8 ms·

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my exper

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code are rediscovering the magic that got them involved as engineers in the first place" <-- paraphrased for brevity. I vividly remember, staying up all night to hand-code assembler primitive rendering libraries, the first time I built a voxel rendering engine and thinking it was like magic what you could do on a 486... I remember the early days at Relic, working on Homeworld and thinking we were casting spells, not writing software. Honestly, that magic faded and died for me. I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned. These days, I've never been more excited about engineering. The tedium of the background wiring is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells again.

neom 8mo ago
Wow, Alex Garden on Hackernews. Hello fellow canuck. I'm now getting up there, still a few years shy of y'all but not much. I came up through the 90s and early 2000s, all web/linux stuff, irc servers, bash scripts, python, weird php hacks, whatever, I was a kid. I'd lose track of time, It was Monday night after high school then all of a sudden it was Sunday morning and I was talking on irc about the crazy LAMP stack I'd put together. 2am? pfft, what is sleep?! Sadly with very strong dyslexia and dyscalculia, being a real programmer was never in the cards for me, I understood how everything worked, I can explain the whole thing end to end in great depth, but ask me predictably how to do a table in html or some fairly simple CSS, and I'll be there for hours. I'm grateful the rest of my life allowed me to be programmer adjacent and spend so much time around developers, but always a little frustrated I couldn't pick up the hammer myself. These days, I've never been more excited about building. The frustration of being slow with the code is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells.
- alexgarden 8mo ago
  Go Canada! I personally can't wait to see what happens to the world when all of us find the passion to create again.
- zzrrt 8mo ago
  Why is your last paragraph nearly identical to the last paragraph you are replying to? It might have been a strange quirk, but there’s also been the suggestion that the post you’re replying to is an imposter, so it gets weirder that you also did that.
  - neom 8mo ago
    I thought I was being cute. :) I'm not a bot. I reached out to Alex and he confirmed the original comment was indeed him.
xtracto 8mo ago
Yes yes yes!!! I'm 45 yo. And also started programming quite early around 1988. In my case it was GWBAsic games and then C ModeX and A Later Allegro based games. Things got so boring in the last 15 years, I got some joy in doing AI research (ML, agents, Genetic Algorithms, etc). But now, it's so cool how I can again think about something and build it so easily. I'm really excited of what I can do now. And im ot talking about the next billion dollar startup and whatnot. But the small hacky projects that LLMs made capable.yo build in no time.
- dingnuts 8mo ago
  [dead]
Lerc 8mo ago
I'm feeling the same. AI development actually feels like a similar rate of change. It took 8 years to go from the Atari 2600 to the Amiga. An 8 year old computer doesn't quite capture the difference today.
anonymous908213 8mo ago
> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned. This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this. It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't it, I don't think. It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years. I formed connections, spent thousands of hours enjoying them together with other people, and pushed myself hard to become one of the top 100 players on the CoH leaderboards. Those competitive multiplayer games taught me everything there was to know about self-improvement, and formed the basis of my growth as an individual - learning that if I put my mind to it, I could be among the best at something, informed my worldview and led me to a life of perpetually pushing myself to further self-improvement, and from there I learned to code, draw, and play music. All of that while being part of amazing communities where I formed friendships that lasted decades. All of this to say, Relic was magic. The work Relic did profoundly impacted my life. I wonder if you really believe your current role, "building trust infrastructure for AI agents", is actually magic? That it's going to profoundly impact the lives of thousands or millions? I'm sorry for the jumbled nature of this post. I am on my phone, so I can't organize my thoughts as well as I would like. I am grateful to you for founding Relic, and this post probably comes off stupidly combative and ungrateful. But I would simply like to pose to you, to have a long think if what you're doing now is really where the magic is. Edit: On further consideration, it's not clear the newly-created account I'm responding to is actually Alex Garden. The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing, but I will nonetheless leave this up in the hope that if there are people who built magical things reading this, regardless of whether they're Alex Garden or someone else, that it might just inspire them to introspection about what building magic means, about the impact software can have on people's lives even if you don't see it, and whether this "agent" stuff is really it.
- ineedasername 8mo ago
  >The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing Good news! You've also related it to the roughly ~3-10M monthly HN readers who are not (potentially) impersonating the founder of a beloved game studio. Also: I think you're probably safe. I'm sure someone at some point has come to HN to LARP as some prominent person in tech that they don't happen, at that specific moment, to actually be... but I can't really think of it happening before, nor would I expect it to take the form of a particularly thoughtful comment if a troll did that. Though with AI these days, who knows? I might myself just be one of a swarm of clawd/molt/claw things. In which case I'd be the last to even know it. Oh-- as for being depressed about their docker/wiring things up sentiment. Try not to be, and instead, consider: Is it a surprise that someone who founded such a place as relic was occasionally-- even often-- frustrated at the things they had to clear away to build the thing they actually wanted to build? People who want to build amazing experiences may not love having to clear clutter that gets in their way. Other people want to build the tools that clear clutter, or other things that keep the whole system going. Those are beautiful too.
