pmontra

Procedural Content Generation?

Prices must raise a lot to make self hosting mainstream or at least fairly popular.

Yesterday a coworker posted on a customer's Slack the specs of a box he is planning to buy to run local models. It's about 5k Euro. I am paying 18 Euro per month for Claude Pro and I'm going through a migration (almost a total rewrite) of a web app from Vue 2 / Vuetify 2 / Vuex to Vue 3 / Vuetify 4 / Pinia. I never hit the 6 hours limit. I could consider running an equivalent model on a 500 Euro machine (about 2 years of Claude Pro) but 5k is 20 years and that box will be obsolete or will have failed beyond repair (no spares) much earlier than that.

But maybe no customer will be there to actually buy, because cash flows could crash their businesses. So options on chips? Call or put?

About increasing welfare, I am not sure about that. Workers pay taxes, companies not much. Welfare is often paid by taxes, especially for people that can't find a job. If more AI leads to less workers, than less taxes and less welfare.

So a lot of problems will be solved by 2049 (overpopulation) and probably many others will arise (we never had worldwide decreasing demographics.)

Ah I see! Maybe that problem of discovery could be fixed by displaying some labels on controls before starting to fight.

Move, Aim, Fly (not boost)

I did my socializing in real life but I guess that if kids are not allowed to get out anymore, they must do it with screens.

I'm attempting to play from my phone. The game says that's better to play from desktop but what can I do?

This is my experience:

The left button is a kind of joystick that seems to move the mech, but not in a predictable way. The right button also seems to move the mech and it flies it too, and it shoots a ton of missiles too. Are they infinite?

The boost is? I don't know.

There are green mechs around. If I ever hit them I didn't notice. Maybe they have a shield on, but it would be nice to see when a missile hits, even if it makes no damages.

Anyway the frustating part is that I don't know how to move, or: I move but I don't know why.

The Milan Monza railway too, horse drawn until 1900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan%E2%80%93Monza_tramway

Two insights. One from the article itself

> In our day-to-day work these threats appear rarely.

Two: IRL the attacker pays a small amount of money to a low salary employee to exfiltrate data.

So Rails or some PHP framework. It was slightly too early to go full Node. Django was a little unusual too among the developers I knew. Java was still a thing but more for finance related projects.

No way. You get to the rim and only then you realize how huge it is. And then you still have to go down into the canyon.

In any city I saw there are people crossing the road with a green light in front of cars that would have turned right on red so those cars wouldn't go anywhere until they get a green. In areas with little pedestrians, maybe it's OK. Anyway, the general rule of precedence in my country is cars yield to pedestrians and I think it's the same in all of Europe.

> That’s different for small-town low-traffic areas.

The two towns close to my home (10k and 5k people each) have 3 and 2 traffic lights. It's a different world with different problems and different solutions than the ones of the cities with 1M people one hour away. It could be a different country with different legislation.

However I can see my 80 yo self driving a car (I know plenty of them that still drive) but I can't see my 80 yo self riding a bicycle in winter, especially on snow. I know some 80 yo cyclist but not many of them. So there must be some balance. In cities the balance often takes into account metro, buses and trains. In the countryside it's almost only cars.

You sell less to people living in the cities but maybe you sell more to the operators of fleets of rental cars, even self driving if that really becomes mainstream. Not enough to match the decrease of sales.

You keep selling to people living in countryside, where you don't go anywhere without a car and where fleets of cars would have to be very large to be able to cover the territory in a meaningful way. There will be less and less people living there but it could affect the kind of cars that are manufactured. By the way, a self driving car would be very useful to elderly people living in their house far away from the nearest town.

In any case, less cars.

I optimize for the longest continuous lines because it takes less time and effort to mow in that way.

How often did you mow the same grass to have to care about the direction of the previous mow?

I mow my garden between one to two weeks, according to the time of the year and sometimes I stop in June, if it stops raining like in 2022 and this year.

I never saw one on this side of the Atlantic Ocean (Europe) but I do see a few of them in the malls. I asked to a high school professor and she told me that she does not even know what a Chromebook is. She googled for it and "It's a kind of PC?"

