The problem is that they aren't reinventing emacs.
The first person that makes emacs for the hoi polloi will suck up all the emacs people as well just based on interop frustrations.
I still can't believe that after seeing how slack just released irc for grandma's and pointy haired bosses that no one has done the same for a sensible defaults for normies emacs.
Yes! An honest to God, real, opinionated distribution of Emacs, with only curated packages with rules and regression testing actually enforced by the package managers. That would be neat.
Great write up. Love to see more of this topic on Hacker News! We've been building in this exact space since 2023, though we jumped directly into 3D with real-time multiplayer from the start.
My take: The "not a game" positioning feels like surrendering before the real design challenge begins. With our first experiment (Retail Mage [1]), we deliberately created a hybrid between traditional game structure and AI improvisation. We released it precisely because we were getting similar feedback from folks that an early implementation was too open ended and didn't "feel like a game." While I think we proved our point, we also learned a lot (including some mistakes we made).
That said, I _also_ think we can build _more than games_ with this technology. I think we’re edging into a new genre or medium: more improvisational and participatory than either traditional games or film. Structure still matters in this space, though. Without it you're really in the fanfic engine or writing assistant space. That’s fine! But it's a different goal.
Honestly, I'm very interested in this space. I was just speaking on a panel about this Monday at GamesBeat in LA and a few of us have a new podcast about this topic "Playing With Inference" [2] with folks like Nick from AI Dungeon as guests.
Last year, my startup launched Retail Mage as our first answer to the question of if there was any point in introducing ML/GenAI into the real-time gameplay loop. I hope this to be the first of a series of articles on what we learned.
Some other highlights, specific to the Hacker News folks:
- We have our own AI backend, running in AWS.
- Costs were a major issue and we did a lot to lower it
- We use a hybrid approach of mixing traditional game AI with machine learning
- We have not just AI NPCs, but an AI world interaction model
When I look back at it, Dugin was right back in November:
"So we have won. That is decisive. The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy."
Dugin wasn’t exaggerating when he said, “We have won.”
Today’s White House display is exactly what he meant. A decade ago, the GOP would’ve never echoed Russian talking points. Now, they’re openly aligning with them.
This isn’t just isolationism—it’s the dismantling of U.S. hegemony from within.
I've been turning my attention to cold war and post-cold war Russia, their espionage, writing and interviews from various defectors, and generally trying to understand if talk of Russian influence is overblown.
It seemed very conspiratorial on its surface. I'm now fairly convinced that the Russians have been refining their espionage for generations, the USA is likely full of agents in all places of society.
Somewhat frighteningly, they anticipated the need to subvert any notions of this occurring, and very explicitly set out on a campaign to destroy trust and truth in US society such that when people began claiming Russia was infiltrating the country, it would just sound like conspiratorial nonsense. You can find plenty of references to this type of initiative going back 50 years at least.
The idea, ultimately, is to get the USA to destroy itself, as you mentioned. The dismantling of democracy in particular is a major accomplishment. Once that trust is eroded, every American's most immediate enemy is another American. Who cares about Russians when you've got neighbours like these, right?
It's hard not to see what's happening as a major victory for Russia. Did they actually orchestrate it? How much? I have no idea. Maybe only slightly, maybe a lot. Regardless, they're celebrating today.
They (Russia) have lost big time, because their goal was total annexation of the country in a couple of weeks. Now they got a unified Europe and Ukraine which is much stronger. Finland in NATO, and other things not to their liking. Not to mention a bunch of young and old people going back from front and causing chaos.
It is funny how they switched their narrative from “we are fighting US and NATO” to “US will do business with us and the war is with Ukraine”.
Finland and Sweden in NATO is a huge setback, but they'll probably get Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia, plus a guarantee against Ukraine joining NATO. This is not a great outcome for Russia, but it's certainly better than a NATO Ukraine and a second Euromaidan in Red Square next year, which was probably the alternative on offer.
Also, it seems likely that Russia will get the dismantlement of NATO as part of the outcome of the war, and that would be a great outcome for them. Will Sweden and Finland remain in a mutual defense pact with France, Germany, and the UK after NATO ends? It's up in the air. But in any case invading Russia from Sweden is vastly less feasible than invading Russia from Ukraine.
I think by 'we' Dugin meant 'anti-globalists', not Russia. There are pro-globalists in Russia and anti-globalists outside of Russia, so one doesn't equal the other.
These are the FP8 distilled versions of DeepSeek we've started testing at Jam & Tea.
We use LLMs for real-time gameplay. We released Retail Mage last year on Steam as a tech demo of what we can do. We've found FP8 to be the current sweet spot for accuracy and performance for our use case. It's one of the many techniques we applied last year to bring our real-time inference costs down by 3 orders of magnitude to make Retail Mage releasable.
Anyway, we're just sharing this with anyone who finds it useful.
You can read a few more note by our ML engineer, Yudi, on LinkedIn here:
Everything swatcoder suggested in his comment is good. I just want to add/emphasize:
If you don't actively stay up with the tech, your understanding will atrophy. Consequently, because you intend to remain a PM, your tech will never be as strong as someone who is dedicated to it and you need to be okay with that.
Another classic example for this are engineering managers: people management (like project/product management) is its own discipline with a deep set of skills, research, training, etc. To become a good EM means you _will_ sacrifice some of your technical edge. That "deep technical understanding" that good EM's maintain is built on a foundation of years as a practitioner and, even then, requires continual investment.
I don't mean to discourage you, I just want to ensure you have realistic expectations.
Given all that and given your goals, I think you should just ask yourself a question only you can answer: how do you best learn?
If that's in the classroom, then go get that masters (online or in person). If that's with hands on projects, then set aside time for tinkering and get going. Likewise with books, videos, meet-ups, etc. You know what motivates you and what techniques keep you focused (because you'll need that discipline).
Regardless, I wish you luck and enjoy the journey!
> If you don't actively stay up with the tech, your understanding will atrophy
Ex-tech turned PM here. This is totally accurate. But as you say, don’t be discouraged. When I was a tech, if my PM had taken the time to learn anything I would have been ecstatic.
My advice: learn at home. Set up some VMs and watch some YouTube. Install some things. Whatever field you’re in, install it. Play with it. Honestly that’ll put you well above your peers.
Other excellent advice in this thread re: going to meetups, conferences etc. Just absorb stuff. It takes a while but it’ll sink in.
I mean, just knowing what half the terms mean is half the battle...
- I had 10+ years of experience in linux/unix development
- Career change to AAA game development which is predominantly Windows based
- Day to day do Unreal C++ developing in Windows with Windows toolchains
- Still use WSL (and thus bash) for everything else, including DevOps related work, cloud/container development work, and personal notetaking/productivity via emacs+org-mode.
So, some of us have reasons to co-exist in multiple OS's. I tend to write up scripts in Python if I can so that there's at least a chance that I can run them in both Windows + Unix environments.
I feel similarly - I first learned about the shell with Linux and all my career has been with Linux, but at home I use Windows. I am making an effort to be better at PowerShell but if I just want to do something quickly, I already know how to do it with bash and I just want to get on with my day.
gnu and emacs already have a long history of cli and text friendly solutions that LLM dev agents can easily use and are trained on.
Or for structured data, just use a database. Dev agents can work with SQL just fine.