He absolutely was not. The first Sonic game involving American developers was Sonic 2 on Genesis (developed at Sega Technical Institute with a combined American and Japanese crew), and he did not work on that game.
I find it interesting how you take your experience and generalize it by saying "you" instead of "I". This is how I read your post:
> I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. I don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where I'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If I have a half an hour, I tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then I continue when I have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because I can't make myself stop.)
Reading it like this makes it obvious to me that what you find fun is not necessarily what other people find fun. Which shouldn't come as a surprise. Describing your experience and preferences as something more is where the water starts getting muddy.
I didn't "create" the pissing contest, I merely pointed it out in someone else's drivel.
And of course, these labels are important to me for (precise) language defines the boundaries of my world; coder vs. non-coder, medico vs. quack, writer vs. analphabet, truth vs. lie, etc. Elementary.
I find it quite interesting that you categorize non-coders the same as quacks, analphabets, and lies.
I would never consider myself a coder - though I can and have written quite a lot of code over the years - because it has always been a means to the ends for me. I don't particularly enjoy writing code. Programming isn't a passion. I can and have built working programs without a line of copy and pasted code off stack overflow or using an LLM. Because I needed to to solve a problem.
But there are things I would call myself, things I do and enjoy and am good at. But I wouldn't position people who can't do those things as being the same as a quack.
You also claim to not be the one that started the pissing contest, but you called someone who claims to have written plenty of code themselves a coding-illiterate just because now they'd rather use an LLM than do it themselves. I suppose you could claim they are lying about it, or some no true scottsman type argument, but that seems silly.
You basically took some people talking about their own opinions on what they find enjoyable, and saying that AI-driven coding scratches that itch for them even more than writing code itself does, and then began to be quite hostile towards them with boatloads of denigrating language and derision.
> "I find it quite interesting that you categorize non-coders the same as quacks, analphabets, and lies."
I categorized them not as "the same", but as examples of concept-delineating polar opposites. This as answer to somebody who essentially trotted out the "but they're just labels!1!!" line, which was already considered intellectually lazy before it was turned into a sad meme by people who married their bongs back in the 90s.
> "I would never consider myself a coder - though I can and have written quite a lot of code over the years [...]"
Good for you. A coder, to me, is simply somebody who can produce working programs on their own and has the neccessary occupational (self-) respect. This fans out into several degrees of capabilities, of course.
> "[...] but you called someone who claims to have written plenty of code themselves a coding-illiterate just because now they'd rather use an LLM than do it themselves. "
No. I simply answered this one question:
> “If I’m not the man who can [...] build working programs… WHO AM I?”
Aside from that I reflected on an insulting(ly daft) but extremely common attitude amongst sloperators, especially on parasocial media platforms:
> "As it turns out, writing code isn’t super useful."
Imagine I go to some other SIG to say shit like this: As it turns out, [reading and writing words/playing or operating an instrument or tool/drawing/calculating/...] isn’t "super useful". Suckers!
I'd expect to get properly mocked and then banned.
> "You basically took some people talking about their own opinions on what they find enjoyable, [...]"
Congratulations, you're just the next strawmen salesman. For the last time, bambini: I don't care if this guy uses LLMs and enjoys it... for that was never the focus of my argument at all.
I guess this is very geographic dependent. I live in a country where only maybe 80% of merchants accept Visa/Mastercard (and thus only those can accept Google/Apple Pay) so I need to either carry a card for our domestic payment card infrastructure–or carry cash in order to be able to transact with any shops.
My first name is "Save" in Spanish and Portuguese, and apparently people think they are saving documents when they send them to that gmail address. I have received medical records, employment documents, so many photos, insurance information, you name it.
"Sorry Timmy, I know you're hungry but giving you a school lunch portion would actually be a false solution. It would do nothing to fix the neglect you experience at home, especially over weekends and summers."
"It's not that I don't want kids fed, I would just rather that kids go hungry than feeding them with the inefficient and corrupt system that I imagined."
If we're doing this, let's look at the other extreme as well: We give all people, including children, nothing as they are expected to take responsibility for themselves. No education, no services, no law enforcement, no roads, nothing at all.
These are both obviously silly examples. The 'Where do we draw the line?!' answer can in this case be answered with 'On the side that feeds hungry children'.
> If we're doing this, let's look at the other extreme as well: We give all people, including children, nothing as they are expected to take responsibility for themselves. No education, no services, no law enforcement, no roads, nothing at all.
In that case, people will always self-organise such structures anyway. Even amongst the most failed of the failed states, eventually you will end up with at least someone claiming to be the chief law enforcer (of whatever kind), someone to look after the kids (i.e. education) while the rest works to provide for food, and some sort of fire brigade.
It will just be many orders of magnitude more inefficient than what a large government that governs more than a few dozen to hundred people can establish.
You know, we say “don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good” a lot for technical problems but it’s far more critical here. A child from a failing home has a lot of problems and it often takes a long time to solve them, but we can for a trivial amount of money ensure that child isn’t malnourished because they get breakfast, lunch, and in many Title 1 schools, dinner. Many of the other problems of poverty, neglect, or abuse are much harder to solve – e.g. sending a child to foster care might be the solution for abuse but it’s slow and has plenty of risks of its own – but this one is easy and cheap to fix while we work on the hard problems.
Of course that is not all, how on earth did you get that impression?
Doing something to address a problem doesn't imply that nothing else will be done and that this one thing is expected to solve the problem entirely. I didn't think this needed explaining.
