode that turns it off - but because the D ecosystem initially started with the GC-ed runtime, most of the D code written so far (including most of the standard library) isn't compatible with this at all.

If D really wants to compete with others for a "better C replacement", I think the language might need some kind of big overhaul (a re-launch?). It's evident that there's a smaller, more beautiful language that can potentially be born from D, but in order for this language to succeed it needs to trim down all the baggage that comes from its GC-managed past. I think the best place to start is to properly remove GC / exception handling / RTTI from the languge cleanly, rewrite the standard library to work with BetterC mode, and probably also change the name to something else (needs a re-brand...)

That's too much of a stretch, but I believe games of the next era will be optimized more towards integrated GPUs (such as AMD's iGPU in the Steam Deck and Steam Machine).

When hardware is priced out for most consumers (along with a global supply chain collapse due to tariffs and a potential Taiwan invasion), a new era awaits where performance optimization is going to be critical again for games. I expect existing game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine falling out because of all the performance issues they have, and maybe we can return to a temporary "wild west" era where everyone has their own hacky solution to cram stuff into limited hardware.

AI conferences are already fucked. Students who are doing their Master's degrees are reviewing those top-tier papers, since there are just too many submissions for existing reviewers.

It has been several years since the reviewing process for top AI conferences have been broken as hell, due to having too many submissions and only a few reviewers (up to the point that Masters students are reviewing the papers). It was only a matter of time before these conferences will be filled with AI-written papers.

> “Do not torture babies for sport”

I mean, that seems to be already happening in Palestine, so I'm even not sure if that rule is universally accepted...

Not just getting it wrong, but also learning from it and be able to internalize those mistakes. There are certainly people who do the same mistakes over and over again (either realizing or not) - it's not just a matter of experience.

A Marxist can certainly also be a Georgist, it's a matter between who should we eliminate first: the capitalists or the rent-seekers. Maybe we should eliminate the latter first in order to be able to properly tackle the former: the real class conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeois!

But you can also go a bit more extreme (and less orthodox) and say that classical capitalism has already come to an end, and in the current neoliberal era most of the purported "capitalists" are actually just rent-seekers (platform based companies which run either on ads or monthly payments) - you don't sell commodities anymore and instead just access to services. Maybe these are just a symptom of The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall - where the value of labor itself has fallen so much that there is no way for any capitalist production to continue generating acceptable profits unless you do any rent-seeking behavior. In that sense, you can certainly be both a Georgist and a Marxist since you still believe in the TRPF and the inherent contradictions of capitalism (though quite an unorthodox one!)

Really think they should support PanGUI (https://www.pangui.io/) first - they're making a native GUI framework that doesn't suck, and have very similar philosophies.

I think the the most coveted ability of a skilled senior developer, is precisely this "uncanny" ability to predict beforehand if some particular detail is important or irrelevant. This ability can only be obtained through years of experience and hubris.

On a tangent, still waiting for File Pilot to have even the bare minimum of CJK support... I do like that the software is fast, but without support for other languages than English it's useless to most of the people in the world.

I think as typical niche Internet "communities" do, the most vocal will naturally be snobby elitists who deride at anything that doesn't fit in their narrow worldview, and that mob will naturally represent the "community". (I also think Jon Blow has his part in enabling that, but oh well.)

But I'm still impressed what Casey was able to organize during the past few years, it's clear that what he's published as educational material (Handmade Hero, Computer: Enhance) has invigorated interest in low-level programming. Even though there might not be immediate results, I think this will matter later on when the people who grew up with these materials will now build new infrastructure for the post-Web era.

Ah good point. Though I've already signed up for it and didn't get the invite yet... so this seems more like a closed beta.