I suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's ironic that the one guy providing these consumer-friendly features is considered anathema by many of the people clamoring for those features. You, yourself even mention downthread that you'd otherwise be interested in the M64 Pro controller, but won't consider it.

I was just trying to make a genuine comment remarking on the dichotomy, but I guess people are more interested in making quippy one-liners.

Besides, it's a dumb argument to compare military purchasing non-weapons commodities like controllers or toilet paper to a literal weapons company. It is almost literally impossible to live anywhere in the world without using a platform hosted on AWS or Azure. It is very easy to not buy things from the drone and now retro-console king. They are entirely different asks.

contrarian and virtue signaling are very different. i could totally care less if you choose not to buy it.

i respect diversity

Yeah, no.

Your historic accounting is not to be trusted by any means if “gen-AI era” is something that you really believe is happening.

Go look up the development of Sonic Xtreme in the 90s. A brutal development process in the 90s that led to more thsn half the development team camping out in Redwood City Sega office building for months until they all got so sick half the team went on medical leave. Or Quake, where the game development process literally broke the team.

That's what pisses off the mostly straight hetrosexual male crowd that make up most of the gaming market.

A big reason why many east asian game studios are doing so well by rejecting that tried and failed formula from the West.

And on top of that, libdragon's IPL3 doesn't just blindly copy the first megabyte of ROM code into RDRAM like the official Nintendo one does, but actually expects the ROM data after it to be a full-blown ELF executable, which it parses out and copies pieces of to the specified places.

Pretty slick stuff.

From a 60 Minutes interview Luckey did last year ( https://www.cbsnews.com/news/palmer-luckey-ai-powered-autono... ):

> Right now, there are so many weapon systems that require manning. You know, if I can have one guy command and controlling 100 aircraft, that's a lot easier than having to have a pilot in every single one. And it puts a lot fewer American lives at risk.

> To be clear, "autonomy" does not mean remote controlled.

> Once an autonomous weapon is programmed and given a task, it can use artificial intelligence for surveillance or to identify, select and engage targets. No operator needed.

> If you were having to require the human operator to actually map every single action and say, "Hey, do this. If that, then this." It would take so long to manage it that you would be better off just remotely piloting it. It's the AI onboard all these weapons that makes it possible to make it so easy.

To me that seems like he's describing a system where you give it a task like "kill all the insurgents in X area" and it'll go and do it without needing an operator.

> Also, Palmer is one of many Anduril co-founders, and is not the acting CEO. His opinions are an input but are not ground truth for the company. He has effectively been a marketing figurehead for years.

If the company's really good at heart, I'm not sure they would have kept a guy who keeps telling the media that the company is working on autonomous weapons to kill people without requiring an operator, and that he's frustrated that he can't make what he REALLY wants to because of all the pesky war crime treaties.

I've been a low level engine programmer in video games all my working life. I worked on a few AAA games that sold 20M+ copies, I'm not saying this to boast, I'm saying this to say I know how the sausage is made. My literal day to day job is fixing issues like "The RHI thread on the Switch takes 0.5ms longer than it should" and optimizing things as much as possible.

I think if you asked me few years ago, I would have also taken the same stance you did - that these tools make it "too easy" and we get unoptimized crap out there.

But you know what, nowadays I feel like I mellowed out a lot. A lot of these so called "friendslop" games are horrible in terms of technical work. And you know what? They still bring joy to people. They still make people laugh and have a great time with the people they like. One of my favourite memories from a game I worked on was reading comments from people who said they were looking forward to just playing the game after work in the evening with their friends. Was optimizing the IO performance on PS4 essential to make the game happen? Sure. But what mattered more was that the game was actually fun to play.

Nowadays I see the improvement in tooling as nothing but a positive. There will always be hardcore engine programmers who know how to do this stuff, I have zero doubt about it. But allowing people to just download an engine and make the thing is absolutely fantastic. To say that it's bad - to me personally - that's gatekeeping. Saying you can't make a game unless you know how to write a renderer or a physics system is so offputting to people who want to make a game but just don't know how - we should be encouraging them, not chastising them for it. Little Big Planet did it well as one of the first games of that kind, if you recall that - just saying, here's a sandbox, make a thing that brings joy to other people. Isn't that what gaming is about?

And on a more serious, business side - it's kinda crazy that Epic lets you use UE for FREE until you start making serious money on the game that you made. You can start a company, hire people, and just start making the game you want to make without paying anything for the tooling. Very few other companies in the world let you do this.

We're living in an amazing time where an algorithm running on a GPU can create novel things by itself and it's just exciting to share what it can do.

I love reading about what people have managed to get running with Claude, because honestly it's amazing that these models can do any of the things they're now doing.

I also enjoy seeing what crazy, cool creative things people are doing.

So if someone talks about how "X" was hard and the first comment mentions there's a library to do "X", is that rude? Or is there a carve-out for the scary AI?

If someone came in with a story about how they were able to easily create an N64 game with No-code/AI/Libraries and the first comment was "ha! I did the same thing in a cave with a box of scraps" that would also be rude.

God forbid people share anecdotes about projects they were working on. On HN...

Yeah! How dare someone share an anecdote about a similar experience they had! On HN of all places. Somebody sharing an experience isn't disrespectful, neither is talking about how they had an easier time doing so.

> Personally, if I read such a comment under something I created, I'd feel way more insulted than if they just called me a slur or something.

Yes, you anti's are certainly irrationally offended by AI.

> ... every single post not directly related to AI has someone in the comments mentioning ... how they used it in relation to the topic of the post somehow

Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, many people use AI?

> I'm starting to believe it's straight up astroturfing.

"Anyone who disagrees must be a shill" is certainly a take.

> I'd argue that such comments deserve to be dunked on, downvoted, or even flagged

So everyone that disagrees with your post should flag it right? Since flagging is just a value judgment on something you don't like?

> unless you want all non-AI discussion on HN to die off.

Least hyperbolic Anti-AI comment.