2025-12-20 13:41:19
I've assumed for a while that gamers would have mild distaste for genAI material, in the same way that they have distaste for asset store assets and, for some reason, the Unity engine. It turns out that I was wrong - they hate it a lot more than either of those things.
I saw Liz England posted about a market research survey from a reliable vendor, Quantic Foundry, which showed that audiences genuinely loathe the technology. Unsurprisingly, players who care more about story hate it even more than the rest of them. Less than 8% of gamers have any positive feelings toward it at all.
62.7% of the survey respondents have very negative feelings about it. Over 85% of all the respondents had at least some negative feelings about it.
This is wild as hell. GenAI boosters are very common on Reddit, Bluesky, and other platforms where people speculate about What Gamers Want and what the future of game development will be like. As long as these survey numbers hold, I'm going to dismiss that kind of boosterism out of hand, and you should, too. There's no reason to assume that this tech will be the norm going forward for game art, audio, or story. The people who insist the audience will prefer it have no idea what they're talking about.
2025-12-20 07:03:00
The title is poking fun at the type of person at work that implies young people are lazy while doing jack shit too, and I use ‘Boomer’ colloquially, meaning not just the late ones born 1955–1964, but also the some of the early Gen Xers born 1965–1970.
The young people don’t wanna work anymore, huh? You know what makes me not wanna work anymore, too? Shocking behavior of the residual boomers at the workplace. Seems like everyone has some sort of horror story about their coworkers who are close to retirement.
Many outearn the others at work due to seniority, more opportunities to negotiate, or having joined during better conditions ages ago… but now do less than anyone else. E-Mails? Not responding. Calls? Not picking up. Office? Is constantly on a break. It’s often faster to just do it yourself than involve them.
A new way to do things? “We have never done it that way!”
Why do we do it this way? “We have always done it that way!”
New tech? Refusal. “I only have 1-3 years left! Why should I learn that?”
Their memory is bad, so they’ll insist on a topic never having been brought up before. “We’ve never discussed this!” meanwhile, protocol says they agreed to it in the last meeting or even brought it up themselves.
You give them documents to read over, they skip half, then write an angry comment about how that half is missing. Their Word annotations are cryptic. Their angry emails with 50 exclamation points and red and cursive capslock turns out to be because of their own mistake. They won’t apologize, though.
They call you over to solve a tech problem. You see 99 unread emails in their inbox. Next time you talk to them about a topic that was shared via mail, they smile. “Oh I didn’t read any of that. I just deleted it.” They laugh. Okay then.
Good luck getting the boomer to understand absences. You are sick or on vacation and return to missed-but-redirected 10 calls and 5 angry emails that pretend you’re just ignoring them. Meanwhile, they’re ignoring the shared Outlook calendar, your Outlook out-of-office message, your redirected phone number, your Teams status, and your absence note on your office door. But how could they have known, right? It’s your fault.
When they happen to take over your work during your absence, you return to more work than you started with, because half the procedures they took over have some documents missing, deadlines missed or other mistakes and you spend the first day back at work correcting that. But beware of having a simple accidental typo - the boomer will let you know, with the boss in CC.
It’s the 15th of December, 9-10 days until Christmas, 16 days until NYE. While everyone else keeps working and tries to get stuff done before the year ends, the year has already ended for the boomer. “Why are you coming to me with this? It’s literally the end of the year. We should discuss it in January.” Now your shit is stalled because someone doesn’t wanna make a small decision like where and if a specific document should be saved. You wouldn’t even ask if they didn’t insist on micromanaging the place at the weirdest times.
Those types of boomers are also successful in delegating work they don’t want to do. They get others to fix the tech for them, to call the IT department for them, to up- or download and zip or unzip files for them, even to rename files for them. It’s incredible. Things they were doing just fine years ago already. They know how to weaponize incompetence. These are people who once finished degrees or even a doctorate, but now cannot deal with text.
And everyone tiptoes around it. “That’s just how they are! We can’t change them. Just do it for them.”
