matthewkayin

You first ask if you really need to.

Well generally the workers who make these games actually care about the game and want to make a good experience for the players. The execs however, only care about how much money they can make off of the product.

Having a union (assuming that the union is run well),

- ensures a better product for customers

- ensures better working conditions for workers

- ensures better pay and benefits from workers (at least in programming roles, the games industry is generally underpaid compared to developers in other industries)

- provides protections against undue firings and layoffs

I would be curious to know why you don't think a union would be good for these people.

> "The Microsoft and OpenAI situation just got messy" is objectively wrong–it has been messy for months

I'm pretty sure "just" is being used here to mean "simply" rather than "recently".

Yeah, it is a valid comparison, and assuming the quality is close to par with a macbook, I think it would be worth the extra cost.

I'm someone who doesn't want to go through a new laptop every other year. I've got an M1 mac right now. I've owned it for 5 years and could easily see myself getting another 5 years of use out of it. Only problem is, the hard drive is small, I can't upgrade it. It only has 16 GB RAM, which is fine for now, but I can't upgrade it. One of the 2 USB C ports gave out on me. I can't repair it.

If I had a laptop that I could repair and upgrade that also ran Linux? I would absolutely pay $2k for it - as long as the quality is good - because I think I would save money in the long term by making a laptop like that last a long time.

> why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all? Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists.

I don't like this perspective because it puts the onus on the individual consumer. Many people who listen to music struggle to make ends meet. They do not have the extra money to afford buying albums off of bandcamp, yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music.

Meanwhile there are billions of dollars floating around in the music industry. Spotify absolutely has the spare cash to pay their artists more; they just choose not to.

As much as I love the idea of Gabe's "piracy is a service issue" philosophy, I think the real truth is likely that piracy is an issue of capitalism and wealth inequality.

Exactly. It is crazy that they described MacOS finder as doing this correctly when finder has no concept of up, it only has a back.

I'm someone who started programming when I was in middle school and went into this career field for the passion. But my passion was and is programming, not corporate office work.

In my career so far, I've spent most of my time troubleshooting AWS configs, combing through cloudwatch logs, and wringing requirements out of people, and a lot less of my time actually solving interesting problems.

The walls of my office are gray, as is the carpet, the desks, and the walls of the bullpens. There are awful fluorescent lights overhead, and my eyes are dry and tired. I am exhausted at the end of the day because of the sensory overload of people being on constant teams meetings all around me. They speak with their outside voices, like children.

So yes, I love software development, and maybe someday I will find a better job in this field that gives me the kind of challenging work and problem solving that I signed up for, but working outdoors? surrounded by the sounds of nature with the sun on my face? I'm sure there's a catch, but it sounds nice.

Yeah, the games industry is in a pretty big crisis right now, and I think change needs to happen both ways:

Consumers need to understand that keeping games at the same price for decades despite rising costs and inflation is not realistic. If they want the industry to thrive, they need to be ok with games being more expensive.

Meanwhile, developers need to stop making games so expensive. This is an entertainment industry / corpo problem, really. Companies have seen the big profits and decided that only the big profits will do, which means you need to make a big open world cinematic experience, which is expensive, and because it's expensive, they won't take risks on making anything actually interesting.

The only way gaming moves forward is if we make riskier games that cost less to produce, which is why indies are the ones making the good games these days.

Know the workplace rules!

Steam: We take a 30% cut of profits on our store. Devs: Aww you're so sweet.

Apple: We take a 30% cut of profits on our store. Devs: Hello? Human resources?

I don't know if the Starbucks example is quite the same as the band example. If anything, their focus on iced desserts shows that they know exactly what their audience wants and is paying for.

When I think about the band shirts, I think about this time an indie game dev youtuber did a full breakdown of their different revenue streams. They were a "full time indie gamedev", but the overwhelming majority of their income came from gamedev Udemy courses.

So really, they were an online course seller that used their gamedev youtube content to convince people to buy the courses.

In addition to this, LLMs are also simply too slow right now to deliver the results ATC would need.

Ridiculous to see people acting like LLMs are a silver bullet for every problem without putting any thought into what that would actually look like.

While modernizing ATC in the US may be overdue, the real issue here is that ATC in the US has been understaffed, underpaid, and overworked for a while now.

My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower.

If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.

There are plenty of stories of ATC helping to guide pilots back to the ground after an engine failure or after a student pilot had their instructor pass out on them or something like that.

Even if most of the work is routine, you definitely still want a human in the loop.

But that's why they said it was tenuous. Google's Pixels have been one of the most open Smartphone hardware lines so far, but Google could change that at any time.

I think we should not even generalize it down to a rule of three, because then you're outsourcing your critical thinking to a rule rather than doing the thinking yourself.

Instead, I tend to ask: if I change this code here, will I always also need to change it over there?

Copy-paste is good as long as I'm just repeating patterns. A for loop is a pattern. I use for loops in many places. That doesn't mean I need to somehow abstract out for loops because I'm repeating myself.

