jhatemyjob

I don't know man. Being able to reason about DS&A was pretty useful before the advent of ML Code Generation. If only to pass the interviews at Google/Facebook (when they were in their prime circa 2004-2016).

Also, didn't the parent comment say he went back to college?

I suppose he was right, just ~20 years too early...

They used to be able to. I don't think they can anymore. The iPhone 6 was 3 years after Jobs died. Apple's corporate/engineering culture has had 12 additional years to rot since then. If the Scott Forstall situation, Chris Lattner situation, etc, tells you anything, it's that Apple cannot make basic, common-sense tradeoffs anymore. All they can do is copy whatever the wider industry is doing.

All of the excuses people are coming up with in these comments are just that: excuses. Look at the sibling comment by musictubes, for example. Citing these ethereal "critics" and "most people" when in reality Walt Mossberg was the only critic whose opinion mattered.

Occam's Razor: The Innovator's Dilemma. It's a rotting, bloated megacorp with too much to lose, that doesn't take risks, and can't change direction. The direction it's in is "bigger phones", for whatever reason. So we're gonna keep getting bigger phones. It's that simple.

The reason they keep getting bigger is because Apple is rotting. When a tech company rots, it gets bloated. That bloat seeps into the products.

I just don't think he realizes how saturated it got over the years. Or maybe he knows at a conscious level, but not subconsciously.

In 2000 (his era), it would have been really smart to study the source of Linux or Apache. Would have paid dividends over decades. Cuz that knowledge was so rare. The number of people hacking on LLMs now dwarfs the number of people hacking on web servers 30 years ago, by several orders of magnitude.

And if you turn back the clock even more, I mean just even having access to a computer, let alone owning one, would have put you at a massive advantage.

I don't know what to call it. The pioneers should be respected obviously, but at the same time you need to understand that for them, the game wasn't nearly as played out as it is now.

I just don't think you can afford to be dicking around with LLMs like you could afford to dick around with random Linux distros 20 years ago. Too many people willing to do it for free these days.

You don't wanna end up being the 2030 equivalent of a certain SNES emulator developer, or maintainer of a package manager for jailbroken iPhones, I mean the list goes on and on. Being a hacker doesn't automatically give you a path to being rich, or even making a decent living. It hasn't been that way for a while.

Mhmm... clearly that is not the right tool for the job!

If you look at one of the studio sessions between Drake and 40 (look up "100gigs" on youtube), there's this flow between the two, almost like an implicit language that they invented together, that lets them collaborate at an insane speed.

The problem is you need to fully trust your collaborators, and that's really hard to find in this industry. Most people never find it. I haven't.

I've seen it though. It exists. Very rare. I know two guys who used to participate in Ludum Dare over 10 years ago who would have loved something like Zed if it existed back then.

By contrast, at your 9-5 where you don't know if your coworker is gonna stab you in the back for a promotion (which I suspect is most people in the comments here) then Zed is probably not a great tool. Git would be a better fit for that. After all it was made to develop Linux, which is one of the lowest-trust collaborative environments out there.

Sounds like you're just lazy. Which is fine. You'll probably have a okay career. But not a great one.

This kind of stuff happens all the time. The employees in question are just incredibly bad at covering their tracks, normally they'd get fired and that would be it.

It is fishy that OpenAI's leadership didn't have the watchdogd in place to catch it. And there's this huge public lawsuit about it now. Plus there's the Elon lawsuit. Makes me think somebody wants OpenAI to go down. Almost like a sacrificial scapegoat, in order to achieve psychosocial unity in the programming community, or something like that.

Ok

The author's base assumption, and stated motivation for doing this project, is wrong.

https://github.com/StephenDev0/StikDebug

For an undergrad project, I suppose it's fine to conveniently forget about the existence of this solution for the sake of getting a good grade.

Windows 7 was the last good one.

I used to believe this for like 10 years. And I never had any custom environment. But then I was at a job where I was forced to create a custom dev environment, because theirs was awful. And then I had to transfer my scripts to another machine, and it turns out, it was actually really easy (just have a git repo you can pull from anywhere). I wasted 10 years with a subpar dev environment.

