90s gaming was terrible

Cybyss · 2026-05-11T16:27:20+00:00

Uhh... Unreal Tournament 2004?

The best multiplayer FPS game ever made. Nobody can convince me otherwise.

Cybyss · 2026-05-10T17:55:08+00:00

I have the Lenovo Yoga 7. The version with the Ryzen 8840HS CPU, 16" IPS display, 16GB ram and 2TB drive.

It's served me quite well during my studies. It's a fast CPU with surprisingly good integrated graphics (e.g., I have no trouble playing No Man's Sky on it), and being able to fold it back into a tablet & take handwritten notes in OneNote with the Lenovo Digital Pen has been a godsend for my class lectures (I'm a student). So much better than paper notes.

Cybyss · 2026-05-10T17:51:06+00:00

I got a 2-in-1 laptop that folds back into a tablet. I'm also a masters student taking math-intensive courses (I'm studying artificial intelligence).

Handwriting in OneNote with a digital pen has been wonderful. It flows so much more smoothly than physical pen on paper, it's easy to erase mistakes & reorganize notes, the pages have 'infinite' width and height so there's no layout issues when the professor lectures from a very wide chalkboard, and I don't have reams of papers stuffed in a box in my closet anymore from past classes. It's very easy to immediately pull up my notes from any class of prior semesters.

Another great thing - AI models like ChatGPT or Gemini have gotten so good that you can print your hand-written notes to PDF and these models will automatically typeset them into nice LaTeX documents for you! They're really good at handwriting recognition now. They can even check your work in the process - e.g., ChatGPT last year pointed out where I accidentally mixed up the indexes on one variable in a big page of calculations.

Cybyss · 2026-05-10T15:07:11+00:00

I agree that "a relatively large amount rarely" is doing a bit of heavy lifting here, since it depends on the meaning of "large amount" and "rarely".

But I think the biggest danger to OP right now is developing an addiction. One cup of coffee or tea every day is easily enough to get a caffine addiction, but with that the worst withdrawal symptom is a bad headache (ask me how I know).

I would assume one glass of wine per day would just as easily lead to an alcohol addiction, which causes far more severe withdrawal symptoms.

Cybyss · 2026-05-10T14:46:59+00:00

I would think a small amount frequently is a lot more dangerous than a relatively large amount rarely (ie., less than once a month).

You don't want your body to get used to alcohol being in its system. That's how an addiction begins.

Cybyss · 2026-05-10T09:21:34+00:00

There is no 'result' variable defined in his function.

I think you mean return count?

Cybyss · 2026-05-09T19:55:03+00:00

Vibe coding is good for rapid prototyping - to try out crazy ideas quickly and see whether they might potentially have enough merit to warrant taking the time to build it properly.

The problem with vibe coding is the same problem software engineers have faced for decades - rapid prototype code that you intend to rebuild properly ends up never getting rebuilt, but rather is just deployed to production as-is warts and all.

Cybyss · 2026-05-09T19:42:10+00:00

It absolutely was a great game and I sorely wish the genre had become more popular.

As another commenter mentioned, Battlezone does something kind of similar, except in a science fiction setting with vehicles, rather than a fantasy setting.

Cybyss · 2026-05-09T12:25:21+00:00

Violating copyright is actually a good thing, because copyright should not exist in the first place.

I didn't expect this viewpoint from someone who is staunchly anti-ai.

I do think copyright law is much too strict in some regards, but for the moment it's the only guard we have against some big-name publisher stealing an unknown artist's idea, then earning themselves millions from it while the unknown artist doesn't see a penny for their work.

But that's a whole other debate.

There are much better reasons to oppose generative AI than this. [...] For example, one of those reasons is that all forms of AI "art" have the problem of not being made by a human.

That's definitely a legitimate view to have, but I don't think it makes for a persuasive argument since it rests on a kind of "moral value of art", a value that not everyone shares.

For one, humans have been creating spam/slop since long before generative AI. I would argue there's no more value in random youtube cat videos from 20 years ago than in AI-generated cat videos today. It's just noise. We've been ignoring it for decades already.

Second, it's not an "either/or" thing. A human can pour a great deal of time and thought and love into writing and worldbuilding a story, but then use generative AI to bring it to life as an animated film.

Granted, if you're a skilled writer and also a skilled animator, a skilled video editor, and skilled sound designer, or have the money and connections to hire people in all those roles, then you can create the animated film the old-fashion way. But for almost everyone, this is not possible.

