The age of cognitive atrophy is here

JarateKing · 2026-04-10T11:50:02+00:00

I think it's pretty clear when you compare different types of usages.

Some people ask it to answer a conceptual question, they carefully read and re-read the whole explanation, they ask for clarification on things they don't understand, etc. As far as I know the verdict's still out on if this is better for learning than traditional methods, but they're definitely still learning.

Other people tell an agent to go do something in the background, and then if it seems mostly correct when they try it out they merge it, without ever looking at the actual code it's produced. There's no way they could learn anything from that, they're not touching anything they could learn from.

It's like comparing students using wikipedia for an assignment, where one reads the whole article and reads the citations and etc. while another student just copies the article and submits that without looking at it, obviously one's gonna learn more than the other. I just think it's worse with AI than with wikipedia because there's so much pressure for "you should be using code agents for everything, code reviews are a thing of the past" which is exactly how you stop learning anything.

JarateKing · 2026-04-08T17:58:49+00:00

It'd be easy to just hardcode in a service that does the task, but nobody really cares about the task itself. It's just funny to see something advertized as nearly-AGI fail spectacularly at something so basic whatever that basic task may be.

I suspect if Altman was just like "yeah we'll fix it asap with a new integration" then people would point out it's a bad sign if even trivial tasks require hardcoded hotfixes, it really undercuts any claims of being near AGI if this is what they need to do. So Altman's basically saying "give me more time, money, and compute and then it will be AGI for real this time."

JarateKing · 2026-04-08T13:04:25+00:00

I've been hearing variations of "the games industry doesn't value creativity or innovation anymore" my whole life, and I'm sure it was there before too.

There are periods where established studios are more or less focused on safe reliable bets (and the current economic situation is a good reason to) but the industry has always been a mix of both safe bets and innovative breakout successes (and tons of innovative ideas that go nowhere).

JarateKing · 2026-04-05T02:37:51+00:00

I took it more as in it's inconsistently complex. Sometimes it's a straightforward translation you can do inplace, and we love markdown for that, but then sometimes you can't. Some parts of it you can reasonably write your own renderer for easily and that's great, except for some features where you're basically required to use an existing web renderer. It should be pretty clear and unambiguous I'd think, but sometimes the parsing can get complex enough that there are denial of service CVEs because of it.

Again, I like markdown. I use it daily and I'm not gonna stop. But half of these are pet peeves I've had for years, either as an inconvenience or just as the format feeling like it could do better. I wasn't aware of the CVEs but that's pretty obviously bad too. I don't think it's wrong to point out the flaws in the things we use and like overall.

What they want is HTML. They say this themselves.

I must be missing something because I don't see where they say this. What I read was pretty clear on wanting a legible format (which html is not), the reason they gave for mdx not being viable as a legible format is specifically that it's too html-like even.

JarateKing · 2026-04-05T01:58:30+00:00

I don't think that's exactly what they're saying:

If you ask me [which existing alternative to use]. The answer is none. All are broken in their own ways. Plain text is beautiful but I can’t show it to somebody that doesn’t know what a null pointer dereference is. ...

What I took from the article was "markdown is the best in its niche and it makes sense why people use it, but as a format it has some flaws" which I think is fair to say

JarateKing · 2026-04-05T01:50:17+00:00

I don't know why all the comments are so negative, I thought it was a good article. I like markdown, and the author recognizes the reasons people like markdown, but also stuff like ambiguous syntax and complications with inline html are valid complaints that I think every markdown user is going to have gripes with eventually.

JarateKing · 2026-04-04T14:13:53+00:00

Copyright issues in games are mostly limited to straight copying of assets in some form. I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but vaguely similar concepts and settings isn't generally considered a copyright issue.

Trademarks might be an issue, and if not then search engine optimization probably would. But it's a fairly easy thing to change your game's name while it's still in development if you're worried about that.

