Having worked on an interactive novel in 2012 (NSString and attributes), low level glyphs (API deprecated) on a rogue-like, two chat apps (with markdown support for formatting) in SwiftUI, and an idle game using a mix of iOS tricks but all wrapped in SwiftUI.. I’m going to agree with how I summarized this response: skill issue.
So the author used the latest and greatest development tech to create a unique little demo in their custom language. I'm unsure your point. You know what I don't use to program with anymore? Punch cards and Borland C++. The industry has evolved for better or worse.
No idea what you think you are arguing. Are you in the wrong thread?
I said I don't get why people keep posting essentially vibe coded game clones...
I get bored checking out GitHub projects on HN that are doing absolutely nothing new and are essentially baby projects made by Claude on a weekend, and terribly architected to boot. Cluttering the feed.
No credit for the art direction and inspiration? Brogue?
Or did I miss the attribution?
* Edit: I’m not looking for the downvotes or to stir things up. I’m simply calling out that this is a small niche community we notice these things, we’re very free with our code, and copy is a compliment, but so is attribution.
The author wasn’t so much inspired the by Brogue style, but copied it directly down to the animations and ASCII.
yeah, this is a Brogue-like. I love Brogue and have been inspired by it. XsofY is not an exact clone but I've studied Brogue C source heavily when making this.
most people would name hack (1984) or the fork nethack (1987) as the successor to rogue (1980). brogue (2018) i never heard of till now but probably i aged out by then (aged out of spending many mindless i.e. repetitive hours of fun)
thanks, since i had never heard of it i had to look it up but I guess I misread it, wikipedia says the project was started in 2009, latest version in 2018. I noticed the difference in word between "project started" and "released", i'm growing numb-er, and jumped to a terribly erroneous conclusion. I have been killed by a rattlesnake.
While I can see perhaps a claim of "inspiration", when I put Brogue & this side-by-side, while artistically there is similarity, I wouldn't say "copied".
Brouge isn't the only rouge-like with LoS mechanics.
the lighting effects are very brogue and like nothing I've seen in angband, which is very very barebones ASCII by comparison. brogue-likes push into ANSI art territory with their abuse of terminal formatting.
That startup is going to LOVE you when they need to backfill your position and every potential iOS developer hire runs in the other direction.
* This is coming from someone doing iOS since the store opened in 2008. I've pretty much seen ALL the bad decisions at some point. There are projects I will not take no matter what the pay is.
Keep in mind, you’re claiming to be an experienced mobile (iOS) dev. Your fallback when things don’t work (let’s say, auth) are your years of doing iOS. Fastlane is handy (I don’t use it anymore re: Xcode Cloud) but in the past it still fell victim to Apple Store changes and updates.
Worse is going to be the job listing, no native iOS developer is going to touch it. It’s possible a rn + ts developer might find it an interesting challenge and maybe even have some iOS experience. I guess it all comes down to what the job qualifications are in said listing. But is your startup going to know this when/if they need to do a backfill?
But here’s the caveat to what I said. If the rest of the team you’re working in is also using the same language and maybe has some familiarity in react native it’s probably not so bad and someone can step into your shoes if necessary. Also, if your implementation is fully transparent and this is what the startup paid for, then I’m going to say more power to you, you built them what they needed and you did it your way.
I can’t speak to OS development but industrial coding there’s a lot of experimenting and throw away. You generally don’t write a lot of code for the platform you’re building on (PLCs, automation components). It’s well tested and if it doesn’t hit industry standards (eg. timing, braking) you iterate or start over. At least that was my experience.
When it comes to general software development for customers in the everyday world (phones, computers, web). I often write once for proof, iterate as product requirements becomes clearer/refined, rewrite if necessary (code smell, initial pattern was inefficient for the final outcome).
On a large project, often I’ll touch something I wrote a year ago and realize I’ve evolved the pattern or learned something new in the language/system and I’ll do a little refactor while I’m in there. Even if it’s just code organization for readability.
Before AI there was a general consensus that creative areas (eg. Cities) were becoming a homogenized experience. A Starbuckization if you will. I can’t help but wonder what gets lost when using tools like this.
It's unclear to me whether it will result in more homogeneity, as a result of prompts being a coarse medium that results in the AI choosing what it's seen to fill in the rest, or less homogeneity, as a result of more people with non-mainstream tastes being able to create music aligned with their niche that otherwise wouldn't exist due time/money restrictions. I think the latter seems a bit more likely, but time will tell.
There's not really any need to speculate when this has already played out in other mediums - would you say that the proliferation of LLMs has led to an explosion of novel and interesting works of fiction, or just an explosion of cookie-cutter slop ebooks?
I would say too soon to tell. There has been an uptick in ebook slop, but I'm not sure if it's impacted the homogeneity of literature, because I don't think anyone is reading ai ebooks. It's not enough for it to exist to impact culture, it has to be being consumed.
