I worked at EA for eight years. I wrote "Game Programming Patterns" (gameprogrammingpatterns.com) and "Crafting Interpreters" (craftinginterpreters.com). I work at Google on the Dart language. I'm into programming languages, music, UX, software architecture, electronics, cooking, and lots of other stuff.
Everyone lives in a world deeply affected by social media. Even if you've never looked at a screen your entire life, you have spent thousands of hours talking to and being informed by people who did.
> Anyway, telling agent to NOT do something is always worse than telling agent to do something.
> That's why you should say something like "Use constants instead of magic strings/numbers" rather than "Do not use magic strings/numbers".
Pro tip: This is good guidance for communicating with humans as well. Don't just block people but give them a path forward. (But don't force them down that path, because people really hate feeling like their agency is being impinged.)
> and the latter is neither unique nor particularly widely used (hot reloads have to tangle with state and patching, so resetting the world for ease of reasoning is considered a best practice for a reason).
For what it's worth, hot reload is very widely used in Dart/Flutter. When you are writing UI code using a reactive style framework where rendering the UI appears to be "generate a new UI from scratch on each frame", it's more straightforward to have an intuition about what does and doesn't get reloaded.
It's not perfect, of course. But it works really well for the kind of changes you make when iterating on a user experience.
Because big companies can spend way more on marketing than you.
If a big company decides to make a game very similar to yours, they can make theirs win by throwing more money into marketing than you can. Do you want them to spend that marketing budget on your competition or on you?
All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry.
The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of this. So using a widely used game engine can put you at a disadvantage if you're trying to make a game that doesn't go with that grain and offers players something different.
As more studios consolidate on the same engine, more players will get tired of that sameness and reward other studios more. As more studios do their own thing, players will become saturated with novelty and the benefits of not using an engine will go down. There is no stable equilibrium.
By that same logic, you could compare a room full of 7-year-olds to a room full of teenagers and claim that the school system gives people sexual libidos.
It's true that adolescents are very behaviorally different from younger kids, but it isn't clear how much of that is natural biological development, how much is parenting, how much is culture, and how much is the school system.
This is a really good article. Not to take away from its insight, but I think the author is very close to restating some of the central points of "The Pragmatic Programmer", especially around YAGNI and KISS.
> the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg.
That's the entire point. That's why the speech ends with "your move, chief".
Sean (Williams' character) is deliberately being confrontational because Will is avoiding making any psychological progress by putting on a fake mask, an avoidance strategy which has been successful with previous psychologists. Sean sees what Will doing and knows that the only way to get Will to stop is to knock the mask off.
In order to get through to Will, Sean has to make Will stop putting up a front, which Will doesn't want to do. So Sean has to go on the attack and break down Will's resistance. He does that by taking a direction that he know will be effeective: Will's own insecurities about his lack of lived experience.
No two things are truly orthogonal when you have to spend time to use either of them. An hour conversing with ChatGPT is an hour of your life unavailable for talking to a human.
It's not really about AI, data centers, water consumption, or energy. Those are real issues. But I don't think that's what gets people so riled up.
Imagine if every AI company was a small local business run by middle class folks and there were thousands of these little companies. The total amount of data centers, water, and energy consumption is the same.
I don't think people would be anywhere near as mad then. There are still other societal externalities around AI to get mad about, sure.
But I think one of the biggest drivers of rage around AI is inequality. It's not about what is being consumed to produce AI, it's about the tiny fraction of soulless billionaire elites that benefit from it. It's about a small number of fantastically rich assholes who keep taking more and more and more while there is less and less left for everyone else.
The rage that Luigi Mangione felt is the same rage these voters feel and I believe has the same root cause. That rage won't go away if AI gets more energy efficient or stops using water.
> The keyboard gave everyone a "bicycle of the mind", now everyone can visually express themselves if they try.
