“tHe PrOgReSs hAs bEeN iNsAnE”
If you think calling AI users “creators” is bad, then let me remind you it was normalized the moment people called
Steve Jobs the creator of Apple computers and the iPhoneEdison the creator of anything at all. Edison was the first archetypical techbro, and Steve Jobs was the first modern techbro.The “developer” is claude the 14 yr old is just the stooge that paid 9000 dollars for it.
Some random 14yo kid has 9k dollars to spend on Claude code. Fuck my life.
Subscriptions cover vastly more than an equivalent amount of API cost. $9k is probably just a few months of the $200/mo sub
I didn’t have $200/mo at that age either
By 15 I could earn $200/mo after school saying “you want fries with that?” into a microphone and running a cash register for a drive-thru, and that was at $3.35/hr minimum wage. In Florida minimum wage is $15/hr now, so $200/month is less than 2 4 hour after school or one 8 hour weekend shift a week, even after taxes.
The $9K figure, as I read the summary, is total spent by all contributors to the project, and if they manage to develop a full commercial quality port for under $100K they’ve beat what the industry players would spend on developer time for the same job by a wide margin.
Okay
“Even a 14 year old shit coder can use AI to port a console game to PC”
Fuckai: Doesn’t look like anything to me
So the developer is Anthropic 🤷♂️ If I order some specific pizza, am I the cheff who made it?
I mean, if you’re ordering Pepperoni, no…
If you’re ordering a pumpkin curry with sweet corn on feta/pesto base, and your friends don’t vomit when they try it, you just might be the cheff.
the developer is Anthropic
More like the developers are the people whose code Anthropic stole
This reminds me of every other child developer prodigy nonsense story. “I dream in code” or some stupidity.
I often dream about code, but dreaming in code sounds unrealistic.
I dunno, I was completing plenty of functional software projects by the time I was 14. The one I’m most proud of is my rendition of Tetris which ran in real time (i.e. independent of CPU clocks) in 80x40 text mode in DOS. It was comprised mostly of the ASCII bricks and extended characters and included a repeating interlocking background pattern of Tetrads made out of ASCII pipes that took me forever to figure out how to jigsaw together cleanly.
I think those days are pretty far gone, though. Not to be all get-off-my-lawn about it, but I think the kinds of things we were doing back then were a far cry from and significantly more authentic than what most of the current crop of script kiddies are up to.
significantly more authentic than what most of the current crop of script kiddies are up to.
I think it’s just that skript kiddiez theze daze can do somewhat interesting (at least to their peers) stuff, whereas you had to bust ass a whole lot harder just to get Hello World to animate back in the day.
Doesn’t make what they do any less impressive just because it’s easier to do flashier things - the interesting part is always the originality of it, if you’re “in the scene” is this kiddie doing something of their own, or is it just a copy-pasta? Same applies to music, visual arts, literature, etc.
I was always turned off by the “ripoff games” - but, then, back when the Palm Pilot was hot, the top earners in PalmGear H.Q. were all “ripoff games” - so, I guess I just wasn’t serious about being popular / making bank.
i just called out another “developer” for saying they made a program, and then said they had claude code it for them and all they did was “test” it. not a fucking developer if you didn’t write the fucking code. it’s like saying i just came back from a trip to Hawaii and all you did was look at pictures of Hawaii from google image search on your phone
So he is not a developer at all, just a slopmachine prompt writer.
To be fair, the kid is mostly likely tech savy.
The test is in the results - are people happy playing the port? If it “works for them” then, yeah, the kiddiez have done something worthwhile, at least to the happy players.
Does it matter if they wrote it in Rust, or C++, or Assembly, or english language prompts?
A sloperator
We added a child-sized crank to the orphan crushing machine so they can help participate younger than ever!
Rich kid uses parents’ money to hire a company to port the game
hire a company to port the game
Management potential. If they have negotiated / found a clear legal path to at least distribution - if not profit, they’re operating on a higher level than a lot of traditional businesses.
hire a company to port the game
That traditionally implies actual humans.
Anthropic is basically a SaaS provider, in this case selling access to their code generation tool. Like many large SaaS-providers, it’s deeply predatory, deceitful about the capabilities of their products, eager to sell promises it won’t keep to executives who won’t care in the hopes of locking them into using their mediocre platform and eventually charging enough to justify the insane amounts of debt they’re taking on.
So really, it’s more like the kid is using other people’s money to pay for a tool they don’t understand to do a job they’ve never worked in and gets hailed as a genius. They’ll make a great executive some day.
