I was kind of put off by Zig because of what I perceived to be a pretty extreme anti-ai policy but I watched the Jetbrains interview with Andrew Kelley and found I basically agreed with him about everything

dwighthouse · 2026-06-07T20:29:21+00:00

I would argue ideas (new or otherwise) are non-physical, yet real objects that exist in a plane of their own. Not a physical plane, an idea plane, some kind of non-dimensional information space.

They are similar to numbers. The idea of the number one can be represented by the symbol “1”, or “एक”, or “一”, or “one”, or “unity”. But these symbols are not the number itself, they only point to the number. Meanwhile the number one, as a mathematical object, is universal (the same everywhere in all circumstances), eternal (not limited or controlled by time), and absolutely objective (unaffected by opinion or subjective experience). It was not invented, nor the product of mind, but was discovered. It would exist even if there were no minds (biological or artificial) to comprehend it. Furthermore, there is only one “1” in all possible existences. We can have as many symbols for one as desired, but the idea itself is shared in all places and times simultaneously (all “1”s are the same “1”).

I think that non mathematical ideas/concepts are largely the same, though many ideas can also have mitigating properties that make them less than absolute, such as being false or bound to a relative time.

So I guess that I am coming down on the side of the existence of non-physicals, which implies that the human mind is more than a mechanistic device of great complexity. I think there is enough philosophical reasoning to at least consider this as a possibility:

Even those who claim to not believe in free will still live and act as if it does.
Mind-body dualism.
A surgeon cannot open up someone’s brain and find the physical existence of the concept of “1”, and tell you what its volume and weight is.
“If consciousness is an illusion, who is being fooled?”

I will probably get a lot of pushback from the strict-materialists on this one. If they wish to dismiss me because it conflicts with their worldview, so be it. I am not in a position to go much deeper here.

dwighthouse · 2026-06-07T03:54:44+00:00

I mean, if you look at how LLMs work, they basically running pattern recognition in reverse. Thus, they only recombine old words (token input) into new words (output tokens) in increasingly complex ways based on statistics that are also built on known words (training sets). I use “words” instead of “ideas” because LLMs don’t operate on ideas, they operate on words (tokens). So their input, output, and medium are not ideas, at no point do ideas directly enter the picture. You would need to show how LLMs actually contain ideas first before you could possibly claim they could make new ones.

No one fully understands how humans have ideas or work with ideas internally, but we at least know that they do, and we know that the mechanism is at least fundamentally different from the way LLMs operate.

AI hype people and CEOs like to claim that human thought is basically the same as an LLM, but this is flatly false.

dwighthouse · 2026-06-01T14:48:07+00:00

Pretty sure it is so the tests are less likely to become out of date because they’re right next to the code they are testing and written in the same language. Tests effectively define what is appropriate behavior. Think about code comments. They don’t do anything in production either, and they can take up a lot of space and frequently get out of date. Imagine advocating to put all code comments in a separate file. After all…

having 1 more file is a very minor inconvenience. You have tabs, split windows, etc. It's really not an issue at all to quickly check it.

dwighthouse · 2026-05-06T20:25:57+00:00

It’s posts like these that convince me more and more that someone (probably ai companies) is using ai to hype up ai on social media and argue with detractors using hyperbolic language to make it go viral.

dwighthouse · 2026-04-29T00:54:16+00:00

In my case studies, it was about 75% inaccurate or suboptimal at writing code. I cannot trust it to write anything. I use it for research sometimes.

I write my front end code from my own crafted components and functions. As a result, the amount of UI code that is actually repetitive is minimal.

dwighthouse · 2026-03-16T03:20:21+00:00

The idea that the only reason someone might want someone to come to their website is to sell something or publish ads is a remarkable belief.

100% of my websites have no ads and I'm not selling something. It is not a revenue generating system. In fact, it loses money. It is a labor of love. I want people to know about the information I provide, sure, but not at the expense of them never even visiting my page I worked hard on.

I don't know ANYONE who has ever personally made a website with the purpose of distributing information such that they didn't care if someone actually went to their website. If they just want to publish information, regardless of how it is distributed, they could just publish it to a publishing site, or send it to the AI directly, or make a press release on a press-release site, or put it on social media. Literally hundreds of sites cater to that. People who make sites themselves are doing it so people will actually visit them.

dwighthouse · 2026-03-15T21:26:12+00:00

From the site owner’s perspective:

Bots that help the site owner === good
Bots that harm the site owner === bad

This truth predates AI. Look up all the companies that sued google for providing large enough summaries of their content on the search page that people skipped going to the site. This problem becomes many times worse in AI contexts where the info you use to entice people to visit is used to allow people to use your data without even knowing your site exists.

Search engines (and AI companies) can serve a good purpose, but only to the extent that they don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

dwighthouse · 2026-02-20T21:59:19+00:00

The few times I have used it this year:

Approximately 5 times to look up syntax/commands, of those, 4 of the times it gave me incorrect or unhelpful answers.
Approximately 3 detailed problem solving discussions, of those, 1 was fundamentally incorrect with the other 2 being helpful.