shafoshaf 8mo ago
[55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not knowing if I could even do it. With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.
- supern0va 8mo ago
  >With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment. I think it's possible that we'll get to the point where "so can anyone else" becomes true, but it isn't today for most software. There's significant understanding required to ask for the right things and understand whether you're actually getting them. That said, I think the accomplishment comes more so from the shaping of the idea. Even without the typing of code, I think that's where most of the interesting work lies. It's possible that AI develops "taste" such that it can sufficiently do this work, but I'm skeptical it happens in the near term.
  - iwontberude 8mo ago
    In my experience, the vast majority of people can't even muster the hubris to think they can understand software at such a basic level, it doesn't matter if GenAI did all the heavy lifting sadly.
- strictnein 8mo ago
  I think there's still quite a chasm out there. Domain knowledge, an informed and opinionated view on how something should function, and overall tech knowledge are still key. Having those three things continues to greatly differentiate people of equal coding skill, as they always have.
  - 4nonverbal-alit 8mo ago
samiv 8mo ago
I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!
- moffkalast 8mo ago
  Well it's more like employing a gardener makes me enjoy landscaping again. It's not like we ever found writing words on a keyboard all that great, it's fundamentally just about having an idea and turning it into something real.
  - zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    Speak for yourself. I have always loved the act of intentionally typing (converting my thoughts into structured text).
    - moffkalast 8mo ago
      I guess some people enjoy the process, but you can still do that. It's like with machinists and 3D printers, you can always spend 10 hours on the lathe to make something but most of the time it's more practical to just get the part so one can get on with what actually needs doing.
      - chasd00 8mo ago
        > It's like with machinists and 3D printers that's a good analogy, maybe change 3d printers to CNC. I think there's a group of people that derive joy and satisfaction from using the part they designed and there's another that gets satisfaction from producing the part as designed. Same for software, some people are thrilled because they can get the software they imagine while others dread not producing the software people imagine.
- mixologic 8mo ago
  *I'm so excited about landscape design. Can't wait to do more. Employing a gardener to do the gardening for me is really making me enjoy landscape design again!
HoldOnAMinute 8mo ago
For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic". Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it. I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic
- refset 8mo ago
  In case anyone else was curious about the screensaver mentioned, I couldn't find any screenshots so just got Claude to cook up an HTML port: https://refset.github.io/xgrav-canvas-js/xgrav.html https://refset.github.io/xgrav-canvas-js/xgrav.html
  - HoldOnAMinute 8mo ago
    It's this one with bees and a wasp https://sources.debian.org/src/xlockmore/4.12-4/modes/swarm.c https://sources.debian.org/src/xlockmore/4.12-4/modes/swarm....
iwontberude 8mo ago
Yeah it’s drugs and or religion. Feels pretty good.
mlhpdx 8mo ago
I started a bit younger and am a bit older, and relate. But only so much. I started programming in 3rd grade (also BASIC) when I found a computer and learned how to play a game on it, then found the source code for the game and randomly started changing it. In 7th grade I was paid to port a BASIC program to C (super new at the time), which I did on paper because I didn't own a computer (I used the money to buy my first). To be clear, I was really bad a programming for a long time and simply kept at it until I wasn't. I love messing about with computers still. I can work at the byte level on ESP-32s on tiny little devices, and build massive computation engines at the time time on the same laptop. It's amazing. I feel for those who have lost their love of this space, but I have to be honest: it's not the space that's the problem. Try something new, try something different and difficult or ungainly. Do what you rail against. Explore. That's what it's always been about.
strictnein 8mo ago
In the second half of my 40s now and I'm in the same boat. I started slapping keys on a c64 when I was 2 years old. Really enjoyed software development until 10-15 years ago. With the current LLM tooling available the number of systems I've been able to build that are novel and tackle significant problems has been kind of mind blowing over the past 8 months or so. Staying up late, hacking away at stuff like I used to, and it's been a blast. Finally, Homeworld was awesome and it felt magical playing it.
dirkc 8mo ago
> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned. I still vividly remember setting up gcc in a docker container to cross compile custom firmware for my cannon camera and thinking about the amount of pain my local system would have been in if I had to do all the toolchain work in my host OS. Don't know if it felt like magic, but it sure didn't hurt like the alternative!
- alexgarden 8mo ago
  For sure. Docker is rad (sorry Docker!)... all I'm saying is that I am not proud of the fact that I can do it and I don't think it moves the awesome needle - but it's still hard to get right and a pain in the ass. It's just an example of something I appreciate that I can automate now.
CoastalCoder 8mo ago
The original Homeworld team was casting spells! I'm still amazed by how you got ships to usually fly in formation, but also behave independently and rationally when that made sense. That game was a magnificent piece of art. It set a unique and immersive vibe on par with the original Tron movie. I'm really glad I have a chance now to tell you.
- alexgarden 8mo ago
