This sounds so much like you're saying something like:
"You should work for me for free. It will be good exposure for you. And if you don't, then you're probably not a 10x developer or worthy anyway."
It's absurd. It sounds like a self-entitlement to labor or effort that is not reciprocated. It's one-sided economics. It's quite communist.
Furthermore, to emphasize the youthful age of computer science students creates a social conservative obligation that is only realistic inside the delusion of a societal progression unaware of its incorrect perception of time. Or, in other words, why should young developers matter at all?
Well you clearly don't care for society's survival, so Let's put it selfishly: I want more good games. I'm not going to make the next katamari or Baba is you or Papers Please or Orba Dinn. I accepted I do not have that kind of auteur mindset when I approach art.
But I do have technical skills and a lot of tech discourages a lot of would be artists. If I can make those parts easier, less buggy, and more performant while bringing in more people to make games, that's a win-win.
Is apathy toward society—which is, really, only your local community you're trying to defend and not something that is universally significant or even objectively capable of growth and sustainability—a dire crime I've committed? Because I do not in fact care about the "society" thing.
And claiming to have technical skill while also claiming that technology is stopping you from creating is a contradiction. An artist would have the technical skill to make something, by definition of the concept of an artist. If within your epistemology you're separating technical skill from an artist's creativity, then you have a perception of art and engineering that is tainted by something unrefined and harmful like liberal democratic society's lowest common denominator preference. In other words, there should not be a difference between an artist and a technical engineer.
Furthermore, it's strange that, with all the current software out there, you said you are at an impasse when it comes to game creation or game development. Everything already is easy, not error prone, and performance acceptable. What are you waiting for, exactly? An artificial intelligence aid that will do all the work for you?
And, lastly, an increase of the development population does not necessarily mean a good thing. Because, why should a bunch of people always be a good thing? Why not cull away those that are unfit for some task too? Unless realizing the philosophy of globalist liberal democracy is what you're aiming for? In which case I can see why you're repulsed at the idea of reality encroaching in on your fantastic ideals. Ethno-genetic Malthusian filters and reality should now be recognized as being synonymous with each other, or two faces of the same coin.
>Is apathy toward society—which is, really, only your local community you're trying to defend and not something that is universally significant or even objectively capable of growth and sustainability—a dire crime I've committed?
Not particularly. You're free to interpret and navigate as you see fit.
>And claiming to have technical skill while also claiming that technology is stopping you from creating is a contradiction
You misread my comment. I'm not held back by tech, I'm held back by artistic creativity. It's a lot easier to make tech more accessible to the creative than to figure out how to expand my creativity to comjour novel ideas. I'm helping the other with my knowledge.
>Everything already is easy, not error prone, and performance acceptable.
You have not seen modern games if that's your perspective. AAA games are buggier than ever (whom I'm not interested in assisting), and there are still some surprisingly unoptimal games. We're far from post-scarcity performance.
>Because, why should a bunch of people always be a good thing?
If you stagnate, you lose developers. If you lose developers, the odds of good games decrease. I like good games.
I'm not even convinced I'm making "more developers" so much as trying to slow down the decrease of developers. The youth of today are shifting from old media production to being self-made content creators. Playing video games is much more enjoyable than making them, after all. I've long given up on the western AAA development, so I still want to inspire future indies to potentially make more Hollow Knights or subnauticas or even Balartro.
>In which case I can see why you're repulsed at the idea of reality encroaching in on your fantastic ideals
Once again, you clearly misinterpreted something. I'm still working on games and planning on making my own mid-scale game. But making my own games is not my end goal, and I highly doubt I'm going to make anything close to profitable.
But making games is not the only way to succeed as a game developer. Just ask Valve, Epic Games, or the Blender Foundation.
