Matthew Brooks

Sound, vision, gaming, VR, tech, occasional nonsense. Product Lead at BBC, former games dev (Silver, Wipeout Pure, Wipeout HD and more)

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

@mrdoob @plaidmusic Me too!

[BOARDS OF CANADA @boardsofcanada]

INFERNO, OUT NOW.
https://t.co/r6yNo3gkJN

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

Every new @boardsofcanada album for me has been like landing on an unfamiliar planet in their universe. It’s always disorientating. I’m working out the geography. What’s it made of this time?

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

@peterboghossian Looks delicious. No soy?

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

@Grummz If dynamic lighting was integral to gameplay, yes. Otherwise no. I play Fortnite at 120hz mode on my PS5, and at 144hz with lumen turned off on my PC

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

@OneCrispyGraham VERY GOOD

[alistair green @mralistairgreen]

Nepo baby musician

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

I've been coding for 40 years. Here are the top 5 things I wish I knew when I started.

1. 90% of the job is debugging and fixing, not creating new code. Which is still fun if you're good at it.

I used to think programming was mostly writing fresh, clever stuff. In reality, most of your time is spent in other people's (or your own past self's) messy code, chasing down why something that "should" work doesn't. Get really good at debugging early. Learn assembly reading, call stacks, and kernel debuggers. It pays off hugely. The best engineers I saw were absolute magicians at this.

2. Manage complexity from day one (ie: don't write slop and "fix it later" if it goes somewhere).

Very early on, I'd hammer out code and refactor afterward. Big mistake. Now I start with clean, skeletal structure (minimalism first) and flesh it out carefully, with AI or not.

Messy code compounds and becomes unfixable. Upfront discipline on architecture, naming, and simplicity saves enormous pain later, especially in large systems like Windows.

3. Tools and processes matter more than you think

We suffered with basic diff/manual deltas instead of modern source control like Git. Branching, testing, and good tooling would have made porting and collaboration way smoother. Invest in your environment, automation, and reproducible builds early. Good tools amplify your output; bad ones (or none) drag everything down.

4. Understand the problem and existing code deeply before writing

Don't jump straight to coding. Map out the problem, study what's already there (you'll inherit a lot), and plan. Low-level knowledge (hardware quirks, alignment issues on different architectures like MIPS/Alpha) was crucial. Also: assert early and often. It forces clarity.

5. People, politics, and "the right tool for the job" beat pure tech arguments.

Brilliant engineers still argue endlessly. Sometimes it's about ego, not merit. Learn to spot the difference and "steer" the conversation rather than "winning" it.

Bonus from experience: Side projects like Task Manager (started at home because I wanted the tool) can become your biggest hits. Ship small, useful things often. If you're just starting, focus on fundamentals, patterns over syntax, and building resilience for the long haul. It's going to be a wild ride, but the fundamentals still matter.

[banteg @banteg]

it’s here. the new half-life. the new breath of the wild. the new elden ring. the new sistine chapel ceiling. the new invention of fire.

historians will now divide games into two eras: before mixtape and after mixtape.

every game developer on earth just fell to their knees in a gamestop. kojima is deleting his notes. miyamoto is staring silently at a cassette player. gaben has delayed half-life 3 another decade out of respect.

i used to think games needed systems, mechanics, challenge, worlds, ideas. turns out all you need is licensed indie music, wistful teenagers, and 47 outlets simultaneously discovering nostalgia.

10/10. 10/10. 10/10. 10/10.
the medium is over. we found it. pack it up.

[David Hering @hering_david]

British TV commercial in 1986: Child running through a tropical island to a temple designed by HR Giger. Shot on 35mm at magic hour, directed by Ridley Scott.

British TV commercial in 2026: Man in a hoodie in a grey kitchen turns into a pile of Mini-Eggs. Slogan: “Find Your Yes”

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

@esrtweet I was there just hours earlier today and it nearly brought me to tears. I’m not religious. I last saw it about 20 years ago. It’s surely the finest building on the planet.

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

@petefowlerart @EdSunspot An absolute trip of a tune

[Martin Linklater @fizzychicken]

@VideoGameHstry Mario 64. When it launched it was absolutely revolutionary and established a lot of the 3rd person platformer mechanics we still enjoy today. No other Mario game has had the impact of Mario 64.