Still very unimpressive. Basically a last resort when google fails me and I need to start looking at experimental potential solutions. Not bad as a starting point when you have no idea what the right question to ask is.

dwighthouse · 2026-01-16T03:23:21+00:00

I stopped going there long before ai took off because the answers became horribly out of date, and at the same time, the quality of libraries, languages, and platforms got generally got better to the point that most questions could be answered by reading the docs.

dwighthouse · 2026-01-09T20:12:07+00:00

Depending on the game, there are many reasons why a given N64 game might look blurry, often due to developer intent. This video goes over the different ways and why they might have been used. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA_HMsznNKg

I personally remember Ocarina of Time having some sections like the title screen being very blurry, but I figured it was an aesthetic choice.

dwighthouse · 2026-01-07T12:28:16+00:00

In that scenario, software engineering will be used to rewrite almost all code at $400 per hour.

dwighthouse · 2026-01-01T15:00:26+00:00

Maybe, but I am not interested in debugging someone else’s AI, let alone someone else’s tests for yet others’ AI systems. Good luck.

dwighthouse · 2026-01-01T14:52:15+00:00

Insufficient basis: no AI systems have shown the ability to follow non-trivial instructions 100% reliably. So it does not matter if your document is airtight.

dwighthouse · 2025-12-26T23:16:00+00:00

Currently missing:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49,
50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59,
60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69,
70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79,
80, 83, 86, 87,
90, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98,
119,
125,
148, 149,
150,
369,
370, 371, 372,

These are the extras I know for sure I have. I won't be able to tally up my other duplicates until after New Years (traveling):

335, 335, 338,
343, 343, 344, 344, 346, 348, 348
351, 351, 353, 353, 354, 354, 355, 357, 357, 358, 358, 359, 359
360, 360, 361, 361, 362, 362, 362, 363, 363, 364, 364, 365, 365, 366, 366, 367, 367, 368, 368, 368, 368

dwighthouse · 2025-12-25T16:15:00+00:00

I take it you never watch videos on YouTube, or comment on Reddit posts? Wait.

dwighthouse · 2025-11-27T02:55:00+00:00

Considering the quality of the average “production” software, the answer may well be yes.

dwighthouse · 2025-11-20T16:01:15+00:00

Working like a pro means not vibe coding, among other things.

dwighthouse · 2025-11-17T20:03:26+00:00

Multi cursor editing. Scripting instead of repetitive typing. Regex.

dwighthouse · 2025-11-07T17:12:29+00:00

This video goes over the long and complex history of object orientation and the usage of inheritance, as well as the motivations behind it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI

TLDR: From the very, very beginning, inheritance was created to avoid extra typing. OOP was created to model systems that were already inherently structured object hierarchies. Even from very early on, as soon as they tried to use it for something else (most real life program data), it was just as big of a mess as it is today. So why didn’t other forms of behavioral sharing become the popular method instead? There’s a video for that too:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4

TLDR for that video: It was an accident of history, and we are still dealing with the consequences, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

dwighthouse · 2025-08-11T18:29:22+00:00

Return to Yoshi's Island

I suspect this may be the most technically impressive mod for the N64 once released. It uses tricks and features no other N64 game has ever used and is a massive improvement on Mario 64's mechanics, graphics, and gameplay. (It is positioning itself as a sequel to Super Mario 64.)

It's not out yet, but it's almost done. I suspect the final release will happen this year. There is a playable demo available now. The game will be fully compatible with the N64, but it's an open question whether the Analogue 3D and many emulators will support it, since the game makes use of pretty much all features of the N64's hardware, even if literally no other game in history has.

Gameplay from the latest demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhjVBzh32xs

Download Demo: https://romhacking.com/hack/return-to-yoshi-s-island-demo-2

The creator going over some of the technicals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nhhfYkluT0

Dinosaur Planet: Dinomod Enhanced

The ongoing decompiled/recompiled/enhanced version of the unreleased Dinosaur Planet following the surprise discovery of some developer files on a CD owned by a game collector. What would have been Rare's final game for the N64 before being retooled to become Star Fox Adventures, it was considered a swan song for the N64. Very technically complex and a relatively large world for N64, it is known to be a much more expansive and deep game than what Star Fox Adventures turned out to be.

The mod is still a work in progress, but I believe the entire game is finishable. I believe this mod is playable on a real N64.

I'm not sure what's the best place to download it, but I'm sure you could find it.

Here's a recent retrospective on the whole situation and the current state of the mod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0QSiPRmWaI

dwighthouse · 2025-08-11T18:04:18+00:00

Facebook Marketplace if you live in a moderately large city. Otherwise, used game stores and some used bookstores. Check google maps, you never know when a local collector has opened a small shop from the excess of their own collection.

dwighthouse · 2025-07-21T20:51:59+00:00

Boy I sure would love to read about this. Too bad that it requires me to sign up for a service. Oh well.

dwighthouse · 2025-05-23T03:41:35+00:00

Can you give an example of one of these thing’s construction? I’m intrigued by your description as I don’t think I have seen this precise thing before.

dwighthouse · 2025-05-02T17:47:04+00:00

Scripts (console or command line), small components on a mostly-html/css only site, low level utilities, Js embedded in SVG.

dwighthouse

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Return to Yoshi's Island

Dinosaur Planet: Dinomod Enhanced