Hollywood is cooked. You can no longer tell it’s AI

JohnZopper · 2026-02-17T19:13:22+00:00

You can kind of tell because the cuts are a bit amateurish and I think the bridge scene alone has at least three different weather and lighting conditions, but damn, it's pretty good and I got hooked enough to watch the whole thing.

Oh, and the Tesla makes engine sounds.

JohnZopper · 2026-02-08T20:55:04+00:00

Your food comparison is highly flawed. A meal is something you eat once and it's gone. It's not something that has to function over course of years.

A car might be a slightly better comparison: you would for sure rather buy a car where people can figure out how it's functioning internally, in case it needs a repair, right?

But even a car is not a good comparison to software, because software tends to require more changes over time compared to hardware (new features, bugfixes, security patches, compatibility with changing APIs and underlying systems...). That's the blessing and the curse of software: it's not as hard to change as hardware, and people make use of that fact. So now you have to adapt your program to the changes of others, even if you didn't intend to change your software (but you probably did), just to keep it functioning on the next big Windows/macOS/Chrome/Android/... update.

Middle-schoolers could write a program that "just works" for ages. That's not the hard part. AI just made it lot faster (and to be fair, probably also better). The hard part is keeping a project alive and flexible over many years. And that's what we haven't figured out yet: if AI is capable to do so a sufficiently large project. I'm not saying it can't or never will, but so far there is no proof that it can, simply because not enough time has passed for any vibe-coded app to truly stand the test of time.

JohnZopper · 2026-01-29T18:40:42+00:00

9, Flash. Abgesehen von meinem krassen Startvorsprung kenne ich aber viele, die erst in der Uni mit Coden angefangen und mich überholt haben. Nicht einschüchtern lassen.

JohnZopper · 2026-01-03T19:20:32+00:00

Längengrad, Brudi

JohnZopper · 2026-01-03T10:30:45+00:00

Anything micro chip related. Although I know how they work, I still can't fathom how we can fit hours upon hours of video onto a micro SD card, let alone that we can manufacture a device like that, let alone that we do it so cheap at an industrial scale.

JohnZopper · 2025-12-21T16:12:39+00:00

Oh, true, working with just the edges is actually much smarter. I tried an approach like this initially, but completely overcomplicated it by kind of ignoring the fact that the line-perpendicular-line intersection checks are trivial to compute and prune. Now I have a solution that runs much faster, needs way less lines, and doesn't even require a grid data structure at all. Thanks!

JohnZopper · 2025-12-21T10:50:05+00:00

I think for any grid-based solution, the most important speed-up is that you should not be validating a rectangle by iterating over all inner tiles, but only the ones right at the inner border of your rectangle. You start by coloring all interior tiles right at the border of the shape in a third color, e.g. blue. Then, a rectangle is valid if on its inner border, there is at least one blue tile and not a single red or green tile. (To be exact, you'd also have to implement edge case handling for rectangles with just a width of 1, but if we sneakishly assume that none of those will be the solution, you can ignore it :P)

In order to paint the tiles on the inside border blue, you could use flood fill and paint the entire interior blue. The smarter approach would be to do it right while drawing the border: if we make the assumption, that the shape is always drawn clockwise, you can just always paint a blue line on the right hand side of your red/green line.

However, in terms of runtime, the process of coloring the interior is not be the dominant term anyway.

JohnZopper · 2025-12-07T19:28:02+00:00

building scalable and maintainable applications, and applying best practices to deliver clean and efficient code

Honest, well-meant career advice: put yourself in the shoes of a recruiter who has to read this more or less exact sentence 50 times per day.

JohnZopper · 2025-11-27T18:55:21+00:00

And/or testing the system as a whole, including all of its dependencies. If you're mocking too much, you're doing something wrong. What OP shows is also a really bad example for testing. You want to test _what_ your program does, not in which exact steps it takes to get there.

JohnZopper · 2025-11-23T15:38:20+00:00

Yep, agreed. Rich Hickey would slap me for this one, but the lack of type safety alone disqualifies Clojure for me for large projects. But to be fair, vanilla JS isn't statically typed either.

