cableshaft

Oh, I thought I was trying to figure out some sort of layout by drafting individual rooms for some reason. The instructions were pretty confusing.

Yeah this has to be some of it. No coincidence certain industries in the market always shifts up or down significantly just before and after each election, as people try to read the tea leaves of how a shift in political power will affect them.

I have played 70 hours of Blue Prince and I still don't know what I'm doing in that game.

Still working for me. You might have to be logged in, though.

> during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.

I wish you were more wrong about that than you ended up being. A lot of companies pushed hard to bring people back to the office. Has made me disinclined to want to look for a new job because of it, since I can work from home all but a few days out of the year here.

The few times I have gone to the office, I commute for 1.5 hours each way, pay $20+ for a parking spot (or take the bus and spend $10 round trip), just to sit at a random desk and either work on my laptop or sit in on Teams/Slack calls anyway, maybe chat with 1-2 people for a few minutes in person over the course of the day. The only highlight of the day is getting to try a different restaurant than usual for lunch. Why bother?

I work for a consulting firm that rebranded itself as an AI solutions firm. So yeah, I'm pretty much expected to use A.I. pretty heavily to keep working here, and so I do.

So I'm guessing that experience will help me get whatever my next job is, but I also think my next job might end up being my last job in the field.

I'll either go into management, or just semi-retire and work on my own projects, or leave the field entirely and start working in the board game industry, I don't know, something.

If I switched fields I'll probably take a major pay cut though (if I go into the board game industry I'll probably be lucky to make a quarter of what I'm making right now). But paycuts might be coming anyway to the software engineering field as a whole before too long anyway.

Keeping up the motivation was already difficult before A.I., I'd already dealt with so much startup, small business, and corporate crap over the years it was starting to pile up. I might need to take a sabbatical at some point, or at least a couple of months off.

I've been working in software engineering in some form or another for a little over 20 years now.

I did let myself get sucked up into it for a while, mainly because I found a group that wanted to develop their own projects and felt it would be interesting to join them and learn how to code smart contracts (and I did learn a decent amount about it).

I was never a direct part of any launched projects though, I mainly just sat in on their calls and helped the devs debug a few things when people got stuck on something.

As they got excited about various NFT projects, I usually got something to be part of the group and show my support, usually a cheap one (like $30 here or there), but a few times I did spend more than that stupidly (like $100-200). Thankfully nothing too crazy though.

I spend more on my board game hobby every six months than I did the entire time I was paying attention to NFTs. Other people in the group did go full degen sometimes though, and spent way too much on it. I tried to dissuade them from the worst of it, but there were some true-believers in the group, thought everything was an investment.

I also never put any new money into it, it was always with Ethereum I had already bought long ago cheaply, so while the coins were worth $1000+ at the time, they were like $40 when I bought it originally.

I still have all the NFTs I bought, I never sold any, and whatever I bought all went to zero probably. That's usually what I do, I just buy things and never sell them, unless I have to make space, and usually then I sell for a massive loss (like my board games, why do they have to take up so much damn space?)

I still maintain that smart contracts are interesting technology, and would like to see something more interesting done than using a Collectible Card Game model with pictures that tries to get people to spend obscene amounts of money for pretty much nothing.

At the time it did seem like more than that though, it wasn't just buying a picture like people like to claim, it was like buying a membership to a club. My local Pickleball club wants people to spent $1500 a year for their memberships also. But as it turns out most of those NFT clubs were more promises and vibes than execution (Bored Apes did seem to be one of the rare ones to actually pull off something that felt more like a VIP club, and do various in-person things with owning the NFTs). But I never owned any Bored Apes, just followed the news about them for a while.

At one point I wanted to create a decentralized game achievement system with it, kind of like existing achievements but you don't need to rely on a console system or the game itself to track it, you just have a digital and system agnostic trophy, generated and signed by the game so you know it's official, that you can keep as long as there are smart contracts, but like every idea that pops in my head, I eventually get distracted by other ideas.

