CIRCLE WITH A DOT

Doesn't this mutant enemy in "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs" (1993) look just like Blanka from "Street Fighter II" (1991)?

#retrogaming #arcade #capcom

Capcom's "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs" (1993) was a very common sight in cafés and arcades when I was a teen. Common enough that, in my mind, it's the archetypal beat 'em up — even though there were many others before it.

But I don't remember being aware there was a related animated series. I guess it never aired in Portugal?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr2iQ96em2w

I have mixed feelings towards arcade beat 'em ups and their two-button control scheme. But this is a good game.

#retrogaming #arcade #capcom

@arroz It is possible for victims to be collaborators at the same time. We have seen this throughout history.

In fact, barely any crime of any significant size is possible without collaboration of a significant part of it's inevitable victims.

@arroz The industry is now so massive that for every engineer that says "no", there are three engineers that will say "yes". And two of those engineers don't yet understand why they should say "no" (they will eventually, when it's too late), and the industry is exploiting this heavily.

But also, we're all on the same boat. Engineers, designers, managers, all are victims.

@arroz To be specific: LLMs can be useful tools, but I look around and everyone is overselling them under the watchful eye of the very same people that *will* take those salaries away.

It's absurd and nauseating.

@arroz Maybe it isn't about saying "no" to management. Nobody's prompting engineers to do the wrong thing. There is no one to say "no" to.

It's the incentives that are in place everywhere. Saying "no" is about fighting against those incentives and that can only be done collectively.

That's why I call it a dystopia, and that's why engineers should at least stop cheering.

They fear they'll lose those salaries if they don't cheer, but that's not true. Silence is safe (yet effective) resistance.

@arroz I don't think this is fixable by complaining about software quality, sadly.

I don't even know if it is fixable at all. But it sure as hell could be slowed down if enough engineers stopped cheering their way to the gallows.

@arroz I think the vast majority of engineers care as much about the "what" as they do about the "how" and will do the right thing when they can.

I'm more optimistic than you on that, maybe.

But the vast majority of engineers *can't*. They must live within the dystopia that the industry has become.

The industry does not care or want people that do the right thing. The industry wants people that helps it meet its goals, and those goals are just: money, and quickly.

@arroz And I think you're right, this is creating a much bigger liability. It's another AI bubble inside the financial AI bubble.

I predict that the burst of that liability bubble is what's going to cause massive destruction of jobs in engineering in the future.

Right now garbage software has value. It provides the appearance of usefulness, creating tokens for VCs to trade, etc.

Once enough garbage exists, value will plummet, wiping out everyone working on those areas of the industry.

@arroz You won't see me disagree on that...

But, outside the Dunning-Kruger crowd that seems to be oozing out of every manhole crack these days, I don't think that has much to do with engineers (dis)liking programming, and a lot to do with the problems being solved.

If you're writing garbage software to solve make-believe problems, why not use a garbage generator?

I think this is one of the big drivers of LLMs among software engineers. Not the only one, bug a big one.

@arroz I know engineers that appear to like writing code for the sake of it (and will often write code that doesn't need writing because of that), and I've known plenty of people in computing that don't enjoy the technical process (and those tend to drift to product).

But I'd say the majority of engineers that "don't like programming" actually don't care about the problems they're solving. Or, often, don't really know whether or not they're soving problems that actually exist.

@arroz It's only a false equivalence if you reduce technical activities in software engineering to the act of programming. Or, if you equate software engineering with the goal, rather than the means.

Never in my life I've felt felt like programming. In fact, I see code as a liability and avoid producing new code as much as possible.

But I've enjoyed writing and debugging code (mostly the latter) many times, when I'm engaged with the problem that I'm trying to solve.

@arroz That's a false dychotomy.

For one, for the most part no one takes "software engineering" at the university. There's much more to computing than producing software, and courses usually reflect this.

Also, what does it mean to like programming?

If you ask a carpenter whether he likes hammering, what do you think the answer would be? How many carpenters do you think wake up in the morning and go to their workshops thinking "I really feel like hammering today"?