Made of cats and bad code. Also known as hippocoder.
London, England.
Joined October 2011
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Robert William Cummings retweeted
November 1st is the #internationalselfportraitday and I've been doing them for 26 years straight. Here's this years portrait. The full list will be in the comments!
AI activists without self awareness:
It's all kinds of crazy. There are no longer any mass market operating systems that don't contain significant AI assisted work. They need to find something else, a new pacifier or chew toy to be busy with.
I see devs threatening devs over AI disclosure. Fact is I very much likely was programming in ASM before they were born. Should they care? NOPE. Should I care how they choose to develop? NOPE.
Devs should deffo be smart enough not to waste energy fighting devs.
Feed customers.
Predict that:
- developers will just lie about AI use and Valve will give up (eventually)
- hate mobs will attack someone's 2017 card game and other innocents
- some other shiny thing will happen and this will all blow over, especially as AAA games start using it more
Robert William Cummings retweeted
This is a challenge all game makers face, and it's magnified during downturns.
The solution? Make a great game, make it efficiently, and set the budget based on to the size of the audience that will pay for it.
Technology that helps achieve that is, in my opinion, good.
Looks like mobile stores, only missing adverts. But AI means that devs should be aiming at games that are hard to clone. It makes that ambition possible.
Seriously simple stuff being cloned has always happened every year, well before any AI stuff turned up.
Be ambitious.
Steam Next Fest looks like Slop Fest!
I'm not against a valuable technology like AI used well and by experienced devs, but the quantity of slop is overwhelmingly bad in Next Fest.
A shame because it harms peception of AI's benefit in development. Slop Fest is an abuse of that.
Robert William Cummings retweeted
Most people today treat multi-hour daily social media scrolling as a normal, low-cost way to unwind or stay connected. By 2050 it may look as reckless as mid-20th-century doctors endorsing cigarettes: a habit that eroded attention, sleep, and real relationships while being sold as harmless entertainment.
I'm glad Epic are openly tackling AI disclosure.
Ultimately it's not possible to continue working the way we used to, with an industry crash like this. It's necessary to be mature about it.
People will come to understand AI is not all about theft, and not all the same as slop.
One thing about adopting agentic coding workflows is your whole world isn't shattered when someone bothers you.
For a programmer, it used to be a real kick in the teeth being distracted. Could take quite a bit of time to resume the same pace, depending on the work.
I managed to completely destroy my back again by existing a couple of days ago. But I wonder what the root cause is? It's probably reaching for a cat or something.
Robert William Cummings retweeted
store.steampowered.com/app/4…
Hey, I'd love to see someone try this tiny arcade game. 5 modes of play, leaderboards, and a crown only one player on the leaderboard can wear at a time.
Seems like some kind of frenzy going on with AI fanboys to decompile everything. This is proper slop stirring.
If you want to use AI properly and build great software, learn how software is made and simply use AI to accelerate your own decisions.
Not quite. Modern engines including mine cook a serious amount of data and package it uniquely. Reverse engineering that != just modding or altering an old binary that does not do that.
My cooker is not available but my game is. So that's a good half missing, forever.
The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.
The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn't have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.
This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.
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