No.

I like AOC and I think she has demonstrated that, of the entire “Squad”, she actually knows how to be a politician and when to fight and when to bite her tongue.

She has zero chance of winning. First, this country has demonstrated that it will NEVER elect a woman. But second, she is still too young and the DNC will never give her that “Obama Moment” where she can win over the entire country in one speech. And third… republicans hate her so much that she would get shot at every single week AND would actually care about the people who took bullets for her.

Nah. I want AOC to stay in Congress. Not sure if she is more valuable as a Senator at this point, but she is increasingly showing she is well suited to being the politician who rallies and guides the other politicians. A Pelosi but not 90 years old and constantly pushing centrist viewpoints.

I would very much not trust a 7 year old with a 450 USD device but you do you.

Honestly? If what you want is something to play “nintendo games” with the family? I would just go buy one of the pi-like devices or even go full sicko with an FPGA and then totally obviously legitimately purchase and rip every single game you want.

But in all seriousness, a small raspberry pi-like device running ES-DE (fuck the hateful transphobic shithead behind Retroarch) is probably the genuine best choice for someone who wants to play the games of their youth without thinking much. AliExpress is nowhere near as good as it used to be but Retro Game Corps has reviewed a LOT of these kinds of devices over on youtube.

And if you want the portability? You can buy two (there are plenty of gameboy-like devices in that space) and still come in way under the price of a switch 2. Which, again, seven year olds are stupid and destructive.

There are two layers to that.

The first is how to develop skills. And you do that the exact same way everyone before you did it: you actually do the work. Calculators are awesome but you still learn how to do long division and the like because it gives you insight into how to approximate things. Same with sims/solvers versus actually solving PDEs.

The other is… if your boss wants you to feed everything into an LLM then you won’t have a job much longer. So you can either look for a new one or work toward more advanced tickets/tasks. Make it clear that LLMs have limitations and that some stuff will need a proper coder and that YOU are that proper coder.

He is 100% a gun nut (although probably the only genuinely universal second amendment guy out there) but Karl over at InRange actually has a ridiculously good video that should be spread to all the right wing loonies in your life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nppYglaJKa0

Yes, there is a lot of "great’ stuff for the fascists and isn’t it great to repeal all those nasty gun laws? And… we can argue about that later.

Selling off all the public and BLM land? Great, you can now put a silencer on your gatling gun you bought at Walmart. Where are you going to use it? You can now hunt deer with your Barrett but there is nowhere left for you to go hunting. And so forth.

I would 100% love a Nightdive (or similar) remaster of Deus Ex. But my point is more that it really doesn’t need it, mechanically. If you were to go boot up DX after having played nu-Prey or Shadows of Doubt or whatever, it would be familiar. Some rough edges but no more than going back to DOOM after… DOOM 2016. And SS2 (and Thief) is maybe one notch further than that.

Contrast that with SS1 where it honestly had more in common with what would become the mechwarrior games than DOOM (see also: CyClones).

As for funding: Plenty of indie devs have talked about it. Xalavier Nelson Jr is always a good listen (he did a few episodes of Remap Radio). Late 2010s/early 2020s, getting funding for a video game was, if not easy, very doable. That is more or less what let Nightdive establish themselves as the weirdos who go REALLY REALLY hard on loving remasters of older games.

But between economic uncertainty and the realization that COVID was probably a localized peak for the gaming market, it has gotten a lot harder for basically every studio to get funding. Which is likely why Nightdive seem to be doing every single iD/MS game they can or games that are part of multimedia franchises (e.g. Dark Forces).

So Quake 4 is a no brainer (would love 3 but that is multiplayer first which gets risky). And while Nightdive CLEARLY love System Shock (it is more or less what the company was founded on), getting the funding for a full “game” a la 2023’s SS1 is a much bigger challenge than a ridonkulous source port/patch. There isn’t a company that is really going to be eager to fund that because it isn’t part of a major monetizable franchise (although Dommy Bug Mommy SHODAN as a Disney Princess would be peak dystopic hellscape) and there would be a hard sell in terms of it significantly increasing market share over the remaster.

