It's funny how people feel the need to repeat that last mantra. Kind of similar to the "listening to audiobooks is reading" crowd.
Compare two high schoolers: one who vibe codes a game in English and generates the graphics with Nano Banana; vs one who actually learns how to program and draw to make the game.
Are they doing the same kind of activity? Getting the same kind of cognitive development out of it?
Is this supposed to be an implicit dig at audiobooks? The scientific consensus seems to be that there's no difference to comprehension or retention.
I wouldn't trust that "scientific consensus" if my life dependent on it.
For starters, there's no scientific consensus.
The linked post refers to merely 2 studies, both of doubtful quality. And one says "it's no different", the other says it's worse.
The one that says "it's no different" asked them to read/listen to mere two chapters of total ~ 3000 words.
That's a Substack essay or New Yorker article level, not a book, and only of one text type (non-fiction historical account. How does it translate to literature, technical, theoritical, philosophical, and so on?). The test to check retention was multiple choice - not qualitative comprehension. And several other issues besides.
And on the other study in the post, the audio group performed much worse.
You’re focusing only on the results, and not the difference in cognitive function necessary to achieve those results.
An illiterate person can “read” an audiobook.
Just like a person that knows zero about coding could (theoretically) vibe code a program with similar/same results.
So yes, if you focus 100% on only the results, then it could be argued they’re the same.
But the OP is saying there’s more to doing something than just the results.
As for theater plays, attending a live performance with actors is fundamentally different from reading the script.
Everyone is definitely different in terms of how they learn best. That's not to say that listening to non-fiction is or isn't better for oneself than nothing, or even different forms of music may be different. There's nothing wrong with entertainment or factual knowledge... (See "Fat Electrician" on YouTube/Pepperbox for a lot of both.)
There doesn't need to be an implicit dig; audiobooks are explicitly a different medium, and in the Marshall McLuhan sense obviously thus impact comprehension, retention, and the overall grok.
Who cares as long as the game is good? There is no inherent moral value in the how with artistic creation. What matters is the end result.
And if people are happy with what they produce, who am I to judge them? I will happily give my opinion on the game but the act of creation is them.
Same with audiobook. You are adding value judgment where there doesn't need to be one. Is the Odyssey less significant because it used to be an oral story?
Calculators make calculation much easier, but people doing math with them lose a sizable part of their mathematic skills.
To the point of kids not being able to do a simple addition or multiplication or percentage calculation (never mind division) with a calculator, even when someone used to pen and paper can trivially doing with just their mind.
Definitely not, but one activity isn't necessarily better than the other. A carpenter and an architect don't do the same activities either.
With regular programming, you have a full specification of the program (the code) and it gets turned into an executable. When you want to change some behavior, you change the code parts that relate to the behavior and the whole thing is compiled again.
With agentic programming, there’s no full spec, no “codebase in English”. You write instructions but they are discarded as soon as you close your session, and what’s left is this lower level thing (the code written in a traditional programming language).
It’s almost like a difference between declarative and imperative paradigm for the process of creating software.
So many of us growing up at that time were inspired by Adams. I think he quite literally is responsible for a huge number of people becoming programmers and game designers. I was lucky enough a few years ago to be able to thank him personally for what he did for me as a kid. He was very gracious and humbly admitted that he gets that a lot.
Playing games back then was a wildly different experience; pre-internet, there was no way to find hints. You'd come to a wall, somehow, and be stuck. I never got to the end of Raaka-Tu, or Madness and the Minotaur, or Bedlam. I wasn't even ten-years-old, and those games were an impossible undertaking.
That said, in 2021, finally got to the end of the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath, and killed the final wizard. I was absurdly pleased with myself that day. That goddamn wizard had been a regret-tinged concern of mine for 39 years.
After a number of very frustrating experiences I ended up buying this. For example, in the Sierra Online game "Dark Crystal", i was absolutely stuck in one spot (ruining my enjoyment of the full game) where I needed to "LISTEN BROOK".
There was another game, (Mad Venture), where I needed to read the book so I could do "THROW DOLL".
In case you didn't know Dungeons of Daggorath (1982) for the Radio Shack Color Computer featured significantly in the best-selling sci-fi book "Ready Player One" (although it was not an element in movie). https://readyplayerone.fandom.com/wiki/Dungeons_of_Daggorath
I got my Color Computer in 1982 and banged my head on Daggorath for many hours. Randomly reading Ready Player One in 2012 was surreal. There were so many impossibly obscure references to esoteric 80s computer and arcade trivia that was personally very significant to me - but to almost no one else - it felt like I was being punked by someone that knew me. And the more I read, the more bizarre coincidences kept piling up - from Daggorath on the Coco to knowing how to beat a Joust arcade cabinet with the arcane pterodactyl bug which was only present in Red/Yellow Joust cabinets. The Coco was obscure, maybe 1/100th as popular as the Commodores and Ataris, and Daggorath wasn't even close to a top selling game on it.
