It was only two years, and it was basically half nornal computer science classes, and half working with engines, making a game with classmates and mentors from the industry throughout the year, and learning about rendering, AI behaviors (the videogame kind, not LLMs). The graphics part was about shaders, lighting, post-processing, global illumination, renderers and math, not modeling. It was mostly technical, but we had some game desing classes.

Having AI not bullshiting will require an entirely different set of algorithms than LLM, or ML in general. ML by design aproximates answers, and you don’t use it for anything that’s deterministic and has a correct answer. So, in that rwgard, we’re basically at square 0.

You can keep on slapping a bunch of checks on top of random text prediction it gives you, but if you have a way of checking if something is really true for every case imaginable, then you can probably just use that to instead generate the reply, and it can’t be something that’s also ML/random.

I forgot to add that I had a Masters in Game Development and Computer Graphics, which definitely helped, but I still learned most of my gamedev skills by regularly attending gamejams and working on my own projects. I’ve also started working in gamedev for the past year, and I wouldn’t say that it teaches you much, since you are missing out on 80% of actuall development and only crunch JIRA tickets and bugfixes, as a junior that is, without being exposed to the more important parts or other skills. Assuming you join a larger studio with game in progress, in an indie studio with team of 10 people, you’ll probably have a lot more responsibilities and impact on other stages of the game’s development.

This isn’t true. If you can get by while working part-time, you still have at least 40 hours every two weeks to work on your game.

It’s one of my biggest regrets, that after school I immediately jumped into full-time job, even though I realistically could live comfortably with 1/3 of the pay I was getting, since young+no familly+no car+shared living reduces your living costs by a very large margin. My best friend did that and has been working only 2 days per week since. I was trying to keep up with him, working on our game in my free time, but it’s simply not feasible to build on top of 40 hours per week of regular job, and then do anything meaningful on your side projects. I barely struggled to get myself to do at least 20h of work per month on the project, missing deadlines, and it sucked.

He, on the other hand, kept our game project afloat and moving forward, with 60+ hours per month, while also writing and running a large LARP for 100 of players, directing his own theater group, and in general successfully working on a lot of projects, including several smaller games.

The best advice I can give, if you want to be a game developer, is to 1) not work in gamedev and 2) work part-time. The IT salary should net you a comfortable life even on part-time pay, assuming it’s not gamedev. Smaller studios will have difficulties keeping afloat if they need to pay you, and in larger AAA studio you will be the same code-monkey crunching JIRA tickets as you would be in any IT job, but for a lot less money. And the design freedom you get when your livelyhood doesn’t depend on your art’s success, be it games or anything else, is totally worth it.

For example, this game has been developed solely in free time, without anyone getting paid for working on it. It’s not AAA and the development takes a long time, but it definitely doesn’t need to be a fulltime job.

I just ignore everything, avoid news, especially local or politics. I just don’t care, don’t plan to ever have children and just hope I’ll get to live the rest of my life with my circle of friends playing games without having to deal with any kind of large crisis that would affect me.

Since I have slightly above avarage salary as someone working in IT, I’m counting on not being rich enough to be of interrest, while also not being poor enough (taking my lack of any expenses on family/car/etc into account) that if the living conditions worsen significatly, it will have already been a problem for more than half of a population way earlier and something will have to be done about it. And even if not, I can still comfortably get by even if prices of everything got 3-4 times as much as they are now, so IDGAF. It’s a privilege, but I’m at a point where I don’t really care what happens to others. For my part, I’m not bringing children into this hopeless mess, and while it’s sad that a lot of innocent will take the fall, I also take solace in that a lot of the people who brought it on themselves will suffer for it.

I highly recommend reading Digital Minimalism, which deals with exactly what you are talking about. It’s a great and inspiring read, even if you don’t actually go through with it.

From what I remember, it mostly talks about how to approach any kind of technology as a tool, though a pretty simple process - honestly think about what your goal is (networking, getting information about new topics, keeping up to date on events…), and properly decide whether the technology is actually The Best way how to do it, while minimalizing any drawbacks.

Some examples I remember are:

• I have to use social networks to stay in touch with my friends and family. - Is that really the best way? Isn’t it better to make sure to visit or call them regularly, so they can tell you what they have been up to, instead of you passively seeing it from soulless posts? If your goal is to have a meaningful connection with them, is chatting in a group-chat the best way and better than talking less often, but in person?
• I have to stay up-to-date on news. - Is endlessly scrolling through clickbait articles for hours the best use of your time? Wouldn’t just subscribing to a physical newspaper/journal, that you get to read every day/week/month, accomplish the same thing while also saving you an immense amount of time?
• I need to have a smartphone so I can be reached at any time. - Do you need to have a smartphone for that? Isn’t dumb phone way better, since you don’t get distracted with other stuff? And are you sure that you have to reply immediately, and it won’t wait until the evening? Will setting up regular 30 minutes per day, to check and answer your personal mails/IMs be sufficient, and if someone needs to reach you immediately, they can always call you.

