Etienne de Martel

although i do try and hold a more nuanced view like "machine translation good, extractive corpus bad, duty of care missing" i simply do not have the time or energy or good faith to talk about the finer points, especially when it feels like people are simply carving out exceptions for themselves

the thing about programming is the finding out is usually pretty disconnected from the fucking around, be it a dev/ops split, or user/developer, or even past/future, people do not get to experience the consequences of their choices and are not incentivised to imagine them either

I do wish video game people had less affection for studio names and more familiarity with people’s names. I feel it does BioWare a disservice to collapse the entire studio to what it was in 2010

I saw NAZA and now I'm hollow inside.

here is a riddle, what do you call it when you copy what other people seem to make work without understanding why and having limited success in repeating results with different team and goals you may be thinking "cargo cult" but no it's "software methodologies"

Sad news everyone. Our beloved friend the computer has now become a hated enemy

yes my bull went rogue in your china shop but I think we can all agree there’s no liability here it’s an agentic being

This is the master key to deciphering contemporary debates about free speech. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...

no game dev skill is more important than making up your fuckin mind

This fantasy that “AI is out of control” provides cover for powerful people and corporations to simply program systems to carry out actions and then shrug. And if that is brought into the larger scheme of operations, the powerful will shrug and blame the tool they control.

Nintendo saw the Metroid Bread memes and decided to embrace the food theme.

yes, i am a bit "my 'velocity makes the structural problems worse' tshirt has been raising questions already answered by my tshirt" still, i am capable of having a nuanced conversation about modern programming tools, albeit only with people who don't call me ignorant or threaten me with the rapture

again i am just not that interested in debating whether human rights should theoretically extend to robots and ai when we currently don't even extend them to all humans

hey homie how’s it going. me and the guys were just debating whether or not you had a theory of mind

back before AI, video game developers had to make every digital woman look the same through hard work and artistry

I hope everyone caught this Lancet study confirming that Elon Musk & DOGE are responsible for genocidal levels of suffering & death.

Before you say positive things about DHH because of Omarchy, a reminder that it's been like 3 weeks since he published a blog that compares Roma people to the wolves Denmark eradicated in the 1800s. He's an open, virulent racist and always has been. Everything he touches should be radioactive.

In Montréal, what started as an emergency pandemic response has evolved into the continent’s most ambitious car-free scheme. Across 9.3 kilometres of 11 commercial arteries in seven boroughs, entire corridors have been handed back to pedestrians, helping some 2,100 businesses thrive in the process.🧵

Holy shit this blog is amazing.

Every dollar spent on social services is, in some sense, a theft from the weapons industry

I’m so sorry for everyone at id Software affected by these layoffs. I know what it feels like to leave id while id goes on. It’s a strange and painful thing to step away from a place that holds so much of your work, friendships and history. 1/5

As the director of a historical video game preservation institution, and someone who has dedicated his entire adult life to this cause, this is accurate. We have attempted to work with the industry's trade organization to find a legal path forward, but they refuse to offer a meaningful alternative.

Opinion: Everything hurts and no one knows when the pain will end

Our games industry is people. Our studios are people. Our teams people, our games by people for people. Our games are made by people, in groups of people, in teams of people, making people things for people. The magic is people, and the people deserve so much better than all this. I am so sorry.

Wacom recently asked me to talk about why I make queer comics, and given there are multiple bills right now floating around in congress that are effectively "we will kill your livelihood if we get a sniff of queer" I had some pretty strong, simply feelings to relay.

New: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is" www.404media.co/it-is-trivia...

we at xbox are coming to terms with the AI-fueled hardware crunch, which we helped create, failing to meet profit margins, that we made up, declining software sales, because we're self-cannibalizing our games specifically, and also everyone hates us which, believe it or not, also our fault

The value proposition of working at an AAA studio was that you were trading independence and agency for stability, and that if the game did well, you would keep your job, and if the game did badly, you might lose it. Obviously it wasn’t that cut and dry, but you get it. Now? You just lose your job.

OH MY GOD I GET TO TALK ABOUT MY THESIS I specifically studied the instance of election fraud within a 1/2 point margin of victory. I'm calling them whisker thin elections. Fraudulent elections are proportionately less likely to be whisker-thin than other close margins of victory. 1/

my one big takeaway from this years pile of Showcases is that Unreal Engine 5 has co-opted or sort of, I dare say, polluted the visual language of games, where nothing stands out theres a kind of mediocrity that comes with being "photorealistic I guess". PBR substance everywhere, but not distinct

DATA CENTERS - dashare.zone ADMIN

📣 GAMEDEVS 📣 Did you know the @gameworkerscon.bsky.social is officially ONE WEEK FROM TODAY? ...And that it's FREE and ENTIRELY REMOTE? 👇👇👇 gameworkersconference.org

We should rightfully scorn DHH for being a fascist but I think he doesn't get enough flack for the irreparable damage he's done to our industry by making Ruby appear production-ready.

The funny thing about chrome shoving a 4gb LLM on all devices is that when I interviewed for Google back in 2019 one of the interview sessions was all about how you'd deploy updates to 4 billion android devices, consider how many users are on slow internet connections or with unreliable connectivity

Attention, please. The Leader has an important announcement for you... 📣 Phonopolis launches MAY 20! 📣 Wishlist on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/1206070/...

I’ve posted it before, but it feels evergreen The two hardest problems in Computer Science are 1. Human communication 2. Getting people in tech to believe that human communication is important

no i'm not bc i don't use that shit. skill issue

Moralists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded.

Wait, it's Ace Day today. I have to admit, I didn't actually pay attention this time, what with, you know, the state of the world. I wish I had something witty to say, but jokes about "invading Denmark" don't hit the same way since the whole Greenland situation.

When AGI is achieved in the future, it'll invent time travel so it can send all the technical debt back into the past.

A lot of people want to talk about what's wrong with the AAA game dev scene but very few people want to admit that the problem is that the whole thing is just structured really dumb.

This is an excellent summary of the US War on Iran current situation. I’m an existentialist and borderline absurdist and even I struggle with the current moment. This summary is just fantastic.

I can't know the mind or requirements of every dev but "passable" assets in the build are just a bad idea, IMO. I've worked on games that reuse assets that are intended to be redone, which can cause its own problems, but I don't think devs should generate temp assets that could maybe pass for final.

It is important I get 8,294,400 pixels (4K) at 120 frames a second. Otherwise it just doesn’t feel real. It is ok if half of those pixels are just kinda guesses based on zettabytes of YouTube and pornhub my graphics card watched

what the fuck are we doing www.wsj.com/business/med...

Free newsletter: The AI bubble's info war demands that we believe in things that aren’t true, like the economic fundamentals of the AI industry are perfectly sound, or that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are anything other than warmongers. www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-bubble-is-an-information-war/

BREAKING: We've freed Cookie. Following an investigation by VGHF, Ukie and Web Capio have suspended DMCA takedowns for Cookie's Bustle on behalf of Graceware, SL. More info: