TBF I believe indie games will benefit the most from generative AI.

This is the one point where my opinions on GenAI split:

On one hand, art assets can be a lot of effort and time to create manually, which may hamstring games with interesting concepts and mechanics whose devs don’t have the skills or time to wrap them into suitable aesthetics. Voice acting is also a difficult point that can fill a world with life (like background chatter in villages), but isn’t always trivial for smaller teams or solo developers, particularly if they aren’t good at voice acting themselves and don’t have the money to pay someone up-front.

For those reasons, I think using GenAI to handle creative aspects is understandable if the devs themselves can’t shoulder that burden.

On the other hand, I feel like there should be better solutions. This reasoning to justify GenAI might be leveraged to justify not hiring artists or VAs. Sure makes your studio look smaller, and also leaves a larger margin of profit. Who’s gonna be able to tell whether you even looked for people to help you instead of just taking the shortcut?

I assume it comes down to economic and competitive pressures too. I’m sure there are plenty of artists or VAs that would lend their time and craft to an interesting game for the promise of a cut once the game releases, if they didn’t have to worry about paying bills right now instead of an uncertain future income.

I find myself returning to the topic of Universal Basic Income, or at least shorter working times for equal income: Imagine how much art people could create if they had the leisure to, instead of maximising profits for some money addicts’ “number go up” fix.

I don’t believe it. I won’t let myself give up hope. No matter how dark the prospects, I will hold on to that light. Resignation is the death of self, and I intend to stay alive a good while yet.

lots more fluids

I’ll be honest about my ignorance, particularly with EVs. What fluids would that be? Fuel, obviously, as well as lubricant and coolant; what else?

And what does the EV need? Not fuel, obviously, and I can guess that cooling will be a lot easier if there’s no combustion engine perpetually combusting. Does it need lubricant or is that just for the mechanical transmission of ICEs? Or am I getting shit mixed up entirely?

Europe: wants peace
US: starts war
Russia: starts war
Europe: prepares for war
You: “How dare they!”

Really, the only sin about that is that we weren’t already prepared.

I’m about as excited about war as any sensible 21st century adult. The necessity of a standing, well-maintained and perpetually ready military is my greatest indictment against the human species.

But it’s like insurance: You hope you never need it, but if you do, you’ll be very glad to have a good one.

I think this would be an opportunity for a targeted protest. It’s clear that the officials don’t like people talking about their corruption, so it would be a shame if people showed up at their offices and kept talking about it.

(Of course, staging a coordinated protest isn’t trivial, particularly if you need to prepare speakers for going to jail, and keeping it up requires a lot of patience and tenacity. Change rarely comes easy.)

Sure, if the provider is RFC882 compliant. I believe 882 has since been superseded too?

I believe when I last researched the question to address some issue in my own regex, some Stackoverflow comment brought up an example of an address that could receive mail but wasn’t compliant.

Hence the more robust approach, which is also the only feasible way to ensure that there are no typos and that the recipient is actually the one signing up: Send a verification mail to that recipient. If the correct confirmation token gets back to you, someone or something probably got and read that mail.

You can do some minimal check to avoid things like spaces, ensure there is an @ in there somewhere, but beyond that, it’s really not sensible to check them against some long-winded regex.

Particularly when you’re vibe-coding, can’t know whether the generator got the regex correct and also can’t debug it.

A guy I know is trying to pitch a tool to people he made with AI. Which is to say AI made it for him, because his coding knowledge just about covers HTML and CSS, as best as I can tell, so everything else (and probably a good chunk of those too) is slopped up.

Recently, someone apparently had difficulties signing up with their email, but only their email. Their partner’s worked fine. The guy was at a loss. I’m not sure he could read the code at all or has any idea of how troubleshooting works.

If it was open source, I’d probably look into it just out of curiosity. My money is on “AI trained on junior devs’ output did the junior dev thing where they discover RegEx and try to use it for email input validation”, because the provider has a dash in their domain and that’s the simplest explanation for email address troubles.

He also should hire an actual developer to fix his shit. My rates start at 100€/h, increasing by 10€ every time he suggests I ask AI.