Thats correct - and I notice that on myself. There are just much more things reachable at any point in time compared to our youth it takes real effort to focus.

I am also looking for that personally.

I think its partially as you say: "everything I may need either already exists". Through the connection over the internet (as great as it is) you see things already done already and often better than I would be able to do it myself with the limited time I got.

Also generally the large amount of things going on, its just a lot one could try, much more than in former times. So for people with focus problems its also a question of, yeah: focus.

For me I still code enough for work (as long as they let me do it - looking at the AI push) so I am fine but I still think back to the old times (C64, Amiga, 90s PC, rise of Linux on the Desktop) where I had more fun. So I guess its the technology getting more mature and personally its also getting older and maybe burned out a bit.

I actually never understood this, the C128 was a strange device (as you say like the IIGS). Was it really because Albert Charpentier left and then nobody was able to do a VicIII until much later (C65)?

Making a VIC III didn’t have to be magic. All it’d need would be a doubled clock and faster memory to keep up with a 2MHz or more 6502. Doubling the clock and memory speed would allow for an 80 column mode and higher resolution without requiring a separate VDP. Also, a couple separate palettes and a palette selector per character line wouldn’t be hard to implement.

At the very least, the two video chips could support overlaying on composite and analog RGB output (because nice colours). The way it ended up was just silly.

Important fun fact, this synthesizer was an Ensoniq chip (ES5503 DOC), designed by Bob Yannes, the inventor of the SID chip. The IIGS was actually a cool machine, not very successful unfortunately.

I wish it expanded on the //e hardware rather than becoming something else. I get the II video hardware was pushed to its limits and something better was needed, but the new video processor with an entirely different approach didn’t feel like a II. Fill-mode was cool, but I don’t remember it being used for anything other than demos. A blitter and sprites would have made more sense, as would colored text modes, redefinable character sets…

The sound chip was so capable it contrasted with the rest of the machine.

In general you are right, I expect something like this to appear in the future and it would be cool.

But isn't the criticism rather that there are too many (as you say repetitive, not relevant) events - its not like there are cool stories emerging from the underlying game mechanics anymore ("grand strategy") but players have to click through these boring predetermined events again and again.

You get too many events, but there aren't actually that many different events written, so you repeat the same ones over and over again. Eventually it just turns into the player clicking on the 'optimal' choice without actually reading the event.

You could mod the game with more varied events, which were of course AI generated to begin with. Bit of an inception scenario where AI plays an AI modded game.

The other option is to have an AI play another AI which is working as an antagonist, trying to make the player fail. More global plagues! More scheming underlings! More questionable choices for relaxation! Bit of an arms race there.

Honestly I prefer Crusader Kings II if for no other reason that the UI is just so brilliantly insanely obtuse while also being very good looking.

Well one can only hope so. It has maybe 2 good years left, would be nice to get a new one at some point.

This was such a relieve for us. Looking back its unbelievable how much combined time we wasted complaining about and fixing formatting issues in code reviews and reformatting in general.

With clang-format & co. on Save plus possibly a git hook this all went away. It might not always be perfect (which is subjective anyway) but its so worth it.

Its also faster when used via Remote Desktop, VNC etc. so still doing it for these reasons.

Wondering whether we will see some combination with Cyc at some point (which tried to solve the „encoding of the world“ problem)

After Doug's recent passing, I sincerely doubt it.

There should be SOPs in place for each "expected" issue so people know what to do. Its not like you (should) start debugging and deploying stuff in the middle of your on-call shift anyway. Its not 100% for sure but in the normal case this should be fine.