  Thanks... It was magical at the time... I've thought a lot about why it was magical over the years... I think if you boil away all the space stuff, Homeworld was a story about people who knew in their hearts that they were special and destined for something greater than the universe was willing to allow. And they went through hell to discover that they were right. Looking back, I think that's a story a lot of us on this thread (inc. me) can relate to. Here we are. Looks like the dorks won.
  - CoastalCoder 8mo ago
    Sounds like there's some overlap with the story of the Jewish people, now that I think of it. > Here we are. Looks like the dorks won. I doubt it's permanent, and we all gotta eat. But you know what? My son still tells me how much he was in awe of that game when he saw me playing it. No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet memory of fun and time together. Thank you.
    - alexgarden 8mo ago
      > No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet memory of fun and time together. Thank you. ^^ Made my day. Tell your son he's rad.
- kinneticslammer 8mo ago
  Amen to this. The optimization the team did blows my mind… whenever I think of it I think of if someone made Crysis run on the NES without compromises. The soundtrack was stellar, and introduced me to Barber (Adagio for Strings).
quietsegfault 8mo ago
I'm in my 40s, and I've been involved with computers since I was old enough to read. I was talking to some customers today about how magical it feels to blast past my own limits of my coding abilities with the help of LLMs. It's not perfect, and I mostly won't generate stuff that's a polished, finished product. But when it works, it sparks the same joy that it did when I was discovering the first bits of what computers can do on my Apple ][+.
olegp 8mo ago
I couldn't agree more. Also, thanks for making Homeworld, it was great! I was building a 3D space game engine myself as a kid around the time Homeworld came out and realized that rather than using a skybox with texture maps, you had it created out of a bunch of triangles with color interpolation. IIRC, I had problems reverse engineering your data format in order to incorporate them in my engine. I emailed someone on your team and was very surprised to get a reply with an explanation, which helped me finish that feature.
- alexgarden 8mo ago
  The skybox with texture maps was our original plan too. The problem was that GPUs didn't have enough RAM to hold anything high-res, so the universe looked like pixel-soup. Rob Cunningham (lead artist) had the idea of "painting with light" using giant polygons and spicing them up with pixels to create a convincing distant galaxy that you got closer to with each mission. Genius.
upmostly 8mo ago
First of all, Homeworld was an iconic game for me growing up, so as other people have said, thank you for being apart of its creation. I could not agree more. It feels like the creativity is back. I grew up building fun little websites in the 90s, building clan websites for Quake 2. That creativity died somewhere between Node.js, AWS, npm, and GitHub. Some might say, well, that's growing up and building serious apps. Maybe. But it doesn't change that I spent the last 15 years doing the same frontend / backend wiring over and over again to churn out a slightly different looking app. The last 2 years have been amazing for what I do. I'm no longer spending my time wiring up front ends. That's done in minutes now, allowing me to spend my time thinking about solving the real problems.
maxfurman 8mo ago
I'll join the chorus of praise for Homeworld. It was a big part of that era for me. I must have spent hours just zooming the camera as close as I could get to all the different ships, or just watching the harvesters do their thing. Almost meditative, looking back. Thank you for casting your spells!
reactordev 8mo ago
Wholeheartedly agree. And you were casting spells at Relic. Bedazzle spells as young gamers played your games and grew up to become artists and engineers… Remember your audience and not just the product. Homeworld shaped me in ways I couldn’t even tell you.
GeoAtreides 8mo ago
Maybe you should disclose you work at an AI startup: "Now building trust infrastructure for AI agents at Mnemom (mnemom.ai)" Casts your comment in a different light, I think.
- soulofmischief 8mo ago
  Appeal to identity. Prejucide and bias. Not considering an enthusiast of a technology might actually want to get paid working with that technology. Shameful comment all around.
  - GeoAtreides 8mo ago
    Disclosing conflicting of interest is standard practice. People writing about economics do disclose when holding relevant shares. In the end, it's a simple question: Are the opinions stated sincere or does the author have a pecuniary interest which might make things a bit more subjective?
    - soulofmischief 8mo ago
      What is the conflict of interest? Guy working for AI company says he likes working with AI?
- alexgarden 8mo ago
  Actually, I don't really work at an AI startup. My day job is investing in cool companies that push the limits across all sorts of industries (space, defense, disaster response, aviation, etc.) In the case of Mnemom, all the passion projects I'm working on hit a brick wall that was hard to get past without reliable alignment tools, which I couldn't find anywhere. After 30 years of being an entrepreneur, it's hard to walk away from an obvious need. Also... regarding disclosure, I put it in my bio. :)
tootie 8mo ago
I'm nigh on 50 and feel very differently. I honestly loved the 2010s and the adoption of frameworks, SaaS, continuous deployment, cloud and even agile. Delivering software felt a lot more professional and less artisan which I really appreciated. I can fondly recall opening 4 ssh windows and running tail -f on every prod server log, but using New Relic or the like is just way, way better. It feels more satisfying to clearly define a feature and deploy it with certainty. It may also be a product of just moving up the seniority ranks and being more exposed to business. All that being said, I think a side effect of being this age is not really enjoying anything as much as I used to. Coding is still fun, but the magic faded a while ago. My oldest kid is applying to college and she loves coding, but I'm nudging her to do either math or engineering because just learning CS doesn't seem like it's going to be as rewarding as it was 25 years ago.

