The proof is (or isn't) in the game. If the game is something genuinely great then this all worked and is important. If the game is a bloviated, boring, and derivative mess then it didn't. Without any proof point on the output it is hard to say if the article has any value.
The player community seems to hold the opinion it's the latter. Steam reviews are pretty dire. Worse, there really aren't a lot of players. Certainly not enough to cover Yegge's absurd number of Claude Max accounts.
This whole article is very strange to me. Consider the following quotes "I have been launching new game features so fast that the players asked me to slow down." and "using magic tricks that are a year ahead of their time. It's a system that we can ride so hard that it scares the players and they tell us to slow down. " That tells me a lot about the operation.
Maybe I'm out of touch but none of what was described seems like a sustainable operation or business. Fun experiment perhaps but that's it.
In another section there's also boasting of how the problem was that more code was needed to be produced and faster. I don't know. Was that really the problem all along before LLMs and agents showed up?
Assuming he's doing this well, and he implies he is, they're doing the content - stories, characters, graphics, level design. He says Fable isn't good at that stuff - his human games designers presumably are.
Eh. A quick scan of steam reviews shows a clear pattern - the game has been in decline ever since Yegge took over, well before LLMs were a product. It seems he started upsetting people with a capitalist-brain insistence on extracting value, and nothing has changed since. As long as he doesn't understand that his goals are contrary to building a game people enjoy, quality of the code is completely irrelevant. I don't think this one works as a test case on the value of programming like this, as the intended audience just isn't interested.
> his goals are contrary to building a game people enjoy, quality of the code is completely irrelevant
i think this happens a lot inside and outside of games when people get obsessed with the tech or process behind it; they completely miss the goal of the job
I am a bit over 50. Most new computer tech doesn't hit me like it used to but occasionally I still get hit with wonder. I got that feeling trying the Apple Vision Pro in store demo. 50-something me still can't believe I have AI at my fingertips.
For the most part though it's not that new tech isn't cool but as I get older, parts of life which seemed mundane as a kid or young man aren't quite so mundane anymore. As a teenager it seemed like family and loved ones were just there and part of the normal background. With years I see those moments with loved ones as precious, finite, and what it's all about. Tech is neat and sometimes very neat ... but it isn't what it's all about.
> As a teenager it seemed like family and loved ones were just there and part of the normal background.
So true. I even thought family was annoying. Now that most are gone ( some dead, some barely keeping in touch ) I understand, too late, they were what it’s all about for sure.
Pascal will always have my heart. My first bridge outside Basic (I was stuck with a home pc so didn’t go down the assembly rabbit hole like others of my generation). Turbo Pascal’s IDE. Add it possible for a kid to learn and create in a way I never would have done if stuck with a collection of semi independent tools. for those who say just use the command line - this was 1989. DOS was not exactly today’s modern shell environment!
Same here! Very fond memories. I used Turbo Pascal 3.3 under CP/M on the Microbee but found it a bit hard and cumbersome to use. But when I discovered TP5 on MS-DOS I was blown away! This was coming from writing BASIC and batch files.
I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source.
I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementations. Did Wolfram really discover the one true way in its language syntax and presentation layer? If it did, is the idea of open source really just making it unviable for companies to invest in important things like that? To be clear these are of course rhetorical questions. The open source world could experiment (and in defense sometimes does) with truly new approaches and interfaces. I just want to see more of it.
Mathematica exists. Mathematica for free versus Mathematica for money is of course a nice trade. But even better would be to try new ways to interact with mathematics unburdened from legacy concerns.
I think the Wolfram Language got 80–90% of it right, and that's why I want to reimplement and use it in the first place. It bothers me that I have to use inferior solutions, such as those implemented in Python and Julia, just because the better solution is prohibitively expensive.
Of course, there are a few things I think we can do better than the Wolfram Language, but given all the available legacy code, there's really no point in making it slightly different and losing the ability to use that code. However, we might build an alternative syntax and frontend in the future that surfaces the capabilities of the Wolfram Language with a better UX.
Good points all. Please understand this is more of a general open source friendly criticism I made. There is good value in preserving access to codebases made for Wolfram language which is expensive albeit they do offer decent licenses now to mess around with it.
I’m curious abut benchmarking. Wolfram claims they put a ton of effort into optimizing the speed of at least certain types of mathematical computations.
UX is an area I’d suggest working on. Wolfram was a real pioneer with the notebook style interface but nothing is meant to last forever. That might be an area to innovate without losing access to legacy codebases.
