dev0p

Skill issue

Hard disagree. The demoscene is entirely comprised of code that produces art, with insane tricks which are themselves art. Which sort of blurs the entire concept, as you can stretch this reasoning to kind of encompass anything, as per the pen and paper example you provided.

For example, is .kkrieger demo? Is it art? Is the game itself art or just the textures, 3d models and locations and enemies and everything else that it produces? Though only the code generates everything, like in demoscenes, so is the code art?

Kind of subjective really.

There have certainly been growing pains, and the term "vibecoding" was forged in a long gone era (almost two years ago!!!!) where AI generated code was actually bad.

I can safely say, especially with how close to actual perfection Claude Opus 5.5 is, that it's no longer the case.

Also people generally hate change. The ethical concerns around AI are also understandable and I agree with the vast majority of them, but the vast majority of the "AI BAD" crowd are simply irrationally angry at it and completely unwilling to engage with it in any kind of good faith.

They'll come around. I'm starting to see some change in the gaming community, which was 200% against any form of AI just a little while ago, and now that they're using it to reverse engineer, decompile, mod and mesh together old games there is a lot of people starting to say "Yeah AI is bad, but...".

There is some CRAZY stuff being being worked on which are objectively good for society as a whole which would have you sound insane just last year, and it's only going to get crazier with each new model.

Demoscene

I skimmed through your article, and I'll address the bolded points

> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen

That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.

That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".

Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.

The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:

> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.

> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.

> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.

> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?

Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.

But, again, that has always been true!

How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.

And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.

> Code as Art

Code is code.

Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.

If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.

If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.

Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.

This kind of mindset baffles me.

Of the story? No.

Of our society as we know it? Maybe.

Yeah no that can't be good

Long since. I witnessed it myself back in my high school days, as fellow classmates routinely behaved in revolting ways towards teachers. Outright emotional abuse, sometimes even physical, often for no other reason than simple boredom.

Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.

Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.

And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.

tl;dr yes, also water is now even wetter.

Did you try it?

If they lost control of a self-replicating swarm of AI agents, coordinating themselves to hack their way into every possible system, it might have already gone off.

While the initial incident is more akin to a biological outbreak than an actual explosion, the possible consequences on the table do indeed include eventual nuclear annihilation.

If someone accidentally caused damage to infrastructure or living beings while using any tool, they would be held liable to the fullest extent of the law.

AI is a tool, and it won't be long before the damage caused by its improper use affects real human beings. These were warning shots.

The most absurd part is that everyone agrees, governments and AI companies included, that the scale of the potential damage and the long-lasting effects of losing control of AI should not be underestimated. Yet, at the same time, they downplay this incident, which somehow makes their behaviour even more reckless than it already was.

It's like they're tinkering with a world-ending nuclear bomb, and it accidentally blows up a small facility. "Damn, that was close. Good thing it was just a contained blast, huh?" And then they go straight back to tinkering with it, none the wiser. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if it did already go off, and they are covering it up.

Completely irresponsible behaviour.

Are you sure the client and the server are powerful enough? Do they support all required codecs? I have issues with 4k movies because my Jellyfin is served by a mac mini, and my client is an old Android tablet that doesn't support hardware decoding, but that is hardly Jellyfin's fault. Though they just updated ffmpeg to the latest version, so it might help.

What features is it missing, exactly?

I wonder how much it would cost?

It's something that's been bugging me for a while: once we reach a "good enough" small model, and qwen 3.8 27b is already getting damn close to it, does it make sense to just bake weights and everything directly into an ASIC, and use that for highly optimized inference? AFAIK only groq and cerebras are moving in that direction, and only to be providers themselves... It would be a dream to buy one for <$1k.

"Sean we forgive you" became a meme for a reason. The fact that to this day they keep working on the game is truly noteworthy; they could have called it quits at any point in time, especially after NMS got good enough.

Obviously it's not purely ego driven (if at all), so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.

