51–59 of 59 posts
If I want to create a furnace into which I can shovel tokens (ie: money) I dont think I can do it quite as elegantly as Gas City. Its novel and funny, but the hype around agentic coding is bad enough for some engineers to think this represents the pinnacle of current software development practices.
I know why people think this, and I went down this route early on, but I’m not sure this logic follows.
Teams of agents, even adversarial ones reviewing work, are prone to the same types of mistakes as the problem they’re attempting to fix. In fact, mistakes at the adversarial/approval layer are so much worse, because the next stage assumes it was correct, and the error cascades. Maybe enough agents and tokens and context bring the probability of “correctness” closer to 1, but what is the judge of what is correct? what if that criteria is hallucinated?
I’m not sure this concept has been proven. I’ve certainly been unable to prove it to myself, and I’ve tried very hard.
Came here to say that a lot of these LLM posts make me feel like I was hit by a hammer and I can't understand the world anymore. Thankfully, the HN comments confirm that this is as insane as I thought it was.
I think it's because LLM output tends to be snippets of truth, connected in such a way as to be subtly false. It leaves you disoriented because it is in the uncanny valley of truth: you know it's not right, but can't put your finger on why it is not right. It's made worse buy its asymmetric nature: it takes seconds to generate pages of words and hours to figure out what is wrong with them, for little to no gain to th…
> It's made worse buy its asymmetric nature: it takes seconds to generate pages of words and hours to figure out what is wrong with them, for little to no gain to the reader.
I think you've just formalized the best argument for the Real Butlerian Jihad we're ever going to get.
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Admittedly, this project started before that was possible with the standard coding agents.
No it didn't!
If I want to create a furnace into which I can shovel tokens (ie: money) I dont think I can do it quite as elegantly as Gas City. Its novel and funny, but the hype around agentic coding is bad enough for some engineers to think this represents the pinnacle of current software development practices.
Companies are mulling about how many software engineers they can get rid of and replace with AI instead.
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You're thinking of bloat, jank is things like putting a cauldron on your head and the physics engine firing you into the stratosphere.
Jank is the third derivative of bloat.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359560
The other nasty bug involving pixelization that we did manage to fix before shipping, but that I unfortunately didn't save any video of, involved the maid NPC, who was originally programmed by a really brilliant summer intern, but had a few quirks:
A Sim would need to go potty, and walk into the bathroom, pixelate their body, and sit down on the toilet, then proceed to have a nice leisurely bowel movement in their trousers. In the process, the toilet would suddenly become dirty and clogged, which attracted the maid into the bathroom (this was before "privacy" was implemented).
She would then stroll over to toilet, whip out a plunger from "hammerspace" [1], and thrust it into the toilet between the pooping Sim's legs, and proceed to move it up and down vigorously by its wooden handle. The "Unnecessary Censorship" [2] strongly implied that the maid was performing a manual act of digital sex work. That little bug required quite a lot of SimAntics [3] programming to fix!
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Are the quake, goldsource, source, etc engines jank? Because they all did this, to some extent. It might be harder to find an engine from the early 2010's that didn't tie at least some physics to FPS.
Your examples are from 10 or more years earlier that Skyrim's creation engine. That is to say, the older engines could have been limited by hardware requirements, or maybe decoupling physics from fps is an innovation that appeared between 2004 and 2011. Or maybe they are also jank. Notably, the source 2 engine (2015) decoupled physics from fps (as I understand).
This only really matters for competitive games though, so it's not surprising it wasn't prioritized.