> Basically, people use them for photos, kitchen timers, quick recipe lookups, quick questions, and "can a dog eat the thing I just dropped".

Accurate. I ask about the dog eating thing at least once a month. Most recently it was cilantro and tomatoes.

I don't have much. I wasn't involved with the company for very long. He just reached out to me, said he wanted to make games based on Lord of the Rings, he gave me some parameters, and I teamed up with Rob, an artist I'd worked with on my Clock Legends game previously, to make the game. I think we got like a whole $250 for it (total, not each), it wasn't much, but it was the first time I got paid for a game I made.

Then he wanted to do a second game, a game like the classic arcade game Tapper set in the Prancing Pony Inn, and we got it about halfway finished (playable, but missing some art and music/sound), but then Rob lost interest in doing the art so it remained unfinished. I probably have the unfinished game somewhere on an external hard drive somewhere.

I remember that at the time I got pretty good at playing the actual Tapper arcade game because I played it a bunch to get a good feel for how it played and to use for reference.

At that point we drifted out of touch and I don't know anything more about the company that's not publicly available.

I think I remember that later he asked me to help him get the leaderboards working for the Save The Ring game on the ArmorGames site, and he gave me some code as a reference that I could embed into the Flash game. But that's pretty much everything.

Probably other people worked with him a lot closer and for a lot longer.

I thought harder, but it was about more trivial things, like how to get this stupid library written by someone else to do what the business requirements say I have to make it do.

Something that doesn't really benefit me in the long term, unless I want to specialize in working with that library.

Like for example, I spent so much time over five years fighting and figuring out a bunch of the quirks of AG-Grid while working for a wealth management client, and now I'm on a project for a different client (and a different industry) that doesn't use it at all, so all that knowledge is mostly useless.

Haha, nice to see this pop back up. I used to live on this site, making Flash games, chatting on the forums, and as a member of the Clock Crew. Some of my games were fairly popular at the time, including Proximity and some Clock Crew themed games.

I also made (with Rob as the artist) the first commissioned game for what would eventually be the really popular Armor Games site. When he got started he was wanting to do LOTR themed games and was calling his site Games of Gondor, but he didn't stick with it long probably because of legal reasons. It was called Save The Ring!

Here's my user profile, same name as I am on here: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com/

#1 is a big reason for our house. The house (and garage) badly needs a significant declutter, but we are both working professionals and don't have the energy to make a significant enough dent, especially since we both have hobbies where we accumulate more stuff all the time as well (especially me, I impulse buy board games and don't cull the ones I'm not playing often enough).

It doesn't help that I design board games too, and have too much of an easy excuse to want to get these games so I can 'research' them.

And because I'm mentally tired all the time after work, that also seems to lower my willpower. And clicking the 'buy' button online is way too easy to do.

We did used to host a monthly game designer playtest night before the pandemic, but our house had a lot less stuff back then. And being stuck in the house during the pandemic with nothing to do but play solo board games and video games (and also the uncertainty if I was even going to make it through the pandemic, since I already had respiratory issues from asthma) definitely accelerated the bad impulse buying habits I already had.

We have made slight dents in it, but the significant declutter probably won't happen until the next time I'm in between jobs, assuming there's at least a month in between jobs.

There's more to big moated software than just code.

It's full of the results of millions of meetings, decisions, and feedback from users over the course of many years. A.I. can't just one shot all of that in an afternoon.

I'm working on software that's highly driven by A.I. development right now, and while we're going faster than we would if we were developing it by hand, there's still tons of discussion happening between us and the client, disagreements, decisions to be made about UI and layouts and architecture and other things going on, gaps that don't necessarily be caught by A.I. in the moment, etc. It's still taking 6+ months to put together just Phase 1 for a new corporate web application, with a team of 15+ people.

And we also have to be somewhat careful how many AI tokens we are using because it's not cheap (but we're still using a lot).

