u/systranerror

How much money could you pick up in the time you spend standing near a tree and hitting it 2-6 times? Now multiply that by every tree you kill for the rest of the game

It's becoming increasingly possible to make good software without knowing the underlying code. With that said, even something like Sol Ultra is generally going to do really obvious mistakes that a human who could code would avoid.

A good example of this, as an example, might be that as you started working on the project, you were saving all the data into a folder or something. The agent might have said "We should probably make a local database for this"

You then say "Okay, sounds good"

It makes the local database. You have the whole thing running locally. Maybe that is where you are right now.

You then say "Okay, how do I actually sell this thing?"

You now are now wanting to go from fully local to full production. You never had a staging environment and don't even know what that is probably. The agent starts throwing options at you, it all is just a bunch of confusing names of services you may or may not have heard of. You just say "Just pick the best one for everything I guess?"

You just tell it to do whatever, but you are now signing up for a bunch of services that cost money. Once it's done, you now realize that every time you change stuff, you are having to do what feels like an insane amount of stuff just to see it live. You don't understand why, Codex tries to help you and it will be pretty good at it, but you are basically in over your head and blindly trusting it on these huge decisions that still kind of need a knowledgable software engineer.

My brother was vibe coding a game with Claude and it suggested to him "We should probably be using GitHub". He didn't know what it was but just said "Okay let's do it" and he told me that he "had everything on github." I looked and he had no remote, so it was all just locally setup.

Are you using Github? Did Codex tell you to use it at some point? If you are deep into the project and have no version control, that is a good indicator that you are likely in some big tech debt.

If you think the idea is really good or has potential, I'd try to get someone who knows what they are doing to at least take a look and give you some feedback.

I think future models and agentic harnesses are getting more and more to the place that you will be able to 100% "vibe code" production ready software, but we are not quite there yet

I really thought I was going to do something with Chinese, but I didn't really. I worked at the International Center at a university for several years after I got back to the US. I was mostly working with J-1 Visa people, so I had to speak Chinese some in that job. It was one of those things though where it was a "bonus" to speak it, and if I hadn't spoken it, it barely would have mattered. Being able to speak Chinese helped me with Chinese visitors and they seemed to like that I could speak Chinese, but I didn't get paid any extra for it and it was an extremely stagnant job.

I ended up writing romance novels for like ten years after that, and I started doing software engineering four or so years ago

I don't regret learning Chinese, and I have drawn a few lines in the sand that would make me go back to China as an escape hatch (Trump third term, lol) at lest temporarily

I studied Chinese extremely hardcore in the US for roughly three full years before I went to teach at a technical university in Chongqing.

When I first landed I was good enough at Mandarin to get around in most situations, hold conversations, order food, read/write at a mediocre level, and I was better at Mandarin than any other foreign teachers in my school.

I was extremely obsessed and my main reason for going there was to improve my Chinese...

This fell apart quite a lot.

Teaching English full-time is a huge immersion killer. You are not only teaching in English, but all of your coworkers are native English speakers. The cultural barrier is often more difficult than the language barrier, and I ended up finding myself incredibly tempted to hang out with my co-workers so I could just sit back and drink beer in a large glass rather than constantly toasting and pouring people drinks in little cups--as just one example.

I forced myself to make a lot of Chinese friends, ones that were entirely separate from any "foreigner bubble". I probably hung out with Chinese people 3-4 nights per week and my coworkers 2-3. Still, hanging out for a few hours per night, and not even every night, is not really immersion.

I had no interest in Chinese media. As interested as I was in the language, I didn't enjoy Chinese movies or TV. It just felt off and boring to me. There is a lot of good Chinese literature, but I found it insanely hard to just force myself to read it. I'd constantly hit characters I didn't know, or I knew the meaning but forgot the pronunciation/tone, or I'd know the pronunciation but forgot the meaning. Or I'd just never seen the word and had no idea what to do with it.

My school offered free Chinese classes, but they didn't fit with my work schedule. I could only attend a few, which meant I was missing huge chunks of classes and couldn't keep up. All my classmates were Vietnamese and ONLY spoke Mandarin to each other. It was like the perfect situation to learn Mandarin in, but I just didn't feel able to get in there because every class I attended, I'd missed two and I just was always frustratingly falling behind.

