IMO it’s sloppy, or at least a code smell, to be merging changes that still have comments like that into commercial software main branches to begin with. But it’s still not a security issue or anything like that.

The future engineer who picks up whatever ticket that’s referenced is going to have no idea that comment exists in that file unless it’s called out in the ticket anyway, or people just know to globally search for references to whatever ticket they picked up in a given day for some person’s old notes. At that point, just share a source code line link in the ticket to however many lines of code are relevant. Quite irritating to see an old comment in the code saying something like “TODO: Remove once PROJ-1234 is done” and PROJ-1234 was marked done three years ago. Does it still need to go? Why was it left in?

It’s client code, nothing there is secret. It’s served to you on a platter. Minifying is just to shrink it. Obfuscation is security theater.

Kenshi is maybe the only game I’ve played where the more I played, the more I was like “What the fuck shit hole have I been dropped into. What happened here.” And that feeling only increased the more of the world I explored.

“AAHGH WHAT IS THIS LASER BEAM”

“AAHGH WHAT ARE THESE THINGS”

“AAHGH WHY ARE THERE CANNIBALS EVERYWHERE”

“AAHGH THE RAIN HURTS WHY IS THERE PAIN RAIN”

The thing is, what they’re doing isn’t technically criminal. It just violates the terms of use of most social media sites and apps.

But since the total sample size is much smaller due to language categorization, review bombing is much, much easier and impactful when it does hapoen for the speakers of the language the bombing is targeted at.

A sucker is born every minute.

The problem they describe will self-correct; the “market” will drive that. But it might not be pretty. The things below are already happening, but will be further instigated:

New AAA non-franchise titles will be less common because return is less likely amongst the sea of new games coming out. Investors will continue to gamble on them, but they’ll be fewer and further between.

Mid-budget AA games not in a niche will disappear. You’ll still have your city builders, your milsim squad shooters, your competitive RTS games, but you won’t be seeing many new AA action platformers, multiplayer CoD style shooters, block puzzlers, adventure RPGs, etc. They’ll either be bare budget / indie or mega budget.

You’ll see dev cost continue to be driven down to mitigate this risk, making quality suffer. Asset flips, AI, and outsourcing will increase for most studios that don’t get recurring revenue from live service games.

Indies will continue to be random breakout hits, but their studios will die fast because followups to their breakouts often drown in the sea too.

Being an employee in the industry will probably mean jumping from company to company where you might only stick around for 1 - 2 titles before a major layoff. Contracting will get more common.

If EA weren’t already so bloated and full of suits, I might imagine this would allow them to pump the brakes on their scummy moneymaking policies like the other publicly traded corps.

Currency is just a debt marker. Person from 3000BC watches their friend’s kids for a bit while thet go on a hunt. Gives em an IOU, maybe it’s some fun looking shells. The markers evolved over time for convenience and counterfeit prevention.

Ever had an “AI” show up at 2AM on an emergency call to fix a gas leak? How about an “AI” to cook a breakfast sandwich? Maybe an “AI” is taking over babysitting while you’re out of town…? No?

“AI” doesn’t do anything. But if your job primarily revolves around words or pictures on a screen, maybe “AI” can help you with that.

Wall hacks could be defeated by the server only reporting the positional information about enemy players to game clients when it detects that the client player’s camera should be able to see some part of the other player’s silhouette. This is possible, albeit computationally expensive, but the main functional issue is latency. Nobody wants enemies magically popping into view when their view changes quickly because their ping was more than 6ms lol

Microsoft is getting out of the games business.

“You got a pay cut!”

Well no shit, they don’t care if they get fuckin stabbed

Ever been to a beach? Lingerie everywhere! /s

They can’t read your mind. A professional painter is going to make the exact image they want in far less time and with more accuracy than repeatedly prompting a black box to make small changes.

But if you’re an amateur and don’t really know what you want, or you’re not very picky or care about quality, then meh good enough. High level software developers know what they want. They are like painters. And at that point, the LLM isn’t really solving problems for you. At best, it’s putting the paint to the canvas. That is, saving you typing time.

But time spent typing is definitely not the limiting factor for productivity in software.

Using generative AI to replace toil and not the creative human process is fine imo. Even doing something like generating visual things, to me, is OK if it’s driven by real creative intent and doesn’t result in something that looks low quality. But it’s not very simple to get output that you can tweak in fine ways to get predictable changes based on specific creative intent - human language is not descriptive enough to really capture that. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is accurate. You’re also shooting yourself in the foot when you end up with a ton of assets or systems that you don’t have fine control over because you can’t do something simple like tweak a layer of an image because what you got at the end of the day was just a raster output from a black box.

He brought an antipasto salad and everything too 💔

Unless you’re a sociopath, like many CEOs.

You’re magnitudes more likely to lose an arm operating a lathe or cutting wood professionally than pushing paper in a camo outfit, which is what over half of US military personnel actually do all day.