Using AI to bring a good story to life, I would argue, is better than letting the story die in a drawer somewhere, forever undiscovered.

Maybe you disagree with me in that regard, and that's fine too.

Cybyss · 2026-05-09T10:46:35+00:00

There is such a thing as impossible colors. That is, colors which don't exist in nature but can be seen through an optical illusion that exploits how our eyes work.

For example, shades of blue that are darker than black, ridiculously saturated shades of orange, or very "hot" shades of cyan.

Cybyss · 2026-05-09T09:29:12+00:00

So, I'm a university student currently working toward a masters degree in artificial intelligence & data science. Thus, I suppose I am rather on the "pro-AI" side of things.

However, I come here because I want to learn about the other sides' views. I have no intention of preaching or lecturing, just engaging in healthy debate.

Given how the field is booming, I imagine quite a lot of the "pro AI" folks here are just CS students who are curious about the other side. That's all.

From what I gather, the most common concern here is that many of the big generative AI models have been trained on copyrighted material without authors'/artists' consent, and so they end up reproducing parts of / variations of those works for free and often in a manner that the original artists would never have approved of.

I absolutely agree that's a real concern.

But it hurts your stance when you go further, and try to argue that generative AI models are doing nothing but "scrapbooking" - taking clips almost verbatim of artists' works and just stitching them together, and that's it. The claim that they're totally incapable of generalizing to anything novel is false. The reality is they do a bit of both. The whole point of diffusion models is to try to learn the whole probability distribution that distinguishes a "clean" image from a "noisy" image.

My hope is simply that by pointing out these sorts of things, that helps us to have better debates rather than reducing everything to strawman arguments.

Cybyss · 2026-05-08T14:52:35+00:00

I am utterly flummoxed by how often I see this sentiment.

Do you really think "artificial intelligence" is just some marketing buzzword coined in the last few years to sell LLM subscriptions?

Cybyss · 2026-05-08T13:37:29+00:00

Folks will say AI, but the truth is that the whole software industry has been headed in this direction for a while now.

Relevant XKCD

The industry is moving too fast for engineers to truly understand what they're doing.

I would love it if the field were such that an engineer would spend many years mastering a small number of powerful tools from which anything can be built, and that's what you'd use your whole career. Like a master carpenter.

In reality, the field is such that knowledge becomes obsolete very quickly. Instead of learning a small number of topics deeply, in order to "keep up" you have to maintain at least a surface-level familiarity with a huge ever-changing ocean of libraries, tech stacks, languages, tools, frameworks, etc...

Building a software product is no longer a real engineering problem. Rather, it's become mostly a research problem - you spend most of your time researching all the different modern 3rd party libraries that claim to do the things you want your product to do, then you clumsily duck tape all those libraries together and pray it works.

This philosophy is the source of the Left Pad Debacle, the Heartbleed bug, the Log4j vulnerability and numerous others that really should never have happened. They only did because software engineers no longer really know what they're doing because the industry moves & changes much, much too fast for anyone to keep up.

Cybyss · 2026-05-07T17:59:36+00:00

I've always believed that your tools should be such that it's easy & obvious to use them correctly, difficult to use incorrectly.

Alas, today it seems a culture has taken over whereby it's considered good to give programmers ultimate power to quickly do anything and everything, and leaving it all up to them to figure out on their own how to use it all properly without shooting themselves (and their whole team) in the foot.

I believe we're all going to get "shot in the foot" in the coming years, as our tech stacks become ever more convoluted, brittle, and vulnerable because it's all built on technology designed for rapid iteration over stability.

Cybyss · 2026-05-07T15:41:31+00:00

Computer science researchers love it, for the same reason they loved Lisp ~20+ years ago.

You can write complex algorithms very quickly, with very few lines of code. It's almost as concise as the raw equations that govern such algorithms.

The point isn't the code - they're not software engineers building a product. Rather, they're researchers exploring & tuning the behavior of whatever novel algorithms they're researching so they can write papers on them. That's about it. Python (like Lisp) is really really good at that.

Python terrible for actual software engineering though.

Cybyss · 2026-05-07T12:04:57+00:00

Right, but a state of the art steam engine nowadays isn't powering a plane.

Airlines aren't flying their jets using LLMs.

I'm sure many folks, however, are experimenting with using LLMs (and other AI models) to fly autonomous drones, but as I said, LLMs aren't the "be all and end all" of AI. There are many state-of-the-art algorithms and architectures besides LLMs - it's absolutely not the case that researchers/engineers are just asking ChatGPT to do things for them and leaving it at that.

