Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50031115

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

As a side note, there's a lot of talk about programming being not fulfilling anymore. But the above exercise was probably the most fun I've had with engineering in a long time, and would have been nearly impossible for me personally without AI. Perhaps it was the novelty of the TLA+ stuff, but I think it offers a glimpse into what our jobs could actually be in the future, beyond simply telling Claude to do what you used to do manually and then clicking enter. There are much more ambitious and fulfilling use cases for it.

Costume generation gimmicks on the internet.

> the fact that there are more ethical tools with which to do those things

More ethical what? For what? Costume generation tricks?

> I'm not sure what to tell you.

I'm not trying to argue. I literally have no idea what you're talking about.

A quick funny story about this game's history:

Back in 2012 I had (poorly) implemented the first version of Snaketron. The issue with it was that I was keeping game state on the client, and while I did realize that it was insecure, I also had no idea what to do about it without increasing latency to unplayable levels. I was still in school, never worked on games, and haven't even heard of the term "netcode" before. The excitement of releasing my first pet project got the better of me, and I placed this security concern in the "theoretical issues" bucket, and shipped it.

No one would even notice, and if they did, they wouldn't take the time to break into my little Snake game project, right?

WRONG! Hacker News absolutely lived up to its name. While I was busy with my first experience of handling a traffic surge, scaling up my database and fixing bugs, several players found the security holes and were beginning their Snake rampage. Reports were coming in of unkillable snakes so I decided to start up a game to see if I could catch it.

I loaded a 1v1 and my opponent was ... space invaders. My snake was a snake. Their "snake" was a rendering of the game Space Invaders. Needless to say they were also moving around and were invincible. I really wish I had taken a video of that, but I was floored that HN not just played, but hacked, my project is such an epic way.

I always wanted to rebuild it properly, so here's V2! The architecture and motivations are quite different this time around.

First, the state is server authoritative and lag is compensated for by client-state prediction. The game engine is written in Rust and compiled to WASM for the client side library.

To minimize the ops burden, I also imposed a strict resiliency requirement on this project: it must be auto-scalable. So a node can join the cluster and live games will rebalance to it without disrupting gameplay.

I also tried to make the new Snaketron a little more fun. The core mechanic is still, like classic Snake, collecting food without crashing. But now team matches have an objective to make competitive games more structured. There's also a Bronze to Grand Master ranking sub system (if enough people play, calibrating this will be interesting) and some fun features like boosting, combos, skins, and Play Of The Game detection.

On Rust: One of my original goals for doing this in Rust was so that I could learn the language. That didn't work out as well as I thought it would. Usually I learn by building stuff, but AI got so good that I stopped writing code by hand and preferred to spend my nights & weekends working on what was more intereting to me than borrow checking errors: game design and the high availability stuff.

On AI: Who knows if this would have gotten done without AI. Probably not, what with my day job and other things going on in life. It's 200k LOC (most of that is tests don't worry) but still.

Anyway, here are the project links. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoy the game and any feedback is very much appreciated!

[0] https://snaketron.io

[1] https://github.com/lopatin/snaketron

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4028597 (original post from 2012)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49499499

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

The quote below are not my words, but are from a prior comment on HN, which I think are relevant.

``` I in no way mean this to be rude, but I think a big part of why the EU isn't in the same galaxy as the US in the realm of business in general, is in some part, the knee jerk reaction to turn to the government to make products and services better. Governments cannot make you an alternative, they can only make something that already exists, different (usually worse).

I have zero interest in creating in the gaming space, however, my gut reaction would be to start down the path of how I could create competition to companies that rug pulled their games.

And yes, I get that "just make a competitor" is easier said than done. But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.

Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them. ```

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130596

https://snaketron.io

https://github.com/lopatin/Snaketron

I've written my fair share of landing pages and copy lately. I start out with Claude for ideation and headlines it produces are almost always low effort word salads. Case in point:

"Software is made between commits"

It never fails to emphasize the last part, even if it bears no weight.

The only response to that headline is "Sure I guess".

It doesn't give you an idea of what problem it solves, doesn't sell you a vision or get you excited about the future. It's not even that insightful and is borderline factually incorrect.