Right, everyone can. So now your film-making vision is simply one infinitesimally small slice of the pie that every viewer is eating. Yes, you can make a movie by yourself. Likely no one will watch it because they're too busy watching other movies made just as cheaply but by companies with marketing budgets.
> I am getting so much more work done that I'm launching easily three times what I did prior to AI tooling.
Great. Have you ever once in your life had a real conversation with a normal person where they expressed, "Man, you know what? I wish I had way more apps on my phone."
Like, yes, there is demand for software that fills unique niches, but really we are reaching saturation.
> When we have at-home Michelin star robot chefs
Eating the world's best meal, alone, while staring at your phone.
> where our cars can drive us to the beach overnight so we wake up to sunrise on the coast
This part sounds nice. Hopefully you can find parking.
> where I can have an idea for a new take on a music player tagging algorithm and just build that without it consuming weeks of my time.
Except you don't have a music player to put that algorithm in because all of the music players are closed source. You can write an open source one (or contribute to an existing one), but those all require local libraries of music, which almost no one has. Because it's not about the software, it's about the access to content.
But, really, why even bother tagging music in the first place? Just treat the tags as prompts and generate an infinite stream of music catered exactly to your mood, on demand.
I get where you're coming from. AI is a massive force multiplier for producing content. But content isn't the point of life.
The future that AI builds is one of perfect solitary meaningless hedonism. Every itch scratched, every base desire satisfied. But there is a hollow void at the center of that. Even a pet dog will lose its mind when given endless food, treats, and toys if it doesn't have an actual person to play with, and I'd like to believe we are somewhat more cognitively sophisticated than dogs.
Think back on the best meals you've ever had. I've had some very good ones. Some were memorable because of the quality of the food. But the memories of meals I hold most dear were dinners I made myself for family, not-very-good cookies my young daughter baked for me, meals shared with friends while travelling, crappy hot dogs cooked over a campfire.
It's human connection that brings us the most lasting joy, and AI is antithetical to it.
As an ex-game dev, I always found it a little annoying that they used "AI" for what was essentially just hard-coded logic.
It's a hard problem because "AI" has been a term since the 50s but has been used to describe different approaches to making a computer do things over time. The way game developers use "AI" to mean "hardcoded logic for game behavior" is fully inline with what "AI" meant in the 60s when they were using symbolic AI to write the first computer-controlled chess games.
Then AI programmers hit the wall of hard-coded logic, went through an AI winter, and what survived on the other end was logic that was automatically trained from big data sets. We used to call that "machine learning" because "AI" had connotations of snake oil from previous AI winters. But then within the past decade, tech companies with grandiose ambitions decided that "machine learning" was too nerdy so resurrected "AI" to refer to LLMs and their ilk.
People are not vectors of real-valued numbers, and "mean person" is not a coherent concept. Does the average person have half a penis and half a vagina? Is their skin a tan-ish mocha brown? Do they have slightly but not really curly hair that is long in some parts and short in others? Incomplete epicanthic folds?
Any representation of people will be a randomly chosen sample, and not an attempt to visualize the blending of all people from the sample.
Agreed. I don't think this is a granularity problem, it's a fragmentation problem.
Users are selecting two data points: start time and duration. The fact that those two points have different granularity is what leads to fragmentation, not the fact that start time is more granular than duration.
It is true, however, that more coarse grained allocation sizes will help minimize fragmentation.
> worse IMO is the "four way intersection with no signs or circle or anything" where you just kind of hope no one comes fast and hits you
Agreed, totally. That's what this street used to be before they converted it. I hated driving it because I had to crawl through each intersection because you never knew if someone was going to just blow through it or not. It was even slower than a four-way stop.
I worked at EA for eight years. I wrote "Game Programming Patterns" (gameprogrammingpatterns.com) and "Crafting Interpreters" (craftinginterpreters.com). I work at Google on the Dart language. I'm into programming languages, music, UX, software architecture, electronics, cooking, and lots of other stuff.
https://github.com/munificent [email protected]