I understand aging poses challenges and I will experience those too, but not every boomer is that way, and people can do better! I see some smart, engaged, passionate and focused older people at work, too. They’re competent, they aren’t learning to be helpless, they put in the work. They don’t act entitled or like 40 years of work were enough to now free them from all responsibility or scrutiny. If you treat yourself like you’re too old and stupid for everything, it’s going to become true in the worst way. Don’t let yourself get left behind.
I am just so tired, man. I am tired of being overruled and outearned by people who are very openly hostile to work in a way that negatively affects everyone else. And it’s these same people who wanna tell you that the younger generation doesn’t wanna work anymore and that they, of all people, should earn even more. Fuck off, you know this place would be on fire without everyone cleaning up behind you.
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2025-12-20 06:38:40
In 1968, Chilean artist Roberto Matta gave a speech titled The Internal Guerrilla at the Congreso de la Cultura in Havana. It's a speech about art and revolution. Prior to his departure, Matta left with poet Jean Schuster, executor of André Breton's will, a collection of notes titled Infra-réalisme.
For Matta, infrarealism is a defense against alienation.
Alienation is of course at the root of the problems we see today in our digital lives. The discourse surrounding platform decay and the state of the web is a reaction to a new reality: we have built a digital infrastructure hostile to meaningful human development.
We find ourselves at a strange crossroads, where conventional wisdom tells us that the internet is a tool and not an end in itself, but after 2020 something changed. To keep the world running in the wake of the pandemic, the digital sphere took on new responsibilities. Forced to stay away from each other physically, we moved part of our lives online.
Today the consequences of that move continue to be felt, and alienation becomes almost inevitable. In the words of Paul B. Preciado, the individual "is not a physical agent, but a digital consumer, a code, a pixel, a bank account, an address". In technology circles we see appeals to a vintage web, rejection of AI tools and praise for projects that highlight the human aspect of social interactions. We see the defense of free speech and privacy rights and conversations about where we go from here.
With an understanding that alienation comes from the type of work we produce and the form in which we consume it, in Matta's speech we find a reminder to do the kind of work inherent to all of us.
The following is my translation of Roberto Matta's speech The Internal Guerrilla.
A Spanish reproduction appeared in print in Prometeo magazine in 1987. I found a transcription at Mecánica Celeste.
In my opinion, one of the most important topics proposed by this Congress is the one referring to the Integral Development of Humankind. Allow me to expose my views regarding this point, especially in relation to one of its essential aspects: the development of the creative imagination, of an intelligence that builds from poetic imagination, of a subversive imagination, of an erotic imagination also.
I understand that just as Revolution is a collective endeavor on the social plane, it is also a process which must be verified in each individual. For intellectuals and artists, for all people, I consider this personal revolution wholly necessary. Especially so if the intellectual, if the artist, if that person is conscious of belonging to a world which finds itself in the complex stage of building a new social organization, in which the Integral Development has an importance of the first order.
It is not about only being with the revolution, but about being revolutionary. And being revolutionary implies, of course, being free, or consequently fighting for liberty. Just like people free themselves through the fight against political and economic oppression, individuals can only free themselves through the fight against internal tyrannies: hypocrisy and fear. Prejudices, false pretenses, self-criticism, conventional and schematic ideals constitute the invisible (often mercenary) army against which the internal guerrillas set out to defend creative liberty. As with more consciousness there is more light, so too there is more light with more consciousness.
To achieve a cultural revolution there must be a cultural revelation, humankind's possibilities must be seen. A high sense of responsibility does not mean practicing self-censorship systematically. In the field of imagination, one must be brave as in the field of battle. The builders of a new world, in the social sphere as in the cultural, intellectual, and artistic spheres are characterized by generosity, for commitment to their work, but also by defiance, by the capacity to assume, with necessary courage, the risks undertaken by all creators and innovators, by all true revolution.