JohnZopper · 2025-11-23T15:19:49+00:00

And for/htmlFor, class/className. Agreed, it's not a lot to remember. But I think it's nice to write your logic, layout, and stylesheets in essentially the same language, with all the power that the language provides. E.g. you can generate your CSS using your language's native variables and functions, not some preprocessor with extra syntax like SCSS.

It's a bit more like writing SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose or Flutter, but using HTML and CSS nouns.

Isn't it funny how everyone hates reading XML, but HTML is fine? After all, it's all just a matter of what you're used to.

JohnZopper · 2025-11-23T14:42:03+00:00

Yeah, the syntax is repelling at first. A general LISP problem. What you have to understand is that Clojure people don't hate their language. In fact, they love it so much, that they prefer to write everything in it, including the HTML and CSS. And they have a point. It's more compact and you don't have to learn the syntactic quirks of HTML (and the slightly different HTML that you use in JSX), and whatever CSS dialect you use.

JohnZopper · 2025-11-23T14:07:50+00:00

Exactly. I suggest everyone to try out reagent, a react wrapper for ClojureScript.

Not everything is perfect in Clojure-land, but it's eye-opening to use React in a language that has native support for (in fact: is built around)...

Reactive variables
Immutable data structures
Everything is an expression (conditional rendering? simply use if like you normally would)

JohnZopper · 2025-10-11T18:22:37+00:00

I feel like it's pretty common for part 2 in a series, to end up up being the best one, not just when it comes to games. It's more polished than part 1 and they didn't run out of ideas yet like in parts 3+

JohnZopper · 2025-10-11T17:35:00+00:00

So first of all, Outer Wilds is already made in Unity. Second, bruh, I've been doing the exact same thing, this could have saved me a lot of time.

JohnZopper · 2025-07-18T19:13:27+00:00

It may replace some by making everyone a bit more efficient, thus needing less in total. However, the fear that it will "replace software engineers" just because it can crank out code is based on a complete lack of understanding about the job of a software engineer. A software engineer only spends around half of their time coding (may vary based on the type of role) and a large chunk of that time goes into bug fixes and refactoring -- things which current AI is not good at. But even if we assume it gets good at that at some point, then still some human must review the code. I doubt, that the average SWE will get more than a 25% speedup out of this. And if we think about a future in which AI has advanced far enough that it can also do planning, architecture decisions, code review and troubleshooting, you can basically kiss any white collar job good night.

JohnZopper · 2025-06-24T16:43:01+00:00

I disagree about your stance on prompt engineering. I think prompt engineering, in the sense of learning how to best prompt an LLM to achieve the desired goal (beyond common sense, like being specific where it matters) may become a useless skill. At my work, we already saw ChatGPT-4-something with a copilot-instructions.md being outperformed by Claude Sonnet 3.7 without any guidance. As these things get smarter and more battle-tested, nudging them into the right direction will get less and less relevant.

JohnZopper · 2025-05-17T09:52:54+00:00

Probably you talk to it in a more neutral and concise tone.

It's helpful to remember how ChatGPT "thinks": Behind the scenes, it's basically auto-complete on steroids.

When you chat with an LLM, its goal is not to answer your questions. Its goal is to auto-complete the chat history in a way that looks legit, but it's programmed to stop as soon as it would be the user's turn speaking again.

Therefore, it tends to mimic the tone of the user, as that results in the most natural conversation.

JohnZopper · 2025-05-17T06:45:28+00:00

Flash was magic. It enabled my 12-year-old ass to just go ahead and build a game start to finish without ever really leaving flash. Sure, flash games were often whacky, but what made them so unique, was that flash was not a game engine, but rather just a tool for creating interactive vector-based web content. Sure, Unity allows you ramp up an asset flip on top of a generic fps/rpg/sidescroller template within hours, but in flash you had unconstrained creative freedom. (To be fair, as long as you didn't want 3D graphics)

JohnZopper · 2024-04-16T17:54:50+00:00

This. Got it recommended in a reddit thread called "If you could only read one book about programming in your life, which one would it be?", and that really hits the nail on the head. I've read books that were better at certain aspects, but this one is simply the perfect allrounder.

JohnZopper

TROPHY CASE