iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

One of many reasons I started an “embellished retro” first person shooter game engine as a passion project: I think it’s ridiculous that players have to sit through long compile times so companies don’t have to provide builds that are ready to go. This Stream review of Borderlands 4 sums it up:

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I heard somewhere long ago that Bing is actually an acronym for “Bing Is Not Google.” And there used to be a time when I would say, “Damn right it isn’t.” But these days? I feel like we can safely joke around that “Gemini Is Not Google” and maybe even have a more impactful point.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Has anyone else been picking up a vibe lately where the questions and comments you get from people make it feel like even side projects are expected to have paying customers? Like if you aren’t doing that, then you’re doing it wrong?

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Just realized that if one catchy slogan sums up so much of what I think about AI it’s this: There is no I in team, but there is an I in AI. On so many levels. So. Many. Levels.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Level design with TrenchBroom, and a custom map baker bakes the map for the engine! Player abilities, enemy behaviors, weapons, etc, are defined with TypeScript files, which support hot reload.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

So, a while back I started working with AI to build a game engine for boomer shooters. Not a one-shot “hey fable make a game” kind of thing. A renderer written in Rust with a curated list of technologies for retro styled FPS. No real content yet. Building features first. And features are landing!

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Lol I burned up so much of my weekly allotment getting Fable’s input on how to improve my workflow setups across my 3 projects, and then when I saw the UI be like “Great news you get Fable for another week!” I was like “FML I burned my usage for invalid reasons.” Oh well. Carrying on.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

A while back, I decided that if a lot of people are using AI to push out of their technical comfort zone and into mine, then I should use it to break out of mine, too. So I started building a game engine, inspired by Quake. One feature at a time. Today was foundations for moving platforms!

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Yeah! I’m building a modern-ish reinterpretation of the Quake engine, as a gift from grown-up me to my inner child (who dabbled with QuakeC a little but didn’t really get the type declaration part of the syntax). So I’m using TypeScript for scripting instead. github.com/majtom2grndc...

github.com

GitHub - majtom2grndctrl/postretro: The first person shooter game engine of your childhood of the future

The first person shooter game engine of your childhood of the future - majtom2grndctrl/postretro

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I mean it really is a lot of ice cream flavors — have they seriously not heard of analysis paralysis?!

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Oh hey that’s kind of on my to do these days too. Like I feel like I need to get my game engine kind of good first, and then develop some good showroom content with it, but I keep finding more fundamentals of the engine to get right first sooo… 🤷🏻‍♂️ Curious about how ATProto goes into a game engine!

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Oh! I just remembered that before, Fable suggested that instead of running my panel of review agents, I just have Fable read the skill and perform the entire review solo. It seemed fine? I want to test that now that it’s back. Would be intriguing if it’s cheaper because it does more in one shot!

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Use it to *evaluate* your workflow. Its capability for reasoning across large context is boggling to me. Today I asked it to tackle a step in my workflow and then it casually pointed out my workflow has a bug that’s been sitting there and other agents haven’t said anything about.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

It’s contingent on the combination of usage and availability of infrastructure. They want to bring it back to more people later, but it depends on variables they don’t own. Their plan was to make it available for two weeks at first, and then they had to pull it within the first week. Awkward.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

I feel like Claude just did that thing Leslie Nielsen did in Airplane where he explains what a hospital is and then says “but that’s not important right now.”

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Reposted by Dan Hiester

Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

journals.sagepub.com

Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms...

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

I think I saw a YouTube video about it somewhere that said the characters all came from the marketing department after the tech was built and the game was deep into development! The devs were like “Talking animals wot?!”

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

I’m pretty sure the YouTube ads algo thinks I’m a woman because I keep watching videos of Nine Inch Noize playing Coachella and now I am even more confused about how our culture encoded gender identity than ever. 😂

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

How would taste fit into this equation? In order to fix Daikatana, AI would have to have really good taste. Unless it’s actually a trap, and merely trying to fix Daikatana automatically means having no taste.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

I know that we truly don’t have any clear definitions of what constitutes AGI, but here’s a random thought: Forget AI that takes everyone’s jobs. What if there was AI that could fix Daikatana? Can Daikatana even be fixed? And if AI could do it, would that mean AGI achieved?

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I think I’m pretty mild mannered about the strength of my opinions nine times out of 10. I think design dot md shows a deep lack of understanding of how the systems we build actually work. Design tokens absolutely should be codified. But they belong in a deterministic system, not probabilistic.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

I’d like to think if I was a staff writer on Bob’s Burgers, I would have pitched Bob doing a special falafel burger called The Straight of Humus

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

I downloaded UT2004 just to be ready!

