Ben Zeigler

Stopped by @oakcityindie.bsky.social today to check out the North Carolina indie game scene and saw a bunch of cool stuff. It's always good to see so many passionate devs!

Violent crime, especially in cities, has dramatically reduced since I was born and you can safely walk around many parts of America that you would never want to go near in the 80s

Anyone who clicks "Add extension" on their real Chrome should not be trusted with secure information. No, I do not want AI to read and change all my data on all websites, so I set up a separate headless browser for Claude to test my website

mastodon.gamedev.place/@bitinn/1174... "4. Epic are going to do the same to UE as they did to Epic Game Store." You heard it in Shanghai first, people. Tim Sweeney wants to make UE a ghost town. (the mastodon thread has a link to the full QQ transcript of the interview he gave)

If anyone likes strategy games and has a Switch 2, I strongly recommend the new Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave. I'm about 70 hours in and really enjoying it. This game is absolutely massive and is packed with interesting mechanics and characters.

Critical PHP vulnerabilities make me nostalgic for the old internet, good to know not everything has changed

Just did my Early Voting, took about 10 minutes. It helped that my county had a site showing wait times for each location, your county might have the same thing!

I just beat #CONTROLResonant last night and really enjoyed it! It's not a perfect game but I loved exploring the environment for weird stuff and it takes some creative risks that you would never expect to see in a AAA game.

Wow they managed to insult both programmers and Steam users in a single release announcement. Whoever wrote this does not understand why people vastly prefer Steam over the current Epic launcher.

Financial analysts are starting to actually do financial analysis on the AI infrastructure companies. We'll see if they continue to do honest analysis or get scared out of it by fears of tanking the economy

I was flying back from my first post-Epic vacation when I saw this. I think this decision happened after I left so I don't know anything about it, but you do not need insider knowledge to know this is not a good plan.

Everyone shut up: HD laserdisc rip of Zuntata Daddy Mulk live youtu.be/Es5WSZ0f1cw?...

There's nothing Trump loves more than sycophants who pretend to be smart and effective, so of course he thinks Grok is a genius.

I’ve known many other defense secretaries, starting with Cap Weinberger, who served as defense secretary under Reagan. I can say without fear of contradiction that Pete Hegseth is the stupidest and least qualified of them all. He is a danger to the entire world. He must be impeached.

Both of these games are really well made and perfect for October! I haven't finished Galley House yet but it seems to be heading in some very interesting directions

Control: Resonant is pretty great so far. The combat is good but the best part is definitely the city exploration where you stumble on cursed object sidequests or just a random PC playing a sweet FM synth track. I'm really curious what else is in this game.

So happy with how this came out. Been in my head for about a decade. Five minutes, free, in-browser, requires audio you can hear. It's a bit of what you expect, and so much of what you absolutely do not. skiesoffight.com Don't spoil it, just play! #indiedev #gamedev #retrogaming

If a company actively trains a human or animal to do harmful things and fails to keep them safely contained, that company is clearly at fault. But apparently if it's an AI agent the authorities just shrug their shoulders.

Is Google suddenly so desperate for money that they need to force my phone to support two brands I hate? What is going on over there.

Today in pointless and arbitrary attempts to rename things...

This is a ton of organizational changes, moving Halo to Activision and Obsidian to Bethesda has made their intentions clear for the future. Good luck to everyone impacted by the changes: www.theverge.com/news/998586/...

After researching current web site development options, I have decided to use Astro for the main site because it's easy to setup with plugins and uses normal html and javascript. I was able to get a site published (on Cloudflare Workers) in an about an hour using docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/...

The one ‘game discovery by player age’ chart you need to see: newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/the-one-ga...

So about that batshit insane AI millenarian Silicon Valley sex cult running much of big tech….from Sonia Joseph: siliconvalleynotes.substack.com/p/agi-cnc-an...

Like everyone else this week, I wrote a thing about the prophesized AI apocalypse (and how it relates to religious history and social psychology): medium.com/@jzig/ai-is-...

What are people using these days to build self hosted substack-like websites for publishing text heavy articles? I did some experimentation with React a few years ago but I think I want to modify an existing system instead of building one from scratch

New: An "expert witness" in a $61 million lawsuit over an industrial explosion that killed three people and destroyed 200 homes used ChatGPT to write his report for the court. He prompted ChatGPT to "show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding" www.404media.co/show-how-3m-...

Hmm you can either read this email subject as "GDC was great this year and you should have been there!" or as "GDC used to be great but is no longer relevant" #gamedev

Someone reminded me about the PIE 3D Game Creation System so I had to look up this classic ad. This is what you had access to as a hobbyist in the 90s #gamedev

Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking": hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mani... 11/

Yep, basically my feelings at this point. I am 110% for game preservation, even if it skirts the law. The broad strokes of what SKG are pushing for is great on paper. But the moment they try to push for any real policy it's an incoherent, unworkable mess that'd kneecap indie and small/mid studios.

Budgets are intentionally unrealistic on the low side to get projects approved in the first place. Sales targets are intentionally unrealistic on the high side to get projects approved in the first place. This guarantees an unhealthy ecosystem. It's bogus numbers all the way down.

If you're on psychatric meds, there's a pretty good chance you're also dealing with some extra heat intolerance, don't overexert yourself when there's a heat wave! You might not think you need water, but you probably do!

Live updates: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exu1...

Those of us in the pro-democracy movement can and should hold both of these positions. 1. We unequivocally reject violence. 2. We will unequivocally oppose efforts by this administration to use last night as an excuse to try to suppress criticism and criminalize dissent.

Not everything that breaks is technically the fault of vibe coding but the kind of culture that would foster vibe coding is the kind that produces a lot of shit that breaks.

Is anyone writing good commentary saying "AI is actually good for some things but much less than is hyped and should not replace human jobs and creativity"? I find myself 90% agreeing with the "never use AI" folk but I don't think the hardline stance is convincing or technically accurate.

While playing Clair Obscur it really felt like the devs used the Unreal Engine to the fullest, and it was nice to see this discussion of how they depended on a lot of the tools I worked on personally. Glad they went into some detail!

I don't know about this, junior devs and contractors have been writing code that only works correctly in the golden path for many decades at this point. I've been treating LLMs as "smart junior devs who think too highly of themselves" and that has worked out well so far.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Reading the actual text, this only matters if you join age-restricted servers or channels, of which I am currently in 0. If this stays as an opt-in process, they're just doing this as a workaround to technically comply with the various laws. But, if they start auto-classifying it's all over.

The National Shutdown protest against ICE is today in the US. I mostly work with non-Americans so won't be fully following it, but hypocritical support of important goals is better than staying silent: nationalshutdown.org

Yesterday, I awoke to news of another ICE killing in MN. On Bluesky, the conversation was deeply critical of ICE. But I wanted to see how things were going on X. Surprisingly, the attempts there to blame the victim weren't getting as much traction as I suspected. So I wrote a thing.

The last 24 hours have shown that nonviolent resistance is starting to work in the US. The press has started to actually document the lies of the current administration, and the attempts to suppress dissent and instigate violence are backfiring.

I went to the Walk for Peace today and it was packed so here's someone else's photos. It was great to get a Buddhist talk on peacefulness right as the snow started. Everyone stay safe for the next few days, from the weather and everything else

Happy 35th birthday ZZT! Thank you for showing us that anyone can make a game