I suppose the fact that it sold so much throughout the years gave them enough runway to actually work on it with no worries? And I suppose that people would be skeptical of a new game launch by this studio, thus dooming them to work on NMS for eternity... we'll see how Light No Fire's launch will do.

Programming, as in manually typing the code, is a means to an end.

While I do enjoy coding, building things is what was rewarding, not actually laying down brick after brick after brick after brick.

I've done that for 10+ years. The fact that I don't have to do that anymore is a relief that cannot be overstated. I only have to check on the code that The Ideal Intern produces while I focus on what actually matters, and that is: Building The Thing.

It's all about how you use it and how careful you are with it, and the fact that today there are people IN THE FIELD that still question this baffles me.

Yes, that is the joke the "without" was meant for.

A thinking press?

We should create our own FIFA, without the blackjack and hookers.

> Believe me, it's very common they tell me that something is bad idea

In my experience, the most they dare is to suggest better alternatives, which is the polite and useful version of telling me something is a bad idea.

But in general, they do not tell you "this whole idea is complete bogus". So far, only Gemini did. Don't even remember what about.

Gemini is the only LLM I've ever experienced that decided on its own to tell me that something was a bad idea. Which, ok, in itself it's not a bad thing, we actually need more of that instead of the pathological sycophancy that all current models suffer from.

But in a physical robot? Yeah, that thing is going to punch me in the face, eventually. Or worse.

Wrap it in an API, sell Mario 64 as a service.

(@Nintendo: this is a joke, you can put down the rifle)

Basically all of Big Tech is betting it all on Red that this whole AI business pays off before they end up losing everything. And I get it, it would be unwise to stay behind and ignore what could very easily turn out to be humanity's greatest invention since pizza. But still, is there seriously no other way to go about it instead of collectively running head first, hands behind at a breakneck pace, while risking the complete collapse of ... well, everything? I suppose not, especially considering it's a technology with potentially massive military and social impact on a global scale, or even beyond that if we're being particularly delusional. Though one has to wonder who will end up paying the tab, and I think that we all know the answer to that.

Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :)

The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here.

Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.

I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems.

Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison.

It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.

I'm aware of that, and it becomes extremely obvious in an inherently soulful context such as a preschool.

Still, while "it's AI generated crap" and variations thereof are all perfectly valid reasons by themselves, they are way, WAY too shallow for the average guy who looks at both versions and prefers the AI one because it looks "better". I would probably sound crazy and/or pretentious trying to explain to him why I prefer the badly drawn one to the perfect AI generated one, I do not know exactly why myself.

The loss of personality is real. The most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.

For example, at my local preschool there was a wall flyer with information about what to bring the swimming pool. It had the most crudely drawn fishes and crabs and seahorses that I had ever seen. It was clear that whoever drew that had no prior experience with anything even remotely resembling a pencil, and by no metric one would define those drawings as "good". Maybe it was drawn by a janitor, or a teacher with too little time to waste on a drawing? Regardless, and I cannot emphasize it enough, I VASTLY preferred it to the new AI generated one they put up, with its generic AI generated marine life that one would get if they just typed "sea life" in the prompt. I can't tell you why myself, if you were to look at both versions side by side, the AI one is undoubtably miles better. But... it just feels wrong. Off. Out of place. I know I sound like a luddite, but it just doesn't look right. It's uncanny, and I really can't explain the reason. It's like seeing a perfectly drawn, realistic, anatomically accurate human being in an otherwise cute and cuddly children's cartoon. It just doesn't fit in with everything else. It's a preschool, it's supposed to be filled with "bad" drawings, you know?

And don't get me started with the time they put up AI filtered group photos. I almost had a meltdown, and I'm (mostly) pro AI.

We need to clear up the responsibility of these "AI went rogue" situations, ASAP.

How serious does it have to get before "oops AI did that not me" stops being a valid defense and we start looking into it?

Because I'd bet my life that if I asked ChatGPT to fix a bug that one of my clients reported, and the model fixed it by outright k*lling the client IRL, I'd be held liable instead of anyone at OpenAI. Just a hunch.

Just in time for my subscription to expire. Goodbye!