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

@RobeeShepherd Yeah you don't have to give them what they ask for, just what they need based on what they asked for, which is not the same thing. But still, involves listening to them

I really don't know what Blender were expecting as a reaction to them being "happy to announce" they took Anthropic money. If the ONLY requirement for being a donor, as the funding guidelines claim, is "to support Blender's mission", and accepting the funding doesn't indicate any endorsement, then the celebratory shout-out wasn't required. But then I suppose not saying *anything* would raise more red flags when people found out. Could have said it less excitedly? Or just...not taken it.

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116449538020922048

I wonder how many people are learning that by relying on a third party to do your job for you, you’re entirely susceptible to them jacking up the price and/or making the product worse (ie cheaper for them to run) literally whenever they want. IMO it’s insane to outsource your work to these guys and undermine your own fundamental skills.

@thomasfuchs yeah it’s daft how many things you need to add to Windows to make it tolerable. I used to love my Macs but Apple made it increasingly painful to be a developer for them. Linux is a bit of a mess on the desktop but maybe heading in the right direction one day. I wish there was some OS I could unreservedly like

@thomasfuchs Not to defend Windows (it’s shite) but FYI Powertoys Quick Accent merged a PR for these quote shortcuts recently https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/pull/30481

I saw a young person ask ChatGPT how long their flight was today when they were literally holding the boarding pass with that information on it in the same hand that had the phone in it. ChatGPT spat out about 4 paragraphs on the subject when the answer was “40 minutes”. What a time to be alive

@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