This problem does not concern the poet exclusively. I think a true person is a poet, an integral person ought to be a poet, because poetry means clinging to more reality, all reality. In the end, an intellectual, an artist, only differentiates themselves from others by their capacity to experience the world more intensely, dealing not only in facts but with imagination also. Stimulating the creative imagination of people, creating conditions for which all have access to true culture (that is, more than accumulating knowledge, but the profound interpretation and appreciation of that knowledge) is the goal of a revolutionary process prolific in its cultural field. A person forged this way will be an integral person, that is to say, a poet, even if their job is not explicitly to write poems.
Art is not a luxury but a necessity, and just like in the social landscape, Revolution confronts new problems and finds new ways to solve them, in the landscape of artistic creation and intellectual labor a truly creative imagination will propose solution to a renewed set of problems, and will find the means of investigation and expression to resolve them.
Art is the desire for what does not exist, and it is also the tool for achieving that desire.
I hope this Congress will not only meet the undeniable need to harbor information and exchange of ideas dear for artists and intellectuals. I hope for more: a discussion on how far we will let our victory over internal guerrillas depend on fruitful development and that an integral person, a poet, a new person, can become reality.
Havana. Congreso de la Cultura. 1968.
La guerrilla interna (PDF)
The Internal Guerrilla (PDF)
2025-12-20 02:00:00
2025 has been a strong and eventful year of progress in LLMs. The following is a list of personally notable and mildly surprising "paradigm changes" - things that altered the landscape and stood out to me conceptually.
At the start of 2025, the LLM production stack in all labs looked something like this:
This was the stable and proven recipe for training a production-grade LLM for a while. In 2025, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerged as the de facto new major stage to add to this mix. By training LLMs against automatically verifiable rewards across a number of environments (e.g. think math/code puzzles), the LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like "reasoning" to humans - they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations and they learn a number of problem solving strategies for going back and forth to figure things out (see DeepSeek R1 paper for examples). These strategies would have been very difficult to achieve in the previous paradigms because it's not clear what the optimal reasoning traces and recoveries look like for the LLM - it has to find what works for it, via the optimization against rewards.
Unlike the SFT and RLHF stage, which are both relatively thin/short stages (minor finetunes computationally), RLVR involves training against objective (non-gameable) reward functions which allows for a lot longer optimization. Running RLVR turned out to offer high capability/$, which gobbled up the compute that was originally intended for pretraining. Therefore, most of the capability progress of 2025 was defined by the LLM labs chewing through the overhang of this new stage and overall we saw ~similar sized LLMs but a lot longer RL runs. Also unique to this new stage, we got a whole new knob (and and associated scaling law) to control capability as a function of test time compute by generating longer reasoning traces and increasing "thinking time". OpenAI o1 (late 2024) was the very first demonstration of an RLVR model, but the o3 release (early 2025) was the obvious point of inflection where you could intuitively feel the difference.
2025 is where I (and I think the rest of the industry also) first started to internalize the "shape" of LLM intelligence in a more intuitive sense. We're not "evolving/growing animals", we are "summoning ghosts". Everything about the LLM stack is different (neural architecture, training data, training algorithms, and especially optimization pressure) so it should be no surprise that we are getting very different entities in the intelligence space, which are inappropriate to think about through an animal lens. Supervision bits-wise, human neural nets are optimized for survival of a tribe in the jungle but LLM neural nets are optimized for imitating humanity's text, collecting rewards in math puzzles, and getting that upvote from a human on the LM Arena. As verifiable domains allow for RLVR, LLMs "spike" in capability in the vicinity of these domains and overall display amusingly jagged performance characteristics - they are at the same time a genius polymath and a confused and cognitively challenged grade schooler, seconds away from getting tricked by a jailbreak to exfiltrate your data.
(human intelligence: blue, AI intelligence: red. I like this version of the meme (I'm sorry I lost the reference to its original post on X) for pointing out that human intelligence is also jagged in its own different way.)
Related to all this is my general apathy and loss of trust in benchmarks in 2025. The core issue is that benchmarks are almost by construction verifiable environments and are therefore immediately susceptible to RLVR and weaker forms of it via synthetic data generation. In the typical benchmaxxing process, teams in LLM labs inevitably construct environments adjacent to little pockets of the embedding space occupied by benchmarks and grow jaggies to cover them. Training on the test set is a new art form.
