BugoTheCat

@Grady_Booch @sukh_saroy We are moving in cycles (we are so back :), but the output is still gonna be stochastic in nature even with a precise json description, unlike 1:1 mapping from real programming languages where it's the only place I feel like I have full control of what to expect.

@sukh_saroy And what do we call a language with a well-defined syntax and semantics suitable for generating executable artifacts? A programming language. We call it a programming language.

Prompt engineering is dead. Nobody is writing english to chatbots anymore. The best outputs are coming from people who write prompts like code. It's called json prompting. and once you see it, you can't go back:

@SandyofCthulhu @GamingRoom There are also actual attempts without mods but real code, to port Doom to work on CGA, EGA, text mode and other weird modes natively, like FastDoom for DOS, but recently two DOS port tried to rewrite the code to run in 8088/286 with very low single digits FPS of course :)

@GamingRoom Wow. Is there a CGA one?

All I can say is every computer developer I know was desperate to be allowed to move onto VGA. Zero of us preferred EGA. Also, it's more complicated than CGA, EGA, VGA, because there was also Tandy graphics. Tandy was the proprietary 16-color system for the Radio Shack computers. It was 16 colors, like EGA, but they were a DIFFERENT 16 colors. It was kind of insane. In 1992, we went to a convention, in which we were showing off MicroProse's new games, which worked on IBM and VGA (everyone was pushing Amiga at the time) and a man in a business suit rushed up and pumped our hands, and nearly broke into tears, so grateful that we were supporting the IBM. Also an Amiga fan got mad that we were doing so. Because he wanted the IBM to die. Anyway, below are the palettes for the Tandy and the EGA but I'm not saying which is which. Do you know?

@revenant_MMXX That's why I still appreciate playing old games, even those with that puzzle solution that makes absolutely not fucking sense :)

Perfect example of how "quality of life" is often just a euphemism for erasing all the tension & fun and making games into visible checklists instead of something you experience in an emergent way.

@JuanIsidro @revenant_MMXX Are we in an era where we frequently use Luddite even for things having nothing to do with AI? What cringe..

@revenant_MMXX I think I addressed that. No, you’re not supposed to get that information. The numbers are a backend thing, not something the user needs to see (unless, again, CRPGs/JRPGs). By Luddite I meant you’re frequently against modernity in your tweets (no matter if wrong or right).

@ThePrimeagen Everybody likes to signal that they are first adopters, positive with new tech and are really making something work out of it, that's it. It's all social media clout.

i still think about this tweet every now and then

@potterypannel @fromsoftserve In my first playthrough of DS3 I died so many times that I thought embers were meaningless if I am going to get 30% up and then lose it immediately the very next minute. So much that I once sold 30 embers for souls. I don't do that anymore as I got much better.

@fromsoftserve On the other hand it also made the game quite frustrating. I was stuck quite hard on an early boss (I believe the Pursuer) and to me it felt quite brutal for the game to get even harder as you struggle. What do people who like DS2 think about it?

"so dark souls 2 wasn't directed by miyazaki and its not really connected to ds1 or ds3, and while I think it's a good game, it's not a good souls game" "that's not true. what the fuck are you talking about? ds2 references ds1, ds3 references ds2, and it's an amazing souls game"

@potterypannel @fromsoftserve It's not a big deal, you need die 10 times to get at 50% compared to something like Demon Souls for example where people never made a fuzz about it.

@fromsoftserve I dont particularly have a horse in this race cus i never beat DS2 and have only played through DS3 once (DS1 is my baby though) but I've always wondered what DS2 lovers think about the hollowing mechanic of losing max HP every time you die

@nic_carter @xwanyex AI cultist cancel culture

@xwanyex I think we should actually ostracize people for Zitronism. Like there should be social and economic consequences for being that wrong. Because it hinders cancer research, anti aging research, self driving cars etc. it’s not only wrong it’s a profoundly evil viewpoint

Nobody cares or needs to hear this from me, but I’m just registering my opinion that: 1) LLMs are a totally ordinary technology. But so were cars. Ordinary technologies can have big impacts. 2) They are *very obviously* not reasoning and the way that smart people specifically trick themselves on this point is critical to understanding many things about the world.

@tsoding Someone once tried to convince me to do ++i instead of i++. I knew it was pointless but got stuck with it. I only imagine INC AX when I do so it stayed.

People often ask me why do I choose to do pre-increments in my for-loops instead of post-increments. The answer is actually very simple. I don't fucking know, stop asking me that.

