ThePowerOfGeek

The funny thing is that they’ve actually improved the graphics of the game a lot over the years. Not just things like water animation, but in improving the resolution of bitmaps for characters, landscapes, etc. they’ve even totally overhauled the graphics for some races (e.g. gnomes, which for a while in beta led to nightmarish animations of their eyes bulging through their eyelids when they blinked).

But to your point: yes, they’ve deliberately left the characters having a goofy, disproportionate cartoonist feel. Because it’s such an integral signature of the game, always has been, and always will be.

I just got back from taking one of my kids trick or treating with his friends. It was great. My wife and I got to walk and chat with the other parents while all of our kids knocked on doors and shouted “trick or treat!”. Lots of friendly, generous, nice people. And lots of shouted reminders from us for the kids to not walk on people’s front lawns, to say thank you, to be careful crossing the quiet roads. There were so many other kids out too. It was pretty crazy, but in a good way. About half of the houses were giving out candy in some way or other, with only about a quarter having an un-monitored bowl.

Then on the way home we drove past a church that was having a ‘trunk or treat’ in their parking lot. That just looked sad. There was no excitement for going up to the really cool houses that were decked out in amazing props and decorations. There was no need to hone analytical skills to determine which houses were giving out candy and which ones probably weren’t. Just going very short distances from one car to the next getting candy. My kid asked why they do that. I said it’s probably because they are a closed community who don’t really want to associate with ‘outsiders’. Give me the conventional experience over that all day every day!

And vodka. Soooooo much vodka!

Interesting article. But as a veteran developer the whole AI trend reminds me of the outsourcing trend back in the mid 2000s.

Back then Western developers (especially junior and mid levels) were seen by many companies as a waste of money. “We can pay for three developing world developers for the price we pay for one American/European one! Why are we wasting our money?!”

And so the huge wave of layoffs (fuelled also by the dot com bubble bursting and some other things) kicked off. And many companies contracted out work to India, etc. It was not looking good for us Western developers.

But then the other shoe dropped. The code being sent back was largely absolute shite. Spaghetti code, disparate platforms bound together with proverbial duct tape, no architectural best practices, design anti-patterns, etc etc. And a lot of these systems started falling apart and required Western developers and support engineers to fix them up or outright replace them.

Now, this isn’t a sleight on Indian of other developing world developers. I’ve met lots of phenomenal programmers from that part of the world. And developers there have improved a lot and now there are lots of solid options for outsourcing to there. But there’s are still language and culture barriers that are a hurdle, even today.

But I digress. My underlying point is that there are similarities with today’s situation with what has happened before. Now, it’s very possible LLMs will go to the next level in several years (or more) time. But I still think we are a ways away from having an AI engine that can build a complex, sophisticated system in a holistic way and have it capable of implement the kinda of crazy, wacky, bizarre business rules that are often needed.

Additionally, we’ve heard this whole “developers are going to be obsolete soon” thing before. For 20 years I’ve been hearing that self-writing code was just around the corner. But it wasn’t even close in reality. And even now it’s not just around the corner.

No doubt, AI will hit a whole nother level at some point. The stuff you can do with Chat GPT and the like it’s insane, even right now (though as another article here on Lenny earlier today said, quite a lot of LLM code output is of suspect quality to say the least). And I know the market is rough right now for greener developers. But I think we’re about to see history repeat itself.

Some companies will lean heavily into AI to write code, with only a few seniors basically just curating it and slapping it together. And other companies will find a middle ground of having juniors and seniors using AI to a more limited and careful level. Those latter companies will fare a lot better with the end product, and they will also be better prepared with regard to tribal knowledge transfer (which is another topic in this altogether). And when that epiphany is realized it will become the default approach. At least for another 10-20 years until AI can change things up again.

Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around… '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.

I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.

I might be getting some of these details wrong.

Isn’t she Tim Apple’s niece?

Ahh yes, the famous 23rd century boy band “NCC-1701-SYNC”

Fuck Adobe. They are the epitome of the greedy, toxic software company.

I switched from Photoshop over to Krita last year. I’ve tried Gimp in the past, but just can’t adjust to the UI. Krita is different too, but not to the same degree. I’ve been enjoying it. It’s well-made and very powerful, with very good online support.

…And a large and expensive gun collection, and tons of NASCAR paraphernalia.

You might find that name hilarious (as do I), but Devan Nunes would seething with anger at that. Especially since he just lost his job at Trump’s money laund- err, ‘social media’ company.

To expand on what others here have said: no they can’t, and there was a recent article here on Lenny taking about how AI (which I know is different from average bots) has figured out most of the visual captcha types.

I hope so too. Although the IT job market isn’t great right now, so I doubt the departures will reach a critical mass.

Interesting. Teams has been doing this for a few years now, so I assume it’s the same functionality just transferred over to Outlook (which has been going through a massive overhaul recently). For anyone in an MS-based company with Teams being actively used, this is not a new thing.

I watched it last weekend with my kids. I was pleasantly surprised - it’s actually a pretty good movie. Shame it’s done so poorly in the box office. Now there won’t be any sequels. The marketing department really screwed this one over with that first trailer. The squeezed every joke into it and made it look really goofy. I think that put off many of the people who even heard about the movie.

Altman is the latest from the conveyor belt of mustache-twirling frat-bro super villains.

Move over Musk and Zuckerberg, there’s a new shit-heel in town!

This has the makings of a great sci-fi story.

Okay, I like this lore.

If he’s the one fixing all the destruction wrought by Kool-Aid Man, isn’t he the good twin? Which would of course make Kool-Aid Man… the evil twin!

That’s a damn good cast. Looks like a funny movie.