Hacker News: vlunkr

New comment by vlunkr in "AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?"

vlunkr — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:39:15 +0000

If you want to watch Shakespeare on your TV you are welcome to. But also I don't think that's the point at all. If it's my job to hammer 100 nails a day, and then my boss gives me a hammer that is 10x more effective. I don't get to go home early, I'm just expected to hammer 1000 nails now. Maybe the work becomes more pleasant, maybe it doesn't. But either way it definitely benefits the boss and the person who makes the hammer.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:04:28 +0000

There was plenty of movie tie-in shovelware that sold well. ET is obviously the infamous example, but this continued to go on into the 3D era. Sports games too. They aren't universally bad, but often they succeeded just because they have the official license. It's just like any kind of media, bad stuff can succeed because of deceptive marketing or slapping a familiar name on garbage.

This is all a vast oversimplification. There are obviously hundreds of games coming out every year without gacha mechanics.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:39:46 +0000

I'm pretty similar. AAA games are very similar to modern blockbuster movies. They're playing to the lowest common denominator, and often aren't motivated by any central vision besides making money. But just like Hollywood, sometimes a really creative project makes it through all that machinery. A series that has worked for me are the modern Doom games. Could have been a lame cash grab but they nailed a really interesting formula and continued to tweak it in each game.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:59:33 +0000

Sure, I didn’t say all old games are bad, we just have to be aware of nostalgia as a factor. It’s difficult for a game to match the ocarina of time for me, because I had simply never experienced something like that. As an adult I recognize that it is a good game, but also that someone who wasn’t there at the time isn’t going to see what I see in it.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:47:14 +0000

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough because I agree with everything you said lol. What I take issue with is the parent comment trying to assert that the SNES (or any console) is the greatest of all time. There’s too much subjectivity in art to make a statement like that. I’m trying to say that it’s nostalgia informing their opinion, even if they’re disguising it with technical arguments.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:36:29 +0000

You have to consider that it’s easier to create a genre when there are fewer games in existence. On Atari you’d make a game called “basketball” and bam, new genre!

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:22:15 +0000

To each their own, but I don’t know how you can call it bleak. This is a golden age of gaming if there ever has been one. So many phenomenal games, amazing sales, way more cross-platform games. Yeah there are assembly line AAA games, just don’t play them.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 05:54:45 +0000

I can name 2 games too. Look at games like animal well or balatro. They’re wildly original and not made by old Japanese dudes.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 05:11:19 +0000

Yeah I think that individual retro games can be incredible and stand the test of time. For me Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night are timeless. As a whole though, it’s hard to measure. Today we have microtransactions, in the past we had games that threw in one bullshit level so you couldn’t beat it during a rental. (Lookin at you battletoads) and bad movie tie-ins, lazy arcade ports, etc. There’s always going to be trash.

One thing retro games obviously don’t have is hindsight. Shovel Knight feels like the best NES games, but lacks crap like lives and continues, because it learned from later games like Dark Souls that you can make death punishing without making it un-fun. Hollow knight builds on my favorite games with a couple of decades of lessons on how to make platformers more interesting and less frustrating.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 04:07:39 +0000

I love retro consoles as much as the next middle aged software developer, but realistically, the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children. Every console generation is that special generation for one group of kids.

I do agree that sometimes limitations breed creativity, but that’s not the only thing that can make the magic work.

New comment by vlunkr in "Why Ruby on Rails still matters"

vlunkr — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 23:24:10 +0000

Also, the size of the elixir community and the libraries available is completely dwarfed by rails. Elixir, Phoenix, all the core stuff is really high quality, but in many cases you might doing more work that you could have just pulled from a gem in Ruby. It's unfortunate IMO. It's an underrated language.

New comment by vlunkr in "Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)"

vlunkr — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 16:58:47 +0000

I’m sure there are optimizations to be made, but DOGE is acting like an insufferable greenie dev who wants to slash and burn without understanding the system or having acquired any wisdom about maintaining and refactoring complex systems.

New comment by vlunkr in "Should more of us be moving to live near friends?"

vlunkr — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 18:36:51 +0000

Might teenagers feel less isolated if they had family around though? I grew up with tons of cousins my age and that was always a part of my social life. Doesn’t matter that I wasn’t 18

New comment by vlunkr in "Merry Christmas Everyone"

vlunkr — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 11:05:28 +0000

This is the beautiful thing about Christmas. It’s a buildup of hundreds of years of traditions if you trace it back to Saturnalia. It’s a mix of ancient and modern customs, folklore from many cultures, and infinite family or personal traditions. The Christian angle is certainly there, but you can leave it out entirely and still have a full experience.

New comment by vlunkr in "Dumb TVs deserve a comeback"

vlunkr — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 01:13:13 +0000

Can we just get some physical buttons back! My tv came with a single multi-purpose button. It’s literally the premise of a dilbert comic. Then the button broke from over use. Just volume, power, change inputs. Not that complicated!

New comment by vlunkr in "King vs. Kubrick: The Origins of Evil (2020)"

vlunkr — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 14:21:56 +0000

I don’t think less of King for it, though it strongly disagree with him. An artist sometimes has a much different connection to their artwork than the audience does.

New comment by vlunkr in "Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT"

vlunkr — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:20:32 +0000

So he’s a naturally talented developer who learned to code as he created his first app. Maybe he didn’t understand specifics, but you have to be able to intuit a lot to string a bunch of AI snippets into an app.

New comment by vlunkr in "Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT"

vlunkr — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 02:18:52 +0000

It’s hardly the first time someone has shipped an app within a year of starting to code. It’s impressive, but not revolutionary.

New comment by vlunkr in "Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT"

vlunkr — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 01:48:51 +0000

There’s a company being fined for exactly this right now. That might be a deterrent.

New comment by vlunkr in "The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it"

vlunkr — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 16:47:55 +0000

The descendants of Mark Zuckerberg will continue to build dynastic wealth through no skill of their own without doing any real work. Other people in the same country are single parents working multiple jobs just to keep their family sheltered and fed. You don't think that's a situation that we can improve?