Ryan Alban

I just need to lock in

A related thing - I struggle to stay motivated to make things when I don't want them to exist badly enough, which is a real problem when what I want to exist can only be reached through the existence of a chain of smaller things that I don't want to exist

Why is it that some people assume that every visible instance of virtue is performative?

I feel like I almost never see graphics programmers here. There were loads of them on Twitter; did they stay there? Where did they all go?

what is C? baby it's UB it's UB all day...

As both an academic and a writer, I am repelled by the "this looks like a long document. Would you like me to summarize it for you?" that seems to appear at the top of every pdf viewer now. NO. The *entire point* of good writing (either books or journal papers) is that every sentence has a purpose.

Reading gaming news on my phone My phone heats up I accidentally click two ads, one making me restart reading the article Once I open an ad clicking on X The article itself reloads two times I think there is a middle part I missed because of an ad that moved as I scrolled I gave up Good job!

this wave of AI has legitimately killed a huge part of what I loved about seeing stuff online, what I loved about being an educator, and what I loved about sharing my own work I just don't feel like doing it anymore

It's the fries going into it rather than it going on top of them, but - soft-serve ice cream

Coding will always be hard because you have to know what you want the computer to do.

No fuck off we're not calling this "Millennial grey" this shit was dictated completely by boomer retiree house flippers we absolutely had NO say in this

Difference between 'writing code for my game' vs. 'writing code for a library' is cutting-corners with assert(). E.g. my state machine plumbing doesn't need to handle pathological inputs designed to break it; I just assert() those thorny edge-cases don't exist, because they don't.

How do you remember where you left off when you finish some yak shaving? I don't use JIRA or anything at home (the kind of thing which genuinely IS a real help), so I'm literally thinking of having a "yak_shaving.txt" on my desktop with a tree of subtasks that I'm currently working on 😅

I always have to remember that when people say "coding" statistically they most likely mean "stuffing an inconsequential feature into an inconsequential web app"

Someone told me recently that they were using LLMs to generate boilerplate code for a particular framework - it was THEIR framework, that they had control of and could change at will. Why... not simply do that, and make it so you don't need the boilerplate anymore?

Spreadsheets are a gameplay programmer's secret weapon

*staring intensely at the cool alien statue* "Bröther, may I have some lööps?"

"When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine. This is a basic principle of respect." 👏

Germany has successfully engineered a revolutionary transparent solar glass that generates clean electricity while remaining completely see-through from both sides, fundamentally transforming how buildings produce energy. #solarpower #ActOnClimate

The perfect weather is 15°C and overcast.

My most "old man yells at cloud" opinion is that short, replayable, single-player games are good and worth making.

My game isn’t even out yet and it has already been cloned three times.

Anyone else think that "skill issue" is actually pretty charitable for a phrase meant to be insulting? Skills can be learned and improved if one cares and puts in the time and effort, so in my mind it's like saying "you're not good at this, but you could be" which is almost encouraging in a way

No better feeling than when someone else’s dog or cat picks you to hang out with, and their owner's always all "awww he likes you" and you play it cool like "he probably just smells my dog" but inside you're just absolutely screaming OF COURSE HE LIKES ME I AM THE CHOSEN ONE AND VERY SPECIAL

I genuinely do not understand this. How is it that everyone seems to utterly hate programming, and seemingly has fuck-all pride in their work? Sometimes as a programmer I feel like the only person who actually seems to give a shit.....

"I've written so much code I don't understand" But that's bad. That's BAD. You understand how that's bad, right? That it IS bad? That you're not actually *supposed* to do that and all the "copy/pasting from StackOveflow" jokes were... jokes? Right?

"Stupible" is actually a great one for a person who is normally smart, but can be made to act stupid by pushing the right buttons

Hello from #CraftConf Budapest! As always, I'll be doing my best to liveskeet all the talks I attend (until my computer runs out of battery, which happens earlier every year) Keynote speaker: "Slow Down to Speed up", @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

Sick of the relentless adult content I see on Bluesky: back pain, interest rates, tax brackets, that noise you make when you stand-up sometimes.

This is a whole mindset some people have toward life in general. I'll never forget how someone once told me to my face that spending money on anything you can get for free somehow means that you're stupid. I don't think they would have made exceptions for paying indie game developers

Increasingly clear to me is the distinction between hobbyists who code because they want something and hobbyists who code because it's fun and they want to make a thing with their own hands

Whole thread good but THIS this is why I won't fucking use AI summaries, coding assistants, none of it. Having something just confidently lie with regularity isn't something I can deal with. If a junior did that? I would fire them. Because that's pathological, and toxic to productivity.

claude is literally wrong basically every time I ask a programming question. the pattern for me and claude is 1. hey claude how do you do this 2. claude says something wrong 3. I say that's so fucking wrong because of X 4. claude says "ah yeah you're right that's so fucking wrong because of X"

Is there a word or succinct term for when you deep-clean something (eg. your keyboard) and for a time afterward, you suddenly start noticing - to the point of distraction - how dirty everyone else's things are?