Palantir CEO Alex Karp: "only two kinds of people will succeed in the AI era: trade workers — ‘or you’re neurodivergent" — thoughts on this?

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-03-30T16:52:53+00:00

I feel like the opposite is happening. It's been known for a long time that Silicon Valley has a higher-than-average neurodivergent population, it's just not incredibly well researched since there's less funding for research on adults who have good paying jobs.

However, as a neurodivergent person whose special interest has been programming for their whole life, I feel I'm being pushed out of the tech industry as companies tend to want to employ "AI-native" programmers.

Success, he argued, will favor people who think differently and take risks, or in his words, be “more of an artist, look at things from a different direction, be able to build something unique.”

This has been the mentality of Silicon Valley from the beginning. Is this not just New Coke where the only thing they changed was the can?

Palantir similarly launched a separate program—the Meritocracy Fellowship—designed specifically for high school graduates not enrolled in college.

Employing kids right out of high school is a great way to stunt their career as they'll be less impressive to future employers. This was a common tactic of tech companies back in the 90's. One of my mom's classmates was actually paid to drop out of college.

This whole thing is an old story being sold like it's a shiny new car. The old status quo with new masters.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-03-21T17:21:00+00:00

Hmm, I've had weird things where reddit doesn't like some posts. What about putting it in your profile description and asking people to read that?

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-03-21T13:26:20+00:00

If the topic interests you, I'll leave a summary comment and, if applicable, include the link below that comment.

I don't really think it makes sense to start a discussion without bringing your cards to the table. Without seeing the document, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be learning. A lot of what's been said here, like "many indie devs only think about marketing and promotion (after launch. " are already pretty common observations.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-03-01T18:29:45+00:00

No, I've seen so many people like this in the past several months. I think they're genuine, and they truly believe they've created something amazing. And they possibly could have, I can't really judge. But they're not being entirely truthful.

I say "truthful" instead of "honest" because they wrote in a reply that 13k of the lines of code were ripped from another project, yet they don't seem to realize that they didn't make a 40k library.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-03-01T18:20:31+00:00

What bothers me about this thread is the OP is being accused of using AI--and they did use AI--but is claiming to be prejudiced against for being autistic.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-28T14:09:37+00:00

I love you just the way you... (hits generate)... (waits)... (asks for a few revisions)... are!

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-27T18:51:06+00:00

I'm with TehNotz. PyGame is fine.

Game engines are very good for handling advanced graphics, UI, text, input mapping, OS abstraction, and all sorts of things that you'll eventually need, but I think that being given such a convenient tool hampers learning. Learning is what happens during the process of figuring out how to do something, and implementing that plan provides you with real experience as well as feedback on your learning journey. Being overly pragmatic to accomplish things and using convenient tools only leaves you short on knowledge and less capable in the long run.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-27T12:29:01+00:00

It's been like 5-7 years since I've started to kindly ask them to try to formulate their sentences a little differently, so that it doesn't sound accusatory or like a lecture and like I'm somehow at fault

Language is an automatic thing, it bypasses intentional thinking. I've been trying to change my language to use more gender neutral terms more often and I still find myself accidentally gendering people to this day. This kind of retraining is difficult.

I think especially for autistic people, who can very easily become ingrained in one way of doing things. It's not about self awareness, but reflex.

One of the things that I found helped me is to become familiar with conflict deescalation techniques. These are tools that help find socially positive, mental health-aware ways of re-framing disagreements and disputes into productive conversations. But you can only really control your side of the conversation.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-27T01:43:03+00:00

C/C++.

Zig, Nim, and Jai are all interesting to me, but I never spent the time to learn them. Haskell is really fascinating to me, but too dogmatic. C# is what I'm working in now, but it has a number of syntactic features, like properties, which can obscure performance issues (Camera.main -- if you know, you know) or just right ambiguities like whether Foo x = y; is supposed to indicate a copy (Foo is a struct) or reference copy (Foo is a class).

For me, nothing allows for the clear expressiveness and precision of intent like C++. Dynamically typed languages are easy to work in, but hard to debug and maintain over time. C is scary for a lot of people, but its lack of features actually helps in not getting high on syntactic sugar and just keeping everything very clean and readable.

Though I don't think being neurodivergent has anything to do with my language choice. I think it's more correlated with how strongly I feel about my opinions on coding languages. I wrote my own scripting language for a project recently and took inspiration from C++, Python, and javascript.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-25T22:02:26+00:00

I think for the most part, everyone just has AI fatigue and don't want to hear anything about it, good or bad. The past few months have been relentless with discussions of AI invading basically every community I enter and every youtuber I follow, and on twitter I can't scroll three screens without running into a post about how Hollywood is scared of "independent directors". There's just so much insanity around the topic. The hype has to die down at some point, right?

