I played this one purely for Desmond’s story. I found everything about Connor’s story utterly tedious and the setting meant that the buildings were awful for traversal.

What does the writer think “extra” means?

I don’t think that’d be much good when the way the specs are written are not based purely on technical merits. We also aren’t paid to test hardware - we have hardware because we develop software to test hardware on. Knowing how to navigate those waters is the key skill. Once I’ve got a solution that’ll work getting it implemented is relatively trivial as our approach is extremely atomic.

In general what you describe sounds like a tremendous amount more overhead than we currently have for little to no gain. What I could do with is a few more engineers that I could train up to have sufficient contextual knowledge, not another junior to babysit. I trained one up and he’s tremendously useful - apart from when he leans too heavily on LLMs. That cost a side project two months of unnecessary faff and sapped team morale massively in the process. I ended up dragging the damn thing over the finish line after he refactored it into something that was exhausting to work with.

Unless it’s the most rudimentary logic I tend to have to hold the LLM’s hand through the entire design. Sometimes that involves breaking the damn thing’s fingers.

I mostly use them to write stuff that I can do but hate because the syntax is a faff (argparsers, docstrings, shite like that). There’s just too much contextual knowledge needed for them to be much use with the codebase I work with, much of which is not in the codebase so much as in the metatextual knowledge needed. I write a lot of software for testing hardware and there’s a needle that has to be threaded - the specifications are not bulletproof, the hardware being tested failing may be the desired outcome (so code that passes on it is inherently wrong), and there are various limitations and priorities that inform test approach.

The actual code I write is fairly minimal but the knowledge needed to write it is extensive.

Occasionally I’ll take on side projects at work to get my hands dirty on something more involved but simpler.

A wasteland that one can throw a stone across doesn’t feel like much of a wasteland to me. I don’t want realism, just big enough that I can suspend my disbelief. I want to get immersed but a “town” with six people isn’t a godsdamned town.

My go-to “too big” is True Crime: Streets of LA. If memory serves it’s a decent chunk of LA at 1:1 scale.

It’s far too big and there’s not much to do. It doesn’t help that the game is dross.

I would argue that Fallout 3’s map is ridiculously tiny.

I’m not American. Fuck that cesspit.

Whataboutism, eh?

They can both suck, it doesn’t have to be equal.

Whilst I can’t be bothered to look it up on my phone - we have hard data that disproves this link, last I checked.

At least for me, not for a second. I have distinctive physical traits from my father.

Saints Row (2022) had some of my flavour of silliness.

Ah, the Kingmaker.

Edit: it’s a reference to Warwick the Kingmaker. Well, it’s a reference to a reference. It’s actually a joke made in Nebulous - “Dionne Warwick, the Kingmaker”.

Which is fair enough and totally reasonable - it was purely in the context of that comment it seemed odd. You had a device that actually uses the architecture that Macs use and one that used an architecture that they don’t but… yeah. It’s not important, it just made me chuckle.

…and groan about the march of time.

But the Switch and beyond use ARM, the architecture Macs have used for the last five years? It just seemed an odd thing to mention given how long it’s been since Macs used PPC. I know they used to, but I’m old enough to have used 68000k Macs too so of course I remember that time.

I’m confused by your first sentence - the last machines they made that used PPC were in 2005. To me it reads like you’re correcting me but saying exactly the same thing…?

The fact that Macs stopped using the architecture twenty years ago makes it bit of an odd connection, I would argue. As you say, the 360 used the architecture far more recently and over 84 million of those were sold. It’s not like it was some obscure device.

Mac haven’t used PowerPC since 2005.

Butch?

Hotline Miami. Frustrating and tedious.

I generally don’t take gaming recommendations from people I know because I’ve been burned too many times.

Apogee’s Secret Agent. It got a lovely remaster a few years ago too.

A fun platformer that spoofs the spy genre.