What does it look like to crush all the benchmarks but still not get AGI?
I have written a lot more on the topic of this section here:
What I find most notable about Cursor (other than its meteoric rise this year) is that it convincingly revealed a new layer of an "LLM app" - people started to talk about "Cursor for X". As I highlighted in my Y Combinator talk this year (transcript and video), LLM apps like Cursor bundle and orchestrate LLM calls for specific verticals:
A lot of chatter has been spent in 2025 on how "thick" this new app layer is. Will the LLM labs capture all applications or are there green pastures for LLM apps? Personally I suspect that LLM labs will trend to graduate the generally capable college student, but LLM apps will organize, finetune and actually animate teams of them into deployed professionals in specific verticals by supplying private data, sensors and actuators and feedback loops.
Claude Code (CC) emerged as the first convincing demonstration of what an LLM Agent looks like - something that in a loopy way strings together tool use and reasoning for extended problem solving. In addition, CC is notable to me in that it runs on your computer and with your private environment, data and context. I think OpenAI got this wrong because they focused their early codex / agent efforts on cloud deployments in containers orchestrated from ChatGPT instead of simply localhost. And while agent swarms running in the cloud feels like the "AGI endgame", we live in an intermediate and slow enough takeoff world of jagged capabilities that it makes more sense to run the agents directly on the developer's computer. Note that the primary distinction that matters is not about where the "AI ops" happen to run (in the cloud, locally or whatever), but about everything else - the already-existing and booted up computer, its installation, context, data, secrets, configuration, and the low-latency interaction. Anthropic got this order of precedence correct and packaged CC into a delightful, minimal CLI form factor that changed what AI looks like - it's not just a website you go to like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer. This is a new, distinct paradigm of interaction with an AI.
2025 is the year that AI crossed a capability threshold necessary to build all kinds of impressive programs simply via English, forgetting that the code even exists. Amusingly, I coined the term "vibe coding" in this shower of thoughts tweet totally oblivious to how far it would go :). With vibe coding, programming is not strictly reserved for highly trained professionals, it is something anyone can do. In this capacity, it is yet another example of what I wrote about in Power to the people: How LLMs flip the script on technology diffusion, on how (in sharp contrast to all other technology so far) regular people benefit a lot more from LLMs compared to professionals, corporations and governments. But not only does vibe coding empower regular people to approach programming, it empowers trained professionals to write a lot more (vibe coded) software that would otherwise never be written. In nanochat, I vibe coded my own custom highly efficient BPE tokenizer in Rust instead of having to adopt existing libraries or learn Rust at that level. I vibe coded many projects this year as quick app demos of something I wanted to exist (e.g. see menugen, llm-council, reader3, HN time capsule). And I've vibe coded entire ephemeral apps just to find a single bug because why not - code is suddenly free, ephemeral, malleable, discardable after single use. Vibe coding will terraform software and alter job descriptions.
Google Gemini Nano banana is one of the most incredible, paradigm-shifting models of 2025. In my world view, LLMs are the next major computing paradigm similar to computers of the 1970s, 80s, etc. Therefore, we are going to see similar kinds of innovations for fundamentally similar kinds of reasons. We're going to see equivalents of personal computing, of microcontrollers (cognitive core), or internet (of agents), etc etc. In particular, in terms of the UIUX, "chatting" with LLMs is a bit like issuing commands to a computer console in the 1980s. Text is the raw/favored data representation for computers (and LLMs), but it is not the favored format for people, especially at the input. People actually dislike reading text - it is slow and effortful. Instead, people love to consume information visually and spatially and this is why the GUI has been invented in traditional computing. In the same way, LLMs should speak to us in our favored format - in images, infographics, slides, whiteboards, animations/videos, web apps, etc. The early and present version of this of course are things like emoji and Markdown, which are ways to "dress up" and lay out text visually for easier consumption with titles, bold, italics, lists, tables, etc. But who is actually going to build the LLM GUI? In this world view, nano banana is a first early hint of what that might look like. And importantly, one notable aspect of it is that it's not just about the image generation itself, it's about the joint capability coming from text generation, image generation and world knowledge, all tangled up in the model weights.