neom 8mo ago

Wow, Alex Garden on Hackernews. Hello fellow canuck. I'm now getting up there, still a few years shy of y'all but not much. I came up through the 90s and early 2000s, all web/linux stuff, irc servers, bash scripts, python, weird php hacks, whatever, I was a kid. I'd lose track of time, It was Monday night after high school then all of a sudden it was Sunday morning and I was talking on irc about the crazy LAMP stack I'd put together. 2am? pfft, what is sleep?! Sadly with very strong dyslexia and dyscalculia, being a real programmer was never in the cards for me, I understood how everything worked, I can explain the whole thing end to end in great depth, but ask me predictably how to do a table in html or some fairly simple CSS, and I'll be there for hours. I'm grateful the rest of my life allowed me to be programmer adjacent and spend so much time around developers, but always a little frustrated I couldn't pick up the hammer myself. These days, I've never been more excited about building. The frustration of being slow with the code is gone. I'm back to creating new, magical things - I'm up at 2 AM again, sitting at my desk in the dark, surrounded by the soft glow of monitors and casting spells.

alexgarden 8mo ago
Go Canada! I personally can't wait to see what happens to the world when all of us find the passion to create again.
zzrrt 8mo ago
Why is your last paragraph nearly identical to the last paragraph you are replying to? It might have been a strange quirk, but there’s also been the suggestion that the post you’re replying to is an imposter, so it gets weirder that you also did that.
- neom 8mo ago
  I thought I was being cute. :) I'm not a bot. I reached out to Alex and he confirmed the original comment was indeed him.

xtracto 8mo ago

Yes yes yes!!! I'm 45 yo. And also started programming quite early around 1988. In my case it was GWBAsic games and then C ModeX and A Later Allegro based games. Things got so boring in the last 15 years, I got some joy in doing AI research (ML, agents, Genetic Algorithms, etc). But now, it's so cool how I can again think about something and build it so easily. I'm really excited of what I can do now. And im ot talking about the next billion dollar startup and whatnot. But the small hacky projects that LLMs made capable.yo build in no time.

dingnuts 8mo ago
[dead]