Sure, until next year or nexteryear or however long it takes to make or break a tradition
…or until the AI bubble pops…
It actually has been insane though. I remember as a kid losing my n64 in a flood and waiting months at a time for single bug fixes to pj64 and some other emulator, plus the graphics, audio, and control plugins. Then in recent years while I was too busy with work recomps like ship of harkinian dropped and gave native+ performance on literally any hardware.
Now on top of the existing iffy at best legality we have llm code, but its moving freakishly fast. Literally 2 days before ocarina released I tried it out on one of the myriad forks of the eden switch 1 emulator, and based on the before times I would have said its months away from 80% playable.
Its been 6 days? It started at playable if you are okay with relaunching to clear full screen graphical bugs and just tolerating things like leaves disappearing when you get close to them, or inconsistent fps that capped at maybe 46fps even for people with bleeding edge gpus. Now barring specific gpu issues you can expect fairly consistent 60 frames with some new scene hangups from shaders compiling, and maybe the occasional model flashing white or glow from behind geometry seams for like 1 frame. On a still decent am4 cpu and a 5700xt gpu.
It’s most definitely not just one kid’s multiple ai subscriptions though. Its like 30+ with some of them also having multiple. There are so many forks of forks of the emulators just cherrypicking single bug fixes amongst many that are just ai bullshit that only had the appearance of working under very specific conditions. Currently as the gamer finding which fork gives functional performance on your specific hardware is the hard part, but eventually the working fixes will consolidate on the main forks.
I have a (relatively simple - by design) calendar/scheduling app. It just keeps schedule planning slots for people, they can check their own schedules, my wife can arrange schedules to get coverage, it tracks “vacations” when people aren’t available, etc.
Last night, we decided we needed to track monthly budgets as well as schedles. Literally 4 prompts to Fable 5.2 and I have the monthly budget tracking feature, showing N (N=4 today) categories of budget tracked, against M (M=8) employees each earning different pay rates (3 different rates today) and showing how the budget spends down across the month as each week goes by in all the categories. It has a web interface, can be managed on a phone, it has .pdf outputs with nicely formatted tables. 4 prompts in one night starting after dinner, and I barely paid attention to it as it ran, tested out working after 2 prompts, added the .pdf outputs and reformatted one view with the last 2 prompts.
A new way to look at vibe coding to point out that it isn’t coding.
It’s hiring a company. In the year 2012, you could email someone with a request for something you want made, and if you have money they’ll reply back over network the code you need.
AI companies just tightened that loop. You hired a company to write software for you. That doesn’t make you a developer or a programmer.
I’ve worked with overseas coders since 2012 - Claude is much easier to communicate with, faster and more responsive.
Yeah it’s more like offshoring.
My team has been trying for years to get apps for internal use and we have waited for IT to either buy or make something. One day I just said, “fuck it” and started building the tools we need. I’m not anywhere near done, but the team has started using them, and it’s increasing productivity.
So someone thanked me for coding the tools, and I said, “I’m not really coding. I’m more acting as a product manager. I gathered the requirements from the users, brought it to the developer team, and act as the go between.” I think that’s the best analogy. And like a product manager, I have to take on faith that the devs are doing what I ask without being stupid.
It’s the difference between: wow this 14 year old developed a pc port for ocarina of time
Vs.
Wow this 14 year old spend money to develop a pc port for ocarina of time
Has he not heard of an emulator?
You can just play it on PC, no port needed
(Unless they mean the new one, in which case I’d say, don’t be a pussy and play the old version, getting soft locked in the water temple builds character)
People say shit like this all the time, and it always irritates me.
“We built a house down south.” No you didn’t, you hired a contractor to build a house for you.
AI has certainly made it worse, though. I keep having conversations with people where “I’m writing a novel” somehow turns into “I’m having ChatGPT write me a novel.”
I have an entirely free LLM I regularly run locally on my SteamDeck. I didnt sign a contract for anything, I just downloaded it.
I could power the Deck running the LLM indefinately with maybe $300 worth of solar panels and a camping grade power station.
Now it ain’t nearly as fast as hooking in to an LLM thats being run on a data center, but that’s tool use, not contracting an outside firm.
We can democratize this technology if we want to, we do not have to rely on environmentally destructive, oligarch enriching cloud computing.
Could I ask what model you use locally? I’ve got a bunch of computers and vijia cards and would love to experiment with a local model. I’ve never used the subscription models, but I’d love to play around with something secure and private!
