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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 7:55 AM

    RE: eigenmagic.net/@vampiress/1168

    “I poisoned my own mind.”

    More and more programmers are writing retrospectives like this — and a huge THANK YOU to Elissa for doing so — where they discover that Programming Is Not Special.

    It is particularly interesting to read this from a solo game developer who is both a programmer and an artist, who began by thinking the programing isn’t art, and discovered by an emotionally torturous process that it actually is.

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Replies

  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 7:55 AM

    Also anti-AI followers I shouldn’t have to say this but in these trying times I believe I must: if you harass the author of this piece, even just to say something snide like “well what did you expect, using the lie machine, you deserved to feel bad” then I repudiate you and you will never see the light of heaven. Please do not be part of the problem.

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  • contrasocialcontrasocial@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 11:00 AM

    @glyph

    As an artist who grew up with tech-minded people telling me how useless and unserious art is, and how I shouldn't waste my time pursuing creative careers, how the social sciences were a joke, who had to listen to them sit in the back of english class and complain when we had to learn about subtext, symbolism, and metaphor and "Why don't they just write what they mean literally?"

    It doesn't really give me any satisfaction that an individual of that class of people became self-aware.

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  • contrasocialcontrasocial@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 11:00 AM

    @glyph

    After tech enthusiasts finally figured out how to build an ocean-drinking, sky-burning, human-poisoning, soul-dismantling machine just to try and push artists and creatives out of the picture, and one finally had the realization that their interests and processes aren't that different after all from artists.

    I don't feel satisfaction, but I don't feel much sympathy either, as tech "progress" turns our planet into an ash heap and disintegrates what little culture we have left.

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  • neoludditeneoluddite@aus.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 3:34 PM

    @contrasocial Elissa is an indie game developer and an artist on top of that? Not anywhere near your "tech-minded" stereotype.

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  • �utf_7@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 12:00 PM

    @glyph

    >well what did you expect, using the lie machine

    why does saying this make someone part of the problem? what problem?

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  • SomeVeganCheeseIsOkSomeVeganCheeseIsOk@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 12:55 PM

    @utf_7 @glyph they're saying don't harass the original poster. It's a basic strategy to not punish people for growth and development away from bad ideas. The current "I told you so" mindset of the world is *incredibly* toxic.

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  • �utf_7@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 1:05 PM

    @SomeVeganCheeseIsOk @glyph

    ah, got it. yeah, growing should not be harassed.

    well, there are exceptions... like laying off thousands of people in favor of AI and then rehiring them. there, i cannot supress a "we told you so"

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  • Riley S. Faelanriley@toot.cat
    Jul 4, 2026, 9:24 AM

    @glyph There's a lot of antipatterns now known about programmers taking decisions to manage their otherwise untreated ADHD.

    I wonder how many decisions in programming are made in order to ward off the emotional torture.
    Is the large amount of ugly code because people don't want to admit that code could be an art?

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  • Philippa Cowderoyflippac@types.pl
    Jul 4, 2026, 10:01 AM

    @riley @glyph Developing aesthetic sense certainly means developing the capacity to find something painful!...

    Awkwardly, we really don't collectively share the same tastes in code.

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  • Riley S. Faelanriley@toot.cat
    Jul 4, 2026, 11:28 AM

    @flippac Ideally, the gallery expositions should be runnable in emulators, and (in)conveniently, these sorts of tricks often provide challenges for devloping truly good emulators. :blobcatcheer2:

    @glyph

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  • Philippa Cowderoyflippac@types.pl
    Jul 4, 2026, 11:44 AM

    @riley @glyph I'm certainly glad I didn't have to do dosbox's PC speaker support, or CRT-specific tricks on modern hardware!

    Then again, I will never again find myself subjecting a cat to the carrier wave of PC speaker sample playback...

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  • Riley S. Faelanriley@toot.cat
    Jul 4, 2026, 11:47 AM

    @flippac But then gain, it's really fun how directly RC filters can be translated into digital counterparts. Almost makes want one to suggest that DOSBox, or maybe DOSBox-X, should support user-speciied R and C values in its speaker emulation, and emulate them correctly.

    @glyph

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  • Lona Theartlavtheartlav@anarres.family
    Jul 4, 2026, 11:23 PM

    @riley @flippac @glyph I wish that was possible, and it's something i though about for a while. Some way to show code off, like you show off hardware projects or artwork. Being able to share the art of code independent of the result of it being run.
    Does not appear to be possible, however.

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  • Riley S. Faelanriley@toot.cat
    Jul 4, 2026, 11:30 PM

    @theartlav As far as I can tell, what gets in the way is looking at code as an industrial product. If one were to radically rip off the covers, and make code in some way easy to observe, a gallery-like thing could be realisable.

