vineyardlabs

Note, the portions of DLSS4 that improve 2x frame generation performance/stability and the improved models for upscaling are coming to other rtx cards. DlSS4 multi-frame generation will not.

This is true, but it's worth noting that 3x was 5ms additional latency beyond original FG and 7ms for 4x, so the difference in latency between DLSS 3 FG and DLSS 4 MFG is probably imperceptible for most people.

Yeah perhaps times have changed. When I was an intern at JPL 10 years ago they brought some senior Netflix folks in to talk about their CDN reliability efforts and it was really impressive. I believe it was called Chaos Monkey and it effectively would take down data centers in production at random, forcing their network to be extremely reliable. Pretty wild idea.

The interesting thing about this thought experiment is that you assume Netflix would have slightly above average employees if they have slightly above average compensation. Now what happens to the experiment if Netflix has ridiculously above average, end of the bell curve compensation (as they do)? Serious question, I do not and have not worked for Netflix.

Personally, I would not try to negotiate an onsite role into a remote one, not because I don't think it will work (though it probably won't), but because you don't really want to be the one remote exception in a primarily onsite team.

The rest of the team will end up having to go out of their way to accommodate you, your accomplishments won't be as visible, and you'll be passed over for performance-based compensation and/or promotion.

Though I guess that's fine if it's a job you plan to take for a year or whatever and move on.

Countdown to zero day is great. It straddles the line between technical and accessible to a wide audience well IMO.

Is this a joke? It's widely known by anyone paying attention that Democrats embraced mail-in voting much more aggressively than Republicans, especially in 2020.

Yeah you're correct. I mistakenly said unnamed due to the theory some people have that Theophilus was not a real person but is some kind of metaphor/personification of the church.

To be fair, I think the public bristled at the longshoremen strike because the vast majority of their leverage comes not from (most) of their jobs being particularly high-skill but from the fact that they can unilaterally destroy the entire economy for everyone else. Add to that the fact that their union chief was extremely blunt about the whole thing, and that longshoremen make, on average, triple the average household income in the US, it wasn't a very sympathetic cause.

Luke would have been literate. Paul states elsewhere that Luke is a physician, and in the book Luke states he was contracted by a third party to write the book.

Questions about authorship aside, note that only Matthew and John claim to be disciples/people who directly interacted with Jesus. Luke is purported to be a physician/associate of Paul who was paid by an unnamed benefactor to document the life of Jesus based on interviews with eyewitnesses and research from earlier sources, and Mark is purported to be writing down an account of the life Jesus based on Peter's eyewitness testimony in Rome several decades after the fact.

idk 2.5% yearly raise and 5% for promotions seems kind of meager to me. Seems like a yearly raise should both cover cost of living and throw in another percent or 2 to compensate for having another year of experience. I know a lot of people in a lot of professions don't get this but tech comp is what it is.

Then a promotion raise that constitute only 2 years of yearly base raises seems pretty lacking to me since a promotion generally comes with increased responsibilities and higher standards.

I've worked as a developer for companies outside of big tech who complain all day long about the fact that they can't compete with big tech on compensation while they hemorrhage engineers to big tech. I'm sure NYT does the same. No amount of moaning about this will change the fact that they are directly competing with these companies for talent.

I'm not anti-union at all and see them as necessary in certain types of jobs (I hope the Boeing Machinist's Union guts Boeing), but I have no interest in being a part of a union as a developer because it seems like collective bargaining just ends up locking everyone into the level of salary/career progression of the lowest common denominator.

I played 40ish hours of Cyberpunk 2077 on m3 M3 Max MBP under crossover. Runs fine on medium/high settings.

I'm not talking about hardware. I mean perhaps the next Xbox will literally be a windows PC with a console-focused interface and the Xbox binaries and PC binaries of games will literally be the same. In the same way that a Steam Deck is actually just a PC.

I don't think it's dying I just think things are shifting. More realistically, I think we're watching console gaming die right now (other than Nintendo).

Neither Sony nor MS are doing strict console exclusivity anymore, with MS going as far as to put out their own IPs on Sony consoles.

MS claims there's going to be a next Xbox, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it's basically a computer with some custom version of windows with a console-tailored UI.

So in some ways, PC gaming is healthier than it's ever been as it is gaining a growing market share as the console market share shrinks.

I think what's happening in the PC space is that we've reached a kind of Moore's law for graphical fidelity where we're deep in the diminishing returns part of the curve. Look at Read Dead Redemption 2 for example. It's 6 years old and still goes toe to toe with games coming out now. By contrast compare Crysis (2007) to anything that came out in 2001. Halo, for example. It's a night and day difference. So yeah the highest end hardware (specifically GPUs) has gotten crazy expensive but it's also gotten crazy overkill. A lot of new games are playable on low to mid settings on older and/or more budget hardware, and low settings still look fantastic on many games.

Add to that there's a general distrust right now of AAA studios to actually make a decent product, really great stuff coming out of AA/indie studios, and a lot of people playing only one or two live service games like CoD or Fortnight instead of playing lots of different AAA games and there's less dollars to get thrown at every new 100 million dollar budget game that comes out.

I think we're close to the point where the AAA publishers wake up and realize that it's not tenable for every game that comes out to have 100+ hours worth of content and cost 100+ million dollars, and the industry will be better for it.

