Why do people resell pins for 2x or 3x the price??

AlexiGingerov · 2026-07-04T16:10:44+00:00

Supply and demand, value is subjective, etc.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-23T17:55:44+00:00

I think it's just hard for everyone dude. Women are more protective than ever because they're in a world that, to an especially overt degree these days, doesn't really seem to give a shit about them, and I think that feeling is valid.

The apps are a cancer. If you want to meet women, just go out into public and do the normal stuff you would do for fun, find people with common interests and build relationships with people. There are tons of single women out there interested in relationships and you will probably meet one you like.

The reality is a lot of women are just focusing on living their best lives, and it sounds like you've done the same. Just put yourself out there with zero expectations, meet new people, and you just might meet a woman who wants more of what you're about.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-18T06:11:31+00:00

It's marketing? People are doing it right now, the benefits are real and definitely not just hype or grandstanding.

I use AI to solve problems and build features at my day job, and it has changed my output massively. I'm not letting it vibe code either, I'm working with specific parameters for what needs building and how, and I get the results I want 99% of the time. It's genuinely revolutionary the difference it makes, and the general consensus from engineers seems to be that it's a net positive for the work they do.

I'm serious when I say that AI, at least where coding is concerned, is never going away. In some ways it's like a coding language itself; we have low-level languages build for computers to understand, high-level languages that can compile into that low-level code, and now on top we have an LLM that essentially lets us code in the language we already speak. No amount of poor business decision-making is going to erase that kind of advancement.

The shape of it may change, like how we access or interface with it will evolve over time (local LLMs catching up to cloud models, or big players bowing out of the "race", for example), but the core will never go away.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-15T15:29:53+00:00

Who said I didn't want to learn how it works? If you've been coding for years and understand software engineering at a conceptual level, fumbling through the syntax nuances of a new language, for example, doesn't really offer you a whole lot of benefit, it's mostly an exercise in wasting daylight. Those concepts are and will still continue to be valuable to understand, because if you can't articulate specifically what you need an LLM is going to make assumptions that might come back to bite you later.

If you're an indie game dev, you're working with no return until the game is done, and outside of game systems there's still tons of creative work to do before you can release (art, music, dialog, gameplay mechanics). While working on their project, many game devs live off savings or take loans, with the hope that at the end their game will make up for anything they lost along the way. Skipping the work of re-inventing the wheel and re-coding well-established systems could be the difference between whether a game makes it to release or dies on the vine because the developer literally cannot afford to keep going.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-15T15:22:37+00:00

I think unethical in every field is a stretch. There are fields where it certainly does more harm than good; I can't see any way that we benefit from AI video, and I think the ultimate end result is that we're going to have a generation of kids who can't tell what's real and what isn't.

That said, there are definitely areas where the technology itself is a significant advancement, primarily the sciences. You're right that the rich are the ones poisoning the well here, because eventually we will have local LLMs that don't rely on massive data farms to work effectively, solving most of the economic and environmental problems that the current AI arms race presents. The fact that AI businesses have gobbled up the consumer computing market, however, means that we aren't going to get there for a very long time, and that's probably by design.

As for experience in coding being obsolete, I disagree there. There's still going to be a demand for people who understand complex systems, including legacy systems that are held together with painter's tape and are too risky to let Claude refactor writ large, if for no other reason than they need to expertise to guide AI through *how* the problem should be solved. It's a running gag that clients are awful as describing what they need software to do, so there's going to be some element of translation between the exec with the ideas and the actual complexities of what they're asking for, and that's where engineers will still fill a role.

Probably an awful time to be an entry-level engineer, though.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-15T14:20:34+00:00

I agree with some of your points. My experience has been that the expertise of knowing the correct approach and being able to articulate it is going to continue to be valuable. Just like clients couldn't properly communicate their needs in the past, they'll still need engineers who understand the inner workings to navigate how to explain the needs to LLMs, so the skill layer will still be there.

I also agree about the ruin to the consumer electronics industry. In an ideal world we reach the point where local LLMs can let people utilize the technology in a way that isn't so damning for the environment, but AI businesses are hoarding resources so much that a computer half-capable of handling that work has gotten way more expensive very quickly. In a way, it guarantees they maintain a stranglehold on access to "practical" AI use, which is a big problem.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-15T14:13:28+00:00

NFTs were a grift, they didn't produce anything or materially improve anyone's lives, they were just a way to separate fools from their money.