Just because models are getting better, that doesn't mean we're getting to AGI anytime soon. It will likely require more than just 'a better model' to get to AGI, and it might not even be fully possible.

That being said, companies have to make their money back on this eventually and they're already jacking up their prices, even if we get to AGI I'm not sure most people will be able to afford to use it to handle everything in their lives, at least not for quite a while (and companies won't be able to afford to replace every human with an AI counterpart).

It's already getting expensive to go too heavy with something like Claude, to the point where my company hosts internal seminars on how to reduce token count (for the company's employees) and also runs out of tokens before the end of the month for the company every month, and we're going pretty heavy on A.I. usage within the company.

And I highly doubt companies are going to just leave servers running AGI models going just so it can do some sort of hostile takeover. It's still ultimately reliant on electricity and massive compute power.

I stated she had a day job making pretty good money. That's not a stay at home wife.

Also didn't say they don't need to compromise, obviously having children requires compromises to be made in your life, there's no way you can live it entirely the same way as you used to anymore. I said they don't need to totally give up on it forever. Thinking something has to be all or nothing is the opposite of compromise. That's essentially a self-imposed ultimatum.

It's also not backed by history. There's plenty of women authors who have children and continue writing books, and have prolific writing careers. It can slow down or delay getting books out, sure, but so can plenty of other things in life besides children, which I've also seen happen (like multiple 1+ year long writer's blocks): https://slate.com/culture/2022/09/women-writers-motherhood-h...

Lately I've been playing a lot of cooperative games with a lot of clever card play, often against some sort of boss or some other win/loss condition, and usually it needs a lot of expansions so I can keep trying new combinations of heros/villains/scenarios. I can set them up and play a game or two solo most evenings.

So the ones I keep coming back to are Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, Legendary (mostly Marvel since it has so many expansions you can mix and match, but I also have and like DC, James Bond, and Alien), Ashes Ascendancy (also Ashes Reborn), Marvel Champions, Aeon's End, Arkham Horror - The Card Game.

Memoir '44 would be in that list too if you could play that solo. I love that game, but I haven't had a buddy to play it with in a long time. BoardGameArena has a great implementation but I don't like playing against random people on there as much. Supposedly there's a new app coming that will let you play solo, so I'm looking forward to that.

I've also tried the following recently and they're pretty high up too, they might eventually join the games above: Primal: The Awakening, Star Trek Captain's Chair, Marvel United, Boss Fighters QR, and Bullet.

Smaller, shorter games I enjoy include Cursed!?, Rove, Hoki, Fliptoons, D-Day Pocket, All is Bomb, Palm Island, and Harmonies

> why must we choose between having a great career and being a great parent. Why is it a zero-sum game?

I had basically this exact conversation with a close family member, who sees having children as being forced to give up on her dreams of being a writer forever, which I just don't get (she's already written and released 4 novels which have made some decent money, just not enough to do it fulltime, and still has a day job in marketing that makes good money).

For a little while it will likely mean a shift in focus, sure, but that doesn't mean you have to give up on something forever. I've mostly taken a break from designing games the past couple of years (unrelated to children, just not as motivated lately, there's so many great board games out there already I'm trying to just enjoy playing them for a while), but I haven't totally given up on being a game designer (plus I've already released several games in the past, that can't be taken away from me, even if basically no one is still playing those games nowadays).

Plus children could also help enrich your life experience that lead to further inspiration for your creative efforts anyway, especially since it seems like the adult life experience society encourages nowadays seems to be sit in front of a computer all day for a day job, sit in front of a computer all evening for side hustle, get takeout, doomscroll/tv for a bit before going to sleep, repeat.

I don't keep up with it anymore. It used to be a 3+ times daily habit, now it's mainly just when I think about it (which could be several days, or more), and I barely check more than a couple of threads now and then move on, usually.

I don't feel like I'm getting as much from coming here as I used to, so it's mostly just idle curiosity now.

