tomgp

It seems people will never tire of finding out that writing code isn't the hard part of making useful software.

Even if you believe this surely it should be paid for by the employer not the individual.

I've played the campaign a few times now (10+) and my advice is 1. it's much better/ more manageable at 3 players unless everyone is already pretty experienced. 2. Try to play the first two acts in quick succession then the third maybe a week later once the dust has settled.

This has been my feeling in more optimistic moments for a few years, fingers crossed the adjustment isn't too brutal.

Think Flash (eventually) had most of these. That said, not all software development needs to happen at the same scale and not all software authoring environments benefit from the same tradeoffs vis-a-vis complexity, collaboration, accesibility etc. the success of Flash as a platform for independent game devs shows that different markets are better served by different tradeoffs.

Yeah, whilst I probably wouldn't go that far I take your point. I suppose the difference is in how people respond to the way games dress up their mechanisms and how interesting they find the decisions around the processes they perform.

I agree, they are just tools, but the way they are presented; taking natural language as their input and responding in kind strongly influences the way our brains react to them on a social level. That's what I mean by their social dimension.

The post has nothing to do with writing software. It would have as much value if it were written by someone who'd never written a line of code in their life. It's about the social dimension of LLMs and how the personality they present is, for some of us, pretty grating.

Martin is a good writer and (from what I've heard from those who've spent time with him) a lovely person which I think makes him well qualified to speak on the topic.

I'm really pleased for the devs and I like that they stuck to their guns and found their audience but...

as someone who decided to get on board at the start of this year I understand the negative comments. I'd really like to explore the universe and run a space station and whatever else but my 5 hours in the game were all schlepping round basically identical planets collecting different coloured stuff to convert into other different coloured stuff.

all of that said, Im glad NMS exists and that people get a lot out of it even though it's not for me. Hell, I prefer games that are divisive than something that's just blandly acceptable to the largest number of players like. alot of modern AAA titles.

I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.

First time I saw this idea was Berg's "Here and There" poster from 2009 (a year before Inception) though they acknowledge a bunch of earlier inspirations...

https://berglondon.com/blog/2009/05/04/here-there-influences...

That's when the players are playing club football.

I think the issue is that the prose on the homepage gives off AI marketing BS "Everything you'd expect. Nothing you don't." "Native down to the pixels" etc. in an age where the web is stuffed full of low value llm generated content this is a strong negative signal for me (and i suspect others). No reflection on the app itself which I've yet to try but seems like a great idea

60 year olds have been using computers most of their working life. Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.

I think this is true, it's like a close relation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#:~:text=%5B14...

So glad you took the time to keep the site alive!

I have it on a long timer so that I have to pause for a while before the auto-complete prompt appears. I've found I tend to deliberately set things up for it to attempt when I know I'm going to have to type a bunch of boiler plate or some code that's logically straightforward but syntactically fiddly ie. I write a quick comment describing what the next few lines should do and then wait a seconds for it to make the suggestion

What microsoft employees do in the privacy of their own meeting rooms has basically no effect on me. When Elon Musk appears along side Tommy Robinson in my city, espousing racist "great replacement" to a crowd of drunken thugs and suggesting my neighbours and friends are problem to be expunged from society, well frankly he can fuck right off.

Not much better but at least they're not speaking at far right rallys and lending support to fascist parties across Europe.

That's what science is though * our intuition/ hunch/ guess is X * now let's design an experiment which can falsify X

Interstingly a paper was published today which confirms accelerated warming whislt accounting for the effects of natural fluctations (el nino, volcanism and solar radiation etc) https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025...

>We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.

This feels lovely! The fact that it reacts to the pressure on my Wacom tablet puts it above many desktop tools and streets ahead of most stuff on the web. Fantastic work.

Yes. Also there's a weird thing going on where the claims are simultaneously that these tools are super easy to use and everyone and their dog is going to be using them to create awesome software and that it's only going to get easier to do so BUT ALSO that you have to immediately start using them or you'll get left behind. Why should we start now if they're going to be more powerful and more accesible in a years time? seems like the effort working with the imperfect exising version will be wasted.

Yeah, this matches my experience, line by line I can probably write code quicker but producing lines of code has never really been the bottle neck, nor infact the point, in software development.

The issue is that whilst the warning exists and is there front and centre, the marketing around ChatGPT etc - which is absolutely deafening in volume and enthusiasm - is that they're PHD level experts and can do anything.

This marketing obscures what the software is _actually_ good at and gives users a poor mental model of what's going on under the hood. Dumping years worth of un-differentiated health data into a generic chatGPT chat window seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths of large language models.

A reasonable approach would be to try to explain what kind of tasks these models do well at and what kind of situations they behave poorly in.

>Accept that most people flake

This is a thing that's always surprised me when I've been in the US. How common it is to enthusiastically arrange to do some activity together, get a meal, play a game, have a drink, whatever, and then for people to just call it off at the last minute. It seems much more socially acceptable to do so than either the UK (where I live) or France (where I have lived and still visit regularly).

The loneliness thing seems common across Europe too though so I'm not suggesting this is the root of the problem. But I do think that whilst this is a global problem the solutions are likely to be local, working with and leveraging different cultural norms.

HTML, CSS, Javascript?

As a customer I often look for the data model without a "moat". I want to be able to move my data to a different supplier without too much hassle

I think the reason is that Bitcoin et al were sold as having practical uses but their ‘success’ has been as a vehicle for speculation. Though the two things are linked (hype for the former drives adoption for the latter) and it’s possible to both hold that crypto currencies are of no practical use and a great investment opportunity. (FWIW, with a long enough time span I believe neither of these is true)

[edited to correct a couple of typos]

This is a very accurate and concise summary of why I can't work in tech companies anymore. Recently I returned for a quick contract to develop a proof of concept app and almost immediately my stress levels whent through the roof. Just the whole thing is a recipe for erroding peoples's ability to produce anything of value.