• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • It’s best to have a local copy of package repos with whitelisted libraries, or so I’ve heard. But containers are fine, too. Especially with VSCode .devcointainers, it’s super easy to setup and distribute with the repo, there’s really no reason not to do that.

    The biggest issue here that a lot people don’t realize is Bing AI, it’s insanely easy to poison it’s results, since it summarizes search results. It’s only a matter of time before someone convinces it to start using or adding a typosquatted/malicious library to answers to a common programming question, and it will be a fun times ahead.



  • As someone who works in gamedev, I’m sure that some of the people there are passionate about it and it is gutwrenching to see your work fail so hard. I’m sad for every project that launches after years of work and fails to get any attention or sales, and I’m definitely sure there’s someone losing sleep due to that.

    I never worked in super-large projects, but I did work for a AAA studio and even there, you got people invested into the project.

    From how I’ve seen it, you wouldn’t work in gamedev unless you are passionate about it, because you can get drastically better pay for the same job in other, more business focused, industries. So, if all you cared about is money, you have better options.



  • I think it’s quite the contrary, and AI will actually increase our job security. Because now, you have a lot of people learning to code using AI, and I’ve heard from my friends who was talking to other CTO’s at a conference that they have even discusses whether it’s even worth it to bother with hiring juniors now, because it turned out that a surprisingly large amount of them are in fact just a front-end for ChatGPT.

    Can you eventually get a problem solved by talking to a LLM about it? Sure, but it will take you a lot longer, and you don’t learn much programming skills. It’s basically a lot worse version of copy-pasting code from StackOverflow, because there you can at least be certain that the code you are copying has been reviewed by at least someone, and the explanation isn’t in most cases hallucinated stuff that sounds correct. You also can’t keep asking Stack Overflow to edit your code for your use-case, and have to figure it out yourself.

    But I’m really looking forward to major companies trying to replace programmers with AIs. Google implementing LLMs into search results was my favorite recent trainwreck, and reading articles with the CEO squrming that “We actually have to manually filter the results, because solving the LLM models halucinating turned out to be a really difficult issue”. No shit, it’s almost as if you want factually correct and precise outputs from a statistically-biased but still random generator.

    Please, I want to se a company fire most of their programmers to replace with AI, and watch them burn. Hopefully, it will happen soon.


  • I spent three days trying to get a RaycastCommand (Unity’s jobified raycasts) working to get multiple hits per raycast. Should have been easy, according to the docs:

    The result for a command at index N in the command buffer will be stored at index N * maxHits in the results buffer.

    If maxHits is larger than the actual number of results for the command the result buffer will contain some invalid results which did not hit anything. The first invalid result is identified by the collider being null

    maxHits The maximum number of Colliders the ray can hit

    Well, no. I was getting super weird results and couldn’t get it to work properly. First thing I checked was if I’m getting two+ hits for any of the raycasts, because you simply can’t trust Unity. And I was getting multi hits, but seemingly at random.

    The error? I was sorting the hits by distance using bubblesort, and made a simple error with index in it. Which resulted in me seemingly getting two hits per ray sometimes, but it was just a result for another ray moved there by faulty bubblesort. Because unity actually doesn’t support multiple hits per ray.

    I couldn’t find the original thread about the issue (which was two years old by the time I was dealing with it), which had an amazing reply from Unity:

    I have discussed it with an engineering team, and RaycastCommands don’t support multiple hits because it was difficult to implement. The documentation just doesn’t explains it really well

    The fuck doesn’t explain it very well??? It literally describes a parameter that sets max hits per ray and tells you how to get the multi hits from results…

    Fuck unity :D



  • Whi getting through college, I was always bummed that we have to learn a lot of stuff that seemed super irelevant to my future carreer, while also being annoying. Stuff like prolog, Phyro, Lisp, Assembly, or bunch of obscure math.

    It was only years later when I finally realized why it was important - the school wasn’t for teaching me to be the C#/Java programmer, but it taught me to be A programmer. I can pick up and start successfully writing anything I need, in any language, relatively quickly and without issues, nonmatter whether it’s functional, objective, or wharever style of language, because I’ve very probably already had to deal with, learn, understand and pass exams in language that is similar to it, since college made me learn a language from almost every style or flavor of languages there are.

    I was surprised when I first saw colleagues struggle with picking up languages other than the ones they work in, and that was when I finally realized why and how sneakily did the college make me a universal programmer without me noticing it. And that’s something that’s harder to get when self-taught, because you don’t get exams and it’s easier to miss the point and just skip courses on lisp, prolog or lambda calculus, because it seems irrelevant, but the different point of view and approach used when writing in those languahes is what will teach you the most.



  • How to best approach starting secops in a small indie gamedev studio. We don’t even have a sysadmin, and our boss mostly also does most of our infra together with one of the programmers.

    We would love to start setting up some basic security setup, ideally FOSS based, and while I work there as a programmer, I do have 5 years of experience working as pentester and doing red teamings, so I kind of have an idea about what we could have. But I never did anything from blue team side, and also worked for large corporations, so most of the tools and solutions I’ve encountered are waaay over the budged of 20 man indie gamedev studio.

    How would I even start? Are there any frameworks that would help but arent aimed at large corporations? What of the buzzwords we even need? Do I start with hardening group policies, get rid of local admins, then set up some kind of log management/SIEM, then IDS? And it’s so hard to google for, because every blog post I found is just a disguised ad for a company that does Security as a Service. Why isn’t there some kind of easy 10 step program that would tell you “step 1. Harden configuration. Step 2. Install <one of many security tooling acronyms>.”

    I vaguely know that most of the buzzwords that are thrown around have some dependencies, but what? Does IDS needs logs from SIEM, or is it the other way around? I’m obviously not qualified for this, but i dolid get time to research it, and some DIY attempts is definitely better than having no security in place at all. And, I know very well how to actually hack and test our security setup, so I can at least tell if something I’ve done is shit or useless :D




  • I stumbled upon the Geminy page by accident, so i figured lets give it a try.

    I asked him in czech if he can also generate pictures. He said sure, and gave me examples about what to ask him.

    So I asked him, again in czech, to generate a cat drinking a beer at a party.

    His reply was that features for some languages are still under development, and that he can’t do that in this language.

    So I asked him in english.

    I can’t create images for you yet, but I can still find images from the web.

    Ok, so I asked if he can find me the picture on the web, then.

    I’m sorry, but I can’t provide images of a cat drinking beer. Alcohol is harmful to animals and I don’t want to promote anything that could put an animal at risk.

    Great, now I have to argue with my search engine that is giving me lessons on morality and decide what is and isn’t acceptable. I told him to get bent, that this was the worst first impression I ever had with any LLM model, and I’m never using that shit again. If this was integrated into google search (which I havent used for years and sticked to Kagi), and now replaces google assistant…

    Good, that’s what people get for sticking with google. It brings me joy to see Google dig it’s own grave with such success.