Part of that might be just because of me, too, as I shift more to letting Claude do more of the heavy lifting, reading a bunch of technical articles seems less useful to me. But if something seems interesting enough I'll still click it, I just don't feel like I need to 'keep up' as much anymore.

Creatives have always found inspiration from what they consume (AI has nothing to do with it). My partner writes, and eventually gets to the point where she has to take a break from plotting and writing and watch tv shows or read books. When she says she needs to refill her well, I know she's about to want to watch tv shows again for a little bit.

I design games. I can't even count the number of times something someone said, or a game I've played or watched a review of, has sparked an idea for new game, especially a board game (which most of the time doesn't work out once it gets in front of players, but that's okay). It's probably been over a hundred times by now.

People love highlighting quotes from poems and stories that they find inspirational for their own lives somehow. You want to know how I know? Kindle used to tell me, with saying how many other people highlighted a specific passage (it might still do that, but I mostly listen to audiobooks right now, so of course I won't see them). Also social media is flooded with people sharing quotes from various books or poems or sayings from people.

That's all this is.

But because it's said by someone who works with A.I. and thus is thinking about the quote with that frame of reference, you had to twist it into some anti-A.I. sentiment, implying that he's doing something perverted or not normal by daring to find inspiration in a quote.

I have done exactly that before with a company, but they hadn't ghosted me.

But this is about them ghosting you. So presumably even if you ask them this they don't get back to you, otherwise they're not ghosting you.

You could be waiting to hear back from one company before telling another company that may have extended an offer yes or no, and it can take a while before you determine if you're ghosted or if they're just busy and haven't made a decision yet.

Maybe there's a bit more to a company and its software than the quantity of code it generates? And maybe there's a built in moat that a lot of these companies have that takes a lot of effort (and marketing, etc) to overcome?

People don't just jump social networks because a new one exist, there has to be a compelling reason to migrate over to it. And for a lot of people, there needs to be a sufficient number of people (and probably existing friends) already using the app for them to expend the effort to start using it.

It's not like there haven't been other attempts at competitors for these over the years, and you haven't heard about them probably because none of them ever got any traction. And that takes more than just building software.

Like DuckDuckGo has been competing with Google search for years (it first came out back in 2008, it looks like), and likely is way better developed than anything someone will crank out with A.I. in a short period of time. And it still has a tiny fraction of Google's marketshare.

I'm not saying there won't eventually be other competitors to these, but it'll take more than just whipping up an MVP with A.I. in a few weeks.

The worst that's happened, that I'm aware of, is I made a change with A.I. that I didn't realize broke something else (that I wasn't even aware our reports supported, it was new to me), and apparently QA didn't think to check for it either (although I did ask them specifically to verify everything in the report still worked), so it made it into Production, clients complained, and I was told about it and got it fixed over the next couple of days.

But that could have happened if I wasn't using A.I. also, because it wasn't something I was aware I had to check for and I could have also broken that same thing while doing the work manually.

We don't have AI agents do anything directly in Production, so I think this is about the worst that can happen with our setup right now.

My Yahoo Mail had all my emails from when I was in college on it (back when people used to chat with each other via email, also AIM). I still used it sometimes for collecting junk mail and as a backup address for my gmail, or to reread a few of old college emails once in a blue moon, but otherwise rarely logged in. Apparently it had been a year because I got that same message as you did. What a shock.

Never been an issue until then (I must have gone over a year without logging in at some point before then and still was able to log in), and then suddenly 'screw you, a chunk of your past is gone with no way to recover it'.

I was so upset when I realized what happened. I'm still annoyed by it. I know I should have exported it all away a long time ago so it's on me, but I didn't think to do so, I had gotten so used to it always being there.

A year of inactivity before total deletion is way too short for email, imo.

Same!

There are older structures and artifacts than 250 years, they're just not European in origin. Like Cahokia Mounds in Illinois: https://cahokiamounds.org/

Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.

> Executive pay might seem astronomical, but it is often commensurate with the level of stress and responsibility involved.

