Witcher 4 devs adjusting to Unreal Engine after years of REDengine:

Brian Eno is pretty cool.

Hard reset and try again?

So what counts as dictating my life?

The government prohibiting me from firing my gun in the air, or my neighbor’s falling bullets prohibiting me from leaving my porch?

I’m always suspect of those who assume there is only “freedom to do” and not also “freedom from being done-to”.

They tend to think they will never be on the receiving end of someone else’s “freedom”.

Pretty much, yeah.

Taking over the Democratic Party vs starting a new party is kinda like addressing climate change on Earth vs terraforming Mars.

The former sounds painful and bureaucratic while the latter sounds exciting and innovative.

But if you can’t fix the party or planet you’ve got, which has like 80% of the hard work done already, what hope do you have of doing a new thing from scratch?

Economics is a subset of moral philosophy, which just happens to care a lot about mathematics but is (or should be) nonetheless primarily concerned with questions of morality.

You think you care about the layout of grocery stores…

I took psychic damage from this

While eroding the body of actual practitioners that are necessary to train the thing properly in the first place.

It’s not simply that the bots will take your job. It that was all, I wouldn’t really see that as a problem with AI so much as a problem with using employment to allocate life-sustaining resources.

But if we’re willingly training ourselves to remix old solutions to old problems instead of learning the reasoning behind those solutions, we’ll have a hard time making big, non-incremental changes to form new solutions for new problems.

It’s a really bad strategy for a generation that absolutely must solve climate change or perish.

Welllll… everything in software development is trade-offs.

It’s honestly pretty rare that one solution is unequivocally “better” than another, across every dimension you might care about (which includes non-technical things).

The kinds of egregious defects you might think of as brazen incompetence or laziness are more often the result of everyone (technical and non-technical alike) refusing the actively pursue one side of a trade-off and hoping that the devs can just “nerd harder”.

Technical constraints as in the case of the N64 example can actually help avoid the “just nerd harder” fallacy, because they prompt serious discussions about what you can and can’t compromise on.

Ironically, when we sit here as users and complain about games not being optimized in this way or that, we’re also refusing to engage in a conversation about trade-offs and insisting that devs just “nerd harder”.

Edit: That’s not to provide any excuses for the blatant financialization of the industry which prompts the whole “don’t trade off anything, just have them nerd harder” mindset… but to warn yall that even if the market wasn’t ruled by greedy suits, we would probably still be feeling like old games managed to do more with less, cuz well… trading away 500MB of bundle size so you can get better logging of resource management in production wasn’t really an option.

Crispy can also mean you’re contemplating the nature of Mario’s 8-bit existence

And CRISPR

Really Not a fan of when Words Are Arbitrarily In Title Case

Recently had a password that was acceptable for the account creation page on the website but too long for the login screen in the mobile app.

Took me a while to figure out that pasting into that field was just quietly dropping characters.

First thought: Damn, that’s crazy they went ahead and did it to get the footage even though they knew how bad it was.

Then: Well, I guess the fishermen were gonna do it no matter what, huh?

Wait, aren’t the fishermen worried that this footage could ruin their livelihood?

Wait… Maybe they believe that the legality of this practice already has ruined their livelihood, and they want it to stop but can’t compete unless regulation forces everyone to stop…

We need a dewey decimal system for clothing in order to clarify this taxonomy

Also the people who do the tagging and feedback for training tend to be underpaid third-world workers.

At first, I thought “remove this imposter” was a quote from ACB and I was like “Damn, she really woke up to this whole thing, huh?”

500 games on 10 CD-ROMs 👌

(485 of them are shareware demos you can only play for 15 minutes at a time, but still)

Soft on crime