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  LOL @ the Proton AI manifesto. “Writing code sucks, we spent too much time on boilerplate, no-one likes writing documentation or tests” Way to just flat out say you just didn’t like writing code anymore and couldn’t be arsed to do it properly.

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  I know it’s incredibly bad but the whole “we used a private key that was just 4” thing has weirdly cheered me up. It’s just nice to see regular human stupidity rather than the increasing amount of over-engineered automated stupidity

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  RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/117313713101758213 I’ve been saying for years that the idea of a project being “dead” because it was stable and not getting weekly updates was idiotic. In the slop era, software that hasn’t had significant changes barring a few small careful fixes for 3 years is S-tier in my book

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  Websites that are “we need to talk about your adblocker”: On my phone I only run an adblocker in full fat Safari: when I open a link from say Mastodon it uses an embedded browser which doesn’t load the ad blocker. I only hit “Open In Safari” if the ads are obnoxious and ruining the reading experience, because I know sites need to fund themselves. So if I’m blocking your ads, it’s because you suck at integrating them in a way that doesn’t ruin your whole site. Maybe we should talk about *that*.

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  Tapping the sign that says “Yes the cloud is STILL just someone else’s computer, and especially if they’re a giant company they absolutely DO NOT give the slightest toss about you or any of your data” Faceless corporate clouds should be your backup, never your primary IMO. They’re too big and you’re too small, you’ll always come off worse https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/microsoft-software-nonprofit-data-delete.html

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  My “strategy” is to keep creating as if GenAI never happened because I do not respect the outputs, I do not respect the process, I do not like the externalities, and I do not like the concentration of power. I know it will achieve nothing in the grand scheme of things except to maintain my self-respect, preserve the joy in what I do, and retain confidence in my ability to maintain the outputs of my work longer term. But it will have to be enough.

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  If these so called geniuses at AI companies don’t know how to airgap a system then they’re even bigger asshats than I thought. More likely this is just marketing - oh OpenAI can break out of its jail, so can Claude they’re so smart you know. Oh piss off Any teen who did this would have the book thrown at them. Screw their “oh no our super smort AI accidentally did crimes haha aren’t we clever” - no, how about you get harassed by the feds for the rest of your lives you entitled assholes

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  For me the question “do you want to write more code faster, but with less quality control and a more superficial understanding” is a ridiculous one - of course I wouldn’t want to make that trade. What has upset me most is realising how many developers are completely fine with that. But it’s nice to see that many aren’t. So I take comfort in the fact that I still have a dev community, it’s just much smaller than appearances would have suggested a couple of years ago

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  @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place idiotic and indicates the moderator thinks of the forum more as a chat room The whole point of forums is that they can store information for longer, and updating old threads is very useful

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  @gilesgoat@toot.wales @psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place I mean it makes me feel *slightly* better given all the shite I have to deal with for a networked multiplayer game, that doing local multiplayer wouldn’t have been a breeze either 😉

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  “Software will be built by machines, directed by people” - fine, you guys do that, I’ll still be over here actually understanding wtf I’m doing

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  Warhammer 40K: we will implore the machine to do our bidding by reciting the litanies, and will castigate those who would try to understand the underlying technology as vile heretics Tech 2026: hold my beer

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  Yay, I have now implemented the "Precompiling shaders" loading bar in MinerMancers, thereby joining the ranks of every game that players swear at for having a "Precompiling shaders" loading bar. 🙃 Better than the first-play stutters though. Tip: do NOT leave Unreal Insights running in the background when you're testing this, for some reason it crashes it and it's not actually a problem in the real world https://issues.unrealengine.com/issue/UE...