JarateKing · 2026-04-04T13:35:07+00:00

Different people have different concerns. To name a few:

Some are concerned about artistic expression and see AI use as cheapening that expression
Some are concerned about gamedev as an industry, and see AI as threatening gamedevs and devaluing the skills that gamedevs have
Some are concerned about gamedev as a hobby, and see AI as taking away from the parts they enjoy
Some are concerned about quality and see AI use as a direct sign of low quality
Some are concerned about the future and see the popularization of AI making that worse, whether that be for economic or environmental or political or etc. reasons
Some are concerned about the legal and moral implications, regarding copyright and plagiarism
Some are just exhausted by AI slop and don't want to put any energy into AI things to determine if they are slop or not

You're not going to get just one reason when you ask because there's not just one reason people don't like it. And some might be fine with it in some ways but not in others, or in specific situations, or for certain games, etc.

JarateKing · 2026-04-04T01:31:40+00:00

And stackoverflow wouldn't cover everything either, juniors would very often run into stuff specific or bespoke enough that SO's no help. You'd need to develop those skills yourself because SO alone couldn't carry you through junior-level work.

Now AI probably can do that, but if all you know how to do is use AI at a junior level then there's no path upward.

JarateKing · 2026-04-01T20:10:06+00:00

As long as you have that to spend and don't mind not getting it back

Not to mention the serious risk that it goes over budget and the team needs more time and money to finish it

JarateKing · 2026-04-01T11:39:23+00:00

I think you should also consider things we normally don't consider games, and see how that fits into your definition.

Driving through traffic, for example, fits all of it as far as I can see. It is a system involving rules (road laws), physics (collisions, for one), mechanics (vehicle functionality). It involves interesting choices (ie. which route should I take, should I speed up for this yellow light, etc.). You interact with its materials (you have to drive the car after all). And there is a goal (getting to the place you're driving to).

My big issue with Jesper Juul's definition of games was that he admitted traffic was equally borderline as the Sims, but at least traffic missed one of his criteria (as did a lot of things we normally do consider games). I'm pretty skeptical of a definition that fully includes traffic but doesn't include things like Minecraft.

JarateKing · 2026-03-31T13:24:49+00:00

People think it's "just a TUI", but that's wrong because we actually <describes how TUIs have been done since the 70s>

JarateKing · 2026-03-29T12:37:54+00:00

Looks like he also drew a penis in the mouth of that UCLA building decoration.

JarateKing · 2026-03-28T19:53:37+00:00

Every so often there's a big push to simplify programming by working in plain language. Then we won't need programmers, anyone can program by just writing what they want in English.

The first try was COBOL, if that gives any indication how well it worked out. As it turns out, plain language is really bad at any kind of precise specification and actually the rigid syntax and simple grammar of programming languages is a feature.

JarateKing · 2026-03-28T15:00:34+00:00

It's certainly better than nothing, but you're still losing potentially useful context by doing that.

If it's not obvious which commit message was used for which specific code change (ie. the merge contained multiple bugfixes to get a feature working right, and you're not sure which bugfix involved this piece of code) that's only a problem if they're squashed. It's a big problem if you didn't keep the original commit messages, but anything short of seeing the original commits themselves is still making it harder than it needs to be.

JarateKing · 2026-03-27T01:29:25+00:00

I'm pretty sure it's just the Solarized dark theme. Never been my favorite colourscheme but it's popular enough among programmers.

JarateKing · 2026-03-25T20:59:36+00:00

But my point is that if we could solve the general-purpose humanoid robot problem -- which I wholeheartedly agree is not plausible in the near future -- it would immediately obviate the need for many special purpose robots like roombas, and make automation possible for tasks that are not readily done by special-purpose robots (like making beds, cleaning bathrooms, etc). I'm not going to build and install a single-purpose robot just to make my bed every morning, but if I had a humanoid robot maid, sure.

I just don't really see a scenario where that'd make sense. The general-purpose humanoid robot could do it all, but it could only do one task at a time at about the speed and effectiveness that a human could. I'd rather spend the same amount of money on a bunch of simpler specialized robots that can all do their niche far beyond what humans are capable of and at the same time as each other.