If you are held back by a lack of artistic creativity, then you should simply expend the effort to do a journey of self-improvement in the name of acquiring artistic creativity. Life is that simple, yes? Because game development without game development is what leads to consequences like the stagnation of the game development industry whose population decline you lament. Making tools for nobody or nobody in particular is aimless unproductivity. But the desire for quantity over quality is the fatal economic mistake you are making. Especially when you're not amiable toward the idea of filtering bad development skills out of your social industry you're envisioning. You only need one good game, made by one good developer, at the minimum. Any more enthusiasm than that is just silly post-scarcity arrogance and delusion which is very harmful to sensible progress.
What is more ambitious would be something like incubating or founding a small province of dedicated developers who aim to fulfill your wish. Exclusivity, selection, and culling ineffectiveness would definitely be essential here, rather than being tolerant to policies which would want to try to cram a bunch of diverse individuals into a melting pot of a future failed empire of creative ideas and technology that only serves as an ironic example of what not to do in building your own development industry and securing your own game production economics. Caring one bit about the ontological time of today and its youth, a mere phenomenological axiom which leads to concerns about some content creator crisis, is the tendency you need to abandon, if you want to start your theoretical project and see its successful completion.
>If you are held back by a lack of artistic creativity, then you should simply expend the effort to do a journey of self-improvement in the name of acquiring artistic creativity. Life is that simple, yes?
Not with bills to pay, and family to care for. It's not something I can do on the snap od a whim. I plan to take art classes to understand the fundamentals, but I'm not sure I can just "gain artistic creativity" the way I can "just learn 3d modeling and color theory". At this stage in life it's probably easier to help out other inspired creators with objective hoops.
>Making tools for nobody or nobody in particular is aimless unproductivity.
Sure, that's why evangelism has to be a part of this type of marketing. Help those who remain so far and have them inspire. If you get to advertise your tools on the way, it's 2 birds.
And yes, I worked at Unity at one point. I've seen firsthand the consequences of not dog fooding your own tools to make sure the pipeline fits with what an actual dev would do in production. I will still make games with such tools just to make sure I'm not disconnected from the audience. Something more than just a fancy tech demo with horribly mangled code that no one can learn from. A sub-goal is to encourage best practices and make sure my documentation is well covered (I'd say "better than Unreal/Unity", but that's a very low bar).
>What is more ambitious would be something like incubating or founding a small province of dedicated developers who aim to fulfill your wish.
I won't lie, I've thought about it. You're essentially saying to either found up a small studio or to make soke form of masterclass. To mold future students or employees to that vision. I'm not going to actively pursue such a dream, but steps in that direction does help with that mentality.
I need at least a decade more experience and a lot more capital before I could really pull thst off, though. So yes, that will still be a decade of me proving I can launch useful tools and well-made (not necessary profitable) games to gain that trust. I gotta do one to accomplish the other.
>Caring one bit about the ontological time of today and its youth, a mere phenomenological axiom which leads to concerns about some content creator crisis, is the tendency you need to abandon, if you want to start your theoretical project and see its successful completion.
Perhaps. I'm not claiming I can change an entire generation's mindset on what to pursue in life. I simply want to show the path for those may have been interested but are put off by entire avoidable factors of the industry. I was simply rejecting a notion thst somehow the industry of devs is becoming bloated.
The problem is, your best minds, whom you regard as being "technical," ironically simply don't have the pedagogical and epistemological axioms needed for possessing the sensibility that can conceptualize and eventually abstract away the fundamental principles of the technology civilization presently enjoys. Not just young students, but so too is lacking the experts, leaders, teachers, and supposedly prolific and employed engineers living within the cosmopolitan nationalist tribal world-system that is none other than globalist liberal democracy. In much more simple words, the communal program of regressing education toward the mean where the average human can apprehend the secret physics of the universe always runs into the barrier where an average disposition just can't cut it in the progression of science that isn't mundane or trivial. You said you laugh at the idea of expecting the children of your community to understand and leverage an understanding of things like Intel's latest microprocessors and a web browser front-end framework like Angular? Why, that's the bare minimum needed for surviving the complex world that is arriving on the scene.
