The whole point was a very visual way of learning with immediate feedback, where you build stuff in order to understand it.

Papert based his own ideas of constructionism on children's cognitive development theories of Jean Piaget, a famous Swiss psychologist with whom he worked in the 50s - early 60s.

Logo pioneered a whole class of tools and languages built around constructivist ideas (e.g. Ozobot, Scratch, EToy, Processing, Design by Numbers...) and I hope these ideas will not be totally forgotten in the era of slop, when people prize ignorance and no longer seem to appreciate the concept of "build to understand".

Since Alienbrain was quite popular back then, I assume they are still around now. Given that git still has no out-of-the-box facilities to handle large binaries and asset previews conveniently.

Not really. There are better products out there.

When I worked at Triple-A studio, we used Alienbrain, which is specifically tailored for huge binary versioning with previews and stuff. We had terabytes of assets, and Alienbrain handled it well, including seamless integration into pipelines - something a stock git or Perforce would never achieve.

But it is hardly unique, and it concerns the community more than the platform itself. Many communities with anonymous access end up toxic. It is nothing new and dates back to early BBSs and FidoNet, where a hostile attitude reached unbelievable levels.

Sure thing, the LLMs will be more polite than humans. For now...

Step 2: The platform becomes the ultimate knowledge base with community-curated answers on virtually any question related to software development.

Step 3: Another company scraps the community-driven database to train its model.

Step 4: The model is so efficient that people start asking questions of the model, killing in the process any traffic to the platform that helped to create it in the first place.

Step 5: Profit. People who spent years asking, answering, and curating programming knowledge for free are now paying for that knowledge repacked in the model weights. The original knowledge base is essentially dead.

Question: What programming knowledge base will be used to train future models?

Are we at the Skynet moment where people will be totally cut out of the loop from now on?

I've seen so many of these already. It would be hilarious to see Brooks proving right once again.

That is why I prefer to call them "bots" or "computers" - just to separate them from a shifting mess of definitions of what "AI" actually means. It reminds me of "Destination Void" by Frank Herbert, where the main characters were trying to build artificial consciousness and were struggling to define what it actually means.

I hate the term "AI" applied to games, since AI means so many things and usually implies something smart, "intelligent". But in reality, it is more like a "bot" or a "computer player". And the main goal is not to be super-smart, but to be plausible enough and provide an appropriate challenge to the human player.

There are some "fair" bots in games - like in my favorite turn-based Mechanized Assault and Exploration from the mid 90s. Computer players follow the same rules as the human ones - e.g., if something is not visible to the radar, the computer will not see it. The only "cheat" is the resource boost computer players can have on the higher difficulty settings, but it is totally optional. And as an experienced player, you always let the computer have it, since you want a challenge, and without that boost, it has no chance whatsoever.

The first time I played, I thought "It is just like Quake". Then you start to notice that the levels are pretty limited - it is all narrow corridors with rare small chambers and open spaces, no steep elevation changes, no rooms above rooms... Kinda like Doom. But then, father's examination shows sloped surfaces, shelves and bridges - stuff the Doom engine can't do.

Maybe, for level geometry, it is closer to portal rendering engines like Build. Still looks pretty claustrophobic even compared to Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. I feel the Chasm level designers could've got more variety from that technology, but again, maybe that was some fundamental limitation. Or maybe it is just like FPS were designed in the mid 90s.

Monsters, items and weapons are fully 3D, though. With dynamic lighting!

So Turbo Pascal (with a whole bunch of x86 asm inclusions) was totally capable of producing Quake-level games. I myself, in the late 90s, discovered the hidden capacities when I learned x86 assembly from Peter Abel's book. Once I got rid of the primitive TP BGI library and switched to VGA 13h, it was an unbelievable level up in abilities to manipulate pixels on the screen!

Now we just have to wait for a visitor from Proxima with more potent Chew-Z. The grim future is closer than we think...

IMHO, Ludum Dare is The Jam for many reasons and it is a pity that it's slowly fading away (the last Mike Kasprzak's post explains some of the challenges https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/$424396/ludum-dare-59...). It looks like we don't have many events left in the pipeline, and this one will be a nice opportunity to participate and still enjoy the sunset of the era and the vibes of the awesome community.

That alone hints that it is very hard to bring a dictatorship down with just aerial attacks - the ground component is also essential. Something tells me it is going to be the same here.

Only a land operation or a total collapse of the government, with the armed police and military joining the opposition, can topple the Iranian regime.

Also, the series was followed by Descent Freespace I/II, leaving a significant impact on the genre of space shooters. Though there are completely different games that have nothing to do with the original series.

I was also so inspired by this Gibson supercomputer interface when I created my little game prototype for js13k games contest 10 years ago:

https://invadium.itch.io/cybergrid-13

Now I think I should've used flight mechanics like in flight simulators instead of walking, but the cyberspace and viruses are still there. Maybe I will refresh it one day to give a more Hacker-like ambient flight feeling.

Also, people should stop playing 2D games. It is pretty silly to base your entertainment on ancient technology when modern GPUs can render super-complex 3D scenes.

And don't make me start on people who still buy vinyl...

Microsoft, being a monopoly, hardly cares about customers, especially about closing some imaginary "gaps". What they care about is preserving their dominant or monopoly position wherever they can, since in the last 25+ years, they lost so badly so many times, they shifted from "owning" the whole industry to being a monopoly in particular segments. They are basically repeating the path of IBM from being the industry to being irrelevant and struggling desperately to stop that inevitable process.

If Microsoft had listened to its customers, it would never have neglected and killed Skype, it would have continued to support XNA, so adored by the indie game devs, it would never have closed Arkane Austin and Ghostwire studios, it would have never preinstalled spyware with every single Windows installation... But Microsoft hardly cares.