    @flippac @glyph

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  • Graeme 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿pa27@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 9:56 AM

    @glyph We've all played with LLM coding. Why not? It's intellectual curiosity - something we have and LLMs don't.
    The results are sometimes ok, depending on what you expect. Try asking it for assembly language code though, or an unusual language variant, and it falls over.
    Then also consider - did you pay for it or us a free tier? And what was the on cost, the energy, water, and addition to the llm bubble size just by using it?

    Then get back to real coding!

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  • VANTABlackVANTABlack2000@mastodon.gamedev.place
    Jul 4, 2026, 11:39 AM

    @glyph At least IMO people use AI for different things and it's like a siren song. They fell for it, but they are on the path to recovery realizing just how poisonous AI is and sharing their story.

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  • 명준chroma@raccoonisland.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 1:16 PM

    @glyph “I poisoned my own mind. Maybe I can go back to them in future, starting from scratch and doing them the right way, but for now, they’re shelved.”

    The door is still open, not a great ending for the post. I don’t get why people are so tempted by laziness and cognitive decay.

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  • 명준chroma@raccoonisland.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 1:29 PM

    @glyph read the quoted paragraph, I will quote it again, with emphasis: “back to them in the future (…) doing them the right way”.

    She suggests there’s a “right way” of doing LLMs.

    This kind of person doesn’t learn anything, they still think it’s “a tool”. They still jerk off to the false and despicable idea of compressing days of work in seconds regarding creative endeavors.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 1:38 PM

    @chroma "Maybe I can go back to them in future, ***starting from scratch*** and doing them the right way" (emphasis mine)

    The author is suggesting that the ideas are now ruined by LLM residue, and that she needs to shelve them until she can forget the dispiriting sludge that they produced, doing them again by herself ***from scratch***, i.e. *NOT* using an LLM, but with the same *idea*.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 1:44 PM

    @chroma Even if the author actually held the position that you are suggesting, the suggestion that this "kind of person" is incapable of learning is bafflingly dismissive, given that this is at the end of a lucid exploration of a profound harm that LLMs can do. Presumably if they imagine some possible future valid use, it would be *vastly* different.

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  • 명준chroma@raccoonisland.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 1:46 PM

    @glyph My bad, I misunderstood that paragraph’s idea by reading diagonally and fast.

    But I disagree, the only viable use of LLMs is multiline (5-10 max) autocomplete after extensive training with a specific repo tbh.

    They’re just glorified autocomplete, any other use out of this is pure brain rot that isn’t far from Markov chains garbage.

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 3:31 PM

    @chroma My position is actually more maximalist than yours, apparently; I don't even think they should be used as autocomplete, certainly not as much as 10 lines at a time; that just creates an opportunity to gloss over 1-character bugs without even really boosting productivity much. I am not even sure that search autocomplete is safe papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf

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  • Glyphglyph@mastodon.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 3:32 PM

    @chroma my point is just that if a person *were* to hold such a position, dismissing their entire capacity to learn out of hand would be pretty extreme.

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  • 명준chroma@raccoonisland.social
    Jul 4, 2026, 3:41 PM

    @glyph I understand, it's just that I despise this technology so much that I become overly aggressive and reactive to everyone that holds a position that isn't "I hate it" or, at very least, "I hate it under its current form".

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  • Ben AvelingBenAveling@mastodon.ie
    Jul 4, 2026, 5:26 PM

    @glyph I love this line: “no matter how many details you put in a prompt to an LLM, there are still decisions you’re ceding to it.”

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  • Matt Campbellmatt@toot.cafe
    Jul 4, 2026, 5:33 PM

    @glyph Yes, *game* programming is clearly art, but some other kinds of programming might not be. Still, the boring, non-art programming is necessary for shipping usable software.

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  • Irenes (many)ireneista@irenes.space
    Jul 5, 2026, 4:27 AM

    @glyph there's this episode early in Sousou no Frieren where Frieren says that it didn't have to be magic that she dedicated her life to, it just happened to be, but now that she has, it matters to her

    that was helpful for us

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  • Bonkersbonkers@nerdculture.de
    Jul 5, 2026, 6:01 AM

    @glyph (a software architect with 30 years in the industry here) I have also made a few prototypes that would take me forever to code by hand. Claude just made them in a few hours. Honestly, I wouldn't even have started most of them.

    My outcome is different from what Elissa says. It's been fun at first, as I didn't use LLM before, and it's still fun now, as one of the projects is production ready, and I'm actually using it. The others aren't ready, but only because the engineering task is difficult and I haven't figured out the solution yet. But it's still fun. Of course there are boring parts, like telling the clanker that it forgot to update the documentation, or other things, and please update your bloody agents.md so that you remember next time.

    So, overall, it's been a useful tool for me and it saved me tons of time. Awesome result for side projects that will never be commercialized.

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