Chris Ammerman

Hobbit tendencies. Indoor enthusiast. Books and games. Tired but not sleepy.

Software architecture. System design. Tidy first. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Humane management. Sustainable business.

Democracy. People before property. Freedom from religion. We're all in this together.

Mostly cis. Probably straight. He/They

Blog: https://whilenotdeadlearn.com

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Last Notes

2026-05-12 21:44:00 UTC

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No matter how many prompt contexts you stack up and fire off in parallel, the machine cannot find truth, cannot do math, cannot know things, or reason.
It's Massively Multiplayer Online Autocomplete.
The fact that the capital and executive class thinks this is sufficient to replace most of the world's knowledge workers tells you all you need to know about how we should be dealing with them, and all of this.

2026-05-12 21:22:49 UTC

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Look, if you tell an LLM it needs 95% confidence, it doesn't know what either "95%" nor "confidence" means. It knows people tend to respond to this kind of direction either by saying "I'm not sure enough because..." or "I'm super confident for these reasons." It has no ability to correctly choose which of those templates it will follow.
Flip a coin. You'll get a reasonable looking sentence back in one of those styles, with a random assortment of reasons that may or may not be rooted in fact.

2026-05-12 21:18:44 UTC

Reading a claude.md and seeing written there many directives like this: "Don't make changes until you have 95% confidence in what you need to build."
This reveals such a profound misunderstanding of how this technology works that I'm speechless. And this is literally what people are trying to build fully-automated "software factories" from.

2026-04-17 15:56:43 UTC

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I deeply apologize, I realize I misread your post, and was too hasty in reacting.

2026-04-17 15:51:39 UTC

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/116420820168955363
There is a frustrating degree of ignorance and credulousness on display from two very prominent mathematicians here: https://mstdn.social/@npub1nf4…nqe4/116420820183042650
It's clear that Baez knows what LLMs are. But he seems surprised that Markov processes produced a proof that doesn't use Markov processes. An LLM wouldn't likely produce a proof that used Markov processes unless humans had written proofs that used Markov processes for similar problems.
#note1vhv…7msd

2026-04-14 00:48:32 UTC

Hey. Nations are made up. Citizenship is made up. Naturalization is made up. We have these things because this is the social contract we grew over hundreds of years.
The idea of an immigrant becoming a citizen is no less legitimate than the idea of someone being born a citizen. They are both and equally legal constructs that exist because things were worse without them.
If an immigrant can be denaturalized, then anyone the government wants to be rid of can be denaturalized.

2026-02-17 06:47:53 UTC

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No, I'm just cynical enough to believe that the capital class is so thirsty to cut programmer payroll that they will make this happen whether it makes sense or not.

2026-02-17 05:38:48 UTC

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The dot com crash did not kill the software industry nor the web.
I think we are heading toward an LLM crash, but, unfortunately, I don't think it will kill this new industrial revolution. Those of us who are yet a ways from retirement are going to have to figure out how to make our way in a new world.

2026-02-17 05:36:43 UTC

I am an atheist, but my "prayer" tonight is that there is room in the world for everyone who wants to make software "with their own hands," so to speak, to make a living from it.

2026-02-09 14:10:50 UTC

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Heh. Sorry to be a weirdo. I was in my feels last night for other reasons. Have followed you I think since the Twitter days, and didn't realize you were following me back till last night.

2026-02-09 07:15:45 UTC

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Thanks. I think they will be okay. They seem to be far wiser than I was at their age.
And thanks for following. I'm so honored to have you. ❤️

2026-02-09 06:20:04 UTC

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I wish I hadn't had to endure the pain, embarrassment, and loneliness that I did in my teens and 20s. But it shaped who I am today. And my life could have gone a lot of other ways that I'd be less proud of than where I am today.
You can't ever truly escape your coulda/shoulda/woulda's. You can wish you'd been started from a different place.
But in the end you are who you are because of where you started & the path you took. If you like who you are, then just be thankful for what got you here.

2026-02-09 06:12:40 UTC

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I want to tell my ~14yo kid to relax, because nothing that happens now is remotely as big a deal as it feels like it is.
But here in sit, in my early 40s. And I regularly remember things that happened in my late teens and early 20s, before I met their mom, my current partner. And those things still seem important, significant, consequential, meaningful.
Even though I didn't continue down the path I thought I was on, that path informed the rest of my journey to now.

2026-02-09 06:07:02 UTC

It is unfair how large our youths loom in our memory, considering how little time we spent there compared to the rest of our lifetimes.

2026-01-08 15:04:54 UTC

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But like I said: they are literally saying obey or die. https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mbw6xnb6lw2l
These are the people that cheered when Trump pardoned people who *attacked and killed cops* on Jan 6.

2026-01-08 14:53:18 UTC

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People are correctly pointing out that what happened to Renee Good, and the justifications being provided, are not new to America. Just new to White America.

