Literally one of the first complaints libs have about Chinese cities is “copy paste skyscrapers everywhere.” They have some variety in parts of the city but most of the residential areas are still “boring” and “homogeneous” and “designed to kill individualism” according to Western internet geniuses.

Minimalism in GUIs, maybe (still, give me CLI any day). But minimalism in housing and infrastructure is absolutely critical and they are absolutely not equal to software. We need to be as efficient as we can because I don’t know if the author has noticed the state of housing in the world. How many more “boring, dull” buildings could be built for the same price? How many more if we copy pasted the same designs instead of demanding everything be unique? (But god forbid they be too different from the existing style or else the NIMBYs protesting minimalist buildings complain about that too.) The people who “prefer” the visually complex building have never been homeless in the back alley of that building before, nor have they ever been priced out of their neighbourhood by gentrification when their boring gray building gets torn down to build the pretty building.

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Sound, not radio, though.

This is where commit based version control can help mitigate the damage or detect it early. The golden rule in AI assistance in programming (if you’re going to use it) is to check the changes to make sure you understand everything before you commit it. If documents had a git-like version control system it would be easier to detect corruption early.

Or just use Markdown files in a git repo IDK

Rebar under the road suggests this is a raised platform. Terrifying.

So instead of seeing an opportunity to do the same, they burned bridges with one of the only companies not locking down their OS?

This would be the ideal end TBH. No warning, no dread, no pain, no suffering, just one instant you’re biology and the next instant you’re physics.

Not really. Proprietary software have just as many if not more vulnerabilities. Linux is just more honest and open about reporting them so it seems like they have more.

You’re welcome 😊

“We’re going back to the four humours theory. George Washington would still be alive if they just bloodlet him some more.”

no u

Very small sample size, but the interiors of the ones near me just look like old buildings assuming they haven’t been renovated. Kind of dated in a cozy nostalgic way, with the occasional bare concrete component. Sometimes has functional limitations compared to brand new interiors (lack of electrical outlets is a common issue), but not due to the brutalism.

Don’t @ me I like brutalism, especially in the middle of the day when the sun’s the brightest. A nice rest for the eyes in a city of flashy reflective shit.

Me me me me me!!! Doesn’t care about Iranians, just that they are getting screwed over.

I’m angry because I fucking know my country is the exact same way.

You know it’s bad when AI slop is calling out your human slop.

TL;DR: A lot of interesting history about Japanese game and console development, some good points about AI in software development, but I’m mainly disappointed in the title and it made me read the article with the wrong lens for way too long. I was eager to learn how specifically Miyamoto managed to jump to mastery in high level software architecture without personally writing code in a time long before generative AI, and it did not deliver on that.

never compiled a line of code

Like, taking high level code and writing out the corresponding executable binary? Unless he works with magnetic core memory, yeah I doubt he ever needs to do that.

I get what the article is saying but this is a weird way to word it.

Miyamoto sat next to programmers and iterated on numbers until the feel was right. The programmers typed. Miyamoto decided what they were typing toward.

[…]

He made them by understanding the machine, the medium, and the human at a level most of his programmers could not reach.

OK but I doubt he has never programmed himself. To be good at doing that probably means he did his fair share of stumbling through mistakes in his own software.

output of a design process that operated above the opcodes and above the data structures, at the level where the whole system coheres or doesn’t.

With the age of the games referenced and the mention of opcodes I assume the “actual” programmers were writing assembly? In that case it does make more sense. He’s probably manually doing a lot of the high level features modern developers now expect to be built into the language. Mad respect.

The industry calls that “design,” and files it in a separate drawer from engineering/coding.

Is that true? That definitely sounds like engineering to me. When I hear “design” I tend to associate it with things like UI mockups in a program like Figma or something. Or in game development, defining the worlds/levels/progression tree.

Level 1: syntax. Loops, types, recursion, the standard stuff. How you write a correct sentence in the language. […]

Level 2: flow. What you do with Level 1. Formally correct and good versus formally correct and terrible. […]

Level 3: architecture. Macro decisions. Full awareness of all the consequences of each call before you make it. Why your node system is trigger-pull-based and not event-pushed. Why your data layer returns synchronously even though everyone expects async. Why you chose a flat table over a pretty schema because the retrieval pattern matters more than the shape. Level 3 is where systems either cohere or silently fall apart two years later, and you usually can’t tell which it is until it’s too late.

[…]

And Level 3 judgment usually grows out of Level 1 time: the architects whose decisions hold up ten years later are, overwhelmingly, people who spent a decade at the keyboard before they stopped needing to. Miyamoto is a genuine exception, not a template.

