stuxnet79

Like what am I supposed to do if AI is going to take my job?

(1) You call your local representatives to start working on AI legislation.

(2) Legislators seek advisors from frontier labs (specifically Anthropic) because there is a lack of in-house expertise in government.

(3) Advisors set up a regulatory body that scrutinizes new innovations in the AI space. Causes a chilling effect in the industry effectively knee-capping OAI and Chinese model providers who don't have a direct line into Washington.

(4) Profit (for Anthropic)

Note that some of the entries here are clearly outdated. I've cycled through some "global south" countries that I'm familiar with and what's shown may have been true maybe 15-20 years ago. GDP has 4x since then and at the same salary level the lifestyle is either equivalent or better than the richer countries.

But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were

It's rooted in Taylorism / Management Science which is good at attaching metrics to the "factors of production" and correlating those to outputs.

But it doesn't have any easy numbers to attach to morale, motivation, loyalty or conscientiousness. These are all human factors that will have a real impact on your business.

Despite paying lip service to all these qualities corporations in the modern era either conveniently hide them under the rug or game them with lazy metrics that ultimately suffer a devastating collapse under Goodharts law.

Picking up a religious text will teach you more about dealing with people than these articles written by MBAs.

Everytime this topic comes up I always replay this clip of Gabe Newell ranting about having to write multi-threaded code for the PS3 and chuckle [1]

Was writing code for the PS3 genuinely difficult or was it also a skill issue? The counter-argument I've heard is that multi threaded programming just wasn't as common at the time due to minimal number of cores available on most consumer hardware.

Perhaps the PS3 would have fared better with a different generation of developers.

[1] https://youtu.be/dKYT6NzsUZQ?si=wzf5e5iBP3MEEJEn

Sony even admitted to this being their strategy, so that later games look better and better as even brilliant devs only over time figured out how to squeeze full performance out of HW.

I think the real strategy was to make it harder for natively developed PS3 games to be ported to other platforms.

It was a sensible strategy except they effectively lost the console wars right out the gate by delaying their release a year. This alienated developers who didn't want to go through the effort of doing development the PS3 way when it was hard to program for AND had little traction among consumers.

If the PS3 had come out a year before the 360 things might have played out differently.

Sony's hubris around the PS3 was very risky. They caught up in sales by the end of that generation but early PS3 adopters unfortunately had to deal with fundamentally broken, unoptimized ports despite having superior (if over-engineered) hardware.

Also the PS3 disaster ultimately set the stage for the PS4 which had a drastically simpler architecture. PS4 was a lot easier to program for but if compared to a PC with equivalent specs it was overpriced and much more locked down.

Batman Beyond is also technically cyberpunk although it has more of a Y2K vibe rather than the retro 80s / early 90s aesthetic.

It might be skirting the edges of what is considered cyberpunk since it has Mecha elements but Patlabor is a fantastic manga/series that should have been included in this list [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patlabor:_The_Movie

Personally I think I'm done with GitS at this point. How many times has it been rebooted, like a dozen times?

The last one I enjoyed watching was Arise but I lost track after that. I think the series has been done to death and I would love to see some completely new IP from Masamune that is more reflective of the AI and economic upheavals we are experiencing in the 20s.

Can you elaborate on the first step? Which cloud and which service? What's the cost outlay if you are just having a convo and not doing anything 'agentic'?

This is the reason the PS2 is having a resurgence in popularity. With FreeMcBoot and TB of storage you can backup your entire collection and play it at your convenience. There are a non-trivial number of PS3 games that are basically unplayable unless they get patched. With digital storefronts getting shut down left and right there is no guarantee that the disc will yield anything valuable, it's basically a paperweight.

On the positive side, clearing out all this space junk could end up being a meaningful contributor to global GDP. See also Planetes [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

How much of that 100GB is actually optimized usage? I suspect that a hard cap on the size of the game would lead to a better quality product. The size inflation of games has literally gone insane. I was looking at my Steam library and Tekken 7 was taking up close to 100GB of space which makes absolutely no sense, because it has the same fundamental gameplay as Tekken Tag 1 which was released on a 700MB CD ROM for the PS2's launch.

This is bad for many reasons:

- Externalizes the costs of distribution to consumers. DVDs and Blu Rays cost a pittance compared to the $100 MSRP that GTA 6 is rumoured to retail under. GTA 6 will likely break records for the highest single day gross of a media release of all time. They can't allocate some of that top line to providing a physical token that gamers can collect?

