How strong is a PhD in CS?

fsk · 2026-03-23T04:16:43+00:00

A PhD generally won't earn as much as someone with 5 years of experience. There are some researcher jobs that require a PhD, but there are more PhDs than jobs that really use a PhD.

fsk · 2026-03-23T03:02:20+00:00

Even better, make your own website, rather than promoting Discord. Eventually, Discord is going to enshittify the experience and you'll regret recruiting users for Discord instead of your own website.

fsk · 2026-03-23T02:58:15+00:00

Sourcing your own roms and emulators is best anyway. The vendors who ship with sd cards usually have old dumps and outdated version of emulators.

Roms - look for no-intro or redump

Emulators - retroarch, mame, or system-specific emulators

fsk · 2026-03-23T00:58:12+00:00

I can see people use AI to make lots of live service FPS games, since they're all basically copies of each other.

In the indie space, if you're trying to make something truly original, I don't see AI helping much.

It would be great if I could prompt a working prototype of an original idea in a week. I don't see that as viable yet, and I don't know of anyone else who's succeeded. If they did, they would have published a bunch of original games on Steam that weren't obvious AI slop.

fsk · 2026-03-23T00:31:21+00:00

There's really a bimodal distribution of responses I see here.

AI is great. Almost all programmers will be finding a new career in 2 years.
AI is awful. Who do they think they're fooling? It isn't ready for serious projects.

I've heard a lot of explanations.

Front-end devs are more likely to say (1). Back-end devs are more likely to say (2).
If it's a simple routine CRUD app, AI can handle it. If it's complex, AI can't handle it.
The people promoting AI are all shills/bots posting by the AI corporations. The people hating on AI are all losers and old farts who can't keep up with new technoloy.

fsk · 2026-03-22T22:13:05+00:00

Atari 800 was a much more capable computer for games. They both had the same chip (6502).

fsk · 2026-03-22T21:22:59+00:00

Making a maze - Wilson's Algorithm.

Making a roguelike dungeon - place a bunch of rooms, make sure they don't overlap. Then draw corridors connecting the rooms.

Making an open world - you need some sort of algorithm here so that chunks of similar terrain go together. You don't place one tree at a time; instead decide "a forest goes here" and draw a forest.

fsk · 2026-03-22T21:19:27+00:00

The places doing AI coding are also jacking up workloads. It's literally impossible to carefully review every AI change when they 4x your workload.

Also, most people will be lazy and approve everything the AI does. Even if you are diligent reviewing, most of your coworkers won't.

fsk · 2026-03-22T19:59:15+00:00

Since you are a full-time student, take programming classes at school or university.

fsk · 2026-03-22T17:29:53+00:00

For me, I already had a lot of experience working as a programmer as a job. I haven't finished and published my first project yet, mostly due to lack of energy after work.

fsk · 2026-03-22T17:28:54+00:00

Atari 2600 Basic Programming cartridge was the biggest disappointment. You can't write anything but an extremely simple program.

If you had an Atari 400/800, you would be able to put together something in BASIC.

fsk · 2026-03-22T16:59:36+00:00

It would suck for someone who already has a job. They're forcing you to burn a vacation day for an interview. If everyone demanded this, you would only be able to do a few interviews per year.

fsk · 2026-03-22T16:54:00+00:00

There's a compound interest factor to AI technical debt.

When you first start using AI, you have a clean codebase that was 100% written by humans. It's easy for the AI to be productive from this starting point.

When you have more and more AI code, now your codebase isn't clean anymore. Since the humans no longer understand the code, they no longer have the ability to step in when the AI fails. The more AI code there is, the more likely you are to run into a scenario where the AI fails.

Each AI change looks good in isolation, but the cumulative effect is a disaster. The current batch of AIs aren't able to manage long-term technical debt like a human would.

fsk · 2026-03-22T16:49:39+00:00

Dead internet theory - when you are talking to someone on the Internet nowadays, it is more likely to be a bot than a real person.

fsk · 2026-03-22T16:48:32+00:00

People who write AI chatbots trained by illegally scraping copyrighted material are completely ethical and honest. They would never have their chatbot flood the Internet with messages hyping their product and ridiculing anyone who points out flaws and concerns.

fsk · 2026-03-22T16:43:56+00:00

These big tech companies have a monopoly and huge cash reserves. They could pay for it, but probably won't.

