A good follow-up to this is Frank Cifaldi’s 2019 talk about the NES’s continued usage as a platform. [1]

Or, if you were making a plug-and-play game device in the 2000s, it was often easy to use a clone NES SoC as a foundation.

[1] https://youtu.be/SHw763qRyJ8

I’ve definitely been on teams where they ran the numbers, and found that they were mostly working with smaller containers, and std::vector was the way to go.

If you’re down to that sort of decision-making, you have to measure.

I sometimes wonder if the verbosity gives the LLM more “margin for error” when generating text that passes requirements.

It's simpler. The verbosity, the line of code count, is what has gotten people excited about it. So everyone optimizes for verbosity.

This does not strike me as true at all. Nobody's crowing about the verbosity of their AI-generated code. Rather, it seems to me they're impressed by the functionality or capabilities relative to time/cost.

10 lines of checks per line of actual execution. Anxiety for their stable pay

Of course. Those 10 lines of extra code is that much more tokens every time your agents read and use that section of code. The more blot in the project to more tokens your agents will burn.

Reminds me of a subcontracting agency

Part of me always felt the wacky setting helped with the player’s sense of anticipation.

Or, you’re always learning new things and encountering new elements, be it plot, interactions, or simply exploring. The replayability ends up feeling quite arcade-y too, trying for a particular outcome.

Spector was in his mid-forties when Deus Ex was released, System Shock a few years before that.

I wonder if he’s an exception that proves the rule like you mention, or if his experiences in his youth working on tabletop games contributed to his design sensibilities in the 90s.

It’s also worth noting that the EA studio that makes FIFA has been continuously doing so for over twenty years. It’s not being handed off between studios and rebuild operational expertise over and over.

If anything, FIFA was probably getting an incredible deal from EA given the cost of making AAA games today.

Claire makes a good point about standards improving require people complaining about their faults. Those gripes affect the discourse!