Most of the arguments in the book were thought-provoking, and from what I’ve tried implementing, it has made my life a lot better. For example, switching my phone to a dumb phone (and carrying a powered off smarthphone that I can make a hotpost for, if I really need an app for something) made my away-from-computer life a lot better and peacful, and it was really easy to get used to that. Once you start considering anything you do on a computer from the pragmatic point of view, and ask yourself what your goal is, and if there isn’t a better way - the answer usually is yes, there is.

If I ever wanted to fight against my local regime, it would definitely not be through US and CIA, lol.

This puts to words something I was recently thinking about pretty well, especially the part about being an “advice seeker” and not really being able to solve stuff on your own, which is something I’ve always attributed to just being a field where you are driven to, especially in school, to have The Correct Solution, and that one always exists.

I mostly struggled with this when I tried getting into art, especially music or drawing. Suddenly, there’s no algorothm or The Solution, and you have to figure out something based only on your creativity and judgement, and there’s no-one who will tell you “this is the correct answer”, which for someone being used to there mostly being one, was something I never managed to get over to this day, because it simply stresses me to the point of creative paralysis.

Thankfully, due to enshitiffication of most of the services I was following, which basically forced me to drop them due to invasive privacy rules, AI integration, or not working in privacy focused browsers or over a VPN, it’s getting better. I’m kind of looking forward to OpenAI, Google and Meta finally killing most of the internet, so I can let go when 90% of content is AI generated, 60% of websites wont work without chrome, and the rest is just porn.

I shudder at the thought of “Programming Inquisition”, that would drive around doing PRs and exterminating anyone whose code shows signs of heresy against The One SOLID God.

None of us would make it :D

Oh, I totally forgot about this bit. Maan, I really want to write “a practical guide for programming with the Omnissiah.”, a book of fun rituals and litanies to support your software development. I always felt like computers are kind of really literally magical, and adopting a more spiritualistic approach to programming sounds like a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any existing spiritualism that would match this, Tech Priests being really close to what I was going for.

I need to add more litanies and copious amounts of censer into my programming workflow.

It took me a long time to realize the worth of having a CS degree. When I was leaving the school, I felt like it hasn’t tought me much. I was already a pretty ok programmer, since I was programming most of my highschool, and it felt like I’ve wasted a lot of time on languages I’ll never see in my entire life. Which is kind of true - I’m still pretty confident that I’ll never use Lisp, Prolog, Lambda Calcul, base assembly or Pharo ever again, but after a few years I’ve realized something important that I was missing - the school wasn’t trying to teach me how to be a “pharo/lisp/prolog programmer”, but to be “a programmer”.

I noticed it on my pentesting colleagues who didn’t have formal programming education, how they mostly spoke about programming in relation to languages - “I know a little bit of python, but wouldn’t call myself a programmer. What programmer are you?”. That question felt wierd, and I eventualy realized that’s because the lines between languages eventually blured for me naturally, and I paid no mind to the language of choice - I was simply able to naturally pick up any language, and write anything I needed in it pretty quickly.

Only then it occured to me that I have my education to thank for that. Sure, I might never use Lisp again, but I do vaguely remember the concepts and workflow the language has, so now I can more naturally pick up any lisp-like language. Same goes for the prolog-style of languages, or the more OOP-focused languages, like Pharo. Since I had to drag myself through hell to pass an exam in most of the flavours of languages, it made me a versatile programmer that can just naturally pick up anything I see, to the point where I don’t have to think about it - I just subconsciously detect what kind of basic workflow style is it going for, google the basic syntax and standard libraries, and I can write whatever I need in whatever language is available in a reasonable amount of time.

I don’t see this “ascendance” mentioned in the post, and I think that it’s a really important point in learning to be a programmer. It’s also a piece of advice I try to give anyone unsure about whether his degree is worth it, because it feels like you’re learning useless stuff. I have no idea how to teach it, though. It kind of happened naturally for me, and I can’t identify the point when it happened or why, or how would I go in teaching it to someone else.

It’s important to keep a wide field of view when learning programming, and not just lock yourself into one language. You can always google for syntax pretty quickly, but seeing the wide array of workflows and flavours different languages use to accomplish the same thing will go a long way in making you a better programmer.

Thanks for this, it actually made me realize that there is another MMO I spent more of my childhood with - Stat Wars Galaxies, and more importantly, that I can still play it on private servers. Which also extends to WoW, playing on a private server might acually be a good compromise, when I get the urge again.