I can honestly say I put in significantly more effort than most people to learn Mandarin, and almost 20 years later (I was in China in 09-10 and started learning in 07) I am roughly about as good as I was at the language when I first left China in 2010. I still can speak it and understand it. I can still read somewhat okay. When I go back to China I'm able to get around fine and talk to people and do whatever...but it's really one of the hardest languages to "pick up"

I think to actually get really good at it, the ideal setup would be something like one year learning formally in your home country, then 1-2 years of full-time Chinese study in China where you do not have to work and are not expected to speak English. You would need to really immerse yourself. This means actually caring about Chinese media, news, pop culture, and using the Chinese internet. If you go to classes for four hours a day and immediately hop onto your VPN and read/watch English stuff...you're toast

I haven't been back since they got rid of the Buy One Get one for $1 deals.

Even prior to that the points were practically useless because you couldn't combine them with the deals. It felt like every time I used points, I ended up paying exactly the same price to eat there since using the points disabled my ability to use an in-app deal

I have been to a lot of cities in China and Beijing just does not appeal to me very much. The Great Wall is obviously very impressive and cool to see, but it's not especially "worth it" considering how crowded it is. I've found the Forbidden City even worse in this sense. Yes, obviously extremely impressive and historical, but it's more or less empty squares and just packed crowded with tourists.

Tian An Men square is...a big empty square. You can't even walk around on it anymore either.

The things I ended up liking best in Beijing always felt like random places or areas I stumbled into, usually places not loaded with tourists.

Traffic is miserable and everything feels incredibly far away and spread out compared to most cities. I absolutely hate the security theater that happens a lot there. Last time I went we had to go through 3 or 4 security checkpoints to get into the Forbidden City. The road our hotel was on got closed for "military drills" or something.

I lived in Chongqing and like it a lot more, but at the same time I'm sure if you just visited for 3 days and were only in Jie Fang Bei or something it would feel overcrowded and touristy too. There are so many districts of Chongqing that are like their own cities, and I'm sure Beijing actually has that as well.

One thing with Chinese cities, for my own tastes at least, is that I typically do not care very much about attractions that Chinese people care a lot about. I don't care about getting photos of me standing in front of stuff (or photos in general). A lot of the "You have to go to x" or "You must see y" seem to be things that it's important to check off a list, get a photo, and say you were there vs. it actually being worth doing.

I had a lot more fun in random cities like Jinan, Linyi, or still famous but smaller cities like Hangzhou. I also really liked Chengdu. With that said, when I was in those cities I was visiting friends of relatives, so it was more of a "Chill at their house and go do stuff," which to me always shows a city off a lot more than "I am surgically dropping into the most touristy areas and hoping to stumble onto some cool stuff in between"

I think House of Suns is his best work

It has non-FTL and a galaxy-spanning civilization

The protagonists have a type of galactic map, and when they decide where they want to go, the map gives them an estimate of whether the civilization they are going to go visit still exists or will still exist by the time they arrive

I haven't re-watched it since it aired, but it was really uneven.

Some episodes and even specific plot arcs were quite strong and good, but my overall feeling is that I do not think the show runners actually knew what they were going to do from the beginning.

There is a lot of "who is a Cylon?" mystery in the show, and I don't think they actually decided ahead of time who was a Cylon. It really feels like many of them were arbitrarily chosen to be Cylons at random points as deemed convenient for whatever they were working on at the time.

Many characters get "re-invented" in various ways throughout the course of the show. This is a strength + weakness, because it's cool to see the same character in a very different role but still feeling like the original character. It gives you a feeling of actual growth, and that a character isn't stuck in their archetype over many years. With that said, even though they executed this decently in most cases, it often feels like they end up doing this because they didn't have a plan for the original role and lacked the followthrough ability. Thus they just shuffled the character up.

I would have a fairly hard time recommending the series to people, and I don't think I ever actually have. If you're in the mood for a very specific kind of character-driven scifi show and are willing to accept some unevenness and flaws, it's cool to know it's there to binge watch.

I would actually compare it mostly to The Expanse. I really did like the Expanse but I also did find it to have some weak arcs and plot points. It had some bad execution and weak characters (Marco...), but every possible criticism I could give to the Expanse, the Expanse does it better than Battlestar Galactica. The one thing BG does better is the mini-series having an amazing opening episode that draws you in, where the Expanse started out with season 1 being the weakest season.