Lerc 8mo ago

I'm feeling the same. AI development actually feels like a similar rate of change. It took 8 years to go from the Atari 2600 to the Amiga. An 8 year old computer doesn't quite capture the difference today.

anonymous908213 8mo ago

> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned. This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this. It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't it, I don't think. It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years. I formed connections, spent thousands of hours enjoying them together with other people, and pushed myself hard to become one of the top 100 players on the CoH leaderboards. Those competitive multiplayer games taught me everything there was to know about self-improvement, and formed the basis of my growth as an individual - learning that if I put my mind to it, I could be among the best at something, informed my worldview and led me to a life of perpetually pushing myself to further self-improvement, and from there I learned to code, draw, and play music. All of that while being part of amazing communities where I formed friendships that lasted decades. All of this to say, Relic was magic. The work Relic did profoundly impacted my life. I wonder if you really believe your current role, "building trust infrastructure for AI agents", is actually magic? That it's going to profoundly impact the lives of thousands or millions? I'm sorry for the jumbled nature of this post. I am on my phone, so I can't organize my thoughts as well as I would like. I am grateful to you for founding Relic, and this post probably comes off stupidly combative and ungrateful. But I would simply like to pose to you, to have a long think if what you're doing now is really where the magic is. Edit: On further consideration, it's not clear the newly-created account I'm responding to is actually Alex Garden. The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing, but I will nonetheless leave this up in the hope that if there are people who built magical things reading this, regardless of whether they're Alex Garden or someone else, that it might just inspire them to introspection about what building magic means, about the impact software can have on people's lives even if you don't see it, and whether this "agent" stuff is really it.

ineedasername 8mo ago
>The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing Good news! You've also related it to the roughly ~3-10M monthly HN readers who are not (potentially) impersonating the founder of a beloved game studio. Also: I think you're probably safe. I'm sure someone at some point has come to HN to LARP as some prominent person in tech that they don't happen, at that specific moment, to actually be... but I can't really think of it happening before, nor would I expect it to take the form of a particularly thoughtful comment if a troll did that. Though with AI these days, who knows? I might myself just be one of a swarm of clawd/molt/claw things. In which case I'd be the last to even know it. Oh-- as for being depressed about their docker/wiring things up sentiment. Try not to be, and instead, consider: Is it a surprise that someone who founded such a place as relic was occasionally-- even often-- frustrated at the things they had to clear away to build the thing they actually wanted to build? People who want to build amazing experiences may not love having to clear clutter that gets in their way. Other people want to build the tools that clear clutter, or other things that keep the whole system going. Those are beautiful too.

shafoshaf 8mo ago

[55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not knowing if I could even do it. With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

supern0va 8mo ago
>With AI, it is like coding is on GOD mode and sure I can bang out anything I want, but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment. I think it's possible that we'll get to the point where "so can anyone else" becomes true, but it isn't today for most software. There's significant understanding required to ask for the right things and understand whether you're actually getting them. That said, I think the accomplishment comes more so from the shaping of the idea. Even without the typing of code, I think that's where most of the interesting work lies. It's possible that AI develops "taste" such that it can sufficiently do this work, but I'm skeptical it happens in the near term.
- iwontberude 8mo ago
  In my experience, the vast majority of people can't even muster the hubris to think they can understand software at such a basic level, it doesn't matter if GenAI did all the heavy lifting sadly.
strictnein 8mo ago
I think there's still quite a chasm out there. Domain knowledge, an informed and opinionated view on how something should function, and overall tech knowledge are still key. Having those three things continues to greatly differentiate people of equal coding skill, as they always have.
- 4nonverbal-alit 8mo ago

samiv 8mo ago

I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!

moffkalast 8mo ago
Well it's more like employing a gardener makes me enjoy landscaping again. It's not like we ever found writing words on a keyboard all that great, it's fundamentally just about having an idea and turning it into something real.
- zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
  Speak for yourself. I have always loved the act of intentionally typing (converting my thoughts into structured text).
  - moffkalast 8mo ago
    I guess some people enjoy the process, but you can still do that. It's like with machinists and 3D printers, you can always spend 10 hours on the lathe to make something but most of the time it's more practical to just get the part so one can get on with what actually needs doing.
    - chasd00 8mo ago
      > It's like with machinists and 3D printers that's a good analogy, maybe change 3d printers to CNC. I think there's a group of people that derive joy and satisfaction from using the part they designed and there's another that gets satisfaction from producing the part as designed. Same for software, some people are thrilled because they can get the software they imagine while others dread not producing the software people imagine.
mixologic 8mo ago
*I'm so excited about landscape design. Can't wait to do more. Employing a gardener to do the gardening for me is really making me enjoy landscape design again!

