> I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself wishing that we, the Western world, were poorer again.
Luxury belief.
Doesn’t it feel a little suspicious that the only people to ever say “we should become poorer” are people from rich countries where even the poor can afford cars and gadgets? Go to the countries actually manufacturing your goods and ask the average factory worker if he wants to be poor and prepare to get flipped off.
On a gdp scale, basically every country on earth is "poorer" than the united states. As you point out, even the poor in America can own cars and tvs and smartphones.
But if you visit any of these other countries you can often be shocked by how much they accomplish with so little. Vastly better standards of customer service, much higher quality public transportation systems, and they often have cheap quality goods and services which compromise in the right areas instead of being so crappy as to basically be a scam
Poorer than average American != poor in 3rd world country.
These words sound similar but mean vastly different things. Poor people in 3rd world countries need more income, not a larger quantity of cheap T shirts.
Car prices are affected by ease of financing and a huge second hand market. The former make it easier to “afford” a fancy vehicle (whether or not you actually afford it is another question) and the later means fierce competition in the lower parts of the market making cheap cars less profitable.
Yeah, this is why neighboring countries never go to war.
If anything, being able to just fly over the ugly parts and arrive directly at your plastic wrapped all inclusive resort is a good way to increase the social divide and drive us closer to a war.
Neighboring countries that trade and are in each other's supply chains + economic zones don't go to war.
See: the US' painful and bizarre attempts at butchering its relationship with Canada. The integration of the two economies means that such ham fisted manoeuvres take money out of people's pockets pretty fast.
In a pre-mass travel world, I can see someone like a certain leader attempting to annex Canada. Now? It's unthinkable. Just saying it causes billions in damage.
This works as long as the leaders strongly favour economic prosperity of their countries. Russia invaded Ukraine, despite that the countries traded a lot, and their supply chains were cross-linked.
Realistically “my website fits in 14kb” is a terrible signal because it is invisible to 99.99% of the population. How many HNers inspect the network usage when loading a random stranger’s website?
Plus, trying to signal your way to societal change can have unintended downsides. It makes you feel you are doing something when you are actually not making any real impact. It attracts the kind of people who care more about signaling the right signals than doing the right thing into your camp.
> This is why almost all applications and websites are slow and terrible these days.
The actual reason is almost always some business bullshit. Advertising trackers, analytics etc. No amount of trying to shave kilobytes off a response can save you if your boss demands you integrate code from a hundred “data partners” and auto play a marketing video.
Blaming bad web performance on programmers not going for the last 1% of optimization is like blaming climate change on Starbucks not using paper straws. More about virtue signaling than addressing the actual problem.
There is something deeply disturbing about your attitude towards making mistake.
You think you shouldn’t give advice because your feedback is not valuable and may even cause your son to give up writing, but you have so far given no reason why AI wouldn’t. From the entire ChatGPT “glazing” accident I can also argue that the AI can also give bad feedback. Heck most mainstream models are fine tuned to sounds like a secretary that never says no.
Sorry if this sounds rude, but it feels like the real reason you ask your son to get AI feedback is to avoid being personally responsible for mistakes. You are not using AI as a tool, you are using it as an scapegoat in case anything goes wrong.
You think the only game you will lose are generic Unity shovelwares when in reality you will also lose good games made by people with good sense in game making but likely not the resources or technical expertise to make their own engines. Think Cities Skylines (Unity, the studio had only a dozen people in total when it released), Dusk (Unity), Undertale (GameMaker), Spelunky (GameMaker)..
Another comparison is game modding which is essentially using the base game as the engine of your modded game. Do you think Team Fortress or Counter Strike or DOTA would have been made if their creators thought they have to build their own game engine?
Lowering the friction to make a game means more games get made. Yes there will be a flood of bad ones, but we get good one too.
Any mature game engine also comes with mature developer tooling. Think profiling, debugging, assets management, map editing etc. That’s a lot of initial hurdles to overcome before you can even start working on your game ideas. For indie / solo developers who tend to be, you know, driven by one’s creative urges, this is not just a huge time sink but also a good way to ruin your motivation by never moving to the part where you get to actually create the game. When your time and energy is constrained you need to choose your battle and for indie developers this often means forgoing the technical part (unless you really need to) and focus more on the game part.
I have seen many people say “there are more games engines written in Rust than games written in Rust” and I wonder if what happened is that the software developers fell for the allure of building their whole stack from scratch and ended up finding out it sucks to actually develop a game for an engine with no tooling and “making an entity inspector that lets you click on an enemy and edit its attributes” isn’t exactly the sexy part of game development.
The trap of "building a game engine" vs "making a game" has existed long before Rust.
When games were really simple, so simple that "making a game" vs "making an engine" had no real difference (say, building a game for 8 bit home computers) then it wasn't a big deal. The concept of "games engine" didn't really exist back then, or was uncommon at least.
But nowadays? A small indie team, or a single dev, are likely to go down the rabbit hole of making their own game engine, forced to solve a lot of problems that are already solved in existing engines, rediscover the wheel, and get frustrated because the step of making the game never actually comes.
I think it makes more sense to use a pre-made engine, unless the game really is so different this isn't an option, or the devs really enjoy making engines (which is valid, and you learn a ton of cool things, but is also a hurdle in the way of actually making a game).
Every games programmer enthusiast I know has a half-made, abandoned, badly performing engine with which they've made a couple of demos or a barely functional unfinished game... (I'm also guilty of this, but given my age, mine was written in C++!).
I doubt the typical Godot Engine user is in that segment of the game industry but the big players in microtransaction ridden “gaming” are definitely very interested.
Luxury belief.
Doesn’t it feel a little suspicious that the only people to ever say “we should become poorer” are people from rich countries where even the poor can afford cars and gadgets? Go to the countries actually manufacturing your goods and ask the average factory worker if he wants to be poor and prepare to get flipped off.