I call bull on that. Employees often have just as much stress, often imposed on them from those higher up, where if they don't do well they could get fired and it could mean they can't put food on the table.

Several times I've worked in environments where the stress was incredibly high, and once it even put me in the hospital after a long stretch of working 70 hour weeks to satisfy the insane deadlines my CEO boss wanted (this was at a startup).

Whereas if an executive screws up they just golden parachute to another cushy gig elsewhere, oftentimes, because even if they screw up, they're still valued as having experience running companies by other companies. And even if they cannot, they still likely got paid enough that they won't be struggling financially if they go through a period without a job.

Video Games:

- Donkey Kong Country 1&2 on SNES

- Yoshi's Island on SNES

- Picross 3D: Round 2 on 3DS

- Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on original Game Boy

- Proximity (old Flash game I made, but I've played hundreds of times, and it's the only game design of mine in which I've done that, out of several dozen)

Board Games:

- Legendary: A Marvel Deckbuilding Game

- Marvel Champions

- Lord of the Rings - The Card Game

- Aeon's End

- Ashes Reborn / Ashes Ascendancy (they rebooted it under a new name recently, but the other content is still compatible)

- Carcassonne

- Cribbage

I've been a software nerd all my life (and there was a time where I worked 60 hours a week at a startup working hard to make mobile games), but there's just been so much extra crap associated with it (especially web development, and especially corporate web development, what currently pays my bills) over the years that it's worn me down and I'm happy to let A.I. churn through the hard or frustrating or endless amounts of boilerplate bits, and let me focus on other things.

Part of me still wishes we were making websites with just HTML, CSS, PHP, and a little Javascript here and there (before AJAX). I'm still not convinced all this extra SPA functionality is really needed for most corporate website needs (something like Google maps or real-time chatting, sure, other things not so much), but I do it because they insist.

I also really like game design, and I had a fairly simple game idea that I prototyped a physical version of and playtested a few times and thought, 'yeah, this is pretty fun'.

But I don't have the energy to code it in my spare time anymore. Was curious how close to a working MVP it could get with me writing up a specification yesterday with the help of ChatGPT (after I brainstormed a few aspects of the design), and dumped that spec into a new repo on GitHub, and about 20 minutes later, it had a fully functional game that worked exactly like my physical prototype.

It was still missing other features, like tutorials and stats and sharing abilities and the like, and I'd like to adjust the presentation some, and the computer opponent A.I. was a bit weak and could have been stronger, but it was fully functional and even looked pretty good, kind of like a Wordle presentation, which was what I was going for anyway.

Something that would have taken me probably 40 hours of dedicated work at least to get everything working and looking as nice as it did.

So yeah, it's kind of like 'well what's the point of me manually coding this anymore'.

What I really like about software was solving puzzles, but now I can focus on the more interesting puzzle of what makes a good game design and 'how best to present this to players' instead of how to get five different libraries and/or APIs to play nice together and learn how it all works.

If coding hadn't become some labyrinthian monstrosity and got out of your way when coding, I probably would want to keep coding more.

Some languages/frameworks get close to that, Lua/Love2D is pretty smooth except when it gets to you wanting to distribute it on platforms other than PC/Mac/Linux, or integrate with external libraries, or for me work with shaders since I'm still pretty weak with shaders.

But even then, it was hard to deny how much faster A.I. could code a feature and I've started getting more hands-off there as well.

That being said, work has gotten less fulfilling, since I'm not doing any actual design work really, just implementing features and making them look according to Figma specifications or fixing bugs, so that's gotten less fulfilling without the busywork of solving coding puzzles (now it's 'how to say this to the A.I. to get it to fix this right, which is still a puzzle but a much weaker one). I'm starting to get tempted to make a go of starting my own business so I can have more autonomy again.

I've definitely had a lot of these same experiences (in fact I've been fighting it on one particular issue the past couple of days and I'm pretty much just giving up and going back to solving it manually now).

But it still seems to get it right (or at least close enough to right that I keep using it) more often than it gets into these traps.