In the early 80s, every time I'd go to an arcade I was always on the lookout for a red/yellow Joust so I could drop a high score. I also read Rainbow Magazine every month and even flew across the country to attend the first RainbowFest in Chicago. Good times, indeed.
BTW you had to 'incant' a ring, near the end, and I could not have figured that out on my own. It was fantastically fun to me as a kid, despite being, lets be reasonable, impossible to beat without knowing some things outside the game. I actually believed I did beat it, in the late 90s, after I killed the 'false' wizard. However, I thought Level 4 was the game restarting back to Level 1, so exited, thinking it was all done.
Rainbow Magazines were magical and incredibly inspiring. I probably typed-up most of the games they ever published and had them saved on cassette. This one was very lengthy -> https://ia903403.us.archive.org/0/items/rainbowmagazine-1984.... (search for 'Karrak')
Sadly, my brother recorded over it before I could play it more than once ... you know, deliberately, out of pure 80s evil older-brother spite. Some part of me wants to paste that code into Claude Code, and generate some sort of working game, as an act of defiance.
I couldn't play joust on the cabinets (no money as a kid); the TRS-80 game was called Lancer. Good times, absolutely.
He was super nice about it, explaining that he didn't actually author that game. We exchanged a few more emails back and forth, but overall a great experience chatting with him over the earlyish Internet. I feel very fortunate that I grew up in an era of computing where it seemed much smaller than it does today.
The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams (madned.substack.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330015
https://madned.substack.com/p/the-further-text-adventures-of...
Here's an email I recently wrote Scott about MOOLLM (like LambdaMoo meets The Sims in Cursor):
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/email/...
He responded:
Scott> BTW I also captured the original Hacker thread for my biography notebooks. I am using NotebookLM with Gemini and have uploaded many thousands of emails, web interviews, articles etc. I added this in today. For some reason it didn’t seem to have found it before when I was web searching. Been thinking about how I actually want to structure the biography. Was thinking about having mini adventures in the narrative that require folks to play on some webpages I set up to get more of the story. Now I am also thinking about MOOLLM
The essential idea we're both pursuing is "Play My Blog":
Adventure Compiler: Hybrid Simulation Architecture
"YAML-jazz in, playable worlds out."
The adventure compiler is the showcase app that comes after the practical stack: Leela Edgebox DevOps, thinking/writing tools, and Cursor‑Mirror. It is the final attraction — a web app where anyone can play my blog.
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/adventu...
I've made a lot of progress recently on importing Sims characters:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/designs/sim-ob...
Here's The Sims character animation system reimplemented in JavaScript:
https://github.com/DnfJeff/SimObliterator_Suite/tree/main/vi...
https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/retro_computing/sundog_dot_...
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12
This is the "Adventure" issue, complete with a source listing of Scott Adam's Pirate's Adventure and a Robert Tinney cover illustration. Plus, reviews of commercial games and articles describing the state of the art 46 years ago. Worth a read if you're hip to interactive fiction.
When I was in first or second grade (circa 1982) our family got a TRS-80 Model 3 and I started learning BASIC on it. I built a bunch of small little programs and even started an ambitious project: a full text adventure game called "Manhole Mania!". You, as the player, were a public works employee sent into the sewers to investigate strange noises. I never made much progress, maybe only a few rooms.
Just a couple of weeks ago I had the idea of just pointing Codex CLI at my unfinished game idea and "one-shotting" it. I wrote a fairly detailed prompt, constrained it to use Elm and to make it a static website. Gave a rough outline of a simple, but playable Manhole Mania. 5 mins, 43 seconds later:
Any IF archive mirror should have these packed into a zip file (look up at Google/DDG with the terms 'IF archive mirror'). Then, search for "Scott Adams" (Ctrl-f) and all of these should be bundled in a zip file (actually, two zip files). In order to play them, there's Lectrote even for Android and maybe Mac and iOS, for PC's there's Frotz for Unix/GNU-Linux and WinFrotz for Windows shines (and it has accessibility options for the blind).
If you are an Emacs user you can just install Malyon from MELPA and play them as if it were another interpreter.
https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/Comput...
Blog link seems hugged.
https://archive.org/details/d64_Twin_Kingdom_Valley_1987_Bug...
It's a shame he never reached the level of fame and cultural influence that the other Scott Adams achieved.
“ The breeder talks up her dog-grooming services.”
Hey, look at me big hunting.