Alastair Reynolds has basically built a career on doing space opera with no FTL

It's insanely fucked up that this NPC didn't realize that you were actually the main character

It becomes a basic economic question. Your actual best scenario for living in China is working for a non-Chinese company that pays US/Canadian/European/Australian wages but allows you to work remotely while living in China. Now you get to live in China but have a very high income compared to the cost of living

If you are working for a Chinese company, your income is going to be lower.

You seem to be more or less ignoring the actual points everyone is making, so I doubt this will be heard, but another very big factor:

There is no set path to become a Chinese citizen. It's very difficult to even be a permanent resident of China. You will ALWAYS be seen as an outsider. Not only will people treat you as an outsider, but the entire system treats you as this in every possible way.

You are "starting to learn Chinese." Try living in China for any amount of time. Speak Chinese, use only Chinese internet while you are there. Get any job you can to live there for a year before you decide you actually want to pursue attempting to build a real career there.

The dismissal and pessimism is because it's a bad idea for 99%+ of people. If you are starting to learn Chinese, dismissive of everything people who have lived in China for years have to say, have your opinion locked in based on no actual experience in China, then it's incredibly likely you fall into this 99% of people for whom it's a bad idea.

I think you truly have to live in China, speaking Chinese and not in an expat bubble, for at least a year before you can have any idea if it's a good fit for you.

I feel like there is a bug where it's reloading way too much cached context or memory in a way that is similar to a "memory leak". It's like there is some egregious bug that is destroying usage no matter what you do.

They dropped the cost of Terra and Luna by so much, and now even a Terra Medium task which takes a few minutes to complete is burning more tokens than a one-hour Sol Ultra task would have a week ago

Every time I see people complaining I have always thought "skill issue"

It's been different this time. I didn't change anything, and on 20x my tokens just evaporated in two days, where I usually had to try really hard to get usage to 0 prior to reset.

https://www.youtube.com/@benjaminhill8092

Watch this guy's videos

He only does Vintage Cube on MTGO, but he is the best drafter I have seen and consistently is at the top of the trophy list on Vintage Cube

He explains all of his decisions very well and clearly. If you watch 3-4 of his videos you will really start to understand the skill of drafting, which will apply to any draft format

Your mana curve is not great. You'll see how insanely highly this guy values 1-drops and his curve. He also is extremely diligent and exact about land counts, which you also didn't do very well. Like I see you have a mana rock and some ramp, but you want your ramp to be 1-drops ideally. A three mana ramp card is not going to help when you have too few lands in your high-curve deck.

It's Seattle. You can put a tent wherever you want with no consequences. Just pick a spot you like and go for it

I live in Seattle and have done thought experiments about this kind of thing baed on desirable land. For example, Lake Washington facing Seattle on the Bellevue side, Medina, has this strip of land where Bill Gates and Bezos both have/had huge mansions. You can see the Seattle skyline, the lake, and Mount Rainier. You are on the water in a prime location but also have a ton of privacy.

If we imagine "nanoswarms that can build 300-story arcologies in under a week for almost no cost" just as a thought exercise, you are still stuck with a human-level squabbling situation for "prime land"

Do the absolute best spots get loaded with the most population dense housing that the nanobots can construct? Do you make denser housing in less good locations and leave the really nice spots free of buildings so they are public-use parks? Is there any situation in which you allow a human to have a massive single-family home in a prime location like this?

Central Park in NYC is another easy example of this. We are already seeing those weird, thin luxury highrises poke up over Central Park. Even given "infinite ASI power," you have a finite amount of people who can have a good view of Central Park from their bedroom.

Most of the solutions to this that come up to me involve AI governance which polls the human population directly. If you figure out what "humans really want," you would likely come up with a solution that is something along the lines of "really dense housing in city centers, forced public green spaces in dense areas, if you want a huge castle you have to live far from city centers...no exceptions."

On paper, many humans would say tings like "That's communism" or whatever, but when presented with "Do you want a small 2-bedroom condo in the city center, or a mansion in the suburbs? Both are free" people would stop labeling or caring and be pretty happy with the situation.

