Great write up!

Of course, I never stopped editing my code in vi so I missed some of the editor frustrations.

This is for me.

I love open hardware and the modern 8-bit game scene.

Good point. With the specs fully open, hopefully we get a portable of this, at some point.

We do always squash merge, which certainly helps.

I was not aware of cliff.toml. Thank you!

Oh, nice.

I’m always looking for another ChangeLog tool.

That said, I never leave my ChamgeLogs up to automation.

My git logs are open to my users for full details, but my ChangeLogs are how I communicate which changes my users probably need to be aware of.

So far, this hasn’t yielded well to automation. But my team is still considering standardizing our commit log messages enough to allow it someday.

One could argue Tetris could carry the whole competition alone, but it is joined by Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, Spy Hunter, and Gauntlet in 1985

I would leave it at that, except Pac-Man, Frogger, Galaga, Defender, and Donkey Kong make 1981 a contender

That’s a fair point. I enjoyed the game later out of curiosity - but it wasn’t a “this is your only Christmas gift” kick in the gut, for me.

they’re all some random platformer which sometimes alluded to they had a movie name.

That’s a good point. E.T. was not alone in this, and had more to do with it’s movie that many games that followed.

I played E.T. relatively recently to remind myself what the fuss was about.

The game plays fine (with average Atari bugginess).

It just stands out as an early huge miss for a movie tie in. Almost nothing about the game feels like the movie, or is particularly anything a fan of the movie would seem likely to enjoy.

I say “almost” because the exploring kind of fits. The same exploring that is constantly frustratingly interrupted by pit falls.

It’s really not that bad of a game, though.

I’d argue Superman 64 for the N64 is a worse game by all measures.

I’ve spent some unfortunate time with both, and can confirm. Superman 64 is worse by a pretty large margin.

E.T. is genuinely playable, after a needlessly awful learning curve. Superman 64 still continues to suck even for (shudder) players who have put in the necessary time to learn to play it.

Edit: As others have said before: E.T. is a decent game, it’s just a lousy choice for an E.T. tie-in.

Fans of a beloved highly polished film masterpiece about gentle communication and wide eyed exploration discovered the Atari game was a nearly unfinished punishing high stress race against a merciless clock - which frequently abruptly ended any aspiration a player had of discovering anything beyond the same pit they fell into many times before.

I’m mainly interested in making code reviews a little easier to manage.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet, here: All future diffs become much easier to read if the team agrees to use a very strict lint tool.

I know, I know. “Code changes should be small.” I’ve already voiced that to my team, yet here we are.

I understand from another Lemmy thread that the tradition is to toss the offending team members’ laptop into the nearest large body of water.

I think many of us feel that way.

The thing is, I adore Saints Row 4, but I don’t think I want to play Saints Row 4 Part 2.

So I do hope they return to the style of Saints Row 3 for the next chapter.

Honestly, what I really want is Saints Row 3 again with some new plotlines and lots of car skins and dress-up options.

Fuck it, make it saints row taking over a small island country for tax reasons and just roll with it.

If they do this, that can shut up and take my money.

Okay, this is fun, but it’s time for an old programmer to yell at the cloud, a little bit:

The cost per AI request is not trending toward zero.

Current ludicrous costs are subsidized by money from gullible investors.

The cost model whole house of cards desperately depends on the poorly supported belief that the costs will rocket downward due to some future incredible discovery very very soon.

We’re watching an edurance test between irrational investors and the stubborn boring nearly completely spent tail end of Moore’s law.

My money is in a mattress waiting to buy a ten pack of discount GPU chips.

Hallucinating a new unpredictable result every time will never make any sense for work that even slightly matters.

But, this test still super fucking cool. I can think of half a dozen novel valuable ways to apply this for real world use. Of course, the reason I can think of those is because I’m an actual expert in computers.

Finally - I keep noticing that the biggest AI apologists I meet tend to be people who aren’t experts in computers, and are tired of their “million dollar” secret idea being ignored by actual computer experts.

I think it is great that the barrier of entry is going down for building each unique million dollar idea.

For the ideas that turn out to actually be market viable, I look forward to collaborating with some folks in exchange for hard cash, after the AI runs out of lucky guesses.

If we can’t make an equitable deal, I look forward to spending a few weeks catching up to their AI start-up proof-of-concept, and then spending 5 years courting their customers to my new solution using hard work and hard earned decades of expert knowledge.

This cool AI stuff does change things, but it changes things far less than the tech bros hope you will believe.

I agree it’s a stupid theory.

But of course, if I designed the simulation, I don’t have to actually simulate any of the complex bits, I just have to alter each simulated person to remember successfully observing the results of the complex bits.

Edit: Of course, my solution breaks the infitine chain of nested worlds anyway. I don’t have to simulate infitine nested worlds in my simulation’s computers - I just simulate a small believable set of memories of having done so. So even those infitine nested worlds are just paper cutouts of the real thing.

I guess either way, I don’t spend infitine processing power, so the average person has a 50/50 chance of being inside or outside the top level simulation.

Edit 2: But ironically, each person has 100% chance of believing that they are taking part in an infinite set of nested simulated worlds - if my simulated memories are believable enough.

I recall IR game controllers of that era were only particularly bad when I got excited, nervous or too focused on the game, and let them point a millimeter away from the sensor…so they only really thoroughly failed exactly when it cost me the most in the game. Haha.

The tactics in Wolfenstein: ET were brilliant.

Oh, gee. A Microsoft product that worked perfectly locally is about to require a subscription. Who could have possibly guessed that would happen, yet again? (This is sarcasm.)

I really like OneNote, but I decided to learn something else when I realized which way the wind was blowing.

Yeah. Luanti following Minecraft is nothing new. Mineclonia was an early pilot game for the engine.

But there hasn’t been much effort on copying Minecraft lately. Mineclonia is done, and it’s great.

We’ve had more mobs, animals, plants, textures, and such than un-modded Minecraft for a long time. (Which is unfair, as Luanti is a mod-first design.) But my point is the core Launti dev team doesn’t have to work on any of that.

The most noticeable recent Luanti updates have been to make the configuration screens much nicer, and add I think to add native support for more graphics tricks?

I’m not paying attention to graphics in Luanti. As others have mentioned, that’s not why I play it. I actually had a conversation recently about the best way to downgrade Luanti default graphics to match un-modded Minecraft.

That said, the Minecraft team taking notice of Luanti would be new, as far as I know.

Yeah. I’m sympathetic to the whole “technology is hard” thing, and the idea that the SteamDeck is primarily meant to be for mobile gaming.

But switching from Nintendo Switch to SteamDeck really highlighted to me how good the Nintendo engineering team is, that I never had any of these display issues with a docked Switch.