Music is a uniquely interesting case, since music has a much lower barrier of entry to consume.
My thought to who you replied to exactly. Am I going to invest several days to read an AI slop novel? No. But I will take several minutes to read a blog post and likely have read many that were AI generated or assisted.
If no one is creating new music/styles for the models to steal, you will only get remixes of what already exists. AI is an entropy machine, it sucks all of the energy/momentum out of everything it touches.
Since you get exactly the kind of music you want, I think it leads to extremely small bubbles, which is pretty much the opposite of homogeneity.
For example, I had never heard epic power metal about birds, but with Suno I got exactly what I wanted. Sure, the sound quality (I only used v3.5) could be better and the songs could be longer, but I don’t care, I now have epic songs about my Bourke’s parakeet. However, I’m not pretentious enough to think those songs are interesting to anyone other than my wife and me, hence the smallness of the bubble.
Generating ‘content’ tailored to you and not meant for someone else’s taste.
Human artists need to make money and those who create music for a tiny bubble probably can’t make enough.
So as an artist what do you do? Do you have to create music with mass market appeal from the beginning?
Or do you need to bank on luck that your music for ‘small bubbles’ gets discovered?
Or you have to have clever marketing strategies to get your music in front of more ears to hopefully gain more fans. And create merch, tour etc.
I wonder how all this AI music is going to impact indie artists. Spotify and the likes is just ripping them off and on top of that their music is / has been stolen from these AI data gobblers.
I don’t see how at this stage it can replace human expression though (singing, playing violin, piano, etc) which is very nuanced.
Same with acting… nuanced expressions that matter. I’m not sure AI can replicate the acting skills of Denise Gough (Dedra from Andor) for example… and many others.
But it would be awesome to generate more story lines or episodes from your favourite TV shows, for example shows from over 20 years ago.
Imagine being able to create more episodes of Star Trek TNG or DS9, maintaining the feel of that era without letting someone like Kurtzmann ruin and tell you how new Star Trek should be.
But how do you ensure actors, writers and other creatives from that show will be compensated directly?
Or maybe this will only be possible in a Star Trek like world, where profit uber alles is not the focus anymore.
Different strokes for different folks. You don't need to please everyone, but it helps if you can move 15 million units with three developers. I don't play Candy Crush but yet somehow this little cash cow keeps getting updated and I'm not one of the 2.7 billion downloads!
I hope you're not saying the only possible alternatives are the opposite extremes of Candy Crush or Hollow Knight, though :) I'd feel vaguely insulted.
I did finish Cave Story after all (but maybe today I wouldn't, I no longer have the time or patience).
So many things wrong with this. Reminds me of the Objective-c vs Swift arguments from back in the day. The author mentions the initial release, as someone who held out migrating production apps to Swift until v3 I think we all know early adoption is going to be bumpy.
But as of iOS 15+ SwiftUI is very production ready. I’ve migrated two production applications from UIKit to SwiftUI. These have active users and are available on the App Store.
Bloated? The last migration resulted in 79k new lines of code written and 181k deletions after rewriting 80% of the application.
Photos album works out of the box. If you mean camera then there are some issues depending on your use case. Beauty of SwiftUI is we can wrap UIKit views and interop allowing it to play nicely with other frameworks.
If you’re supporting applications that target the last few iOS versions it’s time to learn the new paradigm. Do yourself a favor but most of all anyone who might inherit your codebase.
I primarily do iOS and iPadOS, but it’s far easier to bridge the gap between all the platforms than the experience I had in the past with UIKit/AppKit. My last MacOS app sadly does not do infinite scrolling.
Off the top of my head, I’d consider the approach. Is it a ScrollView? A LazyVStack? What do your view redraws look like?
Anyone working with Swift Strings back in Swift 1+2 was in for some shockingly bad performance. We adopt, we adapt, and the framework matures.
LazyVStack and ScrollView don't scale (no cell reuse / no unloading). The only option is List which has different behaviors and performance characteristics on macOS including issues with eager rendering
To be fair a LazyVStack handles cell reuse and unloading automatically which is why offscreen content that was previously viewed further back on the list will only maintain the root level state (children in the view hierarchy may and will lose state in order to save memory and energy). How that data is loaded and how you key off Identifiable is also important.
Apple’s own documentation discusses this in detail and for large data sets recommends the Lazy approach. If you’re using List you’re in for some issues.
I’m on a phone which means digging through Apple docs or WWDC-ascii isn’t fun. But for my recent Insta-like infinite feed on iOS this was very helpful:
Also... Funny that I'm getting downvoted for correctly pointing out that LazyVStack doesn't reuse or unload views. It's so obvious that they should, that no one can believe they don't.
There are additional links and details about LazyVStack highlighted in the content. I thought the top level article focused on Lists would be more helpful for you.
I followed those links and it agrees with my initial post that LazyVStack does not reuse or unload, and confirms that the only choice for large data sets is List (focused on iOS)
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