2026-01-08 01:11:11 UTC

Republicans are literally out here saying "obey federal agents or die, what's the big deal?" Shitting on the graves of every founding father they enshrine in patriotic mythology.
If this is what Republican voters want then we are truly fucked. It's a declaration of war on individual freedoms in favor of complete and total state power. One of the key things they feared about Communism. A betrayal of everything that the party said they stood for just 25 years ago.

2025-12-15 23:03:37 UTC

I don't know how we ended up in a universe where "Trump Derangement Syndrome" refers to people who don't like Trump, rather than to all the batshit fucking unhinged behavior of all the people that have twisted their souls into pretzels supporting or following him.

2025-12-02 00:38:18 UTC

Please add alt text to your images. I have eyes and they work fine. I have high speed internet. I don't know where the issue is, here, but these images may or may not ever actually load in my Mastodon client, if I wait long enough. In the meantime, I can probably get what I need from alt text *if it were provided*. Instead I'm going to scroll on and probably never come back to this post.
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/115/647/180/572/307/282/original/d715609d83e28b4e.jpeg

2025-10-02 13:42:51 UTC

There is no way around the fact that LLMs are being used as a weapon of class war, and that they are moving us the wrong direction on water and energy.
If you have the choice, I think you should not use them, for those two big reasons.
I understand that because the capital class is currently winning the class war, many people don't have the freedom to choose not to use them. But broadly we should be looking for ways to avoid using them wherever possible.

2025-09-30 19:51:43 UTC

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this is why I have a shower speaker: so I can listen to podcasts and audiobooks in the shower instead of the demon dogs.

2025-09-27 17:58:03 UTC

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This looks cool and I might like to try it out. One thing I might quibble on is that I think the signal bus resources are still functionally singletons. It's just that Godot manages that automatically for you, if I understand correctly.
It is possible to call .duplicate on a resource and have Godot create a second copy in memory... Have you considered the effect of this on the functioning of the signal bus?

2025-09-22 05:21:21 UTC

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To be honest, I've put this off for far too long. My aunt first recommended Discworld to me as a middle-schooler, after getting me started on the Xanth books.
But I'm happy there are still some of these gems waiting for me out there that I haven't experienced yet!

2025-09-22 05:02:07 UTC

I am nearing the end of the third Discworld book, "Equal Rites". It's quite different from the first two books. Kind of shocking how quickly this series pivoted from "farcical light fantasy with lots of silly humor" to "pretty serious fantasy with a healthy dose of wry humor."
From what I've heard, it does go back and forth as the books go on.

2025-09-13 16:53:07 UTC

I am prepared for the possibility that I may be on the wrong side of history when it comes to the practical use and cost efficiency of LLM code generation.
But I am absolutely confident of my position regarding LLMs as climate change accelerator, and a nuclear bomb of class warfare against the working class.

2025-06-19 14:34:32 UTC

LLMs are just another lap in the software race to the bottom. Which itself is just another instance of the capitalist race to the bottom.
I have spent my entire career fighting with organizations that are eager to trade long-term quality for speed at every opportunity. This fight has primarily taken two forms:
1) trying to stop the org from laying a time-delayed trap that will blow up on them later
2) trying to get out of orgs that are pathologically incapable of stopping laying these traps.

2025-06-02 14:25:28 UTC

Me: The best code is the code you don't write.
Devs: {generate code with LLMs}
Me: Not like that.

2025-04-08 11:04:53 UTC

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My family has a couple of the A models and I have an S model. We've been pretty happy with them. It looks like the new models all start at 10" however.
The A models can be a bit underpowered for some games. And if you want to do art, a model that supports the S-Pen is definitely the way to go.
I do find all the Samsung apps to be a little annoying mostly because they nag you to use them sometimes and I don't want to. But you *can* just ignore it all.

2025-03-24 14:21:30 UTC

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I would be wary of the analysis here. I don't have personal experience with most of the people she names. But she's wrong to lump in Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, and The Bulwark.
1) They have always been clear in their branding and content that they are politically conservative.
2) They still today are the loudest conservative voices decrying the Republican party as fascist.
Lumping them in with the rest is not fair or accurate, and undermines the trustworthiness of the whole video.

2025-03-12 00:04:33 UTC

Epiphany of the day: Curiosity is a skill, and also a muscle.