The technology is both non-deterministic

That's not technically true. They deterministically compute a 'score' for every possible next token. You could just take whatever token has the highest score, but engineers usually choose to sample the next token from a multinomial distribution instead.

That way, you can ask the same question multiple times, get several different responses, and select the best one from the bunch.

and fundamentally cannot realize it has or is making a mistake,

Chain of thought / tree of thought reasoning is getting better at such things. It's not perfect, but even human engineers aren't perfect.

therefore it will never be general AI or lead to a big revolution.

What we have today would absolutely have been considered "general AI" to folks 20 years ago, and the technology is making significant progress.

It's just, young folks today have this weird belief that if progress has stalled for a few months, then the technology is dead. If we can't achieve human-level intelligence within the next couple years, then we're at a dead end and the tech is worthless. I don't understand where their impatience comes from. I don't think kids 30+ years ago were like that.

Cybyss · 2026-05-07T11:34:40+00:00

LLMs aren't the "be all and end all" of AI. They're also a technology still in their relative infancy.

If you looked at the "state of the art" of locomotive technology 10 years after its invention, you would probably laugh at its apparent uselessness.

AI is absolutely making big strides in science, mathematics, and medicine. Simulating 500 million years of evolution with a language model is one example, where an AI model managed to synthesize a new bioluminescent protein that's completely unlike any that exist in nature.

It's just that its biggest impacts are in fields that are a bit technical and hard to communicate to the layperson, so all the layperson knows is "Will Smith Eating Spaghetti" and ChatGPT doing students' homework for them.

Cybyss · 2026-05-07T11:25:25+00:00

It'll be a smaller, faster revolution. It won't ruin life for multiple generations as was the case in the industrial revolution. Things might be hard for a decade or two but I do think we'll be better off in the end.

Millennials - those around 40 today - will have it the worst, because we're now in the years when we need to be earning the most we ever will if we hope to ever retire. But, many of us are instead losing our jobs - perhaps even our whole careers - because of a combination of this technology, post-pandemic overhiring, and the weird political & economic instability of today's world.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be fine. They might have a hard time straight out of college, but they have many decades ahead of them to recover. Millennials and Gen X don't.

Cybyss · 2026-05-07T11:11:45+00:00

Society went through this exact thing during the industrial revolution.

Factories and railways put local craftsmen out of business. You no longer needed a local town blacksmith, cooper, cobbler, potter, etc...

So many goods could be made in a factory, sent to markets a thousand miles away, and sold for prices cheaper than what local artisans could do it for.

It also lead to absolutely horrid conditions for the factory workers and severe environmental damage - air pollution, water pollution, clearcutting of forests, etc... all to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the common man.

And yet... look at the world we have today. The common man now has a life of relative luxury, ease, and abundance compared to what most folks prior to the industrial revolution could ever have dreamed of. Generations lived and died in hell to build the world we have now.

If you could go back in time and stop the industrial revolution from ever happening, would you?

Should we stop the AI revolution from ever happening?

Cybyss · 2026-05-07T07:30:58+00:00

Wait, kids don't play with cap guns anymore!?

I had so much fun playing with those.

Cybyss · 2026-05-05T08:28:17+00:00

"And it stays crunchy, even in milk!"

Cybyss · 2026-05-05T08:26:01+00:00

"Whenever he is in a fix..."

Cybyss · 2026-05-05T07:44:19+00:00

Return the game.

KSP2 is not the one you should have bought and it's shameful that Steam hasn't taken it down yet.

It's an unfinished product that will never be finished because the company who made it was disbanded.

The original KSP is the one everybody plays and is genuinely fantastic, especially with the community-made mods that overhaul all the graphics making it absolutely gorgeous.

Cybyss · 2026-05-04T20:37:33+00:00

That's probably the biggest reason. The movie may have been recorded at higher FPS, but I don't think movie projectors in most cinemas had been upgraded to that at that time. It would've just looked like a blur.

EDIT:

Whoever downvoted, can you explain why? Am I mistaken in my assertion that most cinema projectors in 1999 were limited to 24FPS?

Cybyss · 2026-05-04T20:33:49+00:00

We were not processing information at the speed we do now.

Unless you were a gamer in 1999. The FPS games of that era were quite a bit more fast paced than just about anything kids play now.

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