Notices by The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)

@rygorous as a kid when I used to see root beer referenced in US things I always assumed it was just another name for ginger beer (the only root I knew that they made drinks out of)

Edit: I voted “have not tried” because I’ve never technically drunk any - I sniffed a bottle once and it smelled so bad I didn’t want to try it

There’s this cachet about Apple folks that they’re somehow different, but seeing so many of their top talent leaving for Meta and OpenAI lately it just looks to me like typical valley bros following the money. I couldn’t for a second imagine even considering working for either of those companies no matter how much they paid me. But apparently all the shit they’ve done just doesn’t matter to these people

People thinking that LLMs are a good replacement for junior devs aren’t accounting for the fact that junior devs naturally turn into senior devs through experience. LLMs will never turn into anything more than they are right now, dumb pattern matchers that fool you into thinking they’re smart just because they can steal & remix work at a staggering scale while understanding absolutely none of it. But they can certainly create technical debt fast

Everyone loves a good complain when they get bad service, so here's a positive story for today. Our upvc back door mechanism started making horrid crunchy/snappy noises this morning, which really freaked my wife out and made her worry about it breaking and getting stuck open/closed. I called a locksmith who happened to be nearby already, and had a window before his next job, who turned up and fixed it within the hour. Stress averted, nice chap who has gone in my 'good contractors' book 👍

"Oh hey now we want you to pay more for our self-destructing chips because we made other terrible AI-hype related decisions" 😂

Jog on mates, come back to me when you've started making things that are actually good again 😛

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/intels-13th-and-14th-gen-chips-will-reportedly-see-a-10-percent-price-hike-soon-partly-in-response-to-the-lackluster-performance-of-ai-pcs/

"It's so weird how we couldn't sell all those AI chips that no-one asked for"

@steter If you're going via FBX you might want to try this editor console option: `Interchange.FeatureFlags.Import.FBX False`

We've had loads of problems with the new Interchange importer but you can revert to the old importer with this option (has to be set every editor session, we do it in an editor startup blueprint)

I remain very not shocked at how a development model of routinely pulling hundreds of third party micro dependencies blindly has turned out to be an absolutely terrible idea https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-hijack-npm-packages-with-2-billion-weekly-downloads-in-supply-chain-attack/

I wrote up how I implemented navmesh generation through solid but destructible geometry in our game, something I could find very little written about (that didn't suggest a worse solution). #unrealengine #gamedev
https://www.stevestreeting.com/2025/09/05/ue-npc-navigation-through-destructible-geometry/

I'm still using an Xbox wireless controller on PC, it has issues but it's basically OK and the Elites were a rip off. There's so many new great controllers coming out, so I keep thinking of upgrading, but every time I do a new "best" one is almost out

The main advantage of being a small player has always been that you don't have to do what all the big companies are doing, because they have a desperate amount of FOMO about staying relevant / trendy / a hot stock. People like the personal touch, the developer they can talk to, the support service that actually takes the time to listen to them as individuals instead of only considering them a data point in a data set that they'll extract the worst conclusions from

The inconvenient truth for scale-up capitalists with an AI boner is that people prefer dealing with other humans when anything gets a bit non-routine. Even people who grew up with technology. We may prefer messaging instead of phoning these days, but 10 minutes of attention from one real person who gets it is worth 10000 automated agents

The state of programming in 2025 that makes vibe coding so attractive is IMO the result of terrible decisions in tech over the last couple of decades. Non-existent stdlibs that normalise the use of a thousand micro dependencies, blindly pulled. Constantly mutating frameworks as performance art. Untyped languages that need huge test suites to prevent basic errors. It all generates mountains of boilerplate that *of course* people want to offload any way they can, even if it’s wrong half the time

Apple has absolutely been behaving like the new 00’s Microsoft and I’m glad they’ve been torn a new one over this, totally deserved. Stop listening to your idiot finance wonks over everyone else Tim https://daringfireball.net/2025/04/gonzales_rogers_apple_app_store_ruling

I do think LLMs capture the zeitgeist in one way: that we’re all supposed to just accept that things are a bit shite all the time, in tech and otherwise. That it’s just how things are & we shouldn’t expect better. Shut up, accept the slop, things getting worse, the enshittification. It’s just the way things are.

No, piss off. Things can be better, we’ve done it before. Just because some people can’t or won’t remember, doesn’t mean we all have to accept their low standards.

In the year 2372, inside the most immersive simulation we can imagine, the lights will still flicker like “mmamammmmammamamaaamammma”

Right folks I finally have a definitive answer to which social media platform is best in 2025. I have made an entirely scientific assessment based on the response to my Tiramisu photo post (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@sinbad/114173681743652265)

Mastodon: 28 likes, 2 boosts, 6 replies
Bluesky: *crickets*

There's just no competion 😉

@mcc I keep telling people that writing documentation is often the best way to realise an API/tool you’ve designed makes no sense or could be significantly improved with small changes that you never realise until you describe it. Also best results are when you do this after not touching the project for a month

Well I guess at least those of us who have warned about the risks of entrusting your entire digital existence to big American companies can feel less like raving street preachers these days. Not so crazy now to advocate for retaining more control via small, local or federated solutions eh

I have to hope that the tides will turn once again towards positive, progressive and forward-thinking behaviour, but I sincerely hope that when they do, people don’t forget all the corporations that *immediately* abandoned their so-called principles the second the opportunity arose

I’ve had a low opinion of big tech for a while but even I was surprised at the sheer speed of capitulation. They really are just empty husks with a logo