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Ryan Alban

@dreamofpsy.bsky.social
92 followers 548 following 537 posts

gamedev, tabletop/video games, sailing, miniatures, long walks on the beach

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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
realizing that my problem with the "make it exist first, then good later" advice has always been that I don't see the first, shitty version of a thing as being the same "thing" as the final, polished version, so it feels like I'm not actually making any progress and I'm getting distracted
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I feel like I almost never see graphics programmers here. There were loads of them on Twitter; did they stay there? Where did they all go?
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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Ellis @ellis_ellis_ell
ipads have no soul but desktop computer is like a nervous horse and has the capacity for love

ozempic gandolfini @IdahoBones 
I don't think you should give kids phones or iPads but you should give them free access to a desktop computer
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Playing through Breath of the Wild for the first time is reminding me of how annoying and frustrating and IMO unnecessary most boss fights are. It'd be one thing if (like in earlier Zelda games) the boss fight was the last climactic fight after a sequence of fights that teach me how to beat it,
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
what is C? baby it's UB it's UB all day...
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✪ Beware the Gray Ghost ✪ @jongraywb.blacksky.app · 13/09/2026
I hate how i gotta check shit with a fine toothed comb to make sure that seemingly harmless shit isnt AI
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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
As both an academic and a writer, I am repelled by the "this looks like a long document. Would you like me to summarize it for you?" that seems to appear at the top of every pdf viewer now. NO. The *entire point* of good writing (either books or journal papers) is that every sentence has a purpose.
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Chet Faliszek @chetsucks.com · 03/09/2026
Reading gaming news on my phone My phone heats up I accidentally click two ads, one making me restart reading the article Once I open an ad clicking on X The article itself reloads two times I think there is a middle part I missed because of an ad that moved as I scrolled I gave up Good job!
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Victoria De Capua @victoriadecapua.com · 30/08/2026
I think what pisses me off most about the artificial force to update devices is that it's locking off apps and software I've used for twenty years and claiming I now require better hardware for them.
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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
this wave of AI has legitimately killed a huge part of what I loved about seeing stuff online, what I loved about being an educator, and what I loved about sharing my own work I just don't feel like doing it anymore
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𝙃𝙤𝙢𝙞𝙠𝙖 💫 @vanitys-emptiness.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
On another note, I’ve grown pretty annoyed when folks think since modders can fix bugs that means developers are incompetent. There’s a pretty huge difference between being able to dedicate time to fixing one thing versus being mandated for tasks and fixing things without breaking the entire game.
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
It's the fries going into it rather than it going on top of them, but - soft-serve ice cream
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Oops! All Paperclips @all-paperclips.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Coding will always be hard because you have to know what you want the computer to do.
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Jack Saint @lackingsaint.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
No fuck off we're not calling this "Millennial grey" this shit was dictated completely by boomer retiree house flippers we absolutely had NO say in this
Millennial grey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A kitchen with beige grey floors, drab walls, brushed steel appliances, and grey granite countertops.
Grey floors and furnishings are said to appeal to Millennial tastes.
Millennial grey refers to a desaturated colour scheme that is said to appeal to the interior design sensibilities of the Millennial Generation in the early 21st century.[1] Cultural historian Kassia St. Clair attributed its widespread adoption to a desire among Millennials for "a flexible, sensible choice that will last years, hide any stains, and can be adapted to different schemes."[1] Some have diagnosed Millennial grey as a reaction to the warm hues of the late 20th century.[2]

Millennial grey is polarising, particularly when used with imitation-wood-texture sheet vinyl flooring, which many describe as depressing, soulless, or corporate.[3][4] Although attributed to Millennials, the grey colour scheme is often chosen by house flippers, vacation rental owners, or other people who do not actually live in the greyed properties.[3] Thus, the occupant of the property—Millennial or not—has little say in its colour scheme, particularly when deployed for fixtures such as flooring.[4] The greying may have been driven, in part, by a desire to prepare properties for sale in a manner thought to be least offensive to the average buyer.[5] Given the housing crises gripping many countries in the early to mid-21st century, buyers and renters may feel they have no choice but to accept a property decked in Millennial grey.[4]