Closed source, proprietary license, starting at $195/year. Their language is a moat for customers, and this is a bridge back out. If you aren’t getting any benefit from their development direction and the compute is happening on your own hardware, what are you paying a subscription for?
Not mutually exclusive? The fact that money is being paid for some closed source product does at least prove there is an actual demand for whatever they figured out to do, and how. So either a marginal improvement, or simply open sourcing a subset of an existing product, or making something completely new, or better... all good isn't it?
Maybe reimplementing something that already exists a couple times over leads to good things as well. I can imagine some subtle insights could be gained which matter to some of the user base.
They spent a lot of effort on consistent naming. It's basically equivalent of hundred of open source math/visualization packages merged into one, and a single person has made sure for 30 years that functionality integrates in a consistent way. It's much less overhead to remember that using a large collection of OSS libraries. So the naming structure in itself is valuable
I agree. There are decades of work in Mathematica and the Wolfram Language, with a lot of carefully made design decisions, working closely with scientists in so many fields, trying to capture what is important for their work and what knowledge is worth baking into the language. I think it’s only fair to respect Wolframs decision to keep it closed source, because otherwise he and his team wouldn’t be able to continue improving the language/system.
I believe we need to be more respectful to human creators, especially now that it has become so easy to just “reimplement” someones work, to circumvent payment or license conditions or for whatever motivation. What would you do if this work didn’t exist? Well, I guess you’d have to do it yourself or use an alternative…
That being said, the Wolfram Engine is actually free for development and personal use[1]. I had a really nice experience with Wolframite[2] on Clojure as an interface layer and that works well enough for the few non-commercial things I do with it (evaluating WL expressions directly in the editor is such a nice experience!).
I mean, you're basically asking why people don't do high-quality original work and give it away for free, as opposed to copying something that's successful and giving it away for free.
The answer in my mind is fairly obvious: it's far more difficult and risky to do high-quality original work and give it away for free. If you want to see more original innovative work in open source, the two main ways to achieve that are to either do it yourself, or to pay others to do it.
Obsessive hacker tools like Emacs are not a productivity enhancer. But If you find them fun go for it. You are allowed to have fun. You are allowed to enjoy your environment. If tinkering with Emacs is fun for you go for it. It's prob not replacing mental cycles for "productive" work. It's replacing zoning out with social media or YouTube between productive work times.
I can't justify using Emacs myself on a productivity basis. But working in an environment I think is fun while being productive makes me marginally happier.
Which is kind of what I was arguing. Understand that having "fun" is not necessarily equivalent to being "productive". And even by an individuals own standards, the two can be completely different.
If you are having fun, and it's a hobby: who cares? If it's in the professional setting, make sure what you are doing is not actually wasting time and/or money, i.e. be productive.
If my measured productivity decreases but my ability to find joy in what I do increases, it's probably worth it. Not to mention the second-order productivity boost that comes along with enjoying one's work.
This is an objectively idiotic and uninformed take.
Do you people think we spend our weekends tweaking our configs because that is how we get our fun? Some do, sure, the vast majority have created their config once and find themselves more productive compared to whatever alternative you might be suggesting. Configuring vim or eMacs is an investment, as you are likely to still see it around in 20 years. Being familiar with one’s tools is the key to productivity.
Calling it an ‘obsessive hacker tool’ just shows you don’t know what you’re talking about, but come with preconceived notions about why people prefer other tools.
> Obsessive hacker tools like Emacs are not a productivity enhancer.
This is intellectually dishonest framing. "obsessive hacker tools" is incoherent -- it's not the tool that is obsessive or a hacker. I don't obsessively hack emacs--I barely know elisp--and emacs is very much a productivity enhancer for me. The main benefit of the hackability of emacs for me is that hackers write useful packages for it that I occasionally run across and install.
Data centers could pay locals a sufficient amount that it overcomes the NIMBY opposition. If you can’t pay locals enough while still generating value for external beneficiaries then the project simply isn’t economical.
Data as an obstacle to legal AI is a human rights violation.
As citizens we are subject to federal, state, and local law. This consists of statutes, regulations, and common law. It is insane that the content of this law is locked away behind private paywalls.
How can one comply with laws when you aren't told what those laws are?
One of my favorite books but it wasn't until I came back to read it 15-20 years later that I realized the whole thing is a tragedy. As a younger man I was high on the futurism. As an older man it's evident that in Stross' telling much of the important parts of humanity are eventually washed away by keeping up with technological advances. It's beautiful but sad.
