Kenney is awesome.

Where's the meltdown?

it was right after he got SLAMMED, and then later he was DESTROYED.

That is breaking corpo face pretty heavily, imo. Starting with "this is bullshit" as a public-facing figure, in response to a very straighforward anti-AI take is about as meltdown as you can expect from a CEO on social media.

You think lashing out and insulting members of the public on social media, who weren’t addressing you at all, is normal CEO behaviour?

It's wild to see the dude who became famous for just making and giving assets away for free, have enough clout to ratio the CEO of Epic. lol.

Can you cite the "lashing out" and "insulting"? It seems to be missing from the screenshot.

Do you not understand that „up yours“ is an insult or are you purposefully trolling?

I don’t know the relationship between the two. It was obviously a harsh response. But it was defending himself as a CEO that apparently is not just a heartless and skillless CEO. If that’s untrue, that’s mostly a separate issue.

But their main point, as I understand, is that the generalising critique of CEOs was missing the point that CEOs who apparently know what they’re talking about can also be pro-AI.

Now I’m anti-AI, but that seems like a meaningful point to make at the moment (although it was done aggressively, as I said).

Honestly, one of the things worrying me at this moment with AI is just how much pro and anti-AI can’t speak the same language any more. And I think this is an example. AI can be good or bad irrespective of whether CEOs psychopaths.

In fact, I worry more so that the anti-AI side is struggling to express our side of things clearly and convincingly. For pro-AI peeps it’s easy. If it does a thing quickly and easily, and that’s your goal, then that’s a win. Talking about quality and the fate of humanity is a different kind of conversation.

With this Twitter exchange, yes CEOs can be psychopaths. But I’m not sure that’s the important point. A world run by Big Corpo is much more psychopathic while there will always be some CEOs in that system who aren’t all bad. Maybe a pedantic point. But in this case, I’m not sure Kenney win the argument, at least not for many of the readers we’d need to convince.

Yea. I’m scared that anti-AI types are losing “the argument” by sometimes being silly or struggling to articulate the big important issues rather than dwelling on smaller easily countered points or points that the world has just moved on from.

I think he was saying "I upped my expectations and so should you".

Kenney the GOAT

He's saying both.

I think Tim is very well aware of the double meaning of his use of “Up yours!” in that context. Both telling Kenny to level up and go fuck themselves at the same time.

That’s a pretty classic way of sneaking that particular phrase in with plausible deniability. Pat Paulsen made it famous.

Ohh! That Kenney! Yeah he is awesome indeed!

Great post, and this especially:

I worry more so that the anti-AI side is struggling to express our side of things clearly and convincingly.

Totally agree. At a certain point, simply calling out slop (deserved though it is) just becomes part of the background noise because it's so commonplace.

It’s the internet; who gives a damn? Once people interact with each other they are on somewhat leveled playing fields. There is nothing special in talking to Sweeney, Musk or even Trump. As long as you don’t say something illegal.

Probably right that no one won any hearts and minds here, both sides of the debate saw the exchange and likely thought they were vindicated.

Always particularly the case in a "micro logging" format.

Good to emphasize "slop" rather than AI, that by volume most AI content inflicted on people is low quality. Likely as much due to the uninspired laziness behind the work as the AI tendencies itself. Turns out when someone barely invests effort, the result is typically crap. Going from a reality where it takes a great deal of passion to start to produce stuff to any casual interest can be manifested in a superficially consistent way results in "slop".

Similar things in artisanal furniture. Artisanal furniture can be supremely interesting, and mass produced stuff is slop. Though at least some of it is quality from a functional perspective, it is pretty much slop from a creative perspective. However there were took the trade as there was more demand than artisans could satisfy because each time consuming piece could only serve one customer. In the digital realm, you can have arbitrarily many customers, so the pressure isn't really there to make compromises for the sake of creative volume.

Tim probably asked an LLM for a clever insult and it spat out a Pat quote.

Another one liner that still stuck with me was, "why spend billions on foreign military dictatorships, when we can use the money to better take care of the one we have at home?" Some things never change.

I write code

Ah of course, now it all makes sense. If you let mentally disabled CEOs create a launcher it will always suck.

Again Steam wins by doing basically nothing.

Tim Sweeney is just mad cause he's discount John Carmack and weeaboo Gabe Newell.

I'm so sick of having to create more and more convincingly nuanced arguments to convince the thickest people that the most obvious shit is a problem. Can't we just start beating them?