HoldOnAMinute 8mo ago

For me it's both - I mourn the loss of my craft ( and my identity ) but I'm also enjoying the "magic". Last night I was thinking about this "xswarm" screen saver I had in 1992 on my DEC Ultrix workstation. I googled for the C source code and found it. I asked Claude to convert it to Java, which it did in a few seconds. I compiled and ran it, and there it was again, like magic

refset 8mo ago
In case anyone else was curious about the screensaver mentioned, I couldn't find any screenshots so just got Claude to cook up an HTML port: https://refset.github.io/xgrav-canvas-js/xgrav.html https://refset.github.io/xgrav-canvas-js/xgrav.html
- HoldOnAMinute 8mo ago
  It's this one with bees and a wasp https://sources.debian.org/src/xlockmore/4.12-4/modes/swarm.c https://sources.debian.org/src/xlockmore/4.12-4/modes/swarm....

iwontberude 8mo ago

Yeah it’s drugs and or religion. Feels pretty good.

mlhpdx 8mo ago

I started a bit younger and am a bit older, and relate. But only so much. I started programming in 3rd grade (also BASIC) when I found a computer and learned how to play a game on it, then found the source code for the game and randomly started changing it. In 7th grade I was paid to port a BASIC program to C (super new at the time), which I did on paper because I didn't own a computer (I used the money to buy my first). To be clear, I was really bad a programming for a long time and simply kept at it until I wasn't. I love messing about with computers still. I can work at the byte level on ESP-32s on tiny little devices, and build massive computation engines at the time time on the same laptop. It's amazing. I feel for those who have lost their love of this space, but I have to be honest: it's not the space that's the problem. Try something new, try something different and difficult or ungainly. Do what you rail against. Explore. That's what it's always been about.

strictnein 8mo ago

In the second half of my 40s now and I'm in the same boat. I started slapping keys on a c64 when I was 2 years old. Really enjoyed software development until 10-15 years ago. With the current LLM tooling available the number of systems I've been able to build that are novel and tackle significant problems has been kind of mind blowing over the past 8 months or so. Staying up late, hacking away at stuff like I used to, and it's been a blast. Finally, Homeworld was awesome and it felt magical playing it.

dirkc 8mo ago

> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned. I still vividly remember setting up gcc in a docker container to cross compile custom firmware for my cannon camera and thinking about the amount of pain my local system would have been in if I had to do all the toolchain work in my host OS. Don't know if it felt like magic, but it sure didn't hurt like the alternative!

alexgarden 8mo ago
For sure. Docker is rad (sorry Docker!)... all I'm saying is that I am not proud of the fact that I can do it and I don't think it moves the awesome needle - but it's still hard to get right and a pain in the ass. It's just an example of something I appreciate that I can automate now.

CoastalCoder 8mo ago

The original Homeworld team was casting spells! I'm still amazed by how you got ships to usually fly in formation, but also behave independently and rationally when that made sense. That game was a magnificent piece of art. It set a unique and immersive vibe on par with the original Tron movie. I'm really glad I have a chance now to tell you.

alexgarden 8mo ago
Thanks... It was magical at the time... I've thought a lot about why it was magical over the years... I think if you boil away all the space stuff, Homeworld was a story about people who knew in their hearts that they were special and destined for something greater than the universe was willing to allow. And they went through hell to discover that they were right. Looking back, I think that's a story a lot of us on this thread (inc. me) can relate to. Here we are. Looks like the dorks won.
- CoastalCoder 8mo ago
  Sounds like there's some overlap with the story of the Jewish people, now that I think of it. > Here we are. Looks like the dorks won. I doubt it's permanent, and we all gotta eat. But you know what? My son still tells me how much he was in awe of that game when he saw me playing it. No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet memory of fun and time together. Thank you.
  - alexgarden 8mo ago
    > No matter what happens next, you gave us that sweet memory of fun and time together. Thank you. ^^ Made my day. Tell your son he's rad.
kinneticslammer 8mo ago
Amen to this. The optimization the team did blows my mind… whenever I think of it I think of if someone made Crysis run on the NES without compromises. The soundtrack was stellar, and introduced me to Barber (Adagio for Strings).