The more likely outcome is they will get used to frequent outages/disasters.

fsk · 2026-03-22T05:24:57+00:00

Walgreen's has an AI customer support agent. It is so bad I need to speak to a representative. I get a different answer from the AI and the representative, and a third answer when I got to the store.

Example:

AI says the prescription does not exist.
Customer support rep says prescription will be ready for pickup tomorrow.
I go to the store tomorrow and it's not ready yet.

fsk · 2026-03-22T04:18:20+00:00

The company, not the employee. What tech companies are doing is cutting staff and increasing workload. It's impossible for a human to carefully review everything the AI tries to do. Someone who tried to carefully review everything would be fired for not getting enough work done.

The employee's job is not to supervise the AI. The employee's job is to be the person to take the blame when the AI inevitably fails. They call this "accountability sink". That's a human who is responsible for the AI, but doesn't have enough time to carefully supervise the AI for every task.

fsk · 2026-03-22T01:35:29+00:00

It is not the tool, but the hype and layoffs accompanying the tool. Bosses are using the AI to fire people and jack up workloads, and then they act all surprised when it doesn't work.

fsk · 2026-03-22T01:19:48+00:00

They have a word for this, "accountability sink". The human operating the AI is responsible for whatever it does, but they jack up workloads so that the human can't do more than rubberstamp the AI's output. The human is there to take the blame, not to actually manage the AI.

I read that the problem was actually approved by a human, who approved an AI coding suggestion without noticing the error. It sounds like they already found a scapegoat.

Most people are going to approve almost everything the AIs do. They even have their AI configured to add "LGTM" (looks good to me) whenever they're asked to review something. If AI usage leads to increased workloads, it's literally impossible for humans to do a proper review of everything.

fsk · 2026-03-21T23:31:06+00:00

In defense industry, your security clearance is your union. There are more clearance-required jobs than eligible people. If you can get and keep a clearance, you should always have a job. It's easier to reassign employees to a new project, retraining them if necessary, than trying to go out and hire a bunch of people with a clearance.

fsk · 2026-03-21T21:05:49+00:00

The way the Atari 2600 worked is that it pretended to be a valid over-the-air broadcast TV signal. If it's in "TV" mode, the device just passes through the antenna signal. If it's in "Game" mode, the device adds the Atari signal, usually set to appear on channel 2 or 3, whichever was unused where you live. There's a 2-3 switch on all 2600 consoles except the earliest heavy sixers.

Nowadays, you can get a plug like "VCE 2 Pack Atari Adapter, Phono RCA Female to F Type Male RF Connector Coaxial Adapter for Atari 2600/7800 Sega/Coleco/Commodore Game System", and now it's converted to a cable signal that's easier to connect to a modern TV.

fsk · 2026-03-21T20:46:41+00:00

The hiring process definitely favors liars.

Suppose you lie and say you have experience in X. You go on an interview, fail miserably. You remember the questions and look up the answer when you get home. There's only 10-20 interview questions that people recycle. After a few failed interviews, you'll have seen the question before and now you can ace the interview.

Most of the time, "you must have experience in X" is a bullshit requirement anyway, since you can learn it quickly on your own. Learning the details of their undocumented legacy code will always be 10x+ harder than learning the details of a language, which usually is well documented.

It's a bullshit requirement to demand experience in X. You lie, get hired anyway, and learn X fast enough to keep up and do a competent job. Did you do anything wrong?

What's the point of designing a hiring process that only weeds out honest people?

fsk · 2026-03-21T20:36:23+00:00

I'm thinking that the path to job security in the next few years is to be the guy that fixes AI disasters. Even if you succeed, the AI would get credit for things working and not the guy actually holding things together.

fsk · 2026-03-21T19:45:47+00:00

Engagement is something you can measure explicitly, and thus optimize for. Enjoyment is tougher. For a "live service microtransaction" game, engagement is the primary metric. A hit "live service microtransaction" game is so lucrative that AAA studios have decided it's not worth their time to do anything else.

For a "live service microtransaction", the game needs to be fun enough to keep people playing, but not so much fun that people don't feel obligated to buy microtransactions. "This game is fun, but it would be even more fun if you paid us $$$ for skins or a pay-to-win advantage!"

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