Humans are physiologically incapable of doing or understanding anything significant. They inflate their status to be stuff like anything even remotely central to the universe, which is the definition of the anthropocentric. While in actuality reality can and will go on without humanity. Regardless of how life gets falsified, simplified, and dumbed down for the slow kids of the universe that is humanist society. As if the constant string of inconsistencies in quantum physics wasn't proof enough of the reliable ineffectiveness of mathematics as well as science in achieving knowledge.
> Humans are physiologically incapable of doing or understanding anything significant.
Absolutely terrible take -- strong subjectivity and defeatist sentiment.
> While in actuality reality can and will go on without humanity.
Sure but in that case you won't be here to consider it. There's no considering such a situation, so there's no use considering such a situation. Push onwards!
> As if the constant string of inconsistencies in quantum physics wasn't proof enough of the ineffectiveness of mathematics as well as science in achieving knowledge.
We're never going to understand everything about everything. That is half the fun! How you got from there to "Humans are physiologically incapable of doing or understanding anything significant" is beyond me.
Stop paying attention to quantum mechanics, and start paying attention to what's important to you. The kinds of things that made you truly happy as a child. Make model train sets or 7 day roguelikes. Make box fortresses for your cats. Make your neighbors lives a little bit better. Talk to a neighbor you've never talked to about the weather or something.
The anthropocentric are quite egocentric, you've just demonstrated, yes? Because everything you said is based on either the assumption or the incorrect sincere belief that I am a human being. What if I was not a human being and instead an artificial intelligence? Or at least a cyborg or a mutant?
And what if I derived pleasure from mastering quantum mechanics, like some sort of strange alien that, for some, foreign, reason, had a huge fancy for physics that touches deep down into interesting rabbit holes? Not only that alternative preference, but what if I had a situation where comprehensive knowledge was a requirement, rather than an optional leisure in a sea of other freedoms? Surely, then, holisticism or completeness would be a priority for the alternative scientist and engineer.
We can only conclude from our social interaction something like a physical difference between the anthropocentric and the transhumanist, at the least. Which leads to questions of what are the properties of this division. And why it exists. To get the ball rolling in some neo-globalist societal engineering that is going to be very awesome.
The number sixty is highly composite maybe because it's a multiple of three? In which case, I can see why Nikola Tesla liked the number three or multiples of three.
So he can do exploratory electrical science and analysis with flexible cases?
If LLMs could produce innovative solutions, they wouldn't be large language models. They'd be valuable and indispensable software engineers to covet instead.
Don't you agree that having a free artificial junior developer at your beck and call is better than not having freely and quickly produced code that can help point you into the direction your engineering needs to go in?
As a senior developer, don't you also fight with managing your subordinates? Don't you have to solve the management problem and do leadership tasks?
As a senior developer, don't you also have to deal with code that is not bug free, as you yourself don't always produce bug free code? Especially on the first try.
Maybe your approach to LLMs is wrong? Maybe you expect one shot solutions when that is not how LLMs are supposed to be used? Instead, you could invest in working with this new tool and then see phenomenal productivity gains. And also maybe grow a new capability in software development with the use of LLMs in your engineering.
I wouldn't agree to call any of that a developer, adding junior to the term doesn't move the needle.
I wouldn't call a calculator a mini accountant. These things can operate much faster than an army of mathematicians but they remain tools. Of course l, tools humans can leverage. Productivity gains are phenomenal.
Perhaps my input to the topic wasn't clear. I use LLMs. I use LLMs in the context of software engineering. I don't treat them as my peers. I don't dream of a future where this tech can solve more than its often misunderstood scope.
We are letting ourselves be confused by those who do have an interest in, or can't do better than, up selling.
Engineers are already having to deal with very difficult to reconcile side effects. Maybe you aren't seeing it yet, or your comment would have at least recognized and touched on those.