2024-12-03 20:28:15 UTC

When I find myself feeling that urge to tell people on here that their bad takes are bad, rather than just let the stream flow by, I know it's time for a break from social media. 👋

2024-11-29 07:33:55 UTC

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I am almost at the point where I could share some screenshots / clips.
Visuals need love (from a professional, ideally) but the mechanics are starting to stabilize. Now I need to build maps and enemies, spells and equipment, etc
#GameDev #IndieDev #godot

2024-11-29 07:04:03 UTC

Omg. I had been *dreading* trying to figure out how to use a different sprite set for when my player character is facing right vs left. I had no idea how it was going to work, and was worried I was going to have to settle for a messy / duplicative solution.
I finally sat down to figure it out tonight and it only took 5 minutes and worked perfectly the first time! I just needed to define the SpriteFrames resource for each direction and swap them out.
I could scream for joy. 🥲
#gamedev #godot

2024-11-26 16:51:15 UTC

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E.g., the advice everyone gives for "flipping" a scene horizontally.
Flipping the sprite is easy, IF it has no X offset, and all your sprite frames are the same size. (That last is probably good practice anyway TBH, but I had to learn that the hard way.)
Flipping child positions around the X axis is harder. The "best" advice I saw was to Rotate the root node 180-degrees, then Scale.y * -1. Works, but complicates anything else you might want to do with rotation or Y scale.
#gamedev #IndieDev

2024-11-26 16:46:11 UTC

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One frustration about learning #gamedev on your own from reading docs and forums and watching training vids, is that most of the "here's how to solve this" content makes HUGE assumptions. It is usually entry-level solutions that don't scale, and/or close off many other possible future paths for you.
#indiedev #GameDev

2024-11-26 16:01:05 UTC

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What I *want* to do is define some kind of anchor point for the effect which I can place and flip as needed, and just spawn the child scene there when I need it. If it's just one little node, or a Vector2 property, I could live with having as many as I need, and just choose the right one at the right time to use for the spawn.
And maybe that's all I need to do, is just place a couple of Node2Ds and move on.

2024-11-26 15:57:04 UTC

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The thing I'm having a hard time with is that the slash effect needs to be placed slightly differently relative to the player sprite depending on whether the player is standing or ducking. And it also needs to match facing direction.
I've been trying to figure out a good way to do this. The easiest would be to have two effects always in the Player scene tree, and just enable the one I need at the right time. That would definitely work, but feels slightly wasteful/redundant.
#indiedev #gamedev

2024-11-26 15:48:18 UTC

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Velocity, momentum, and gravity were particularly hard to get right. So was jumping. But I've got it all dialed in now and it works *great*. I'm really proud of how good the jump looks and how right it feels. Now it's just a matter of tweaking the variables to get height and distance right.
But what really got me last night was trying to add in an attack slash visual effect with a hitbox. I gave up around 2am and am not sure how to proceed.
#IndieDev #GameDev

2024-11-26 15:46:01 UTC

I stayed up too late last night working on the player motion and attack mechanics in my #IndieDev #gamedev project.
I made a mess of things a while back when I decided I was tired of my Player class being a "god object", and started to modularize things. It took a lot of work but gravity, motion, jumping, attacking, etc., are all modular now and reusable for NPCs.

2024-11-07 18:58:26 UTC

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I am using C#. Had not considered source generators. Have not properly studied what they can do or how to use them. I probably should do that.

2024-11-07 18:26:57 UTC

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I took a shower and had a lightbulb on my "DI within Godot" topic. I think I have a way to satisfy dependencies from the top down, with very little per-dependency-per-component code, and without adopting a full-on IoC container.
Though I reserve the right to do so at a later time. It looks like there are ways I could use a "normal" IoC container orthogonally to Godot's tree composition.
#gamedev

2024-11-07 16:14:53 UTC

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In business programming, this is where dependency injection / service location comes into the picture.
Gameplay ability systems generally give you a service location mechanism to help with this, for finding "abilities". Which is why there's such a pressure in those contexts to Ability-ify All The Things. Which I also don't super like.
It moves you from coding against the problem to mapping your problem into The Model.
#gamedev

2024-11-07 16:06:26 UTC

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Godot (and a lot of Godot developers' advice) really seem to want you to rely on the design-gui-driven composition. But this is punishes you for small components, because of all the "hookup" you need to do. E.g., if I have a velocity component, the number of other components that need a handle on that is large, and setting those all in the UI is beyond tedious. Especially when moving things around causes the settings to get lost.
#gamedev

2024-11-07 16:03:28 UTC

I've been thrashing a lot lately with the architecture for my game.
Started writing in GDScript, but didn't really like how the dynamic/gradual typing was encouraging a lack of discipline in my code. So I've been moving to C#. That's part of the churn.
Another part is I'm trying to figure out how to move code out of my root scene scripts for enemies, npcs, and players. They are too big and complicated. I'm struggling with finding the right patterns for that.
#gamedev

2024-10-04 13:27:07 UTC

One of the reasons for the enthusiasm for AI is because it seems to promise to all the "idea guys" that their ultimate dream is within reach: Freedom from the dreaded reliance on a "technical co-founder" and all that comes with it. One must only speak their unique and beautiful Idea into the machine, and out the other end comes an implementation. Just a little spit and polish, and then ready to sell.

2024-09-16 23:14:11 UTC

My birthday present to myself has arrived.
#indiedev #gamedev
https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/113/149/765/220/252/777/original/74705a4f73f4f18a.jpg