In Yesterday's IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web.
While they packaged it as a lot of "AI" talk what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated response means is that they want to establish a new abstraction layer on the web. Where Zuckerberg with his Metaverse failed Google is starting the next attack: Your website, your work no longer matters.
Well it matters as (unpaid) raw material for their synthetic text extruders but not as cultural artifact you can share with others.
This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google's abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It's about monopolizing access to information.
If you care about the web, about people's ability to participate in it as more than mere passive consumers, this needs to be taken seriously. De-Googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don't use their browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment.
@praetor Yep, makes sense. I've not coded professionally, despite my CS degree, but I know enough to know that I don't want an LLM coding for me -- especially as I have barely any experience in real-world software architecture, which means the unknown unknowns for me are vast, and you can't maintain or fix code you don't understand.
@praetor Likewise with some game dev stuff I'm doing in my (very limited) spare time. I also want to actually learn and improve my skills, and to think carefully about the design and architecture -- because I know it'll be better (and feel more rewarding) that way.
@thomasfuchs Agreed. I'm deeply concerned at the coming loss of knowledge and insurmountable tech debt that lies ahead if more people in software engineering (and especially the managers) don't get their heads around this soon.
It's a tool; its power lies in the augmentation, not replacement, of skilled human talent.
The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-things
New blog:
I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.
Oh, you want to know *why?* Sure. Let’s go for a drive.
https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2026/you-need-ai-that-reduces-your-maintenance-costs
an extremely underrated 2 hour interview with robyn miller by MossRC@social.mossrc.me several years ago
they provide a walking tour through several of cyan's early titles such as the Manhole, Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx. a live art director's commentary.
what i love the most is how much robyn makes it clear how these games were never built for "gamers" as we understand them now. robyn played very few games, and wasn't familiar with genre expectations.
he and rand just focused on making games that let the player explore a world at their own pace, and all else is secondary to exploration and discovery.
@ratsprite Diagrams seem pretty likely. At the very least, there are some fascinating diagrams and charts that the programmers and designers made while working on the games that I'd be wanting to include. But there could be the odd bespoke "here's how this worked"-type diagram to help with explanations, too.
My SCUMM documentary is going on hiatus and I need to decide whether to do it as a book instead.
really happy to have discovered something hiding in plain sight for several years: robyn & rand miller's original Myst pitch document from 1991.
it's a succinct work of art in itself. i'm surprised at how much of the world design was already on paper.
as all of the copies found elsewhere online are heavily compressed webp/jpeg, i've uploaded the robyn's original PNGs to IA here:
https://archive.org/details/myst_proposal
originally from robyn's site:
http://www.robynmiller.net/video-games-films
#digiPres #softwarePreservation #archival #gamedev #myst #cyan
as far as i know, i found a software preservation zebra this week: this bit of extremely obscure archival work blends together HyperCard, Sierra On-Line and edutainment.
back in the early 90s, a company named EarthQuest started publishing educational reference titles for kids using HyperCard. the early titles were nice hypercard stacks probably drawn in macpaint. this one doesn't depart much from that format, except with nicer art and more creative page layouts
now, here's where things get weird. when saw it on ebay, only one pic buried at the bottom captured my attention: a weird stamped label on the bottom of the box that read Property OF SIERRA with the Half Dome logo. i bought it out of curiosity, and it arrived today.
back in the 90s, the larger game companies routinely maintained their own on-site libraries of competitors' games. Origin Systems in Austin had one. EA Burnaby, when it was known as Distinctive Software, had one. These were kept so marketing folks and developers could get an idea of what other studios were doing.
thing is, i've never seen mention of a library at Sierra On-Line in Oakhurst. the On-Line part of the logo is critical: Time Treks was published in 1992, and this is the year before Sierra moved its corporate offices from Oakhurst, California to Bellevue, Washington.
i have no doubt that there are other games from the Sierra On-Line corporate library somewhere out there, but i've never come across one even once in 30+ years. feel free to share this post with your fellow Sierra collectors :) it would be great if we could figure out where/when the Sierra library existed.
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/time-treks
#hypercard #macintosh #vintageApple #sierraOnline #adventureGames #retrogaming
I keep asking, where are the works? Where is the software that does ten or twenty or a hundred times more? Where is the human needs that are ten or twenty or a hundred times better met?
Instead, we have the mandated code generators feeding uncomprehended text into integration pipelines hit testing for textual correctness without meaning, purpose or intent.
This is a machine that turns strings into waste heat. That's nearly all it is.
It is money on fire.
@oscherler @vga256 Ugh, what a cop out. If they're doing news properly, you'd get all the "20 seconds summary" information from the headline, subhead, and first paragraph anyway.