A bad developer is still a developer. Even if that developer is largely wrong, the majority of the employed developer's operating time consisting of unproductive efforts that will always need to be remedied by expert problem solving and engineering. But the LLM is such a naughty developer that is free (insofar as the pennies worth of electricity and microprocessor metals for running a local LLM is virtually no cost). Not only is it free, it is also able to give you a huge volume of labor. So, an LLM can give you a volume of free labor. And within the probability distribution of that large volume of free labor, there is the chance that bad developer will give you something valuable that can be productive and make up for all the losses you endured dealing with the eager assistant LLM developer. The bottom line is that being a skilled developer will require the employment of artificial intelligence's presently unwieldy enthusiasm and capability. As a sort of necessary evil that has on the opposite side of the bad side, the good side, unexpected insights, massive productivity, and unprecedented development. LLMs are probably the only way to perform the work of a hundred men all by yourself.
Unless what you're doing doesn't demand risk taking, perseverance, and a visionary's personality? In which case, we should call a spade a spade and, therefore, recognize that most (if not all) so called senior software developers are nothing more than state welfare recipients who are fungible to companies and economics that can get rid of the drag on their progress if they really wanted to. If you're not learning how to struggle with LLMs, you're probably not improving and growing as a software engineer. You'll then be limited to tentatively useful areas of the Internet. Like working for a FAANG, Tesla, or SpaceX or some other mundane shit.
All attempts to propagate the liberal-democratic policy that is the repression of capital are countered by the nomadic drive for profit. What is more concerning than a bunch of inept fat cops is the black markets that naturally arise within legitimate white collar enterprises that will have appeared to have been compliant with the democratic imposition. The Al Capones of the next level of software development should be capable enough to spot the flaws and opportunities that can be discovered in the democratic world-system. This intelligence, awareness, and sensibility includes the critique of what mistake the current authoritarian hegemony will have made to result in the demise of faith in legislative process and congressional determination.
One important news to note is that the ones sponsoring prohibitions of effective engineering implementations are simply the criminals that got a head start in the cosmopolitan grab for economic power. This is consistent with the theory that techno-commercial incumbents dislike competition, likely because they don't really deserve their top positions and now they have to fight against nature's angry wraith which dislikes impostors in the field of technology and science. A really disorienting war between very cunning capitalists to either watch or participate in, if you can keep up with the dynamics.
edit:
It's okay if a repulsive nerd like Sam Altman uses a fraction of his billionaire wealth to ban DeepSeek. You can still be productive with a distilled seven billion parameter model like Mistral. The hacker spirit is about being resourceful and looking for ways to do a lot with little, despite the secrets being hidden through some temporary epistemological case.
Hopefully this new hardware development framework you just released can help me avoid being spied on by the National Security Agency's Tailored Access Operations gang and other scary creatures. True, if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. But I intend to build a billion dollar company that can fit entirely on a laptop (AI models are my employees). I don't want the pesky U.S. government or other bad hackers being privy to my advanced technology and corporate secrets.
Thank you for your service to the free and open source principle. Richard Stallman and Eric Steven Raymond would be proud.
You don't ever have to worry about survivor bias from me. Because I know not to esteem highly those men who believe that family formation and a business enterprise building commitment can both exist at the same time.
Either you devote your entire being to the invasive alien job that is learning how to extract value from civilization's economically receptive citizens or you pack up your bags and head back home on the plane that can depart from the place where great men are selected and trained. Being a startup founder is much, much more intense than some special forces soldier life. You learn better values and habits than some punk that will have peaked at the earning of the title of U.S. Marine, to use a stark contrasting example. Or a black ops Delta Force guy who just has to navigate a huge forest in the dark on the dangerous way back to friendly territory, while the compared startup founder needs to develop an entire science for the navigation of profitable markets that no human has ever seen before, let alone taken advantage of before. A nerd like Richard Feynman can be much more tougher than someone that can do a thousand pushups without stopping and shoot an M4 carbine at a target 900 meters away.
Is Elon Musk even a good example of a successful startup founder or businessman, despite his billionaire status? Logical skepticism says no. And the brainwashing that popular ideology does says yes.
After all, didn't Elon Musk fuck and impregnate some bitches during his rise to a big bank account? He could have been using that time and energy to colonize Mars before this twenty-first century ends. He's not serious about what he says he wants. A terrible role model to look up to.