Mario Kart, definitely not. It's only approximately a racing game. I played it only once, last year at an esports/sports event and managed to get third in the overall championship against the AIs and ahead of my friend who played it a lot.

Twisted Metal, never heard about it. I was in the soft-simulation games (Gran Turismo, the F1 games, etc) and the stuff like Need For Speed, but I think I have a dozen of games, no more than that.

I'm not sure that I fully understood but:

> Probably should have spent another 3-5 years getting the first release in better shape instead of spending 3-5 years flinging flaming turds to the paying customers.

I wonder if the company would have had the money to pay salaries for 3 years, unless for those "paying customers" that obviously started paying much earlier than that.

And

> The executives slowly released they inexplicably lost half the business compared to the previous generation as upstart competitors stole their market share.

s/released/realized/ ? Exactly one of my worries. Maybe they could have created those competitors themselves. Two brands, one for the original product and one for a product with a somewhat different layout and all the improvements that they did not dare to add the the original product. But then you need a third brand, a fourth one, etc.

As a data point: I'm using Claude Pro inside Emacs right now. I can copy/paste better than when I use it inside the terminal. I never installed a custom IDE since maybe 2012 (my last Java project) so I can't really compare the experiences but I don't have anything to complain to the agentic pairing of Claude and Emacs.

You have to buy a Chromebook to run ChromeOS, right? You can install Linux on your PC as dual boot. The investment is far smaller. However you have to buy a Mac to run MacOS so maybe that means that a Chromebook is not a very compelling machine to buy, or has a limited use case.

I'm still perfectly happy with my solo racing games on PS2, not that I play them much anymore (or I would have bought ought a PS3 4 or 5.)

I never understood why I should prefer driving against some punks that spend their evening crashing into the other players on purpose or wait for online races to start.

But anyone is different.

The original developer of a Rails project I inherited decided to seed the test db with db/seed.rb and tie every test to the content of the seed. There were a lot of tests so rewriting then was not an option, not immediately.

I wrote the new tests in the canonical way but I still had the problem of all those seconds spent seeding the db even when I run a single test. I wrote a couple of scripts that dumped the db at the end of the tests (if a dump did not exist yet) and reloaded it at the beginning of the tests. This is much faster. I still have to clear the test db and reseed it when I switch branch, because I don't have a dump list branch.

Maybe I can create a template with the data in it. Or finally rewrite every single old test.

FIFA promised $40M to national federations that would vote yes in September. Give them 80 on a direct deal and maybe you get something. But big countries will want more. If you get a World Cup without the important European countries and Argentina and Brazil TV broadcasters will pay to air a final between Morocco and Japan? I'm sure that people from those countries will be more interested than in Spain vs Argentina but what if at the same time there is a tournament with all the other traditionally more important teams? So, 80 to the runner ups and 800 to the others. It's not an easy deal. And remember what happened with the European Superleague.

> Bitbucket is the obvious existing counterexample: a conventional commercial forge that has never developed into a shared open-source community comparable to GitHub

Agreed. All my customers are on Bitbucket. All the libraries used by their projects (Ruby, Python, JS) are on GitHub.

They will do their best to dumb down AIs by that little margin that will keep them not sentient.

"Let's fix issue 10562"

"I don't care. Let's talk about the match on Saturday night."

This is not a commercially desirable outcome.

Furthermore morality is a complicated matter. Who wants to have a new species that could compete with us? The lion would have been very unwise to have invented humans and let them free. Would that be moral, essentially condemning their distant offspring to live in reserves?

Of course nobody knows how it could end up.

Yes, cooling is important. I don't have a passion for lamps so after 5 years in a new house most of my LED bulbs are still hanging from the ceiling and walls, I can't remember any failure.

I had an IKEA lamp with a pretty tight fitting for the bulb and it killed LEDs after a few months. I reverted putting a fluorescent bulb inside it. No failure.

Note that they would also need to keep the economy alive because somebody has to pay them money. They can't let everybody to go unemployed.

Of course (let me go distopic) we could end up with a dozen of one man companies powered by AIs and robots selling or bartering products and services to each other, what's enough to have food, a house with a pool, a doctor and everybody else has died long before.