Maybe there's a bit more to a company and its software than the quantity of code it generates? And maybe there's a built in moat that a lot of these companies have that takes a lot of effort (and marketing, etc) to overcome?
People don't just jump social networks because a new one exist, there has to be a compelling reason to migrate over to it. And for a lot of people, there needs to be a sufficient number of people (and probably existing friends) already using the app for them to expend the effort to start using it.
It's not like there haven't been other attempts at competitors for these over the years, and you haven't heard about them probably because none of them ever got any traction. And that takes more than just building software.
Like DuckDuckGo has been competing with Google search for years (it first came out back in 2008, it looks like), and likely is way better developed than anything someone will crank out with A.I. in a short period of time. And it still has a tiny fraction of Google's marketshare.
I'm not saying there won't eventually be other competitors to these, but it'll take more than just whipping up an MVP with A.I. in a few weeks.
The worst that's happened, that I'm aware of, is I made a change with A.I. that I didn't realize broke something else (that I wasn't even aware our reports supported, it was new to me), and apparently QA didn't think to check for it either (although I did ask them specifically to verify everything in the report still worked), so it made it into Production, clients complained, and I was told about it and got it fixed over the next couple of days.
But that could have happened if I wasn't using A.I. also, because it wasn't something I was aware I had to check for and I could have also broken that same thing while doing the work manually.
We don't have AI agents do anything directly in Production, so I think this is about the worst that can happen with our setup right now.
My Yahoo Mail had all my emails from when I was in college on it (back when people used to chat with each other via email, also AIM). I still used it sometimes for collecting junk mail and as a backup address for my gmail, or to reread a few of old college emails once in a blue moon, but otherwise rarely logged in. Apparently it had been a year because I got that same message as you did. What a shock.
Never been an issue until then (I must have gone over a year without logging in at some point before then and still was able to log in), and then suddenly 'screw you, a chunk of your past is gone with no way to recover it'.
I was so upset when I realized what happened. I'm still annoyed by it. I know I should have exported it all away a long time ago so it's on me, but I didn't think to do so, I had gotten so used to it always being there.
A year of inactivity before total deletion is way too short for email, imo.
There are older structures and artifacts than 250 years, they're just not European in origin. Like Cahokia Mounds in Illinois: https://cahokiamounds.org/
Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.
> Executive pay might seem astronomical, but it is often commensurate with the level of stress and responsibility involved.
I call bull on that. Employees often have just as much stress, often imposed on them from those higher up, where if they don't do well they could get fired and it could mean they can't put food on the table.
Several times I've worked in environments where the stress was incredibly high, and once it even put me in the hospital after a long stretch of working 70 hour weeks to satisfy the insane deadlines my CEO boss wanted (this was at a startup).
Whereas if an executive screws up they just golden parachute to another cushy gig elsewhere, oftentimes, because even if they screw up, they're still valued as having experience running companies by other companies. And even if they cannot, they still likely got paid enough that they won't be struggling financially if they go through a period without a job.
- Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on original Game Boy
- Proximity (old Flash game I made, but I've played hundreds of times, and it's the only game design of mine in which I've done that, out of several dozen)
Board Games:
- Legendary: A Marvel Deckbuilding Game
- Marvel Champions
- Lord of the Rings - The Card Game
- Aeon's End
- Ashes Reborn / Ashes Ascendancy (they rebooted it under a new name recently, but the other content is still compatible)
I've been a software nerd all my life (and there was a time where I worked 60 hours a week at a startup working hard to make mobile games), but there's just been so much extra crap associated with it (especially web development, and especially corporate web development, what currently pays my bills) over the years that it's worn me down and I'm happy to let A.I. churn through the hard or frustrating or endless amounts of boilerplate bits, and let me focus on other things.
Part of me still wishes we were making websites with just HTML, CSS, PHP, and a little Javascript here and there (before AJAX). I'm still not convinced all this extra SPA functionality is really needed for most corporate website needs (something like Google maps or real-time chatting, sure, other things not so much), but I do it because they insist.
I also really like game design, and I had a fairly simple game idea that I prototyped a physical version of and playtested a few times and thought, 'yeah, this is pretty fun'.