[…]

Miyamoto operates almost entirely at Level 3. He doesn’t operate at Level 1, he delegates it, and has for nearly fifty years.

Again, the article vaguely implies that he has only ever done level 3 but doesn’t explain further. Nothing so far has explicitly stated he’s never personally written a program other than the title.

The industry lets Miyamoto be a genius. It does not let him be a coder. Those are different containers, and the border between them is patrolled harder than almost any other line in this profession. Designer is allowed to mean taste, vision, intuition, feel. Coder is reserved for the people who type. A definition as narrow as narrow can be. Not architect, not systems thinker, not person-who-decides-what-the-machine-should-do, no. It is: “Person who types”. The entire conceptual territory beyond the keyboard has been recast as “design” and quietly removed from the coding conversation, because coding as a word has been collapsed to its most accidental layer. Philosophically speaking.

Maybe this is different for the game industry but I don’t really hear the term “coder” used that much, as in someone who only writes code with no input on higher level designs. Usually it’s called developer which implies all three levels the article mentions.

The work Miyamoto actually does - the architectural decisions that determine whether the system coheres - has no home inside that definition. So it gets filed under “design,” which is the industry’s word for “important but not coding.”

Again, maybe game development is different, but usually those decisions are lumped in with writing code. The project manager or client don’t really care what the internal architecture is, just that it does the thing it needs to. Design to me is even higher level than that, going into what the application should do, who will use it, and what problems it’s supposed to solve for them.

The article then goes into how the game boy came to be, and for the most part I agree here. Gunpei Yokoi focused on the experience instead of technical specs, which is what consumers actually care about especially for a game console. This is definitely something more people in software development should learn from, because in the end no one cares what kind of technology is behind some application, as long as it does the thing. This is even more true for hardware design which has orders of magnitude longer life cycles for a particular technology, also cost for hardware is directly proportional to how “advanced” the tech is.

The industry’s blindness to Yokoi isn’t an accident. It’s structural. The industry only measures Level 1 reliably and Level 2 occasionally, and has no vocabulary for Level 3 that isn’t vibes. The Yokois and the Miyamotos get classified as “designers” or “visionaries”: nice words, soft words, words that imply they don’t really belong in the engineering conversation… while the Level 1 people who implemented their ideas get the engineer title.

Again, from what I’ve seen they’re definitely seen as part of the engineering conversation.

People thought AI would make Level 1 coders ten times more productive and leave the architects behind. It’s closer to the opposite. AI does a growing slice of the Level 1 work now, and that slice is growing faster than the industry’s ability to readjust to that change. Level 1 coders worry for a reason, and their anger is rational.

I mean, I’ve definitely seen that conversation about development going from writing code to higher level design pretty much as soon as AI coding tools came out. You could even say that’s an embodiment of all programming higher level than assembly, a way to offload low level implementation in favour of higher level “design.” There’s a whole other conversation to be had about whether current AI is “good enough” to actually trust to replace manual writing of code, but I think most people in software development could see from very early on that it won’t be long until AI can code as well as humans.

If you’re a coder reading this and you’re angry, I understand. But the worst thing you can do right now is double down on Level 1 signaling. The LeetCode grinding, the “real engineers do it by hand” posture, the insistence that craft means typing is the direction that gets you nothing, because the machines do that pretty well by now and are going to keep getting better. Sorry.

Probably good advice for most people but just because AI can do it now doesn’t mean we will no longer have any need for level 1 people. I mean, you still have to maintain the programming languages AI uses, sure you can use AI for that too but at some point you still need humans involved for troubleshooting. It will just become a niche and not the default. Take assembly as a parallel. Most people don’t need to write assembly anymore, but every once in a while you still have to go through the assembly the compiler generates and check for things like whether it’s correctly optimizing stuff, using certain hardware acceleration features, etc. Or how processor design is mostly done in HDL nowadays but you still need people to know the actual physics governing the circuits themselves.

IMO, if you find that your calling TRULY IS the manual implementation of algorithms by writing code, I say still pursue that passion. You’ll still be needed and that passion will make you extremely valuable. I think AI can eventually free people from being forced to do that when what they really want to do is higher level design, which I suspect is a good majority of developers. But that only means the people who want to do that can focus more on their specific niche.

Really seems like Deepseek is one of the only vendors actually focusing on performance per unit compute power and not just throwing infinite compute power at the problem. Calling it now, when the bubble bursts they’ll be one of the few to make it out with a usable product.

Everyone asks wherewolf

No one ever asks howwolfdoing

QwQ

From a worldbuilding perspective it fucking sucks. Like if you’re going to build a strawman commie totalitarian state at least make it interesting.