But if I have logic that says that button_b.x = button_a.x + button_a.w + padding, then I should make sure that I only write that information down once, so that it stays consistent throughout the program.

I tried looking through some of the spec samples, and it was not clear what the "language" was or that there was any syntax. It just looks like a terse spec.

This is a good point, though maybe means that "understanding the underlying problem" requires a degree of humanity.

I think it's fair to say that Blizzard at a certain point went corporate and "lost the plot", so they thought they knew what people wanted, even though they really didn't (don't you guys have phones?).

They are just gotos, but does that mean that they are bad (along with their friend try/catch, who is also a goto?), or does that mean that gotos can be useful when used with restraint?

Gotos get a bad rep because they become spaghetti when misused. But there are lots of cases where using gotos (or break/continue/early return/catch) makes your code cleaner and simpler.

Part of a programmer's job is to reason about code. By creating black and white rules like "avoid gotos", we attempt to outsource the thinking required of us out to some religious statement. We shouldn't do that.

Gotos can be useful and can lead to good code. They can also be dangerous and lead to bad code. But no "rule of thumb" or "programming principle" will save you from bad code.

I think 512GB is a fair minimum for a computer these days, but I agree with your "Where does it stop?" sentiment when it comes to RAM.

If browsing the web takes 12GB of RAM, at what point do we stop chasing after more RAM and instead start demanding better performance and resource usage out of the web?

I wouldn't call my personal project "heavy load", but I have a cross-platform C++ project that I am developing on both a Windows gaming PC and a 2020 M1 macbook air.

I use clang to compile on both machines. The M1 mac has noticeably faster compile times.

I've been feeling the pain of google being awful for a while now. Do you have a different search engine you would recommend?

To take this a step further. I want a phone that is small (doesn't have to be tiny, just iPhone SE 2020 or smaller, please), has a replaceable battery, has an unlocked bootloader, has a headphone jack, and costs $400 or less.

It doesn't need to have a cutting-edge processor or tons of RAM and storage space or a 120hz screen or razor-thin bezels or a studio-worthy camera, yet somehow all these things are prioritized on the market over a basic, reliable phone.

The rule of good fast cheap still applies the same as always, but business leaders consistently choose to ignore this reality and insist upon fast and cheap without acknowledging that it will come at the cost of good.

What's worse, is that these decisions are usually made on a short-term, quarterly basis. They never consider that slowing down today might save us time and money in the long-term. Better code means less bugs and faster bug-fixes. LLMs only exacerbate the business leader's worst tendencies.

I respectfully disagree. If you compare the western designs in the article to the Japanese ones, the western designs have these giant banners and images that insist on themselves. Those are the ones that are shouting. It's like the Japanese pages are presenting information and the western pages are trying to be highway ad banners.

I would think it would have to work the same in both since otherwise C code using that behavior would not compile in C++, right?

I am not a C++ expert, but I'm surprised to hear that it is considered UB to access the other member since as far as I can tell a union is just a chunk of memory that can be interpreted differently depending on which union member you access?

So, if you had a union { bool b, char c }, and you set b = false, then I would think that accessing c would predictably give you a value of '\0'.

Granted, you probably shouldn't go around accessing an inactive union member like that, but when people say it's UB they make it sound like it's impossible to guarantee what data will be inside that byte, and it seems to me like that isn't true.

You cannot remove the toil without removing the creative work.

Just like how, in writing a story, a writer must also toil over each sentence, and should this be an emdash or a comma? and should I break the paragraph here or there? All this minutia is just as important to the final product as grand ideas and architecture are.

If you don't care about those little details, then fine. But you sacrifice some authorship of the program when you outsource those things to an agent. (And I would say, you sacrifice some quality as well).

The problem pointed out in the article seems a little silly. We're adding an entire language feature because someone wanted an optional bool class? Why not just create a uint8_t with three values: OPTIONAL_BOOL_FASLE, OPTIONAL_BOOL_TRUE, OPTIONAL_BOOL_UNDEFINED?

Doing so takes the same space as a bool, and could be wrapped in a class if desired to provide a nicer interface.

It looks about the same as stock android.

Except there are literally people on this thread saying that this is proof that code quality doesn't matter and that we all need to "wake up". It's the same as the people saying that spec driven development is the way of the future and that engineers should be focusing on the spec and not even looking at the code.

If you use LLMs and you do care about code quality, then great. But remember that the term vibe coding as it was coined originally meant blindly accepting coding agent suggestions without even reviewing the diffs.

Many of the people aggressively pushing AI use in code are doing so because they care more about delivery products quickly then they do about the software's performance, security, and long-term maintainability. This is why many of us are pushing back against the technology.

> Will human generated art still be as respected/valuable?

I would hope that humans would always value human generated art, but these days it seems that many businessmen and AI bros do not. Perhaps they are not human.