If enough people support the notion that capitalism is some kind of survival of the fittest selector that drives innovation, there could be some allowances made. You COULD set aside some "mansions in the city center" (and other "unfair" truly scarce resources) for people who really want to grind in the post-scarcity world rather than just have their needs met and chill

Reading through this thread, it's 100% clear the airlines are the most at fault here. There is something deeply wrong with this whole industry that they are allowed to both oversell seats and kick people off when their gamble goes wrong but also nickle and dime you for every possible minor convenience. It's completely false to say that "Well, you can pay and if you want to absolute cheapest option you can skimp on conveniences." They are literally forcing you into middle seats at this point unless you pay. Even on relatively empty flights!

Given all of this, at the end of the day, even if the overweight person did everything right and bought two seats and the airline screwed them over...when push comes to shove and there is a situation where there is no space, the overweight person should have to give up their seat and deal with the airline.

If you are so big due to overeating that you cannot fit in a seat and take up part of someone else's seat, you should understand that "sitting on a tube full of small, cramped seats" is not something you can comfortably do.

As someone who can fit in a seat, I should never have to worry that the person next to me is going to take up part of a seat I paid for. It should simply not be a thing that happens. Even if they did all the proper procedures and bought two seats and the airline screwed them over, it's 100% not my problem. I fit in my seat and the airline sold me a seat. It's my seat. The overweight person needed two seats and the airline failed to provide them the two seats they needed, so they cannot fly. They cannot say "I tried, so now you have to give me part of your seat"

I am a full-time non-game dev and have been coding with LLMs since the first GPT dropped, basically altering my flow as the LLM became more capable. So early on in the process I was having it make a function for me, then reviewing its code and maybe tweaking it from there.

Now I just have codex with Sol Ultra delegating subagents of varying abilities for specific tasks across the entire multi-repo codebase and I do not really look at the code anymore.

It's hard to say where this is going, but your webserver in assembly example is pointing at the heart of it.

Just as things like Python were further abstracted from Assembly, we are going to have agentic tools, harnesses, and things we don't have names for yet that are providing a significantly higher level of abstraction. A for loop is now equivalent to assembly or maybe even binary. We know that the LLM can do the for loop, and in some sense we don't even care when or where it is using what kind of loop. I think it is currently important to understand what a for loop is, and it probably is very helpful to learn how to do one "by hand" until the concept clicks for you.

I know how to code normally, so it's possible for me to take for granted the advantages that gives me when coding with an LLM.

With that said, I think that advantage is eroding and will erode more as time goes on. A year or so ago, if you weren't careful, an LLM might turn your webserver module into something that was 20,000 lines with no modules breaking it up. It was very useful to have the human knowledge and say "Wtf are you doing? We need to break this up." If you didn't, the LLM would get its context blown out trying to read the entire 20,000 lines and start hallucinating or fucking up.

We are rapidly getting to a point where none of that really matters though. I don't think "modules" are going to matter that much, and they certainly will not really need to be human parsable. As long as the LLM can ingest the codebase and understand where to delineate, it should be fine.

The biggest difference in the last few months is that something like Codex using modern model is so incredibly good at testing everything. It still fails on the absolute full human-level E2E because its browser use and computer use is clumsy, but any backend type thing it will just test and iterate super fast until it is working cleanly.

The way I see things is that we are getting to a point where one human is able to do what 10+ skilled, coordinated people could do previously.

I sometimes feel like I'm playing Starcraft. Like if I can have five tasks running concurrently all doing different high-value tasks across the codebase, and context shift between them without losing quality or focus in one, that is ideal.

Like if you imagine a pre-LLM full stack dev, you might spend a half day creating a single endpoint and wiring a button up for it. You might have been hand-writing SQL queries, testing the SQL, making a React component, making sure you are handling your props correctly, there was just this whole list of tedious shit you had to do.

Now, I can literally make a list of ten button + endpoint with heavy database operations and complicated logic as a bullet point list and tell Codex to do it. It has insanely good memory now and knows what our product is doing so well that I can often just trust it to do things the right way where I was not explicit or where I was accidentally too ambiguous. I see it so often say things like "The user didn't specify if this button should be here or here, but it wouldn't make sense to put it in the second place since [very specific and accurate reason relating to very specific and accurate things about our users].