Bazzite -> LM Studio (installed via BoldBrew)
Uh what… model am i on now lol… hold on…
Qwen 3.5 9B DeepSeek v4 Flash by ‘Jackrong’
But yeah generally, Qwen 3 / Qwen 3.5 type models, will work reasonably well and reasonably fast, at 4B or 2B. 9B works if you close basically everything other than LM Studio lol, or, this latest DeepSeek v4 Flash variant is considerably more performant than just standard Qwen 3.5 9B.
But yeah the way Bazzite does LM Studio via BoldBrew, it is at least theoretically reasonably containerized and isolated… not even gonna pretend I am competent enough to give any guarantees there, but also, I don’t think anyone is capable of saying anything LLM related is 100% certainly correctly understood.
Oh uh, yeah, you’re gonna wanna be docked/plugged in to a power source, if you want more than …idk, 0.5 to 1.5 hrs of battery life while the LLM is actively working on something.
Thank you so much for your detailed response! My user tag I don’t remember setting for you proves correct again!
I never ended up picking up a steam deck cuz I don’t leave the house, so I’ll be using a desktop with maybe a 1070 or 2070s maybe? I’ve never tried Bazzite but I’ve got a bunch of different distros on various machines at home. I’ll throw Bazzite on my Medicat drive. Thank you so much again!
YMMV with other hardware, I genuinely have no clue rofl!
Maybe start with 2B… try to work up from there?
Maybe Nvidia cards are just… better generally, due to generally better CUDA support for LLMs than ROCm?
I have no idea!
The Deck uses an AMD APU, RDNA 2, shared LPDDR5 RAM… so… yeah i have no idea how to translate that to a more standard PC set up, in terms of performance expectations. Tooooo many variables.
That sounds like a cool setup, what kinda stuff do you use it for?
See my reply to Rai’s comment!
=D
Slippity sloppity
But it’s also used by actual programmers with strong credentials who seem to actually use them intelligently (e.g Torvalds) which muddies the water a lot for the general public, and allows these people who are basically the programming version of a script kiddie (leveraging powerful tools they barely understand to accomplish things that look impressive on a surface level, and then misrepresenting the results).
For those of you who feel sorry for Nintendo with this situation, I blamed Nintendo. It’s come to the point where they have to realize that PC is a viable platform that they need to utilize instead of avoiding it. When they avoid it and don’t do an official release, this is what they get. Your games on PC are inevitable now with or without you. It’s a reality. Adopt.
If they ported it to PC people like this would just pirate it. There’s no winning.
Not necessarily. Take for example, Gabe Newell’s stance on this.
Newell rejected the industry assumption that people pirate games simply because they refuse to pay. Instead, he noted that many pirates are regular consumers—such as people with expensive gaming PCs and internet plans—who turn to illegal downloads because the official options are inconvenient.
I don’t think the person who spent thousands of dollars to have AI port a game was concerned about convenience.
You’re missing the point. If the game was officially available on PC, released by Nintendo, then this individual would have no reason to do a tool to port it. Game accessibility is one of the biggest reasons people pirate.
i’ve got some bad news for you about console games, then.
That’s why there are no PC developers then?
I’m not saying nobody would buy the PC version. I’m saying the kind of person who spends over 10x what it would have cost to buy a Switch 2 and the game, to have AI port it to PC, doesn’t sound like the kind of person who would have bought the PC version if it existed.
I don’t feel sorry for Nintendo, I think it will be funny when they inevitably take legal action against this ignorant arrogant child. As is tradition.
For what? They’re not emulating the game. They’re not providing game files in any capacity. It’s a tool to recompile a ROM. There’s nothing Nintendo can do about it or they would have done it already.
Well if he’s receiving money from people specifically for this project then at the very least there’s some level of copyright infringement going on. Even if they’re technically “donations”.
Then Nintendo should also go after Anthropic and OpenAI. They’re making money off the AI tools used to create the port that allows this to happen.
The problem is that you can’t just sue toolmakers. All this 14 year old did is created a tool that allows you to make a PC port. He used an AI tool to do this. If you could sue toolmakers, then you could sue Intel for creating a CPU that is used to generate a PC port of the game. A CPU is just another tool afterall.
The donations being received are for the development of a tool. That tool doesn’t pirate anything, doesn’t circumvent anything, doesn’t infringe on any Nintendo properties in and of itself. It doesn’t hack any Nintendo hardware. It doesn’t share copyrighted information.
Nintendo would have a very hard time trying to bring a lawsuit and have legal standing for this issue.
