Hacker News: meheleventyone

New comment by meheleventyone in "Why I don’t vibe code"

meheleventyone — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:13:53 +0000

I think that's just to have the domain complete their name.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

meheleventyone — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:46:58 +0000

Fighting games usually run peer to peer either with deterministic lockstep or rollback both of which are managed on the client. For actual gameplay at most there’d be a relay as a server. But almost certainly a bunch of ancillary services to support matchmaking and so on.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

meheleventyone — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:07:47 +0000

I think you're probably castrophizing the impact with statements like "it'd be impossible for a manager to ever become technical again" because that's not the likely outcome as I understand things. But yes people who stop programming for an appreciable amount of time do find it harder to pick back up again.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

meheleventyone — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:04:27 +0000

You're misrepresenting the potential problem. It's more along the lines of using AI stops you exercising the cognitive processes you would doing things yourself and those encompass skills, knowledge and brain function that can atrophy. For an extreme example you can look at cognitive decline in the elderly which can be mitigated by taking part in activities that are cognitively stimulating.

New comment by meheleventyone in "AI's economics don't make sense"

meheleventyone — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:48:39 +0000

They could make it work like rewarded video ads in mobile games. Block progress until you watch the ad. Then as dutiful engineers people can consume ads to support the business and avoid being laid off.

More seriously for software engineering it’ll just cost a lot.

New comment by meheleventyone in "It's OK to compare floating-points for equality"

meheleventyone — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:23:19 +0000

Yeah in a lot of cases it's much better to use integers and a fixed precision as the absolute unit of position. For games it's just that the scale of most games works well with floats in the range they care about.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

meheleventyone — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:10:04 +0000

Russia pre-invasion of Ukraine probably said something very similar.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

meheleventyone — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:08:06 +0000

You realize you’re essentially building a false dichotomy? I work in video games where code really is a means to an end but still see that authorship is important even if that code is uuuuugly due to it being the expression of the game itself. From that perspective I’m neither worried about craft or product but my ability to express myself though code as the game behaves. Although if you really must have only two categories I’d be in camp one.

As such AI is a net negative as it would be in writing a novel or making any other kind of art.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

meheleventyone — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:33:01 +0000

I don’t think the air campaign against Iran and the campaign in the war game are similar at all.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

meheleventyone — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:02:29 +0000

They are spending a lot of money on Fortnite’s UGC side in the form of paying developers for their games engagement as well.

New comment by meheleventyone in "John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists"

meheleventyone — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 09:12:11 +0000

Yeah the main difference seems to be that he open sourced the games after he got very wealthy from them not before. So of course at that point you can easily feel magnanimous about bestowing gifts.

Open sourcing something from the start and essentially giving up any ability to profit from the use of your work when companies are often making huge profits from it seems less easy in comparison.

New comment by meheleventyone in "New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike"

meheleventyone — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:21:25 +0000

The collapse in this case being the murder of children at school.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)"

meheleventyone — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:20:00 +0000

The JetBrains local autocomplete is hilarious but occasionally useful. I find it really hit and miss in terms of when it will decide to autocomplete and whether it will exhastively complete all elements, miss some out or get itself into a loop over several.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Stop Killing Games update says EU petition advances"

meheleventyone — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:18:41 +0000

I can see your perspective and relate to the strong emotions you’re showing but you’re not actually engaging with what I’m saying.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Stop Killing Games update says EU petition advances"

meheleventyone — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:14:57 +0000

Sure but this is back of the envelope and surely a question any legislators will be interested in. If you have better data I’m all for seeing it.

For the record I’m not using the number of dead games from the last year just the number of released games in the last year as a point of comparison. If I used a wider period and considered more platforms than Steam that would include more games and make the percentage significantly smaller. So the bias is actually in favour of SKG with this ballpark.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Stop Killing Games update says EU petition advances"

meheleventyone — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:57:10 +0000

Thanks for the list!

Mobile presents even larger problems as games and apps get orphaned by quickly moving APIs which don't have backwards compatability. It's not clear to me what the Stop Killing Games answer to that problem would be.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Stop Killing Games update says EU petition advances"

meheleventyone — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:09:10 +0000

I'm trying to understand the scope of the issue.

The reason I picked the last year is to see what the current landscape is. If this is a common practice in need of regulation then I'd expect a large number of current titles present the issue. If it's a 'few' then how many exactly does that imply? If we're talking less than ten then that would be less than 0.05% of games released last year (let alone the number releaded over the last ten).

Someone linked this page which has 440 dead games over the past few decades which is 2.2% of the output of 2025 but obviously includes many more years, mobile, console releases and so on: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list

New comment by meheleventyone in "Stop Killing Games update says EU petition advances"

meheleventyone — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:03:10 +0000

License verification via a server is a pretty common and normal method of copy protection. For example the JetBrains IDE I'm using at work right now does this.

If it didn't work then players would have no issue with the server being taken offline! But that isn't the case so clearly it impacts people.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Stop Killing Games update says EU petition advances"

meheleventyone — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:00:13 +0000

A form of copy-protection basically. I get the desire for the emotive framing though but I think the EOL implications were simply not considered. I also agree with the idea that at EOL that copy-protection should be removed. There are however a vanishingly small number of games that are built this way so I'm not sure regulation is the best way of approaching it.

New comment by meheleventyone in "Stop Killing Games update says EU petition advances"

meheleventyone — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:56:10 +0000

There were about 20,000 games released on Steam last year how many worked that way?