- Sets a bad precedent for future AAA releases in terms of acceptable size. Forces gamers to have to buy more storage at a time when storage costs are astronomical. At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.

- Genuinely leads to worse quality product. Without physical media there's no deadline and effectively no incentive to provide a polished product on release day. Have fun playing a broken game for the next 3 to 5 years.

This is a perfect articulation of why even 13 years later, I still have no motivation to beat GTA 5. It worked great as a quasi-movie but not a video game.

One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom.

Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career ending failures. It took down the Dallas office which was the main HQ, left a black mark on many people's careers and was also ill timed with the popping of the Dot Com Bubble. Funding for new, risky ideas was essentially gone in the aftermath.

It will probably be an unoptimized hot mess for the first year. Same as the rest of the over hyped AAA titles. I'm sure devs are on a death match to hit the deadline.

Is this after aggressive optimization? Size inflation for AAA games has truly reached new heights. If it had to be released via physical media that would require 3-4 BD discs at minimum.

I've been on a retro gaming binge lately because I strongly believe the constraints & limitations of older platforms yielded a better product imo.

F.E.A.R 2 was released on the PS3 and Xbox 360, both of which have laughably low specs by modern standards. When you have to create dynamic experiences out of a potato you are forced to get creative and that involves squeezing a lot of juice out of basic techniques.

Transformer based AI had to wait until the world's compute capacity reached a certain level to become feasible.

The Wii U walked so that the Switch could run. I'm glad to see renewed interest in it. Now if we only had a decent emulator. I know Cemu exists but the compatibility of most games I want to play with it is atrocious.

I really just want to not think about that stuff when I'm not working.

This is my exact attitude but I don't have decades of sysadmin experience to lean on so I'm completely lost on what approach to take setting up my first NAS.

My requirements are simple: (1) Should be plug and play (hardware + software) (2) Must support ZFS since I already set up a pool in my beefy desktop PC.

What would you recommend? I've looked into Synology's offerings and they look perfect except for the fact that they don't support ZFS only Btrfs. I clicked into this thread expecting Ubiquiti's offering would be what I want, but all I see here is hardcore enterprise gear for the prosumer crowd.

It is the Asian model of capitalism. David Oks did a great article about this focusing on Japanese firms in particular [1]

[1] https://davidoks.blog/p/why-japanese-companies-do-so-many

There are multiple reasons.

(1) Canada over-indexed on low skill immigration. High skill white collar professionals either directly immigrate to the US, immigrate to Canada with the intent to move to the US eventually or they stay in their own countries because COL in Canada's major economic centres is astronomical.

(2) Supply of doctors is artificially constrained by the governing bodies. It is much more difficult to become a physician in Canada vs the US. Salaries are also substantially lower. No surprise that the ratio of available doctors to patients is concerning.

The housing crisis in Canada is a complicated topic and I'm not informed enough to offer a summary of what led us to this mess. But this Wikipedia article [1] provides a good overview.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_property_bubble

Except ... the collapse never happens. Once your engineers burn out or age out you just hire fresh meat and the cycle repeats. The issue I have with these types of articles (and books like Peopleware / Slack) is they never provide any actual metrics that may convince the beancounters to try a different approach.

Well the structural issues have been present for some time but the influx of newcomers during COVID did not help the situation. Not saying it is right, but these newcomers have become a scapegoat and it's stoked the flames of xenophobia which was previously never an issue in this country.

Also QC for all it's local issues has largely been insulated from "over-immigration" due to the language requirements. If your only experience is there you may not be aware of the scale of the problem.

Believe me an open border would do nothing but increase xenophobia. Canada is dealing with its own immigration crisis with a ton of newcomers DDoSing the overextended healthcare system and real estate market.

Going directly from a research lab with a healthy and collaborative culture to an agile scrum factory in the private sector was one of the most jarring experiences of my life.

Everytime I speak to an academic who is trying to make the same leap this is something I always warn them about.

Only thing missing from this comms masterpiece was all lowercase.

A very unserious tone from probably the most consequential company of our lifetimes. It's vibing all the way to the top I guess.

Appreciate your comment. I skimmed the online version and it covers all the 2010s era developments all the way to Transformers which is enough to earn it a spot on my bookshelf.

Grab "Deep Learning" - you'll find it useful, imteresting, and likely less 'dense' in the negative sense!

Absolutely! I just ordered it and it's enroute :)

This is incredible, thanks for sharing!