The best thing Nintendo could do is to start officially supporting PC. If they had done this from the beginning, many people would gladly pay for the ability to play the game on PC. I would. Take it from Gabe Newell:
Newell rejected the industry assumption that people pirate games simply because they refuse to pay. Instead, he noted that many pirates are regular consumers—such as people with expensive gaming PCs and internet plans—who turn to illegal downloads because the official options are inconvenient.
no there isn’t, at least not in the slop port itself. do you think the developers of, say, OpenRA are committing copyright infringement against EA? do you think the developers of OpenMW are committing copyright infringement against bethesda and zenimax? of course you don’t.
the copyright infringement is in the LLM that illegally gobbled up public code despite said code’s license. it’s the AI company that is committing crimes.
feel sorry for Nintendo
Who?
what did they get? 5 million units in sales in the first week. The vast majority of the Nintendo audience doesn’t buy gaming PCs. The real problem for Nintendo is something like an R4 cartridge but for the Switch 2
That’s not even an issue for them now with checking unique IDs. They’re just outright banning entire switch 2 consoles that use duplicate unique cartridge IDs which appear after dumping the game data onto a Migswitch cart. They see the same ID in two places at once? That ID is poisoned now. Any time that ID comes online, it bans a console. The fact that they’re doing this and still remaining profitable is a testament to customers blind love for this company’s products.
It has also killed the second hand game market for me regarding switch and switch 2 games.
Must be nice to have a rich parent.
Having had both, poor is better. Money turns people into monsters.
Future dystopia: investing in your own skills is no longer valuable. That kid with rich parents will always be ahead of you.
Bro that’s just how it is to exist now. Though it’s not invaluable to invest in your own skills, but you’ll still always be behind wealthy nepo babies.
Thats the promise of AI. Take skills from people without money and give it to people with money.
Not so future tbh, that already is the case a lot more often than we’d like to admit. Rich parents and parents with good connections are the absolute jackpots you have to land as kid or you’ll be some kind of screwed unless you manage to be incredibly lucky later on.
Yeah, taking AI out of the context of tomato’s comment makes you think it’s not already the case, but it’s been the case since, like, wealth and connections and status became a thing, if not earlier.
Back on topic, I don’t think having real skills that you can leverage without AI is going to completely lock you out of a job or something. For now, it is pretty gloom, but I’m seeing more and more cases in my company where AI leads to nearly catastrophic failures because people use it mindlessly and generate too much busywork of others, who don’t bother checking it that thoroughly, leading to really bad consequences for everyone in a couple of weeks since the slopping commenced.
Of course, it’s happening because the upper-management has been pushing hard for everyone to use AI for everything.
Maybe companies turn away from AI because their average AI user does more harm than good with it. If I can’t have a world where all the tech that’s powering AI goes to something where it actually has benefits (which is a few scientific fields and applications like protein folding or some shit, if that hasn’t been proven wrong, too), I hope I can at least have a world where AI has disappointed the decision makers enough so that it becomes a niche expensive toy for morons with money that are ridiculed and shunned.
I’m not saying that rich people have never had an advantage. I’m saying that the only thing that gives lower income people a little bit of extra advantage is completely lost.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the best programmer in the world. You’re no match to what the rich brat can output.
And currently it doesn’t matter if you’re the best programmer in the world if you can’t find people willing to either work with you or employ you because say you’re poor and have a crappy personality. Or because you’re highly autistic and undiagnosed and people always tried to avoid you and all you ever learned was doing things on your own.
Or you could even possibly be the best programmer in the world if you actually could touch a computer in the first place, sucks that you have to spend your childhood on some cocoa fields.
All your (dormant) skills are nothing without opportunities to actually use them to their fullest and you can only go so far on your own. If you were born into the wrong family (as in wrong economic status) it’s very possible you don’t even have the chance to develop your amazing abilities in the first place, ai or not.
That’s the current dystopia, dawg.
Always has been 🔫 🧑🚀
Being rich is a cheatcode.
That’s not future dystopia. That’s just how it is and how it has always been since capitalism was invented
What future lol. That has been the case for thousands of years. Science, art, philosophy, writing and so on was the thing rich people did for thousands of years. Some peasant’s kid had to work in the fields as soon as he could while the rich people’s kid could get education. This is not something new. The last few hundred years or so is where this wasn’t the case as public education became a thing and people’s standards of living rose enough that kids were not just another pair of hands to help on the farm or around the house.
“Michael Reeves here. Today we’re replacing the brain of this Tesla Cybertruck with a fly brain running on an XBox!”
It says “job and donations” so if we take that at face value it seems to be self-funded whaling.
And a community who are ok with being beta testers