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Great. Now I almost want to vibe code a video game of a museum heist where you have to steal a thermometer just to tell if you have a fever. The fever symptoms make traversing the museum and evading security more difficult as you progress, but your thermometer keeps saying your temp is normal.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

One unexpected challenge of enshittifcation is I can’t tell if I *still* haven’t had a fever in years or if I actually do have a fever but the last thermometer I bought was simply just unreliable because it’s consumer grade tech, and if I want a good thermometer I need to steal from a museum.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

Depending on who you talk to, Discoteque was the word that crushed U2 in the 90s. 🙃 (I kinda liked it though)

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

Ryan Gosling was on SNL and they didn’t even mention Papyrus or any other typographic trend. I think that settles it. AI has killed design in 2026. #sarcasm

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

I got into quitting ChatGPT for Claude before it went mainstream.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

It really fascinates me that it feels like Q1 modding has held up longer than it has for just about anything ever since. Not sure how much of that is the level editor. Not sure how much of that is QuakeC not needing a compiler. Not sure how much of it is Q3 focusing on DM.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

I briefly caught a glimpse of a post that started “I hate the term vibe coding,” and my brain went straight to imagining John Leguizamo in character as Tybalt, saying: “Vibe coding? Vibe coding. I hate the word. As I hate hell… all AI… and thee.”

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

The ability to create an app, in and of itself, won’t carry the same meaning it used to. What will slowly start to matter: The ability to make complexity feel simple. #SoftwareDevelopment #AI #ProductExperience

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Ngl one of my favorite dumb jokes is to say “I think we’re gonna need a bigger ________.”

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

If you’re a two or three trick pony, and one of those tricks is gatekeeping? AI is gonna eat you alive.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Like, I can kind of sort of get a vision where life works like a free to play video game as long as it isn’t too P2W. Not everyone needs to be a whale. I don’t. But I need to not freeze to death in the winter. So I need electricity. And it needs to be paid for. So. Who has a real plan for this?

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Question for AI abundance type folks: In that vision of the future, where AI and robotics produce almost everything and no jobs exist for humans anymore, how does electricity get paid for? How does it become available to humans who can’t pay for it?

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Yes! I’ve noticed this, too. Nice to hear I’m not the only one seeing it!

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

But you wanna know what feels truly ironic about all of this? The whitepaper that led to the birth of these ADHD simulators was called “Attention Is All You Need.” Is it now? Is it?!

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

In some ways, I feel like LLMs are a thought-provoking simulation of an ADHD brain. They go on tangents. They make random connections between disparate-seeming topics. When I build something involving a sequence of steps, they tend to have a hard time “seeing” the steps—they’re kind of time blind.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

So wait. Disney bought Fox, so Disney owns Family Guy Disney signed a deal with OpenAI letting users user Disney characters in Sora videos But I can’t generate a video of Stewie asking Brian “So how’s that vibe coding going?” because guardrails. Clearly the AI bubble is about to burst. 🙃

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

As someone who was an opinion columnist in college and high school, I am so often profoundly disappointed by men who discuss “politics” as if they’re an “intellectual debate” and not lives on the line. But murder apologists are just a whole other level of wretched.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Lol I’m not sure how, but after a few days of fast and furious vibe coding, Ghostty (terminal emulator that’s engineered to be snappy and lightweight) was taking up over 1gb of RAM. Sometimes life has ways of telling you to take a break, I guess.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

In about 24 hours of vibe coding, my new project went from 3,800 lines of code to 18,000. The question / experiment now is have I done enough due diligence to get architecture contracts written carefully enough for this to hold together as I get closer to the use cases I’m excited about.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

Alright, y’all. I connected Claude to a sandboxed Teamspace in my personal Notion. My emotional support bot can read my todo list, and write notes on tasks. 2026 is gonna get weird.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

I asked Codex CLI, running a max-tier model, to do some web searches on where popular coding agents store their agent rules. I don’t want to approve it crawling the entire web so I’m giving it one-off approvals… but **it just keeps going**. Look, decision making is hard, okay? 🙃

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

I randomly decided to ask ChatGPT to generate an image of what it thinks I look like based on what it knows about me—partially as a test of myself, and seeing how much I’ve shared with it. Here’s the thing: It accurately depicted the hair I *wish* I had. 😂

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Still having weird fun, though. It’s like being an editor helping a junior writer find the better version of a chapter. Never thought I’d say I enjoy refactoring. I swear I’m fun at parties.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Loosely related: Anyway. I’m refactoring my game I vibe coded with Claude Code. It’s definitely gotten me further than I would have gotten on my own! But even as a Rust newbie, I’m still looking at many code decisions and going “this algo is not the best SWE in the room, much less on Earth.”

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

When I see someone say AI consistently”AI writes better code than I do, let’s be real, so I don’t even need to review it,” I feel like they just owned themselves.

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Dan Hiester @majtom2grndctrl.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

“Damnit. I was going to not write Rust. Leave it to typography to be the thing that finally pushes me over the edge into writing some Rust.” 😂

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