David Nelson

If you want to have fun playing with the earliest games of Spiderweb Software, reminder that you can get a nice, new, working copy of Blades of Exile (From 1998!) on itch. Users made tons of cool adventures for it, all still available! nqn.itch.io/blades-of-exile

@Aaronontheweb That said, I would venture that 90+% of AI users today are in a similar position and just haven’t had their turn yet.

@Aaronontheweb What a cacophony of failure, including by the author, which he never acknowledges (despite claiming in the comments that he did). The incident was bad enough but he is shooting his recovery prospects in the foot by refusing to taking responsibility.

Agent guidance / prompts are never fully safe. Only procedural code at tool calling boundaries can give you any real security guarantees and those still put the onus on the human approver to review and fully understand what the agent is proposing to do.

i think we overestimate the value of the ability and power to make the big up front broad jump. and we underestimate the value of the insight and patience that shows us when, how, and where to take the next baby step.

@patio11 This is entirely leaving out the parts of the connotation of the term that are integral to it being used disparagingly. Such as “the company could have handled this during normal course of business such that it would not have required missing the ballet class but chose not to”.

(“Heroics” here is a term of art generally used disparagingly to mean “an individual or small group expends market-superior levels of intense effort to avert a negative outcome.”)

This is both a really rough adjustment for individuals/orgs and also a culture one can reasonably opt into or not.

Cause I named it that 10+ years ago in Squirrel, then I fixed it so you didn't need to, but Discord forked Squirrel from day one then never updated it

Every State actor: "wait, they just... voluntarily root kitted themselves?"

@spiderwebsoft …and come back to finish them. Also FWIW, if you released Nethergate for a third time I would buy it for a third time 🙂Still my favorite, despite my love for the unique worlds of Geneforge and Exile (which will always be Exile to me).

@spiderwebsoft As a customer and fan for nearly all of those 32 years, thank you for the transparency. I was one who bounced off of QW1: yes for the graphics, but also because I couldn’t get invested in the factions (the gameplay changes I was fine with). One day I’ll need a Spiderweb fix…

New Blog Post! We've concluded our Queen's Wish series of RPGs. These games contain some of our best design and worst decisions. I'm very proud of them and never want to think about them again. Here's a postmortem, with sales figures! bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/queens-wish-…

@Aaronontheweb @bertyJobbo And unlike delegating to another developer, taking the time to explain what you want and review the work will not yield any benefits in the future.

@bertyJobbo That's a better way of putting it - I'll spend more time explaining and fixing it than just writing it myself.

Have an Akka .NET feature I need to write and I don't have a good way of explaining why I feel this way, but after looking at what's required I instantly decided "nah, there's zero chance I can delegate any of this to an LLM - have to write it by hand"

sent this to the team today everything great comes from being able to delay gratification for as long as possible and it feels like we're collectively losing our ability to do that

@shanselman 2 for 1!

"just dropped" "killed every ____ with this one simple" "absolute game changer" "here's the real unlock" "this 20 line md skill changes everything"

@Aaronontheweb @AutismCapital Same thing they did to TikTok, they couldn’t do anything to them directly so they threatened to sue Apple and Google for allowing it in the stores. It won’t go anywhere, they have no idea what they are up against. But they will waste a lot of time and energy trying.

@AutismCapital they're not going to be able to do shit to Linux - who are they going to sue, a bunch of OSS contributors?

🚨FYI: Gavin Newsom has already signed California Assembly Bill 1043 which mandates that operating systems including Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD implement system-level age (identity) verification. This takes effect on January 1st, 2027. Colorado also has a similar act called SB26-051 which is currently advancing through the committees and ready for full Senate consideration. It would come into effect on January 1st, 2028 if passed. Utah, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama all currently have app layer verification laws, but not OS level YET. So OS level verification isn't a future thing. It's happening now. They are chokepointing the internet. Enjoy these days.

Hi everyone! I was informed this morning that I am no longer employed at Sonar. With that, I’m seeking a new role and would appreciate your support. If you hear of any opportunities or just want to catch up, please send me a message or comment below. #OpenToWork

From a liability perspective, yes. The problem is the hype and normalization of a risk profile we usually go out of our way to warn people about. There is a real unbounded risk with this software which cannot be meaningfully constrained once untrusted input can influence system-level actions.

@AskPerplexity If anyone wants, you know, an actual office suite, we're here.

For example, we can all probably relate to this scenario. You're looking at some existing code thinking "wow, this is dumb. Whos the idiot that wrote this. That makes no sense". Then you go ahead and make a change, not understanding the ramifications. Often you realize you were the idiot who wrote it 😂, but you also then remember the context of WHY that it exists in the first place. More then ever the context of WHY matters. Currently that lives in peoples heads. In my experience, software systems die when the context is lost. Typically that's because people leave companies and all that tribal knowledge (context) is lost.

@Aaronontheweb @bertyJobbo @raimeyuu A headline-making bug at a national airline was caused by the error from a failed confirmation email resulting in a retry of the entire purchase process. Source: I was sharing desk space with the people who caused it when the reports started rolling in.

@bertyJobbo @raimeyuu A concept I try to teach our team constantly, because we work on a complex OSS project that is used in lots of mission-critical applications, is the notion of a change's "blast radius" Introducing automatic, global behaviors into the HTTP Client is "high blast radius"

Having automatic retries built directly into the HTTP client itself feels like a gigantic footgun waiting to happen - especially true if you have third party libraries that resolve clients from DI. Always prefer to do this explicitly where you know you need + can see it versus having unseen magic do it everywhere

It's called the Hellstone. We're all ncreasingly divorced from physicality, so we wanted to build a monument for not only our international teams to gather around, but for the rest of the gaming community to rally around. We wanted people to get excited for the next big game on their list, and we wanted to do it in a way that employed skill & craft, by hand, to drive people outside to see it, and to talk about it. So many people assumed it was AI, or even a "UE5 render." Expectations are understandably low. We saw by the reaction, however, that excitement is at an all-time high. We hope that your favourite game is announced, whatever it may be. We hope that the people making it feel empowered enough to go out and talk to you about it. We hope that the physical world still plays a large role in the adventure that is the video games industry. We at Larian will continue to invest in ways to be tangible, and present, and open with what is clearly an excited and engaged audience. The level of skill & craftsmanship in creative spaces has never been higher, and I hope we can all make time to go out into the world and appreciate it when we see it. That physicality between the process and audience is that maintains a necessary level of mutual respect. It is very much ok to be excited about video games, and we can't wait to see you in person, when we're ready, on the road to Divinity. Oh and thanks for not setting it on fire.