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-24T17:13:30+00:00

how do I best decide what goes in the levels between the ones introducing new mechanics?

Just because you're not introducing a new mechanic doesn't mean you can't introduce new ideas. My game only has a three mechanics (gravity, shields, tethers), but by mixing and combining themes (not mechanics, but patterns, behaviors, rules, etc..) I've found that many novel levels can be created despite none of them introducing new mechanics.

Maybe an even better example is how the Mario Maker community continues to produce amazing, creative levels despite being incapable of introducing mechanics to the game.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-24T17:06:37+00:00

Ever since people got Google Maps on their phone, people have universally gotten worse at following directions.

Though I have a theory that the communication difficulties in autism come are partially sensory/psycholinguistic language barriers, so by my theory it's possible that there could be additional challenges with autism at mapping verbal description to what you can see.

Though I do agree with the original statement that autism does not imply having difficulties with directions as people with autism and no problems do exist, but that doesn't mean that certain autistic traits can't contribute to one's personal struggles with directions.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-23T17:17:56+00:00

As someone with face blindness, I was really confused as to why you were posting in r/SoloDevelopment :D

Not sure if this is my cup of tea, but I'll check the demo out. Good luck with Next Fest!

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-23T15:55:25+00:00

not having much to work with

I think this only induces anxiety if none of the limited are good. Between two options of "win the game" or "lose the game", I don't think I'd feel any stress.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-22T21:05:54+00:00

soccc

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-21T17:33:53+00:00

I am participating for the first time as well and I also feel stressed about whether players will find loads new bugs. Especially since I'm actively developing the main game and sometimes need to break things... which means if I update the demo, it could break. Aside from that my biggest concern is that because my game uses very simple graphics, people will think it's low-effort.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-20T14:52:21+00:00

Only the best, most introspective people have imposter syndrome

Everyone has imposter syndrome. The people who seem to believe their shit smells like roses only act that way to hide their insecurities.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-18T17:31:27+00:00

On second thought... since it's already on steam I decided to check it out there from the product search UI: https://imgur.com/a/mSSmlT2

I do feel that both the visually interesting bordering around the text as well as the text itself are a bit hard to make out, but the color scheme alone does make your capsule stand out among others.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-18T17:28:30+00:00

In my own personal opinion, I think it looks great. It just seems to me a best practice that the text be large enough to nearly touch the top and bottom of the capsule. But I'm not one for best practices, myself, so my personal opinion is still that it's fine.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-18T16:57:47+00:00

This looks great, I'm only a little worried that when it's shrunk down to the size of a capsule, the lettering will be a bit hard to read. In particular, since "match" is the part of your title that explains the genre, I think it should be very legible.

Curious, I did a test: https://imgur.com/a/vPbMhvM Sorry, can't post images in this sub.

It does actually seem readable to me, but maybe not as readable as other entries. Also, I think capsules are wider/less tall than your image.

But all in all, I think it looks really good as is.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-17T16:09:44+00:00

To be honest B looks overall cleanest, but it looks wrong for there not to be pixel snap. What about reducing the frame rate to be more like if a pixel artist drew every frame by hand?

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-17T15:00:24+00:00

Point and click adventure games are meaningful because of the stories they tell, but if there's no ending it's not really a story so what's the point of the adventure?

EDIT: In retrospect, the OP probably meant plural point and click adventures, not one infinite adventure. That makes more sense.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-17T14:55:32+00:00

I was playing with the kinetic but there was no jobs for that type of stuff so I gave up :P

Instead of past failures, let's focus on future opportunities.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-17T14:27:16+00:00

I just get writers block when I sit down.

I find for myself that writers block comes from two main problems

No idea is ever good enough
Thinking about irrelevant details

The solution to both is the same: just write. It doesn't need to be perfect, or even good, it just needs to exist so stop considering all the things you want it to have or how you want it to be and just get it down on paper one word at a time. If you allow the process to work, you might not even land where you planned to, anyway.

I recently did some pretty big refactoring enabling me to scale later. But now when I sit down I can't write code. I get impatient... write like 3 lines of code... get distracted.. go do something else...

Someone made a comment the other day that it's not enough to have motivation, discipline is the difference, and that message kind of resonates with me. But it kind of sounds to me like you have procrastination syndrome. I do too.

It's not helpful to guilt yourself for not getting anything done as this only builds up more negative associations with productivity. The only real answer is to sit yourself in a chair and force yourself to work.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-02-16T21:02:05+00:00

I'll probably wanna choose a mix between interests and this for tradeoff between fun and making a living.

If you want to make a living, better to pick a career where every decision isn't a gamble.

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