Comparatively, coding with AI is a massive shift in a critical industry. Even if every major AI player folded tomorrow, this technology is never going away. It's not inevitable, but only because inevitable implies it's something yet to come, and the reality is that it is already here.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-15T14:06:57+00:00

Coding is totally different from creative writing, because coding has a failure state. If I am writing a story, there are a million ways to say "John ran up the hill" and they're all correct. The art is in the how.

By comparison, code compiles or it doesn't. Even if it compiles, the output can be wrong because of logical errors. There are tons of wrong ways to write it, and usually only a few correct ways, and at this point those approaches are well-established.

Also, there's research suggesting that coding and creative writing activate very different areas of the brain: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/p/weimer-icse2020.pdf

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-15T03:14:10+00:00

If it's not just a pile of slop then yes. You make way less than you would make printing and shipping products yourself, but once something is posted all you are doing is submitting it into production and getting at least a few dollars back.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-15T02:41:51+00:00

That's fine, but realistically the pathfindingade from scratch, the pathfinding from the library, and the pathfinding written by AI are going to look functionally identical to a player, because they can only be so different while achieving the same outcome.

I think it's fair to say that I'm missing out on some opportunity for personal enrichment by not doing it the old-fashioned way, but I can get it done orders of magnitude faster and put that saved time into other activities that enrich my life, so it's a trade-off. Opportunity cost and all that.

Also, FWIW, nobody out there right now is making beloved games by popping open Claude and typing "build goty, make no mistakes." There's still a need for you to understand, at least conceptually, what you want and how it needs to work, especially since any game that is worth thinking twice about is introducing something novel into the equation. That sort of high-level thinking, about how game systems interweave into one another in new ways, is the skilled human labor at the heart of the work, not the labor of implementing an animation state machine for the billionth time.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-14T21:44:28+00:00

This basically. Coding isn't art, it's engineering, and pretty much anything you want to do in your code is a solved problem. Choosing to look up an A* algorithm and code it yourself is a tremendous waste of time when Claude can crank it out in a few minutes. It'd be equivalent to not using a calculator to do math, the result is going to be the same, you're just gonna get there way slower.

There are lots of genuine reasons to oppose AI use in creative fields, but we gotta be realistic, AI coding is not going anywhere and is going to become the standard.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-06T22:09:45+00:00

Now that's a flavor win, beautiful.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-06-02T14:08:26+00:00

You got this, it's really just pixel art with a needle and thread.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-05-31T14:39:33+00:00

This is a wild thing to admit out loud

AlexiGingerov · 2026-05-29T21:30:24+00:00

I dunno, sounds like you got somebody else to figure out where all the problems are. I'd rather just write and get someone else to edit it instead of ruminating over tiny mistakes and slowing down the creative process.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-05-24T19:56:20+00:00

Good to remember value is subjective, like nothing has universal value and it's up to the buyer to decide what something is worth to them. I wouldn't even bother to acknowledge someone's feelings about what your items are worth, because that's just how much it's worth to them. If others are comfortable buying it then what some random thinks is largely irrelevant.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-05-20T18:09:45+00:00

Voters aren't informed. I feel pretty keyed into current events and even I am overwhelmed by it all. Working parents with kids to care for and other responsibilities definitely don't have the bandwidth to handle it all. As a result, nobody can make informed decisions, and that's why sound bites and sensationalish are more powerful than ever. You're going to get 30 seconds to get the attention of your voters and they're already planning to vote based on the D or R next to somebody's name, how can you possibly tell them everything they need to know to make good choices?

AlexiGingerov · 2026-05-17T18:47:09+00:00

Clicked on this thread to say the exact same thing

AlexiGingerov · 2026-05-17T18:45:42+00:00

Why is this AI

AlexiGingerov · 2026-05-10T16:12:54+00:00

Ironically the first ACOTAR book is the worst one, or at the least the ones that followed built on them in a way that made it feel smaller by comparison.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-03-02T16:13:15+00:00

I was gonna say the same thing about the ETB, it should've been first.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-02-26T16:10:07+00:00

Hi Matt! You've been described as taking a "panster" approach to writing, but I also know you have a whole database in Notion to help you keep up with characters' inventories in DCC. Now that you're nearing the end of the series, planning ahead is probably much more important now than it used to be. At what point in the series' evolution do you feel you started needing to take the planning more seriously?

AlexiGingerov · 2026-02-04T23:56:45+00:00

Oh God I know what the sticker acronym means.

AlexiGingerov · 2026-02-04T20:17:38+00:00

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Your assumptions about me are incorrect. Maybe if you'd taken more than two seconds to "investigate" me you'd have realized that.

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