quietsegfault 8mo ago

I'm in my 40s, and I've been involved with computers since I was old enough to read. I was talking to some customers today about how magical it feels to blast past my own limits of my coding abilities with the help of LLMs. It's not perfect, and I mostly won't generate stuff that's a polished, finished product. But when it works, it sparks the same joy that it did when I was discovering the first bits of what computers can do on my Apple ][+.

olegp 8mo ago

I couldn't agree more. Also, thanks for making Homeworld, it was great! I was building a 3D space game engine myself as a kid around the time Homeworld came out and realized that rather than using a skybox with texture maps, you had it created out of a bunch of triangles with color interpolation. IIRC, I had problems reverse engineering your data format in order to incorporate them in my engine. I emailed someone on your team and was very surprised to get a reply with an explanation, which helped me finish that feature.

alexgarden 8mo ago
The skybox with texture maps was our original plan too. The problem was that GPUs didn't have enough RAM to hold anything high-res, so the universe looked like pixel-soup. Rob Cunningham (lead artist) had the idea of "painting with light" using giant polygons and spicing them up with pixels to create a convincing distant galaxy that you got closer to with each mission. Genius.

upmostly 8mo ago

First of all, Homeworld was an iconic game for me growing up, so as other people have said, thank you for being apart of its creation. I could not agree more. It feels like the creativity is back. I grew up building fun little websites in the 90s, building clan websites for Quake 2. That creativity died somewhere between Node.js, AWS, npm, and GitHub. Some might say, well, that's growing up and building serious apps. Maybe. But it doesn't change that I spent the last 15 years doing the same frontend / backend wiring over and over again to churn out a slightly different looking app. The last 2 years have been amazing for what I do. I'm no longer spending my time wiring up front ends. That's done in minutes now, allowing me to spend my time thinking about solving the real problems.

maxfurman 8mo ago

I'll join the chorus of praise for Homeworld. It was a big part of that era for me. I must have spent hours just zooming the camera as close as I could get to all the different ships, or just watching the harvesters do their thing. Almost meditative, looking back. Thank you for casting your spells!

reactordev 8mo ago

Wholeheartedly agree. And you were casting spells at Relic. Bedazzle spells as young gamers played your games and grew up to become artists and engineers… Remember your audience and not just the product. Homeworld shaped me in ways I couldn’t even tell you.

GeoAtreides 8mo ago

Maybe you should disclose you work at an AI startup: "Now building trust infrastructure for AI agents at Mnemom (mnemom.ai)" Casts your comment in a different light, I think.

soulofmischief 8mo ago
Appeal to identity. Prejucide and bias. Not considering an enthusiast of a technology might actually want to get paid working with that technology. Shameful comment all around.
- GeoAtreides 8mo ago
  Disclosing conflicting of interest is standard practice. People writing about economics do disclose when holding relevant shares. In the end, it's a simple question: Are the opinions stated sincere or does the author have a pecuniary interest which might make things a bit more subjective?
  - soulofmischief 8mo ago
    What is the conflict of interest? Guy working for AI company says he likes working with AI?
alexgarden 8mo ago
Actually, I don't really work at an AI startup. My day job is investing in cool companies that push the limits across all sorts of industries (space, defense, disaster response, aviation, etc.) In the case of Mnemom, all the passion projects I'm working on hit a brick wall that was hard to get past without reliable alignment tools, which I couldn't find anywhere. After 30 years of being an entrepreneur, it's hard to walk away from an obvious need. Also... regarding disclosure, I put it in my bio. :)

tootie 8mo ago

I'm nigh on 50 and feel very differently. I honestly loved the 2010s and the adoption of frameworks, SaaS, continuous deployment, cloud and even agile. Delivering software felt a lot more professional and less artisan which I really appreciated. I can fondly recall opening 4 ssh windows and running tail -f on every prod server log, but using New Relic or the like is just way, way better. It feels more satisfying to clearly define a feature and deploy it with certainty. It may also be a product of just moving up the seniority ranks and being more exposed to business. All that being said, I think a side effect of being this age is not really enjoying anything as much as I used to. Coding is still fun, but the magic faded a while ago. My oldest kid is applying to college and she loves coding, but I'm nudging her to do either math or engineering because just learning CS doesn't seem like it's going to be as rewarding as it was 25 years ago.