But so far, I’m falling for FFXIV. Hopefully Square Enix isn’t as bad as Blizz. I remember hearing some NFT writings on the wall, but so far it doesn’t sound too bad.

I just got through whole of ARR and started HW, so I should be past that point. Haven’t really noticed it too much, but the difference in pacing is kind of apparent in the hindsight. The story is interesting enough and the game never ceases to amaze me with variety of side activities or QoL things that I don’t mind a slower pace and am greatful for the game as is. Especially comparing it to WoW, its such a breath of fresh air. So far it feels like the game SWTOR wished to be, and it’s great.

I also think that they heavily cut through the amount of slog required for ARR, judging by the list of removed mandatory MSQ quests on wiki.

I don’t think so. If people leave and the only reputation you’d hear about the platform is that it’s full of shit like that, you won’t have any reason to start an account in the first place, since there’s no “normal” content with which they’d first hook you in, before they can slowly start changing your views.

If the serious content remains, you’ll get people signing up for that content, only to be slowly manipulated into whatever The Algorithm feels will drive the engagement (which is probably fascism). If there’s nothing in the first place, you don’t have that hook.

Let it die.

To add to other commenters - its also really hard, assuming you play solo, to focus on your own performance and not blame teammates. I’ve never been toxic, and tried to focus on my own gameplay, but I eventually realized its almost impossible. Even though I thought that I don’t care about others, and even though I managed to never be toxic, it only ocurred to me when I switched to StarCraft, where you play 1v1 and there’s no-one else to blame. It was so mentally taxing, queueing for another game when you know that you just suck and will loose again to some easy build. I lasted for two months of ranked StarCraft, before I had to quit due to mental health. I just wasn’t able to play anymore and was dreading the next match.

Which is something that never happened to me in MOBAs, because even though I was sure I’m only focusing on myself, it became clear that wasn’t true - otherwise, I’d have quickly had the same problem as with 1v1 games. I managed to not be toxic because I hate toxicity and am non-confrotational in general, but if you are someone with less self-control, blaming your teammates just come so, so naturally. And accepting your own mistakes is way harder than I thought, which surprised me by how much.

It was more funny when I didn’t know that :(

But thanks! I kind of expected it’s something like that :D

I started FFXIV trial few weeks ago, and so far I was having a blast. The major issue is that I probably won’t manage to convince my friends and partner to also switch, since they are invested in WoW and are having fun. But the plan is to find a nice FC and get some regular events in, and we’ll see how it goes.

On the other hand, I tried that with GW2 a few years ago, had a blast, found someone random to play with, but eventually I just forgot about the game… Which is something that never happens with WoW 😠

Blizzard. I’ve been recently thinking about how much of a “comfort food” the game is for me, and how no other game could ever get me the same feeling as returing back to a game I’ve spent literally months player over the last 15 years. It’s my escapism, where I don’t have to stress about anything and know so much about the game, that I don’t have to learn anything new or unknown, which makes it even more comfortable. It’s also a game where I have a lot of friends, and since they are in the similar boat, we usually just meet up for an expansion - but investing our whole group into another game usually just fails.

The problem is, that Blizzard knows this and has started to exploit it. Milking players of as much money as they can, while abandoning their “Players First” motto and absolutely shitting over the playerbase by gutting most of the development teams that had some passion left, hiring management who didn’t care about the game in the slightest and only was there to increase revenue and reduce costs as much as possible.

It’s more and more apparent, the game is in the worst and buggiest state as far as I remember, lot of content was cut, there’s literally no customer support - people can be stuck for weeks with their character somewhere, while only response they get is an AI generated “FUCK YOU”, and their only hope being that their post will blow up on reddit and someone will actually look at their case.

The new book about Blizzard is so depressing read, and makes me extremely angry. Fuck all those people who ruined the company, even though one of the founding owners was extremely against it and fought for years to keep at least some semblance of original vision. And he lost.

I hate that I always return to the game when I’m down and just need a serious dose of escapism from real life, that only this game can provide. I’m slowly trying to invest myself into other MMOs, and get rid of this toxic, gaslighting ex WoW has been for me. But what I hate the most is how obvious their change of priorities is in their recent games.

I wish nothing but the worst for people who ruined Blizzard. We could’ve had second Larian, if it was Morhaime instead of Kodick and his greed who won.

Thankfully, we have FFXIV and Path of Exile, that still respect players, and Blizz games can go fuck themselves. I hope I’ll manage to finally transition from WoW for good this time.

Dovetail sounds like a bird. It’s not a bird, right? Right?

I mean… Every game you download and run can do almost anything on your computer, no matter what it’s written in. It’s just code.

My first C2 agent I made for our malware to use in Red Teamings was a Unity Engine headless server.