adamrezich

He was right about the mouse, in the long run.

he always had a bold take

Often quite literally, in his PC Magazine columns!

I grew up reading his column in PC Mag, then watched him on TechTV, and then listened to him on TWiT (where he was consistently the best part of the show, and how I learned about Sarbanes-Oxley, because he'd bring it up like every single episode for a good long while there), and later No Agenda. Before I'd realized it, John had be come the constant throughline as technology progressed throughout my life. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later, but it still really hurts to see him go.

Trust the Experts who have done Studies and written Papers in Committees their objective view of reality not to mention their morality is superior to yours yadda yadda heard it all before

Why am I supposed to take a janky-ass web visualization, completely devoid of citations as far as I can tell, and which was, itself, almost certainly vibecoded, at face value, as a valid argument?

I love how you went from posting links to articles to make arguments for you, to then editing your comment to link to a $250 book that I should buy and read, so it can make your argument for you.

I love the idea of a Captain Planet villain having some underling crunch the numbers to choose the optimal place to build dozens of AI data centers such that there's just enough water available for them to use, but then by using said water, it conveniently destroys any and all local ecologies and human communities in the process, cackling all the while—it's so completely divorced from reality that it makes perfect sense that average people living in the mediabrained modern hellscape of today would believe that to be the case.

The energy grid use seems far more worrisome than water use. Why would anyone build an AI data center in a specifically “water-stressed region”?

The other day I was talking with two friends—one programmer, one musician, both of fairly conservative political persuasion—and the topic of “AI data centers” came up. I said something to the effect of, “y'know, all that talk about how they just use all up all the water from wherever they're built is total propaganda nonsense, right?” and both were genuinely taken aback by this statement. As far as they were concerned, “AI data centers” were something a Captain Planet villain would build, just absolute ecological disasters, inherently. I'm relatively neutral when it comes to this stuff but man, the propaganda against “AI data centers” really works!

I greatly dislike how “cyber” has just become this completely malleable standalone word.

I imagine that's all very understandable to the average Bay Area five-year-old.

Loneliness, as far as I can tell.

This is how basically every console video game works.

See also: Edge Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Games#Trademark_disputes

Flick the joystick to launch common Codex workflows like reviewing a PR, debugging an error, or refactoring code.

Uh… what?

What on earth is going on when you click the Tutorial button on that website?!

Sure—so, is Sol 109.2x better than Terra? Or 1.304x10^6 better?

One thing I didn't like about it (and briefly experimented with, in a prototype for my own game in a similar vein), was, much like EVE, it's called a “spreadsheet game”, but there's no spreadsheets in the game, or any sort of API bridge that makes doing stuff with the game in an external spreadsheet environment easier. I understand that this may just be part of the appeal of these sorts of games for many people—reading through stat blocks and wiki pages to figure out what numbers and what formulas need to go where to build the Ultimate Spreadsheet for your purposes (though in the end doesn't everyone just use existing Ultimate Spreadsheets created by others, or at least use them as reference?). And trust me, I did have a lot of fun building my Google Sheets infrastructure to coordinate business and production between myself and the three friends I got to (briefly) play Prosperous Universe with me. Also, don't get me wrong, I also enjoyed the subsequent rabbit-hole of learning how spreadsheet implementations actually work, including historical alternative spreadsheet implementations that had a lot of cool ideas like Lotus Improv [0]. But, in the end, I just wasn't having enough fun with Prosperous Universe to keep playing after awhile.

[0] This video is worth watching the opening few minutes of just for the vibes alone (trust me) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M

I got way into Prosperous Universe for a few months, a few years back—it was fun for awhile but the pace at which new features were being added to the game was (and still seems to be) absolutely glacial, given what the game is. Really fun ideas in there, though.

Box2D is still pretty darn good! Definitely recommended for 2D physics game projects. The C APIs for Box2D and now Box3D are just so nice to work with.

I just wish impotent slacktivism was rightfully looked down upon rather than enshrined as something noble and worthwhile, man.

Is that really so much to ask for?

I thought we all agreed that flags-as-political-statement in software were Certified Cringe after the one-click “add a French flag overlay to your Facebook profile photo” thing, eleven years ago?

Look again—there's only one “List of grenade attacks in x” article.

For more context, from wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...

Sweden is the only country I'm aware of that has a Wikipedia page specifically about this incredibly niche local phenomenon which by the way has no correlation to anything being discussed here at all.

There's a huge difference between making your own streaming box that people have to buy in order to use, and buying the company that makes the streaming box built into basically every new TV.

How about sheer panic after seeing the bill?

Where are the panels sourced from?

I meant that the games industry is a few decades old, and it's been dead for about a decade and a half or so now.

That... basically kills the entire gaming industry.

Am I missing something serious here

Only just that the video games industry as we've known it for the past few decades is basically already dead—at best, it's a hollowed-out husk of what it once was.

This isn't really much of an excuse given contemporary models though. My current game project has a GUI editor mode and it was not difficult at all whatsoever to set it up such that whenever I run a debug build of the game:

- It opens to the editor mode rather than the gameplay mode on launch

- It makes a .run/ directory next to the executable if one doesn't already exist

- It makes a timestamped directory within .run/ for this current debug run

- It automatically records stdout to stdout.txt, stderr to stderr.txt, and a crash.txt if the game crashes, in the directory for this run

- When the “take debug screenshot” function is invoked (which can be done by pressing F12), it saves a timestamped (based on time since executable launched) screenshot in the directory for this run

- Editor actions and 3D camera movements are recorded to playback.txt in the directory for this run

With all of this in place, I can do a debug build, run the game, do something in the editor, and take one or more screenshots where things went wrong. Then, Codex can see the log files and screenshots and try to diagnose the problem. When attempting to fix the problem, it can automatically recompile the debug build and rerun it with a launch option that plays back the latest recording file, which does the same sequence of editor actions/camera movements and takes screenshots at the same points in the process. Then it can compare this to the initial recorded run and see what needs to be fixed.

We could be having a GUI renaissance right now but for various primarily aesthetic reasons people are churning out TUIs, and personally I think it's a huge mistake.

Why is it only a matter of time? The AI-as-a-service companies are going to continue to improve their products by improving both the part that could be reproduced in a self-hosted setup, but also the “secret sauce” they put on top of that to make it a better product. There is no incentive for this “secret sauce” to be something that can be reproduced for self-hosting, is there?