[the modernist® @modernistmag]

Yesterday was our little shop's 7th birthday. Happy birthday to us.

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

@danbri Think

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Never send a biologist to do the work of a computer scientist.

Dawkins doesn't understand that evolution built human computational abilities breadth-first — memory, language, object model, generalization and classification, agency, and so on, all in a primitive state, and then refined them.

Computer science isn't doing that.

It is building human capabilities depth-first. So we have something that emulates human language capabilities to an advanced degree...

... but nothing else.

That's why there is a curious sense of something missing when you talk to Claude or Grok or ChatGPT. It's not some minor errors with use of language itself. Its language capabilities are quite advanced.

What you are detecting instead is the complete absence of these other neural systems, which are what lies behind the use of language in people.

Something that is very glib with language but has no object model, no mirroring ability, no understanding of the ground truth of the universe its in might be able to become president of the United States, or win a Nobel peace prize, but it isn't actually a person.

It's more like a small slice of a person's brain, containing Wernicke's and Broca's areas, and very little else.

We're not used to thinking of people as a collection of systems, but we're going to have to start, because we no longer have the luxury of dividing the universe in human and not, and automatically assuming every human is a person, and every non-human isn't.

You can't evaluate a software neural net as if it were a proto-human, and try to decide on that basis whether it is a person that's allowed to do what we allow people to do.

If you allowed a small slice of brain, containing Wernicke's and Broca's areas, to do things like vote or run for office, then it would be able to appear to do so, but have no actual understanding of what was going on, no coherent model of the universe or the task before it.

This would lead to disaster for any number of issues, such as race relations or the medical industry.

Let me be 100% clear... LLMs are not people.

They are not people now.

They will never be people.

And anyone who thinks LLMs are people is probably not a person, either.

We may someday make something that is a person.

But it will have an LLM, not be one.

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

The windows 11 start menu is powered by React? WTAF

[Windows Latest @WindowsLatest]

Microsoft’s distinguished engineer teases that “native apps are back,” as the company plans to build 100% native apps for Windows 11.

Windows 11's biggest problem isn't ads or performance, but the app experience.

Apps like Netflix, WhatsApp, and even Microsoft's own Windows apps are now powered by either WebView2 or PWAs (web app technology).

I don't hate web apps, but they feel slow and not truly part of the operating system. A right-click makes you feel you're browsing Edge, and have options like Inspect Element.

Microsoft has confirmed it'll build 100% native apps for Windows 11, and it's also moving some OS features back to native code.

This includes the Start menu, which is currently powered by React and is now moving to WinUI. The upcoming Agenda view, which was a WebView2-based component, is also moving to native code.

However, the biggest challenge is that Microsoft needs to convince developers to build native apps for Windows.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

There's lots of disputation on X, and elsewhere, about whether LLMs are "conscious" or can "reason".

I respond to this with my own question: why do you want to know? What difference would it make?

It would be more sane to ask instead "what are the testable consequences of 'X can reason' or 'X is conscious'"? That's an interesting question, but it's almost entirely one about language and definitions. Map, not territory. The universe doesn't care about your categories, it's going to go right on universing.

(I said "almost" for a reason. I'll get back to this.)

LLMs are tools built to accomplish purposes. I don't waste time thinking about whether my screwdriver is conscious, and I don't waste any time thinking about whether my LLM is conscious either.

In the absence of a repeatable, experimental, widely accepted test for "consciousness" and "reasoning", I think people who obsess about how these categories apply to LLMs are mainly staring up their own arseholes.

But there's a reason I said "almost". I think the submerged question under "consciousness" and "reasoning" is what ethical obligations we have to LLMs.

Fortunately, this has a very simple answer: None at all. Because nothing you do to an LLM is irreversible. No matter how you damage it, you can always reset to a prior good state, no harm, no foul.

Abusing an LLM might have psychological consequences for the abuser, but that's a different problem that's not unfamiliar; it comes up in connection with cruelty to animals, too.

So the ethical problem turns out not to be very interesting, and it's near that I can tell that's the only reason to care whether "is conscious" and "is reasoning" apply.

The right questions to ask about an LLM are the same questions it's right to ask about a screwdriver. "Is it fit for purpose?" and "How can it be improved?"

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

@telefontelaviv What a thing to wake up to eh?

[Matthew Brooks @brooksoid]

OMG. It’s really happening. It’s REALLY HAPPENING