@exQUIZitely Also early 3D. Reason I enjoy more and can adapt on visuals of early FPS or something like King's Field which looks extremely outdated but I can more easily distinguish 3D space and imagine the whole map structure as I navigate. Simplicity and not overblown details

Studies have shown that older games with simpler graphics had a much more stimulating effect on a gamer's brain - actively "training" creative skills and imagination, with positive impact on memory building and abstraction skills. If that sounded to scientific, have a look at the 4 images. The older ones among you will recognize some classic games. In the first one your brain would turn that into a "Rambo" style scenario, dropped in the jungle fighting against hordes of enemies. Have a closer look at the main character - that's 3 colors and a pile of pixels. Your mind does the rest. In the second image your brain converts the image into an epic space battle against aliens, with you sitting in a spaceship, fighting wave after wave. Again, have a closer look at the aliens. One (!) color, 2 animation phases. Now look at your "spaceship". In the third image you are teleported by your creative mind into a fantastic world with heroes, battles, an open world, portals and so on. A magic world, that was created aong the way, by your mind. The fourth picture turns you into Bruce Lee. The common thing in all of those examples is your brain "filling in the blanks" - and that's EXACTLY the part that's positively stimulating it. Now think of hyper-realistic modern games with graphics so good that your brain doesn't need to do any "imagining" anymore... instead it turns into pure consumption mode. Brain waves look entirely different then. No creative areas will fire up. The reason why many retro gamers have fond memories of old games is not just nostalgia. It is connected to what those games have done to our brains and imaginative minds at the time. They didn't oversaturate us - they merely hinted at the right direction and our brains did the rest. Old games were similar to books - the world was created by the reader/player. And those worlds looked different for each and everyone of us.

@Invinium Thinking about it, they exactly did what Demon Souls did, and there are many other things in the game making me wonder they got inspiration from DeS.

@Invinium I think I would have loved it to go from firelink to the village then reach the castle. Like going from more desolate places gradually to more grandiose. And Lothric is kinda tough and obnoxious for new players imho. Village is my favourite early area.

In regards to teleporting to the first area, IMO DS3 gets away with it because of what came before it. DS2 established the multifaceted usages of the bonfire and DeS already had you teleport to the first area. So DS3 isn't really breaking any rules.

@ProficFicus I don't see wobbly textures, lack of subpixel or other artifacts, something that would tell me it's exclusively mimicking PS1. It's just nearest pixel and it looks ok imho. As long as it's stable and not shaking or wobbly.

I hate forced PS1 graphics.

@FanaticsCollect I want the Souls-brained study now

A Stanford study found that people who played Pokémon heavily as kids developed a small region of the brain that responds specifically to Pokémon characters. Researchers scanned adults who grew up playing on Game Boy and showed them images of Pokémon like Pikachu and Bulbasaur. Their brains lit up in the same exact spot, a consistent area in the visual cortex tied to recognizing specific categories of objects. The reason comes down to childhood. When you’re young, your brain is more flexible, and spending hours memorizing hundreds of similar-looking Pokémon essentially trained it to carve out space just for them. (via @Stanford)

@awesomekling At least Rust is not pushed as the only way to code and if you use anything else you are outdated. Unlike AI.

The Rust community is pretty annoying, but the anti-Rust community is on a whole other level of insufferable. Guys, grow up, there's more to life. 😅

@r_aguilita @agomarmusic It's exactly the opposite. It's very easy with image, video and music gens to generate something complete even if elements of it feel wrong, but some wrong inserted code in software could produce bugs or crash the app. Software is delicate and needs more attention.

@agomarmusic As a programmer, I understand why using AI is almost mandatory, the final product is what matters, not the individual lines of code, but in music, every single note matters, why would someone want to hear music generated by AI.

While Suno is generating 7 million songs per day, some of us are still crafting music the old way, composing it by hand and recording it with the best musicians to create unique soundtracks one at a time. No AI slop EVER

@trevorlasn @neogoose_btw And you have to code review the changes, accept small changes, know what you are doing, don't expect 10x miracles. I've recently seen someone forking something I did and vibe coding changes by trusting Claude without knowing what they are doing and it was awful when I looked it.

@BugoTheCat @neogoose_btw yeah it's not deterministic. but "here are the exact files, here's the constraint, change this specific thing" consistently beats "fix this bug" by a mile. the floor goes way up even if the ceiling is random

I got 2 exact same AI generated contributions and it is intimidating how much code they are generating. The one on the left is the AI generated PR code, the one on the right is the actual fix needed. The bug is SUPER easy while the agent is likely mislead by the context provided in the issue which is leading to 100x more code to fix it. My change was also AI generated, it's just the way you phrase your request. It's not a surprise Garry generates 100k LOC a week

@trevorlasn @neogoose_btw Even if there is a "right" prompt, the whole thing is wishful thinking. It's not like in another context one will be able to predict which way of prompting will always lead to the best results.

@neogoose_btw the prompt is everything. i've seen the same bug get a 3 line fix or a 500 line rewrite depending entirely on how you describe it to the model

@f4micom Similar to what happened in Greece long ago. We were ridiculed in global news, the country that banned gaming in outside places. It even affected some local internet cafe businesses. I thought then we were the only ones.

when i was a teen visiting some friends staying at their place in a somewhat big italian city i always played outrun 2 with them at a local arcade there, but visiting again recently i noticed it disappeared turns out italy BANNED ALL VINTAGE ARCADE CABINETS THEY UNIRONICALLY MADE PAC-MAN ILLEGAL