Notices by Martijn Frazer (tijn@dosgame.club)

Bluesky has been flaky as hell lately, but today is easily the worst yet.

You're more likely to see nothing than something over there.

Also, the people building Bluesky are heavily into vibe-coding. Coincidence? Maybe!

Anyway, I'm glad Mastodon is here, going strong as ever. Bluesky isn't it, folks.

@dalias @baldur Yeah this is fair imho!

What I was mainly trying to convey was a sense of caring about what is you're building as a developer.

That's the thing that's lacking imho from corporate coding practices. The workers don't have to care about the software, they don't have to understand the whole thing, they just need to solve the ticket and move on.

This mindset fundamentally undermines the quality of any software project. And also perfectly lays the foundation for LLM-generated code.

@baldur the software crisis is definitely what enabled vibe coding, I feel.

When making software was an artisan process, it was hard for corporations to scale it and treat programmers like cogs in a machine.

So they've been trying more and more to fit software development into a neat mold, essentially dumbing down the process, to the point where making an app has become "just slap together some libraries and hey presto".

That has 100% laid the foundation for LLM-generated code, I feel.

@thomasfuchs 💯

But of course this only has any value if solving problems is your goal to begin with.

I feel a lot of devs aren't in the "solving problems" business, but rather in the "selling something as a solution" business, which plays by completely different rules entirely.

Read this blog post today, about how a Claude-generated app does kind of work, but is also horribly inefficient and bad at performing its main function.

The problem imho is that we've been seeing this kind of software for a good while, even before LLMs came to "help".

There's been a decades-long trend of developing increasingly over-engineered projects.

So much boiler plate and scaffolding is taken for granted, that yeah... AI does kind of work to automate writing it.

https://blog.katanaquant.com/p/your-llm-doesnt-write-correct-code

The real question is: is that how we want software to be developed? All those frameworks, all those libraries, is that really the best way to put an app together?

Imho the answer is clearly a firm "no".

Real progress lies in deeply understanding the problem at hand and developing an efficient solution to solve it.

Often once you truly understand the problem, then the solution is surprisingly simple and compact. It often comes down to a handful of crucial lines that do exactly what it is you want done.

AI helps with none of that.

@thomasfuchs Getting any serious virus 5 times is nothing but bad news.

That's also why all the flu comparisons fall flat. Real flu is no joke, but people typically only get it maybe 2-3 times over their entire lifetime.

People have been getting covid that many times or more *every year* in recent times.

And covid is well known to be worse than flu, so really... what are we doing??

Tbh even if AI wasn't harmful for the environment, and not built on stolen data and actually worked well... I still wouldn't want to chat with a computer as if it's a person.

@thomasfuchs In the past CEOs, especially of smaller companies, mainly dealt with their staff and barely had ways to keep in touch with other CEOs.

But now with the internet, that's all different.

Basically it's all LinkedIn's fault.

Learned about the "Wuselfaktor" yesterday when talking about Settlers II for @dosgameclub

It's a German concept that describes how interesting and nice a game is to look at without the player doing anything in particular.

It's especially relevant for simulation type games, where your screen is filled with a bunch of characters that are each working on their own task.

Settlers II has a very high Wuselfaktor, but so do games like Lemmings or Transport Tycoon.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuselfaktor

Made a comic

Read this article on Eurogamer, about how the most played Playstation games in 2025 are exactly the same as the ones in 2024.

They are:
- Fortnite
- Call of Duty
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Roblox
- Minecraft

They don't say which Call of Duty, but I'm guessing Black Ops 7. If that's the case, it's the only game on the list released in 2025.

Fortnite was released in 2017, GTA V in 2013, Minecraft in 2009 and Roblox in 2006.

https://www.eurogamer.net/playstations-top-five-most-played-games-of-2025-are-exactly-the-same-as-2024s

So the average top 5 game on the Playstation in 2025 is 11 years old.

And it's not old people holding onto their games, it's kids playing these old games mostly!

All gaming is retro gaming now.

Yesterday I spent most of the day playing Road Trip Adventure, a 2002 open world RPG for Playstation 2, in which all the characters are cars and instead of battles there are races.

This game is great. Fantastic writing and an engaging numbers-go-up type game loop. The world is also absolutely huge and free to explore.

I had a fun conversation today with @johnpassfield, mainly about Halloween Harry and Flight of the Amazon Queen. He brought along Pete Mullins, his long-time friend and collaborator.

Among other things they mentioned a Flight of the Amazon Queen sequel is on their minds, so perhaps if their Halloween Harry game does well that might be on the cards in the future!

We'll publish this as an extra @dosgameclub podcast episode along with the main Halloween Harry one that's coming up.

I'd like to cancel our Disney+ over the Kimmel thing, but the only ones actually using it are my sister's 5 and 9 year old kids, and I'm not sure I can explain they can no longer watch their beloved classics in a way that makes sense to them.

Holy crap the Stop Destroying Videogames European Citizens' Initiative is almost 75% there, while only a week or so a go it was stuck at 50% 🤯

We might make it after all!

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

The internet is specifically designed in such a way parts of it can be down without taking the whole network down.

But we use this inherently decentralised infrastructure to route all traffic through a handful of services, making the whole setup futile.

The reason why nostalgia is so big right now is because nobody dares to think about the future