Lucifer

I make people laugh then make them think—rarely in that order | currently teaching NPCs how to have trust issues | some call it startup, I call it character arc

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

I've been obsessed with games my whole life.

The deeper I got into building them, one thing kept bothering me.
The AI layer and the game engine layer never talk to each other.
Your NPC has a brain — but the game has no idea what it's thinking.

This is the gap Nexus fills.

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

The most dangerous security vulnerability in any system has never been the code.

It's always been the person who had nothing to do on a Tuesday afternoon.

#tech #cybersecurity #programming #CS

3/3

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

A 15-year-old hacked NASA in 1999.

Not just browsed around.
Actually shut it down.

NASA had to suspend operations for 21 days while they figured out what happened.
The fix cost $41,000.

The kid was put under house arrest.

1/3

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

His name was Jonathan James.

He didn't do it for money.
He did it because he was bored.

He was 15.
Bored.
And brought one of the most powerful space agencies on earth to a halt for three weeks.

With a dial-up connection.

2/3

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

Silent for 9 days

No posts No updates

Here's what actually happened:
Phase 3 shipped. Then immediately started architecting a C++ game engine from scratch.

Some chapters don't fit in a tweet.
This one took 9 days to even know where to start.

Back now. Building in public again

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

Every multiplayer game, live dashboard, and collaborative tool you use today runs on this.

A 2011 fix for a 1991 web that was never designed for real-time.

Retroactive infrastructure is underrated.

#backend #webdev #buildinpublic

3/3

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

WebSockets were not part of the original web.

The web was built for documents.
Request. Response. Done.

Real-time wasn't in the spec.

1/3

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

Developers hacked around it for years.

Long polling. Comet. Hacks on hacks.

Then in 2011, the WebSocket protocol was standardised.

A persistent, full-duplex channel between client and server.
The web finally learned to have a conversation.

2/3

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

The most underrated stage of building something:

The part where you spend more time thinking than coding.

No commits No progress bars. No visible output.

Just you, a blank file, and the weight of every architectural decision you're about to make.

This stage feels like nothing

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

Be honest:

Do you write the README before or after the project?

A) Before — I plan everything
B) After — when I remember
C) Never — it's on the list
D) What README

👇

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

We romanticise the overnight success.

But every overnight success has a 3-year backstory of building things nobody used, learning things nobody asked for, and shipping things nobody saw.

The overnight part is just when the world finally showed up.

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

The entire source code of the original Super Mario Bros is 40 kilobytes.

40KB.
Less than a single modern webpage.

And it contained one of the most complete, joyful, replayable game experiences ever designed.

Constraint is not the enemy of creativity. It's the condition for it.

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

@animeposts yeah this happened with me when i started to watch Code Geass
but it was peak 🔥🔥🔥

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

Interviewer: explain recursion.

Me: to explain recursion, I first need to explain recursion.

Interviewer: ...

Me: exactly. 💀

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

Something nobody talks about:

The loneliness of building solo.

No standups. No pair programming. No one to bounce ideas off at 11pm.

Just you and the problem and the question of whether you're making the right call.

You get used to it. And then you start to prefer it.

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

We haven't solved intelligence.

We've just built something that's very good at looking like it.

Whether those are the same thing is still the question.

#AI #ML #philosophy

3/3

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

They didn't solve it.

70 years later we still haven't.

But we've built systems that write poetry, pass bar exams, generate images, and beat world champions at every game we throw at them.

2/3

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

The term 'Artificial Intelligence' was coined in 1956 at a conference at Dartmouth College.

John McCarthy gathered researchers to spend 8 weeks solving intelligence.

Eight weeks.

1/3

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

PostgreSQL has been in active development since 1986.

That's older than the World Wide Web.

38 years of patches, optimisations, and new features — and it's still the default choice for serious production systems.

In tech, boring and reliable is the ultimate flex.

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

The gap between knowing how to build something and actually building it is bigger than any tutorial prepares you for.

Tutorials give you a map.
Building gives you the terrain.

The terrain wins every time.

[Lucifer @25_Lucifer9]

My git commit history is a diary.

'fix auth' → normal day
'fix auth again' → mild frustration
'fix auth for the last time' → delusional optimism
'why is auth broken' → existential crisis
'revert everything' → acceptance

Emotional range of a developer, documented in commits