I mean, that is literally what they did with SS1.

I’m not optimistic though. SS1, even in the EE, was ROUGH. SS2 is not that far off from Deus Ex and immersive sims… really haven’t evolved much past that. That combined with the endless funding faucet shutting off makes me pretty sure they’ll be sticking to more popular franchises and the like (allegedly the next big Nightdive announcement is at Quakecon).

But also AI cannot currently do everything, so you need someone to fill those areas.

And who is going to be able to fill those gaps? Probably not the person who “knows what I want to achieve but (…) don’t know how to actually implement it”.

Which ties in to

their capability to learn, their personality, will they mesh well with the existing team, have they got drive to make things better, do they have soft skills to position themselves to become better, is the person adaptable

is the bar for what is considered fundamental shifting?

If the bar is “I know how to ask a magic box to do my job for me” then there is genuinely no need for previous training and experience and a company won’t be hiring engineers or spreadsheet gandalfs or marketing experts. They’ll hire the cheapest “prompt engineer” they can, underpay them, and then replace them the moment they ask for a cost of living increase.

And… the companies considering that really aren’t the ones with any longevity. Yes, yes, any port in a storm. But they will RAPIDLY run into that wall and have no way to move past it. Whether that is getting the senior engineer in cargo shorts to do it or curating training data to improve the model.

but as time went on we got new levels of coding and so knowing how to write low level code is no longer a required skill.

And that is another barrier that MANY companies have run into.

The average coder? Yeah, they don’t need to understand how to optimize a loop. But when there are forty tools on the market that all just call pytorch? The one company that knows how to optimize a critical path function suddenly looks REALLY good with their 10% performance (and thus power) savings.

Again, these tools are incredibly powerful and I regularly use chatgpt et al to generate a first draft of a utility script. And I’ve been using editor plugins for… sweet Eothas over two decades now, to generate docstring stubs and even a lot of unit tests. And people SHOULD know how and when to use these tools.

But you also have to consider what you can get out of it. “AI” generated documentation is pretty much worthless outside of checking off a box that you have documented every function in the code. Your LLM won’t understand what that function was trying to achieve or why “it is wrong but that is because this library is wrong” and so forth. Any documentation that is actually meant to be referenced still needs a proper pass from whoever drew the short straw in Engineering.

Same with testing. AI can generate tautologies. AI won’t stress test your code because it doesn’t know what you think that code might do in the future. By all means, generate the boilerplate, but you are still going to be the one who has to go in and add that really weird corner case that TOTALLY didn’t break prod lats month.

And… you know who historically did those tasks? Interns and junior engineers. The same ones who are adamant that their entire job can be done by chatgpt and lamenting that they don’t know how to move from idea to implementation. And guess how you learn how to do that?

I have a rough idea of what I want to achieve and some steps on the way there, but don’t know how to actually implement it.

That is literally what the job is. If you can’t do that then you aren’t an engineer.

I’m concerned that there are skills I am missing out on developing, but at the same time if AI is being pushed so heavily is it not something I should lean into to be better equipped in working with it?

I’ll tell you what I told my nephew: Yes, everyone is going to use AI to one degree or another. So why would I hire you over anyone else? Or, more pointedly, why would I hire someone at all?

Getting to that interview gets harder and harder every year (every month, really). But engineers (and even many managers) can immediately tell someone who knows their shit versus someone who “vibe codes” all the “hard parts”.

These days it more or less explicitly refers to asking an LLM to write your code for you based on prompts.

But on a broader spectrum it is just the idea of (I forget the buzz word) Ticket Driven Development. A manager defines software based on a series of (jira, gitlab, kanban, whatever) tickets/issues and someone below them (in this case, an LLM) implements it.

Done properly? It is incredibly effective as it allows designers and “idea people” to work to their strengths and junior developers to work to theirs. The problem being that, much like when it is a junior dev under them, the person making the tickets likely has no idea what they are doing.