But I don't have the energy to code it in my spare time anymore. Was curious how close to a working MVP it could get with me writing up a specification yesterday with the help of ChatGPT (after I brainstormed a few aspects of the design), and dumped that spec into a new repo on GitHub, and about 20 minutes later, it had a fully functional game that worked exactly like my physical prototype.
It was still missing other features, like tutorials and stats and sharing abilities and the like, and I'd like to adjust the presentation some, and the computer opponent A.I. was a bit weak and could have been stronger, but it was fully functional and even looked pretty good, kind of like a Wordle presentation, which was what I was going for anyway.
Something that would have taken me probably 40 hours of dedicated work at least to get everything working and looking as nice as it did.
So yeah, it's kind of like 'well what's the point of me manually coding this anymore'.
What I really like about software was solving puzzles, but now I can focus on the more interesting puzzle of what makes a good game design and 'how best to present this to players' instead of how to get five different libraries and/or APIs to play nice together and learn how it all works.
If coding hadn't become some labyrinthian monstrosity and got out of your way when coding, I probably would want to keep coding more.
Some languages/frameworks get close to that, Lua/Love2D is pretty smooth except when it gets to you wanting to distribute it on platforms other than PC/Mac/Linux, or integrate with external libraries, or for me work with shaders since I'm still pretty weak with shaders.
But even then, it was hard to deny how much faster A.I. could code a feature and I've started getting more hands-off there as well.
That being said, work has gotten less fulfilling, since I'm not doing any actual design work really, just implementing features and making them look according to Figma specifications or fixing bugs, so that's gotten less fulfilling without the busywork of solving coding puzzles (now it's 'how to say this to the A.I. to get it to fix this right, which is still a puzzle but a much weaker one). I'm starting to get tempted to make a go of starting my own business so I can have more autonomy again.
I've definitely had a lot of these same experiences (in fact I've been fighting it on one particular issue the past couple of days and I'm pretty much just giving up and going back to solving it manually now).
But it still seems to get it right (or at least close enough to right that I keep using it) more often than it gets into these traps.
My main card game lately has been the Legendary system of games, in particular the Marvel version (although I did just order the James Bond version this morning too after playing the app version this past week). I like to play it with two players and alternate hands, but you can play it solo too.
Another one I like to play is Ashes, which has solo enemies you can play against. It's entry point nowadays is called Ashes Ascendancy.
And I play a lot of cooperative card games by the publisher Fantasy Flight Games, namely Marvel Champions, Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, and Arkham Horror - The Card Game. Lord of the Rings is starting to go out of print, and the older content for the other two is out of print, but the other two are still coming out with new content (and I have all the old stuff so I can still play them).
All of these have a ton of content with them, so I can play a bunch of games and not get bored of them. I've played each of them over 50 times, and some as many as 150 times, and yet there's still plenty I haven't played for each of them.
I would. I don't sell on eBay because it's a hassle to manage all the rest of it. So I end up taking it to a place like Half-Price Books instead and get hardly anything, but at least it gets out of the house. 30-40% cut would be a significant step up compared to what I get from those places.
Yeah I work from home. Except for 1-2 short zoom calls a day or talking with my wife, who also works from home, I can go pretty much the whole week without talking to anyone. I try to make sure I go out with friends at least once on the weekends, though, to sort of make up for it.
But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life.
But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat complicated solo card games, in my spare time. So I'm hoping that helps counteract things a little bit too.
Agree with you for my day job (which is coding corporate web app), for sure. I'm still letting A.I. drive more nowadays, but it does feel less fulfilling than it used to.
But for my personal projects, I work on games, and by offloading a lot of the coding work to A.I., my puzzle solving is no longer 'how to fix this stupid library spitting stupid errors at me' or 'how to get this shader working' or 'why is this upgrade breaking all the things' and more 'what does this game need in order to be fun and good?', which I find a lot more fulfilling.
It's also why I switched my focus to board game design for the longest time. I didn't have to fight my tools or learn some new api or library frequently. And if I wanted to try a new mechanic, I didn't need to spend 20 minutes or 2 hours or 2 days implementing it, I could write something on an index card in five seconds and shift mid-game most of the time.
A.I. just brought video games closer to that experience, which actually has made them more fun to work on again, because board games has the immense (financial/logistical if self-publishing or social/networking if attempting to get published through a publisher) challenge of getting physical games published to worry about.