I'm actually at the point now where I just can do `curl https://website.com/my_environment.sh | bash`, and it sets everything up for me. So even if I SSH into a machine for a brief period of time I'll have my environment with me there too.

If I had the means, and if it was as convenient/pleasant as this, I would absolutely get an MRI every month.

Ahhhh. Okay. I didn't realize you meant game studios. Wasn't familiar with that "big 3" term until now. Thanks for clearing that up.

It's hardly the same thing at this point. For instance you could say Nginx is API-compatible with Apache, and yes that is correct (Maybe? Let's not split hairs here). But to go as far as saying Apache is state of the art and link to Apache's homepage (like throw2ih020 did) is just like.... no.

I think you think I'm trying to correct/one-up reactordev. I'm not. I agree with him. He's pointing out throw2ih020 is being ridiculous, and I'm pointing out that it's even more ridiculous because it's less than 3.

It's not even baked into Google anymore.

Great talk. I'm glad he was wrong about this. Having js/wasm be the standard ABI would have been horrible. Obviously he could have never predicted in 2014 that Valve would pour a metric fuckton of resources into improving Wine/Proton, to the point of getting x64 binaries to run on other architectures. But here we are, past the year of the Linux desktop, well on our way to the year of the Linux handset.

Same. I think I watched this 10 times when it first came out.

Okay, sorry. I retract that. I responded to the original comment saying "this", which implies that I would have said that myself. So... you got me there.

As for the second part of your comment, well... yeah, I don't disagree with you there. That doesn't have any value either. Those people are probably not making that much money.

Entertainment isn't inherently valuable.

I touched a nerve huh? You wanna know another leading consumer? Recreational drug users. Lot of money in that industry.

Ok so now you're lying. I never said that.

I never said they are low skill. They just don't have their priorities straight.

Those QA teams, automation people, production, level designers, vfx artists, tech artists, character artists, 2d artists, prop artists, gameplay scripters, etc are doing all that work just to put some pretty pixels on a 14 year old's screen. There's very little value there.

That is precisely my point, thank you. Yeah there's a few good ones like Undertale or (early 2010s era) Minecraft or Roblox or Garry's Mod but those are rare. Most of the games out there are the types like Pokemon which are more like a drug addiction.

So bringing this back to the "why don't game devs make boatloads of money like FAANG" it's because the vast majority of roles are being a scripter at Game Freak or Rockstar or whatever. I'm sure the engineers at Valve or Roblox or Epic Games are being treated very well because those companies actually provide value to people's lives.

Roblox to a lesser extent, but you get my point. I'd rather have my kid play Roblox where he might learn Lua scripting, than Pokemon which is just a complete dead end. Just look at what happened to Byuu and Hax. Or hell, even endrift with that weird unnecessary drama with Analogue. Many such cases. Not sure if you get those references. But the stories surrounding those people are why I stay far away from Nintendo stuff. And gaming in general.

Funny you mention Pokemon. Have you been to a Pokemon regional championships recently? Take a good look at the average Pokemon player. You really think that hobby is adding value to their life?

This, and also, if you just take a step back and think of the bigger picture, the work isn't valuable. There's a lot more value in pushing ads, a CRM, an email app, etc than keeping a 14 year old kid entertained.

I don't really buy the supply/demand argument everyone else is saying here. The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives. The amount of effort you'd need to put in to provide value to someone's life through a video game is way higher than the effort you'd need to put into a productivity tool.

In fact, more often than not, video games provide negative value to people's lives. They're usually a waste of time at best. And at worst, addictive and carpal tunnel inducing.

I agree with your sentiment but I think a fairer comparison would be:

> Who is more valuable as individual, the owner of a watch factory in Vietnam or the guy who makes one watch a month in Switzerland?

With that framing, I'm not sure what the answer is. I suppose it depends on your priorities

True

Yep. Headline is clickbait. Never bet against Elon.