Which is the big problem. Someone who has been writing scripts for decades? Using chatgpt to get the syntax of a function or even to write a utility script is great. They can focus their brainpower on the harder/more fun stuff. Someone who has been writing code for, at most, a year or two? They never learn those foundations and never have a way to do anything the LLM can’t (or verify if the LLM is correct).

What you are describing is less a throuple and more just bog standard Ethical Non-Monogamy with shades of Polygamy. It would be your wife with multiple partners and you making the proverbial (sometimes literal) sandwich.

I emphasize that because there is a lot of media and societal pressure on all sides. ENM has increasingly become divided on gender lines with (cishet) men having been taught by the tates and the manosphere that it is taking THEIR women away from them and ruining THEIR women forever and so forth. Whereas women (and the lgbtq community) have almost flocked to it in a similar manner to “free love” back in the day as there is an increasing push to not actually have kids… at which point monogamous sex starts to make a lot less sense. Also it is a “good” way to justify splitting a two bedroom apartment’s rent six ways.

Whereas throuples are often romanticized. In large part because people watched/read the trainwreck that was Twilight and all came to the realization that “she got two hands…”.

At the end of the day? Every person and every relationship is different and it is really on you, your partner, and your friend to decide what works for you.

For what its worth? Some very good friends of mine are in an ENM relationship and I’ve had a relationship in the past where we also weren’t exclusive sexually. But the ground rule we, and they, use is that they have one emotional partner. Sex is fun and harmless (if you use protection). I broke up with my ex but for completely unrelated reasons and said friends are perfectly happy as far as I can tell. Emotional bonds are where things get REALLY messy. I’ve always avoided it but every couple I’ve known that tried it fell apart within a year or two. Whether that is good or bad really depends on your life experiences and where you draw the line on “save the relationship” and “live your lives”.

So, personally? If you and your partner want to try this I would suggest NOT banging the dude you clearly both already have emotional connections with. But, again, you do you.

Yeah. It has rapidly turned an initiative that was already unnecessarily combative toward devs (fuck the publishers though) and associated it with harassment and review bombing games that are actually Doing It Right just because they worked with the wrong third party studio. Not to mention all the “Well, we don’t agree with everything asmongold says, but let’s call a truce so long as he is gonna let us play our video games”

And… honestly? I have disliked thor since LONG before all y’all realized he isn’t the world’s best WoW player or he has an opinion you don’t like because he was considering things from the perspective of the people who would be doing the work to enact these “simple requirements”.

But it feels REAL fucking everyday normal to watch people immediately go from “the harassment campaign that led to the death of Mikayla Raines was horrible” to “Let’s fucking ruin Pirate Software’s life and attack him and everything he has ever associated with because we are morally righteous”

I don’t use jellyfin but my general approach is either:

1. Expose it over a VPN only. I usually use Tailscale for this so that I can expose individual machines but you do you
2. Cloudflare tunnel that exposes a single port on a single internal machine to a subdomain I own

There are obviously ways to do this all on your own but… if you are asking this question you probably want to use one of those to roll it. Because you can leave yourself ridiculously vulnerable if you do it yourself.

As someone who used to work for an org: I got this bridge for sale. I’ll get it to you for a good price.

Generally speaking, those orgs are designed around punishing those who are so egregious that it can’t be covered up and going after peons committing time fraud.

But there is very much a reason that the dream of most workers is to negotiate a big purchase and they just so happen to buy new cars or leave for a private industry job with the contract winner shortly after. Same with how orgs outright structure their travel/reimbursement in ways that encourage misreporting and taking the most expensive options.

Again. If the goal were ACTUALLY to have “outsiders” identify fraud and waste, they would have found MASSIVE amounts. And most of it would actually make the average worker happier. Instead they just gutted the government and carved out more contracts for musk.

I’mma be honest:

If you have unconstitutional widespread access to the books of the US Government and DON’T find fraud and waste, you… are somehow even dumber than I ever expected.

The issue was never the lack of efficiency. The issue was that musk actively was not looking for it and was just tearing the government apart while making sure he got more handouts.

Understand that significant percentages of any game are made under crunch conditions. And there is no real “okay, let’s go back and reduce our technical debt” for the majority of games.