The defensive code is getting to me (it's adding a ton of bloat) and I'm trying to fight it but I'm not sure how best to word it. What I've attempted hasn't worked too well so far.
How do you get it to not add so much unnecessarily defensive code?
Have you tried Blue Prince? It's got some similarities (it's basically Myst + a spatial puzzle + modern drafting/resource management board game).
And you don't have the time element of Outer Wilds (Outer Wilds is brilliant though, and it kinda needs that time element to work properly).
I mean technically it does in that you only have so many steps in a day, but you only spend a step moving from one room to another, so you can take your time in any given room, and you have ways to increase those steps.
Also you're more likely to block yourself off with your room layout for the day than you are to run out of steps, at least once you start getting better at the game (it can happen though).
> However that is because cars have gotten more aerodynamic so fewer insects are hitting the windshield.
According to this research the opposite is true:
"The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark used data collected every summer from 1997 to 2017 and found an 80% decline in abundance. It also found a parallel decline in the number of swallows and martins, birds that live on insects.
The second survey, in the UK county of Kent in 2019, examined splats in a grid placed over car registration plates, known as a “splatometer”. This revealed 50% fewer impacts than in 2004. The research included vintage cars up to 70 years old to see if their less aerodynamic shape meant they killed more bugs, but it found that modern cars actually hit slightly more insects."
Personally, I prefer Claude for coding, but I still prefer ChatGPT for hashing out ideas for my projects (which tend to be game designs). So I use both.
I'm on the other side of this, in that I attend a lot of these.
I made a big effort about 12 years ago to go to a bunch of these (like three meetups a week and trying out a variety of different meetups), but now I mostly stick to a couple of them as I don't have as much time or energy for it anymore. But I've met most of my current friends through those meetups.
Find one you like and keep showing up until you're a regular, and get to know people slowly, and if they like you they start inviting you to things outside of the meetup, and then eventually you end up being friends.
I've done this with three different groups over the years and despite naturally being shy and an introvert I've ended up making friends at each one.
At the height of me doing this (like ten years ago), it got to the point where I'd go about my daily life and about once every other month I'd run into random people I've met at meetups also out and about. Like go out to dinner and spot someone I knew from a meetup also showing up to the same place, or run into them shopping at a Best Buy or something.
Meetups where you do a shared activity seems to be the best, like hikes or movies (+ dinner afterwards) or board games, since you can always focus on the activity if you don't feel like being social, and you have that activity you can always talk about as a subject.
I used to get so many comments about how the computer opponent in a tile-based board game of mine cheats and got all the high numbers while they always got low numbers, and I'd be like "that's mathematically impossible. I divide the number of spaces on the board in half, generate a deck of tiles to go into a 'bag', and then give a copy of those same tiles to the other player.
So over the course of the game you'll get the exact same tiles, just in a different random order.
Now to be fair, I didn't make that clear to the player that's what was happening, they were just seeing numbers come up, but it was still amazing to see how they perceived themselves as getting lower numbers overall compared to the opponent all the time.
Meanwhile on the base game difficulty I was beating the computer opponent pretty much every game because it had such basic A.I. where it was placing its tiles almost totally at random (basically I built an array of all possible moves where it would increase its score, and it would pick one at random from all those possibilities, not the best possibility out of those).
My Dad used to play a lot of online poker, and he used to complain when other players got lucky with their hands, be like 'I know the chances are like 5% of them getting that! They shouldn't have gotten that!' and it always reminded me of those people.
People don't just jump social networks because a new one exist, there has to be a compelling reason to migrate over to it. And for a lot of people, there needs to be a sufficient number of people (and probably existing friends) already using the app for them to expend the effort to start using it.
It's not like there haven't been other attempts at competitors for these over the years, and you haven't heard about them probably because none of them ever got any traction. And that takes more than just building software.
Like DuckDuckGo has been competing with Google search for years (it first came out back in 2008, it looks like), and likely is way better developed than anything someone will crank out with A.I. in a short period of time. And it still has a tiny fraction of Google's marketshare.
I'm not saying there won't eventually be other competitors to these, but it'll take more than just whipping up an MVP with A.I. in a few weeks.