Fair enough, I suppose I could be overly optimistic. I just figure it's garnered enough interest that even if there's turnover in the team somebody will carry the torch. Especially since Apple seems to be actively tolerant if not even supportive of the project.

Almost certainly. Asahi linux is getting pretty useable on M1 and M2. They don't support M3 yet, let alone M4, but support will surely come eventually.

Related question. For those who do any kind of programming for fun on the side, how do you feel about using tools like cursor for those projects. Is it a cool productivity enhancer that allows you to focus less on the code and more on the end-product, or does it suck the fun out of it for you?

I work in an environment right now where feeding proprietary code/docs into 3rd party hosted LLMs is a hard no-go, and we don't have any great locally hosted solution set up yet, so I haven't really taken the dive into actively writing code with LLM assistance. I feel like I should practice this skill, but the idea of using a tool like Cursor on personal projects just seems so antithetical to the point that I can't bring myself to actually do it.

RAM aside, it would be silly for you to ever buy this model for your use case anyway. This is the base M4 that's also in ipads with no active cooling. If your running large LLMs locally, you aren't the target market for this product.

This is also the case in the US. The majority of college courses are limited to people within a given major and can't be taken by outside majors with limited exceptions.

Going to chime in. Young(ish) person in tech. Have heard nothing but great things about Bentonville. I'm into mountain biking and the city is like a spiderweb of awesome looking biking/walking trails built by the Waltons.

Note that the X37B has been flying since 2011 and is part of a larger program that has been ongoing at Boeing since the late 90s. It's likely that a lot of the hard work was accomplished before the MBAs at Boeing ruined the company to the extent that they have today.

You mean PhantomWorks. Skunk Works is Lockheed Martin's advanced R&D arm.

This seems like a big assumption to me personally.

To be clear, I happen to be of the opinion that AI/ML/LLMs/whatever cannot truly replace software engineers without the true advent of AGI.

But to play devil's advocate. I'm an embedded SWE and work with circuit designers/have dabbled in some PCB design myself. Taking circuit design as an example:

From an abstract logic standpoint, PCB design is not that different from software development. It essentially boils down to taking some input and feeding it through a cascade of various discrete transformations until you have some desired output. The fact that PCB designs are captured through schematics is irrelevant, as a schematic is just a visual representation of a netlist. There are even DSLs that allow for the design of circuits through code alone. The mechanisms that make LLMs work show some level of adaptability to domains outside of traditional language. It is totally conceivable today to finetune an LLM on netlists (or even on images of schematics with the right encoder model) and have it be able to generate circuit designs. The training data exists, though it's not as plentiful as say code or english texts. I'm not an ML expert but I believe it's totally possible to have something where, for example, the text "555 timer-based LED-blinking circuit", could map in embedding space to a netlist that describes said circuit. There are in fact companies working on this exact thing today (Flux.ai)

I don't see why this wouldn't work for other engineering disciplines aswell. There's lots of public scad code for various 3d models. It's totally conceivable to build a model trained on scad or even raw 3d object file geometry and text embeddings to generate mechanical designs. Lot's of research is going into generative meshes which could be seen as an early form of this.

I think my point being that the hard part of engineering, discipline aside, is being able to take a fuzzy set of desires from a customer and a fuzzy set of constraints and being able to use the hard math and science to create and iteratively refine a product/system/whatever to make all stakeholders happy. LLMs can't really emulate this process today.

Not sure about that, the consumer CPU market is probably more competitive right now than it's been in a decade, primarily on efficiency.

Also not sure what that has to do with the original point, which is that the A15 is not an impressive chip to be manufacturing in the US because it's designed by apple and meant for mobile devices, neither of which are reasons to discount the complexity of the chip.

Not so. Apple's new mobile processors are routinely the fastest processors in the world (single threaded) when they come out. The A17 pro is currently the 17th fastest CPU, and the M3 (which is in MacBook airs and iPads) is number 2.

Sure these don't have the scope or number of transistors of like an NVIDIA Blackwell or something but in terms of performance/watt these are ultra high-end ICs.

You should check out any of the books written by Ben Macintyre, especially "The Spy and the Traitor". It turns out a lot of spy novels aren't that far off from reality.

I wouldn't be so sure. Proximate for 5 days in office and 3 days in office might be two different things. I got an offer from Amazon last year (ended up declining) and the HM at the time talked about how a sizable portion of the team were commuting extreme distances to work there (including by plane) on the pretense that they only had to be in office 3 days a week.

I've heard people voice the opinion that browser extensions are uniquely difficult to actually monetize. Moreso than SAAS/mobile apps, etc. because users are accustomed to extensions being simple and free with the exception of a very select few (Grammarly)

Thoughts?

What is the point of the question being asked by the title, and why do things have to take off?

I think VR is super cool. Playing an hour of beatsaber, pistol whip, or superhot is tremendously entertaining. I also get why people aren't flocking to VR in droves. Compared to other forms of entertainment it's expensive, clunky, isolating, and potentially causes motion sickness. I don't believe in the metaverse / AVP future where your average person is going to work 40 hours a week with a headset on or whatever. My fear is that Meta is going to wake up to the fact that the returns for the billions of dollars per year they're burning trying to make Metaverse a thing are never going to materialize and then give up on the whole thing. Why can't VR just be a niche subdomain of the games industry?

If they just accepted it for what it is, VR could be a small but profitable business within Meta's portfolio or a profitable/sustainable spinoff.