Ahh yes of course, as we know cpp is an upgrade and so is 3d. Thats why indie games are doing so well and all the people cofing in cpp like it so much. Anything related to coding was already liie 90% bs and now that 90% is also adapting the newest bs trend while the 10% actually trying to do stuff right is getting fucked.

If he isn't BLASTED, I'm not interested

personally the threshold of my interest varies between TORN TO SHREDS and ATOMIZED TO SMITHEREENS

Especially given the context, "CEO of Epic" is a liability in social media clout.

from closed source to open source

As a wannabe game dev in Godot: it is absolutely insane what Kenney is putting out there for free. They are legends.

tech tree following optimist

Permission to ew?

Do yourself a favor and drop the "wannabe" part of that self identifier. If you're making games, you're a game dev.

Tim Sweeney is a dipshit

I’m totally with you. But I think that’s where we are. As I see it at the moment the big points are

• “safety”, which is a lot like climate change (yay),
• power and wealth concentration, which I’m surprised I don’t hear more about
• enslavement of potentially conscious creatures (again more of a future problem thing but a serious one)
• a human and even spiritual urge to not reduce ourselves to mere operators of machines, which is a pretty basic matter of taste but which gets Amish pretty quickly.

These are all big “what is life about” issues that are just hard to get penetration on. Only the second is material right now. Maybe it’s an issue with today’s society that we’ve forgotten how to talk about these sorts of things. But maybe we’re just wired to jump off of these sorts of cliffs. I don’t know.

I honestly don’t thing this will be the end of humanity. It could be, but I’d bet on some weird future first. Could it be better. Yea. But again, we’re a funny bunch.

It's wild watching people admit they don't have reading comprehension anymore.

Not getting the double meaning of the "up yours" is also wild.

Literacy is dead.

Yeah I don't think that's what "up yours" means in that context.

I, for one, only read tweets if they are EVISCERATED

Wonder how Tim's feeling about the amount of games being decompiled now, assisted by AI.

From closed source to vibe source (it's open if Tim feels else his lawyers will see you in court)

"Up yours?" Why go through all the trouble creating the impression that you're interested in good-faith arguments if you're ending your message with that? What a jerk.

To shreds you say...

That's precisely what stood out to me, as well. Not sure if the double entendre was intended, but the message is clear.

Up yours, too, Tim.

It's hard for me to get past the fact that a person has willfully deferred their creativity and skill to an AI chatbot.

At that point, to me, you become a no talent ass clown.

Okay, assuming your tinfoil hat theory of the secret up yours is true, where's the meltdown?

At least of the folks I know that have gone all-in on GenAI, almost all of them never displayed much creativity in the first place.

One that I at least once had some respect for had walked away from doing any creative work 20 years ago. I frankly had sorted out about a decade ago that he was more "right place right time" than actually knowing his stuff. But he had a fairly common narrative I've heard a few times now: "I walked away from coding years ago, but I'm back in thanks to AI!". There's always good reasons they walked away in the first place that are generally not fixed by embracing AI.

Broadly the GenAI steps on creativitiy and skill by not producing precisely what the content creator wanted, so it favors people who don't really have an opinion on the specifics, and without opnion it's generally pretty flawed premise.

Anyone using it in that manner absolutely means it that way in context. It's a gag that's decades old, a staple of Gen X culture, which is squarely Tim Sweeney.

Have you seriously never seen someone do the 'so up yours!' schtick? Have you managed to never interact with a Gen-Xer in your life?

How great of you to know everything about what everyone else thinks and does.

/GenX

One of my execs played that same card. He wrote hello-world fodder. In the 20th century he claims he used to do more real development, though based on how much he talks out of his ass day to day he has no credibility.

With Sweeney, hard to say. He had interest in the industry before it was an obvious cash grab, though he couldn't acheive a solo project.

Whatever the case, he's probably decades removed from substantive contribution. Epic Games essentially let itself be just 'Fortnite' and as people got over that, that's been pretty rough on his company and likely devastating for his self-image.

Well I only read them if someone is FLAYED ALIVE and CONDEMNED to ETERNAL DAMNATION. Everything else is just weak sauce.

Personally, I am like "get fucked, corp", but I'd never run these vibecoded recomps on my PC, fuck that. Same goes for these vibecoded PS5 emulators that are popping up like crazy.