To the extent that Millennial grey is said to be enjoyed by Millennials, it is also said to be loathed by Generation Z.[1][2]
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Max! @littlepolygon.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Difference between 'writing code for my game' vs. 'writing code for a library' is cutting-corners with assert(). E.g. my state machine plumbing doesn't need to handle pathological inputs designed to break it; I just assert() those thorny edge-cases don't exist, because they don't.
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
You cannot actually be sure that you fixed a bug unless you understand what was causing it. No, "this pointer was null" is NOT the cause; that is a symptom, please stop adding random null checks everywhere and actually think about what you are doing
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
How do you remember where you left off when you finish some yak shaving? I don't use JIRA or anything at home (the kind of thing which genuinely IS a real help), so I'm literally thinking of having a "yak_shaving.txt" on my desktop with a tree of subtasks that I'm currently working on 😅
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King's Lead Hat @antitechbro.com · 08/07/2026
I always have to remember that when people say "coding" statistically they most likely mean "stuffing an inconsequential feature into an inconsequential web app"
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Someone told me recently that they were using LLMs to generate boilerplate code for a particular framework - it was THEIR framework, that they had control of and could change at will. Why... not simply do that, and make it so you don't need the boilerplate anymore?
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
I don't understand why title bars in modern UIs have so little contrast between selected/unselected. It's bad enough in Win11's light mode that I can't tell the difference between selected/unselected unless I alt-tab and watch the title bar. Surely this violates some kind of accessibility guideline
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Spreadsheets are a gameplay programmer's secret weapon
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
*staring intensely at the cool alien statue* "Bröther, may I have some lööps?"
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
"When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine. This is a basic principle of respect." 👏
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alexvonwitzleben.bsky.social @alexvonwitzleben.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Germany has successfully engineered a revolutionary transparent solar glass that generates clean electricity while remaining completely see-through from both sides, fundamentally transforming how buildings produce energy. #solarpower #ActOnClimate
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Andy Kelly @ultrabrilliant.xyz · 23/06/2026
The perfect weather is 15°C and overcast.
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David Lindsey Pittman @dphrygian.com · 17/06/2026
My most "old man yells at cloud" opinion is that short, replayable, single-player games are good and worth making.
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Sos "Buy Lazy Kickers" Sosowski @sosowski.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
My game isn’t even out yet and it has already been cloned three times.
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
Anyone else think that "skill issue" is actually pretty charitable for a phrase meant to be insulting? Skills can be learned and improved if one cares and puts in the time and effort, so in my mind it's like saying "you're not good at this, but you could be" which is almost encouraging in a way
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Jonathan Edward Durham @thisone0verhere.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
No better feeling than when someone else’s dog or cat picks you to hang out with, and their owner's always all "awww he likes you" and you play it cool like "he probably just smells my dog" but inside you're just absolutely screaming OF COURSE HE LIKES ME I AM THE CHOSEN ONE AND VERY SPECIAL
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Alice Bottino @bottino.games · 08/06/2026
I genuinely do not understand this. How is it that everyone seems to utterly hate programming, and seemingly has fuck-all pride in their work? Sometimes as a programmer I feel like the only person who actually seems to give a shit.....
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
"I've written so much code I don't understand" But that's bad. That's BAD. You understand how that's bad, right? That it IS bad? That you're not actually *supposed* to do that and all the "copy/pasting from StackOveflow" jokes were... jokes? Right?
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
"Stupible" is actually a great one for a person who is normally smart, but can be made to act stupid by pushing the right buttons
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Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 04/06/2026
Hello from #CraftConf Budapest! As always, I'll be doing my best to liveskeet all the talks I attend (until my computer runs out of battery, which happens earlier every year) Keynote speaker: "Slow Down to Speed up", @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com
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~daniel_barker~ @daniel-barker.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Sick of the relentless adult content I see on Bluesky: back pain, interest rates, tax brackets, that noise you make when you stand-up sometimes.
