u/TrrrustRacer

all three happened in the last few days and i keep thinking about them together

first, the studio behind Party Animals ran a $75k AI video contest, got review bombed instantly, issued an apology. they said they "hoped AI could be a more accessible tool." the reviews are still bad

second, Amazon had a studio pivot an entire game away from something the team was excited about to make it "more AI." then laid the whole team off anyway. so the pivot wasn't even about the product, it was about optics or cost cutting or both

third, Garry Newman's s&box is actively suppressing AI generated content and straight up admitting their steam reviews aren't great partly because of it. a creator who built his career on user generated content is now distinguishing between human UGC and AI UGC and penalizing the latter

and meanwhile over 7,300 steam games disclosed AI content in early 2026. double what it was in 2024

here's what bothers me about this sub specifically. we talk a lot about AI as a tool for indie devs to punch above their weight, ship faster, do more with less. and i genuinely believe that use case is real and valuable

but the market signal from players is pretty clear right now. they can tell. and they don't like it. not because the assets look bad necessarily but because something feels off and they've learned to associate that feeling with AI slop

so i'm genuinely asking, are we building tools that empower developers or are we building the infrastructure for the next wave of steam shovelware. and is there a version of this where the answer isn't both

finishing up my junior year CE. love the program overall but something's been bothering me more and more

we spend a huge chunk of time on x86 architecture. like a serious portion of the curriculum is built around it. meanwhile the actual industry in 2026 is ARM everywhere phones, laptops, servers, apple silicon, and now apparently 90% of AI server custom chips by 2029. RISC-V is picking up serious momentum in embedded and academic research. and we're spending weeks on x86 because that's what the textbooks were written around

same thing with embedded systems. we're doing projects on hardware that nobody ships anymore. not for depth or fundamentals, just because the labs haven't been updated

i get that fundamentals matter. i'm not saying skip theory. but there's a difference between teaching you how to think about architecture and just teaching you the specific architecture that happened to dominate in 2005

talked to a professor about it and got the "fundamentals transfer" answer which is true but also feels like a way of not updating the curriculum

curious if other CE students are seeing the same thing at their schools or if this is just my program. and for people further along did the x86 heavy curriculum actually matter once you were working or did you relearn everything on the job anyway

not talking about people who have everything booked. talking about the times you landed somewhere and realized you winged it a bit too hard

had this happen in lisbon last year. flew in, had a hotel, had literally nothing else. stood outside the airport for probably 20 minutes just staring at my phone not knowing where to even start. ended up just picking a direction and walking which turned out fine but the first hour was weirdly paralyzing

curious what other people do in that moment. do you have a default first move. coffee somewhere and regroup. find a local sim. just walk. sit in the airport and finally plan. ask someone

feels like nobody talks about this part of travel but it happens to almost everyone at least once

i'll start

ctrl + shift + t in any browser reopens the last closed tab. most people either don't know this or forget it exists and spend 30 seconds digging through history every single time

also windows + v instead of ctrl + v opens clipboard history on windows 11. you can paste anything you copied in the last few hours not just the last thing. genuinely changed how i work and i only found out about it by accident

and on iphone if you hold down the spacebar it turns the keyboard into a trackpad so you can move your cursor precisely instead of trying to tap between letters like an animal

none of these are new but i've shown all three to people who use computers every single day and gotten genuine shock reactions every time

what are the ones you use constantly that feel like a secret