TLDR. 2025 was an exciting and mildly surprising year of LLMs. LLMs are emerging as a new kind of intelligence, simultaneously a lot smarter than I expected and a lot dumber than I expected. In any case they are extremely useful and I don't think the industry has realized anywhere near 10% of their potential even at present capability. Meanwhile, there are so many ideas to try and conceptually the field feels wide open. And as I mentioned on my Dwarkesh pod earlier this year, I simultaneously (and on the surface paradoxically) believe that we will both see rapid and continued progress and that yet there is a lot of work to be done. Strap in.
2025-12-19 12:13:00
Last weekend I was building a mini RSS reader (you know how I do), and in the process I was going through some of the blog posts in my feed. One of them stood out:
This grabbed me particularly because I've been getting into cassette tapes as a hobby, both collecting and creating them. If you read the post you'll see that the tapes were originally released on something called Gemini. I didn't know much about it but I did know I wanted to download those tapes! After a bit of searching I found a Gemini client and was able to download the zip files which had everything I needed to make replicas of the original tapes.
The tapes are fantastic, but this whole event peaked my curiosity about Gemini. The more I learned, the more I liked. It's relatively new, only five or six years old, yet seems to have a small yet steady userbase. I found a better client to use in the terminal and I started exploring some more. Soon I found some gemlog (a micro blog on Gemini) aggregators which let me find some interesting capsules (a website on Gemini). I found one in particular that was really well done: loads of posts, cool links to other pages, and even a photo log! I had to navigate to each photo, press a key to open it, and then choose whether to download it or view it in my default app for viewing photos (Apple Preview in my case).
There was something magical about viewing bits and pieces of this person and their life through text on a screen and images that didn't load directly on the page. Who else knew this capsule existed? How many more people know Gemini exists? A small web floating on the internet with a vibrant set of people just wanting a peaceful existance. That is one of the primary reasons Gemini was created. The founders wanted a text based internet protocol that would let you link out to other pages, similar to HTML, but without CSS and JavaScript. The web had become too noisy and slowly invaded privacy down to the favicon. There were protocols like Gopher, but they had problems that went unsolved since is inception in the early 1990s. A new protocol was needed, and it became Gemini.
While I have become a new fan of Gemini, and will talk more about that soon, it's not the reason of this post. To be frank I don't think that Gemini is a replacement for the web or that it answers every single problem. I don't see myself ditching HTML altogether for something like Gemini. It's not Gemini itself the reason that I write this post, but rather the hope it brings. Gemini exists because a few people said enough is enough with the current state of the internet and did something about it. There were enough people who believed in the same idea and principles that now there is a decent community living on this network. People are sharing their lives, recipes, resources, you name it. It's not full of people who only talk about a niche topic or just talk about Gemini itself. They just use the protocol the way they envisioned the internet to be.
That, is what brings me hope. We don't have to take the abuse of our current internet sitting down. We don't need a VC funded company to build something that "saves us" by moving us to just another mental prison. We, the people, have the power to buid whatever we want. We can control our experience the internet, not the other way around. We can still connect with other people without social media, without noise, and to much surprise, we can do it without HTML.
I hope your main takeaway isn’t some kind of lecture on how you should use the internet and what it should look like. You can do whatever you want. However, if you’re like me, and you feel tired, worn out by the current state of the web, and you want to see a change: it’s already happening. That change starts with you, deciding to do something different, no matter what anyone else thinks.
I know this is a bit weird to make this post on HTML while boasting about another protocol, but I decided it was worth it to communicate the idea. If you're interested in Gemini and want to learn more or even get started, just follow these two steps:
amfora with brew install amfora or one of the many other install methods
amfora gem.stevedylan.dev/gemini-quickstart
I’ll see you in space 🫡
p.s. if you thought this post was about some coding CLI, sorry :)
2025-12-19 11:32:00
Small things that take more conscious thought than they’re given credit for.
Fun little topic to think and write about. Might even make this an ongoing “series.”