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
This is a whole mindset some people have toward life in general. I'll never forget how someone once told me to my face that spending money on anything you can get for free somehow means that you're stupid. I don't think they would have made exceptions for paying indie game developers
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Increasingly clear to me is the distinction between hobbyists who code because they want something and hobbyists who code because it's fun and they want to make a thing with their own hands
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Megan Fox @glassbottommeg.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
Whole thread good but THIS this is why I won't fucking use AI summaries, coding assistants, none of it. Having something just confidently lie with regularity isn't something I can deal with. If a junior did that? I would fire them. Because that's pathological, and toxic to productivity.
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🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ>∿<ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
claude is literally wrong basically every time I ask a programming question. the pattern for me and claude is 1. hey claude how do you do this 2. claude says something wrong 3. I say that's so fucking wrong because of X 4. claude says "ah yeah you're right that's so fucking wrong because of X"
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Is there a word or succinct term for when you deep-clean something (eg. your keyboard) and for a time afterward, you suddenly start noticing - to the point of distraction - how dirty everyone else's things are?
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
amaze amaze amaze
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
This is yet another reason to prefer making small, atomic changes. The approach some programmers have of "commit everything in my workspace when I get a thing working" rather than putting in the effort to decompose things leads to so many issues getting missed and makes them harder to fix later.
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
I don't understand why there are so many genAI "photos" of Artemis II going around when the actual imagery is easily available and gorgeous. Like, look at this stuff www.nasa.gov/gallery/arte...
nasa.gov
Artemis II Splashdown and Return - NASA
NASA's Orion spacecraft carried Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch from NASA, along with Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen from the CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, California, at 5:07 p.m. PDT, (8:07 p.m. EDT) on Friday, April 10, 2026. The Artemis II test flight launched on Wednesday, April 1, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin its 10-day journey around the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars. NASA’s Landing and Recovery team and the U.S. military coordinated efforts to extract the Artemis II crew from the Orion spacecraft.
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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
I'm moonscrolling
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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 08/04/2026
We don't need to speed up production. We need to slow down. We don't need to write code faster. We need to think through what we write. We've spent decades working to ship faster, and that's landed us in a world of hurt. Build better products, not faster.
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Ólafur Waage @olafurw.com · 06/04/2026
Artemis II today.
scene from lord of the rings
"this is it, if I take one more step it'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been"
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
I had a pleasant dream where I woke up in my bed as usual, but there was a cat
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Eternal Skies TCG RPG @eternalskies.neocities.org · 05/04/2026
I was forever converted to Oxford comma usage by this comic years and years ago.
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Eize Basa @eizebasa.baby · 05/04/2026
“I will NOT sacrifice the Oxford comma. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They assimilate the em dash and we fall back. They capture ‘not just X but y’ and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!”
I know the tweet is Al generated when they use " ," before and.
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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
This is so, so well-articulated.
People call this friction "grunt work." Schwartz uses exactly that phrase, and he's right that LLMs can remove it. What he doesn't say, because he already has decades of hard-won intuition and doesn't need the grunt work anymore, is that for someone who doesn't yet have that intuition, the grunt work is the work. The boring parts and the important parts are tangled together in a way that you can't separate in advance. You don't know which afternoon of debugging was the one that taught you something fundamental about your data until three years later, when you're working on a completely different problem and the insight surfaces. Serendipity doesn't come from efficiency. It comes from spending time in the space where the problem lives, getting your hands dirty, making mistakes that nobody asked you to make and learning things nobody assigned you to learn.
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Ryan Alban @dreamofpsy.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
SPACESHIP
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