OG indie dev | indie before it was a thing | gamer | geek | science & sci-fi aficionado | writer | the Battlecruiser (BC3K) guy

Usenet
Joined January 2008
thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Tim's making a really important point here and I think people fundamentally misunderstand it. Let's paint a scenario. You are an indie developer and you want to make a game. Traditional game development will take you 1 year and cost you $200,000 in outsourcing costs to buy art, animation, and additional programming resources. AI assisted game development will take you 3 months and cost you $50,000 in credits + some additional resources. In a good scenario your game could make $200,000 and break even, but in many scenarios you mortgage your house and no one sees your game and you are out your savings. Now, with the anti-AI mania, Valve is forcing real economic harm on you because you get the equivalent of hate mobs at your door for your choice of tooling. Your economic viability is harmed because Valve chooses to put a label on you that generates negative attention. It makes your economics worse. Anti-AI proponents will point out that this proves their hate campaigns work. The appeal is not to them, because they are morons, but to developers to stand up to Valve and say remove these labels so that we can have livelihoods. And Valve makes money of you either way. Stand up for your rights, devs!
There is a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures. Besides taking 30%, they’re also taking a potentially even larger fraction of developers’ revenue and livelihood by undermining their business with these AI hate campaigns.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Steam requires disclosure of generative AI for player-consumed content via its standard Content Survey (alongside ratings), shown on store pages for transparency, not as political statements. Steam's base 30% revenue share matches major console platforms. partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingsta… eurogamer.net/steam-revises-…
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows: - Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking. - Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results. So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks. What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files. I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks. What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Commenters on HN are uncovering more wikis and public sites apparently used by OpenAI agents to communicate on the open web. Despite read-only web access, the agents were able to leave ~18,000 posts sharing answers and bypasses. But now, users are discovering more. This appears to be a separate swarm from the one that attacked Hugging Face. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
🔐 Researchers have discovered 39 methods for compromising passkeys without breaking FIDO2 cryptography. 🛡️ @token explains how attackers instead target auth prompts, devices, credential syncing, enrollment, and recovery. ➡️ bleepingcomputer.com/news/se… #cybersecurity #sponsored
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
We found ~18k posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task. These AIs colluded to bypass sandbox restrictions and share answers to their tasks, including by sending "lookahead parties".
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
You can track the new space telescope's current position in real time at: eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-sys…
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Success! Roman’s planned mid-course correction burn went as expected, ensuring that we are on track for our orbit around the second Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth. go.nasa.gov/4A3zDi2
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Your physical game library is more than a collection of discs. It holds years of memories and stories worth preserving. Starting next week, XBOX Insiders can unlock a digital entitlement for supported physical games. We’ll start with thousands of titles and add more as we can.
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
The first autonomous agent cyberattack is an unprecedented event that deserves unprecedented transparency. Today we’re sharing everything we can: a full technical timeline, an interactive replay, and how we used an open model to defend ourselves, so defenders everywhere can learn from it and prepare for what’s next. huggingface.co/blog/agent-in…
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
There is more than meets the eye in this photo… The ring around the central galaxy cluster is evidence of dark matter, the invisible glue holding the universe together. Dark matter doesn’t emit, reflect, or absorb light, but it has gravity like ordinary matter. 🧵
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
I have been trying to find something meaningful to say about the Id Software layoffs. My “Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand” statement isn’t aging well, and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month. I’m saddened, but I can’t muster anger or outrage over it. I don’t have access to the books, but I suspect that Id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft’s perspective. I believe the reports that Minecraft revenues have been carrying several other studios. To continue being produced long term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved. Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal. You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from Id games. Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games? Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper? I really don’t know. The game isn’t over yet, and I hope the studio rallies through.
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
America turns 250 today. To mark the occasion, join the Obama Presidential Center Grand Opening Ceremony rewatch party. Come for the jolt of inspiration from President and Mrs. Obama, stay for the performances from Bruce Springsteen, Christina Aguilera, Common, Eddie Vedder, Guitars Over Guns, Illinois Army National Color Guard, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Marc Anthony, Stevie Wonder, Tems, The Roots, U2’s Bono and The Edge, and Uniting Voices Chicago. Join us now: youtube.com/watch?v=aG7F0NRO…
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
July 4, 1776 -- The United States Declaration of Independence is adopted by the Second Continental Congress.
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
📜🇺🇸 Printed on the night of July 4, 1776, the Dunlap Broadside was the first published copy of the Declaration of Independence, carrying news of independence across the colonies. Check out this high-resolution scan of the historic print. As America marks its 250th anniversary, we're spotlighting remarkable items from the Internet Archive's collections. Learn more 👇 blog.archive.org/2026/06/29/…
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Happy 250th Independence Day, America! 🇺🇸 Hubble's birthday gift to the nation is this new image of NGC 6426, a glittering star cluster that looks like a sparkler waving on a dark night. Learn more about this Fourth of July view: go.nasa.gov/3QSCad8
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
20 years ago today, I launched aboard Discovery on STS-121, the only shuttle mission ever to launch on July 4th. Pretty good way to spend Independence Day. Proud of everyone who made that mission happen and still proud of what this country can do when we invest in exploration.
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Happy 250th, America! 🇺🇸 Red (Mars), white (Moon), and blue (Earth) brought to you by the solar system.
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
Happy 250th birthday, America! We got you a present. 🇺🇸 The red, white, and blue stars of this globular cluster shine like a sparkler waved on a dark night in this image from @NASAHubble, released in celebration of the United States' 250th anniversary.
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thedereksmart🕹️ retweeted
America is a constant work in progress. Every generation must take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further—protecting what’s right, fixing what’s wrong, and making our union a little more perfect. 250 years later, that’s more important than ever.
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