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  Working on this shader precompilation thing which defaults to Dx12 / SM6, I decided to do some testing in DirectX 11 / SM5 instead. It's pretty easy in UE, provided you've kept the defaults you can just pass `-d3d11` on the command line. I expected problems, but everything seems to work fine, probably because I've got Nanite and Lumen disabled. Good to know for the small % of people with older cards

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  Microsoft talks about the improvements they’re going to make to Windows 11, and then proceed to only talk about the Start Menu and File Explorer, the two things I’ve already wholly replaced and never use (with PowerToys Run and Directory Opus respectively) precisely because they’ve been shit for a decade

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  Suits you, sir

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  Agree with this. I lived through the “great video game crash of 83” and never even noticed because I didn’t live in the US and for us games just carried on regardless. The US isn’t the centre of everything (and given recent events that’s likely to become more the case, not less) and neither is AAA. https://aftermath.site/video-game-industry-crash-26/

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  @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place nah I tried it back in the early days on the same assumption and it choked constantly even under light load (Edit: possibly it’s better now, I tried it literally years ago)

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  @Doomed_Daniel@mastodon.gamedev.place I pack the repos and LFS separately already but I’ve always used gitea dump, it works and is the recommended way. Can’t use SQLite because we’re multi-user (gets upset if >1 person tries to hit the web server at once)

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  As an aside, this process reminded me that I’m so glad Go exists for stuff like this. I’m biased because I used Go for a while a decade ago, but compared to the rats nest of duct tape that you typically get with a NodeJS server, it’s such a breath of fresh air to dig into the code.

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  I know I'm an old man, but I remember when you decided what to put in your software largely based on what people were asking for. Apparently what the "best" developers in the world who work for all the "best" companies do is the exact opposite of that

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  What do people use for screenshots on Windows these days? I’ve been using the default snipping tool for ages which is fine except it lacks text annotation, which is always annoying (I often take screenshots and annotate them for bug reports etc). I started using ShareX (open source) which seems decent but I’m curious what other people use https://getsharex.com

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  Software development as a process is a mirror of the general trend in software itself to use more and more resources for no particular reason except developer laziness and that it increases velocity and feature churn (which software users hate). All incentivised because pointless complexity and thrashing around using 200 things you don't need gets you promotions / job security / tech talk slots

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  I think what I've learned since being introduced to the idea of a cyberpunk dystopia in the 80's, is that it isn't dystopia just when big rich tech companies control everything, it's when most people start being fine with that.

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  Finished moving all my websites across to Mythic Beasts ( @beasts) which will save me about £200 a year compared to my previous host, who suckered me in with a cheap intro offer. When the renewal came up and they turned the screws I was so busy/stressed with the game and my Mum’s illness I didn’t have time to shop around so got burned. I have super simple needs but don’t want to park my sites on some big faceless US corp like AWS/Cloudflare/GitHub. MB are extremely affordable and approachable

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  I found this a relatable read, even though I’ve taken a very different exit ramp. https://www.jamesdrandall.com/posts/the_thing_i_loved_has_changed/ On the one hand, you could argue it’s karma. After all, we spent the last few decades in tech automating lots of things that changed other people’s jobs in the name of efficiency, and I’m sure that sometimes that made those jobs less enjoyable. Now, perhaps change has come for us. I still think long term maintenance is going to be untenable, but...

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  I didn’t want to jinx it by saying anything earlier but Artemis II has been such a cleansing salve to my timeline. Humans collaborating to actually do interesting, difficult things just because they’re worth doing, not because there’s a quid to be made. Everyone involved rocks - I will happily see their faces filling my news feed for as long as possible 🚀 🌕

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  Another busy #caturday for the boys

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  I really wish I’d kept my MiniDisc player.

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  I’m finding Cyberpunk 2077 a bit more enjoyable now that I’m leaning into the combat skills more. I’m still trying to play it *initially* stealthy but then when it inevitably goes titsup for annoying reasons beyond my control I just go full murderbot and it’s fine. As a result I’m about 5 levels higher than I was in my previous playthrough at the same point. Silverhand is still a bellend though. Also their tits per hour mechanic was unnecessary