@icculus
There's a guy who open-sourced reverse engineered versions of Adobe Suite and Microsoft Office; don't dread. Not all of the things out there are bad: some of them are fighting the evil of SaaS.

What system software kind you talkin' 'bout? Embedded Linux? I'm curious now. Let me know. : )
@gamingonlinux

@icculus several years ago I wrote a Vulkan renderer for Unreal Engine 1. At least I had some fun and learned API along the way.

@icculus
The *end* product is not the *only* product.

Writing code improves its author. A machine doing something faster or better or both does not diminish the value of your own self improvement in the slightest.

There is joy in action. Playing the game. Learning the correopgraphy. Hiking the trail. The act of programming itself is worthwhile. Its new to you.

Diversity has value. 101 solutions is objectively a more fertile idea-space for innovation than 100 solutions. Add yours.

the... source code to Unreal Engine 1 is just... there... like... what a waste of computing power... and it's really freaking easy to modify and port...

@icculus I'm wondering when the call will come for seasoned developers to come out of retirement & fix the mountains of technical debt that'll be generated over the next few years.

They can take that job and shovel it.

@icculus I think one thing that's been missing from the convo so far is the value of design/implementation and of talking about it. This is all happening on the tail end of a phase of little and poor documentation and frustrating, infantalising tools. The true value of coding is the experience, shared. Some of that is the effects of the running code but by no means all, we just haven't been reveling in the others lately. Capitalism but also we need to choose to rebuild the culture.

@icculus the last section of the document basically says "it's not done and it doesn't really work." am i missing something? i'm also very unconvinced by the whole "oracle" thing—just bc the LLM didn't create the test doesn't mean it won't produce code that games the results. also using emulators and WINE as the sources of truth really seems to be begging the question imo. i get the same dread but then i remember actual understanding is the real goal, not flashy demo

@icculus I would say UML based code has been around for years and enabled similar speed improvements. Yet it tends to disapear, maybe this is going to be a trend if it tends to generate the same quality of code.

@icculus your dread is shared

@icculus Look, you can go to Ikea and literally buy a dining table with four chairs for $100. Yet people still drop a thousand for a handcrafted table.

Yes, AI can do this and that, but does anybody *want to* play Deus Ex in the browser? Maybe it will be great to preserve the game on archive.org or something like that, IDK, but probably no.

15 years ago, everyone was like "Schoolkids need tablets because they can do this and that! " Today, we're going back to books. It'll be fine.

@icculus I hate that programmers decided it was acceptable to use this insidious garbage machine to make the art of programming nonexistent. I actively avoid any ai coded or assisted projects (where I’ve been told of it, not much can be done if I haven’t) and thankfully a good chunk of the world does too, so knowing you’ve haven’t been tempted to use the redundancy machine in any way will only endear you to a good percentage of players (and more people are feeling this way each day).

@icculus I will not predict any specific outcome with regard to AI capabilities. clearly they can produce words, images, math, sounds, videos, code, music, and various other kinds of Content, to some degree of efficacy.

however I do have both a logical and an empirical coda to this uncertainty.

@icculus 1) gah, I could feel my brain rot as I read that
2) where’s the code? (or it running even) I suspect it’s assembly cosplaying as rust.
3) What’s the point? We learned nothing from this (like, was it compiled in debug? like Mario 64) or some neat idea from the source? And I can already run it where I want, why run in a browser? - I’m not sure you could claim it as a learning experience, the bar is so low now.
4) SDL brings so much more to the world than this

@icculus Mate, the *only* thing I have interest in valuing or celebrating is labour and the enrichment people get from the effort they put into their creations and the world around them.

When I see a chair someone's built from scraps, that's got different meaning to a chair made by someone who milled their own lumber, and getting a mass produced machine-assembled chair means something different again. If seating were scarce, the calculus might be different, but I have more chairs than backsides