We're reading a post about engineering. Why? Why aren't we reading posts about game design? Why does engineering even matter for games?

The status quo is, if you are good at engineering, you can ship games, even if they're bad.

If you're good at game design and bad at engineering, before Claude code, you will not ship any games.

So engineering mattered back then.

Unity is very hard to use. If you want to make a game on Steam or iOS or whatever you need to know a lot of engineering.

Okay, now you don't. Claude code can engineer for you.

Now game designers can ship games. Do C# features matter to them? No. So does it matter for shipping games anymore? No.

Will this help them make money or get distribution? Time will tell. Very different questions. It is a CERTAINTY that you don't need the developers as much anymore.

If Steam had an easy way to turn photoshop files or board games into product SKUs, it would also be a different story. It doesn't. The App Store doesn't. The Switch doesn't. Are you getting it? They are still really complex to deploy for. Unity is hard to use. We put up with engineering stories because it was meaningful. Now it's not so much anymore. Now it's, what helps GAME DESIGNERS ship games? C# features? Not anymore.

"No no, that's not what I mean. I mean, privacy is this only, specifically this set of technologies applied to this very specific set of products, and nothing else. Whatever definition will allow me to make this conversation as uninteresting as possible."

Look, I guess my point is, privacy is complicated. In my example, I suppose OpenAI could authorize access to something. They already do, for training. Right? And in some sense, something valuable leaks from one users' data to another. It is still privacy when access to your data is limited in some important way from other people, even when you (or a lot of people, or other people) could benefit from such access. The biggest apps in the world have very, very complicated privacy stories.

then claude code swung everything back in the other direction. things are accessible again. does any of what the article says matter anymore? games are the ultimate, "if it looks good and works correctly, it is good" software product, nobody is going to care if you use [field: SerializeField] or records or whatever.

so yeah, will Claude Opus 6 mail you a check every month? who even needs Unity?

the flaw with class actions is not that they don't pay enough (or too much, to the wrong people) money. it's that they're reactive, which is to say, it's the same tradeoff with nearly all US commercial policy.

Amazon saves SO much time. Costco is SO slow, a preposterously slow experience. Minutes of ordering and unpacking Amazon Fresh takes hours for Costco. And the food is fresher.

It is dark patterns in retail embodied.

I hate their social media advertising. That is, they pay to tip the scales on algorithmic recommenders, they don't pay influencers or ads.

They really are the thing that Pixar mocks them to be.

Everyone has to stop going there and just buy this shit online.

should every non-Western country be subsidizing all consumer fuel costs?

see, i don't want to generalize about left and right. it's much simpler than that. look at what this thread is actually about: "chart for $/GLD is going up and to the right, therefore, gold good." okay? it's not complicated. it's not left vs right as much as it is, for every 1 person who's like, "things are complicated, economics are interesting, let's talk about it" there are 19 who live day to day in a relentless grind, and get-rich-quick is literally their only apparent salvation. they want the world to be ordered where they are a Green Wojack, where some random bet or gamble makes them a ton of money. that's why we're talking about it, not to figure out economic policy. same reason we talk about cryptocurrencies and startups. to most regular people - and programmers are regular people - it's about, $$$.

it is a totally valid complaint to say, "floating exchange rates do not produce charts that go up and to the right." I mean, that's their problem! They made the wages per hour chart stop going up and to the right! It's not that they are bad policy!

Do people on HN care about joe schmoe hourly worker? No. You can certainly make tons of money trading currencies, but look, these people are not trading. They're gambling. This class of get-rich-quick person likes: real estate, cryptocurrency, gold, startup stock... are you getting it?

You are making it about, "neoliberal dogmas" and "gold bugs" or whatever. Trust me, those people are not the morons. The gamblers are 10x as stupid. They are the antagonists.

All that said, Bretton Woods matters because people look at the gold standard as a time when wages in the United States rose. Like that's why Bernie Bros on HN care. It's the same reason they oppose globalization: me me me. So it's worth knowing why it was flawed. They don't comprehend that before and after Bretton Woods, hourly wage charts measured a fundamentally different thing.

I think it's better to attack the charts - I mean, you're responding to a Charts Guy, a guy who's like, look at this Gold Denominated Chart guy - because that's what their brains work on. Don't worry about economics. These guys are not economists. They are Charts. The real attack on their worldview is that, well, just because the year in the X axis is an increasing, doesn't mean that you can compare a bigger year to a smaller year. They would really like the world to be ordered that way, but it's not, and taking leadership on convincing them of that is very hard.