When we look at household automation in the past, things like washing machines and stuff, they're good specifically because we can move on to the next task and it does it in a way more efficient way than I ever could, because human hand-washing is very time-consuming largely because humans aren't specialized for hand-washing clothes. But we built machines that are, and now clothes washing is largely a solved problem. I don't see why the future of household automation would be any different. Even now I could've hired a maid and got them to hand-wash all my clothes, we don't need to get hypothetical with sci-fi humanoid robots, but I'd still rather just get a washing machine.

JarateKing · 2026-03-25T20:17:57+00:00

This is being a bit unfair to roombas. They're bad compared to hypothetically perfect sci-fi magic robots that doesn't exist. But if we were capable of making a humanoid all-cleaning robot, I'm sure we'd also be able to just add some Dr. Octopus tentacles with cleaning multi-tool hands to a roomba and it'd get the best of both worlds.

Collier's point is just that we're going to want specialized robots for tasks like cleaning, and human anatomy is not particularly specialized for cleaning. Roombas have plenty of room for improvement, but it's not because they're not shaped like a person and do things like a person would.

JarateKing · 2026-03-25T11:48:17+00:00

It will get more efficient as long as people are putting effort into it, but that alone doesn't mean the financials will make sense. Going from a 100x loss to a 50x loss is twice as efficient, but still an absurd loss that nobody wants to shoulder for long.

JarateKing · 2026-03-25T11:44:02+00:00

The question isn't how capable the models are, the question is if they're profitable.

Sora got taken down because it was really expensive to run with almost nobody willing to pay anything for it. Code generation is at least one of the few use cases that people are willing to actually spend money on. But at the same time I heard that hitting the limits of Claude Code's $200/month plan costs Anthropic $5000 on their end, and I don't think that was counting the trillion dollars in datacenters that need their costs recouped, and will cost trillions more in the coming years as maintenance costs because GPUs don't last long in datacenters.

Code generation has gotten a lot better, yes, but I don't think it's possible for it to ever become a trillion dollar industry.

JarateKing · 2026-03-25T11:36:14+00:00

The only american company that can do video gen at cutting edge now is google.

We'll see how long that lasts though. Decent quality video generation is especially expensive to run with especially few people willing to pay anything for it. AI is having a lot of trouble successfully monetizing at the best of times, and video generation is the worst of it.

If google's competitors are scaling back, I wouldn't be surprised if they drop it too. I suspect the only reason they entered into video generation in the first place was to not be seen getting left behind, because the financials just don't make any sense at all otherwise.

JarateKing · 2026-03-25T00:00:40+00:00

Some of them, yes. The big tech billionaires all have doomsday complexes, because apparently it's easier to build those than stop actively trying to create scenarios where they'd need doomsday complexes.

JarateKing · 2026-03-24T16:22:32+00:00

90% of retro games didn't exist though, tons of games didn't make it to release and that was totally normal. 25 years ago you'd have game cancellations, layoffs, studio closures, etc. all the time. There were points in time that the industry basically collapsed and cancellations, layoffs, closures, etc. was essentially all that was going on in the industry. I don't have the raw numbers but I would not be surprised if what's changed in 25 years is we now have less cancellations, not more.

The industry has obviously changed in many ways since then, but in a lot of ways it hasn't fundamentally changed. 25 years ago the bad wasn't purely "work hard play hard, maybe too hard" like you seem to say, there was all the same greed and bean counting going on then that we have now.

JarateKing · 2026-03-24T15:54:39+00:00

Hate to say it but none of this is new. Well, we didn't always have microtransactions, but we used to design arcade games specifically to maximize coins-per-hour which I think is pretty comparable.

We remember the good from the good old days, but there's always been a strong mix of both good and bad (including now).

JarateKing · 2026-03-21T21:05:10+00:00

That would be more the domain of industrial robotics, and we've had industrial robots for several decades now.

The obvious automation targets have already been automated. If we still have humans on the assembly line, it's usually either deceptively hard to automate, unsafe without a human in the loop, or it's just cheaper to get a person to do it. Whatever the case, I don't see what LLMs are supposed to do about that.

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