So many pieces of software though are bottlenecked by the human element. If you are making a product that humans use, it's the human using it and then realizing what needs to change based on that which cannot be automated away or really sped up. You might need 30+ users on something before you can really know if it's working or not, and then once that is happening you have to figure out where to steer it from there. In gamedev example, even if the LLM can literally one-shot the entire game exactly as it appears in your head, people might play that game and think it sucks. It's up to you to come up with a fix based on the vision for the end product, and that is like the real developer skill now

I did gamedev pre and post-LLM. You are spot on here.

The thing these guys don't realize:

The actual hardest part of gamedev, by a large margin, is making the game fun.

Needing to be able to code the game was effectively a gate-keeping busywork. One good thing it actually did was made it so that only people who were willing to do the herculean task of actually coding, getting all art, etc. etc. etc. and THEN play-testing the game properly and making it genuinely good, fun, and balanced were able to serve a finished product on Steam.

That gate-keeping felt REALLY good if you were good at coding.

This actually started collapsing way before AI, just with Unity and other frameworks that made it possible to not really have to code. Yes, you should be coding a lot making a good game in Unity, but you also could Unity store patchwork a bunch of garbage together and have a game that looked surface-level like a good game from 2007.

Now with AI, people don't understand that the coding is done. You can literally just use Codex, make a game in Love2d (great angle because it's ALL text with no GUI), and tell Sol Ultra or whatever EXACTLY what you want to do and it will blast the code out effortlessly.

You are now confronted with the uncomfortable truth: You have to be really good at making a fun game now. The coding was just gatekeeping and a means to an end. You're at the end now and realize your idea actually sucks and isn't fun. You can no longer "work on your game" for three years and never get it into a playable state where you realize you aren't good at game design.

Honestly, people should be celebrating this, because you now get to do the actual fun game design part and also the art. If I were going to make a game right now I would still do the art by hand, and it would take forever, but that would be my actual personal decision to have the human element in there beyond the game design itself.

I do think you can have a skillful AI art gen process though where you work hard to generate everything with an attractive and coherent art style, I personally just wouldn't.

Like, basically, look at Balatro. It's the perfect game. It's not that hard to code. The art is much harder than you'd expect (it's incredibly difficult to make clean, functional, attractive pixel art UIs like that) but once you get the basics in you can just draw jokers, and then the real difficulty is balancing that game as perfectly as they did and making it infinitely replayable and challenging.

I actually wondered sometimes if I went blind if it would be possible to play MTGO anymore (or even play braille cards honestly)

In my head I figured it wouldn't be possible, or it would at least be a huge disadvantage. Do you basically just have to keep a very accurate mental model of the entire board state in your head? How do you do things online like execute big combos with a lot of loops, for example something like Amulet Titan?

Were you blind from birth? If so, what is that "mental model" of the board state like in your head?

Just very curious and think it's super cool you can play!

[ Removed by Reddit ]

Like, notice that I said sorry, got rid of the post, and rather than being like "Np, it happens," you had to tell me exactly where the spoiler was down to the chapter, then argue nonstop about it.

I presume you are actually autistic, in which case saying "autistically" is not ableist but rather an accurate explanation of what you did

I don't think autistic people are inferior to me, I just think you are being autistic about this in an insanely grating way, and if you are autistic you should reflect on how to communicate with people without being so obnoxious. If you are not autistic then you should know better

Okay, yes, I will admit defeat. I have cross-checked and you are correct. I must have somehow read a spoiler and I cannot remember clearly something 15 years ago and made an unforgivable error by trying to take part in a discussion on Reddit. You win. I will now delete my original post even harder than I already deleted it and say I am even more sorry than I was before.

I don't want to sell people on the series. I think WoT is really good despite its MANY flaws. It's a weird situation where it really is genuinely great and does so many things so well, but the flaws really are in the way a great deal of the time.

There are other books I like that I would "sell people on" because I think they are just great with no qualifications beyond "If you like scifi, you'll love this," or "If you like biographies, this is great."

With WoT, I know that a lot of people are actually not going to like it. Just because I like it doesn't mean I want to try to make people read it.

It then makes sense to qualify, explain the weaknesses, and let people get a better idea of whether they want to possibly commit to a huge 10+ book series