So all those best software practices go out the window when you have slept in your cube for the past four nights and your well rested boss is screaming at you wondering why the cape physics still look so shit.

But also… how does that change anything? “Here is our end of life offline mode. We reference these packages you will never have access to and that have no open source equivalent because they are so specific to the proprietary way this auth system works”?

Louis Rossman is, at best, a “free speech absolutionist” libertarian, but he is probably the youtuber with the most experience actually working to get consumer (well, small business) rights legislature passed. And he specifically talked about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4zH8bJDI8

In a nutshell: It doesn’t matter if thor is a dipshit (he is and always has been). Attack the arguments, not the person. Because others will have similar complaints and all “He is a fucking prick and he didn’t read the FAQ” does is hurt your argument and make things seem culty.

Because if it really WAS actually addressed (and understand that a response is not necessarily a refutation), point that out. Rather than require people to go dig through a bunch of youtube videos and blog posts.

All signs are that he still has enough dirt and genuine threats to browbeat the republicans when it matters. There is a lot of argument toward making him do that rather than just assuming he will but that would involve the fucking democrats doing anything.

The only “hope” will be IF we have fair midterm elections and there is a blue wave. Suddenly “only trump can get you reelected” will be forgotten (or, more pointedly, they’ll remember how he has never been able to do that…) and it will just be the die hards who know there is footage of them doing Whatever in moscow.

Because it works.

kiwifarms has been doing this en masse for over a decade and others predated that.

It is gauche to link to it considering this is the umpteenth fucking person murdered by angry and hateful bastards. But Patrick Klepek, someone who has been targeted by these orgs for over a decade, wrote about this in the context of the emulator developer Near being murdered by kiwi farms et al a few years back https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-i-learned-from-near-an-emulation-legend-and-real-person/

He talked about it more on the Waypoint (now Remap) podcast, but it is very much an open secret that these hate campaigns are ongoing with the explicit goal of murdering their target (it is not fucking suicide if you were tormented until you picked up the gun). And how even fellow victims who usually will advocate for this kind of stuff are wary of raising their voices because they or their partner are semi regularly approached, in person, by these bastards.

My hope, as always, is that this will be the last time. That this will lead to focused efforts by those with platforms to speak out. The reality is that the mid tier “creators” will probably say something and give the trite “If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call the national suicide prevention lifeline”. Or, well, these days “the national slip and slide prevention lifeline” because gotta stay fucking monetized. And then they’ll remain silent. All while the biggies choose to stay fucking silent out of concerns of losing people in their audience who are part of those hate campaigns.

To be clear, I do not fault the people who are under attack and wary of reminding those murderers they exist. I specifically linked to Patrick’s post because he and the (now Remap) crew did an amazing job of explaining exactly what goes into this and how painful it is and why they are genuinely afraid to speak up.

I do very much fault the ludwigs and charlies of the world who will mention this for clicks and then never care again. And if the truly massive outlets were to speak out against this kind of harassment and reach out to the victims? Suddenly youtube and twitch and reddit and the like would care and start moderating this shit rather than laughing that kotaku in action and the like are so popular and only occasionally link to where the REAL hate and doxxing happens.

Fuck that.

Of course it has no chance of passing. That has absolutely no bearing on future attempts to impeach the dictator which also will have no chance of passing.

But you know what voting against it does? It tells the American People that the democrats in office support trump completely shitting on everything and unilaterally joining israel in a war.

It is not something people could really predict.

Games and media sales did indeed go down. But movie theatres (and a lot of live entertainment) never actually went back up. People didn’t “go back to their regular lives”. We got a new normal

Which is why trump et al are working so hard to trigger doom spending and likely another pandemic or three if rfk gets his way.

But the bigger factor is funding. Plenty of indie studios have talked about how hard it is to find funding. Because economic uncertainty means that even a 2-3 year investment is a LOT riskier than it used to be. And that is a death sentence for indie devs but also very alarming for the major publishers who have to answer to investors.

Fuck microsoft and all their bullshit. But this goes way beyond “they bought too many studios and mismanaged them”