chrisfosterelli

The biggest thing the bugs introduce from an LLMs perspective is a necessity for realtime response. Without them, the LLM can take as long as it wants to decide and do its next operation on the factory. With them, not responding fast enough results in death (particularly early game where a lot of biter combat is player driven). I presume it doesn't do great at this.

That's a good point, the use case for mobile app dev would be quite appealing even if a little niche.

The touch bar's specific advantages grew on me and I liked the slider for volume/brightness. But I definitely haven't missed it either.

I agree, there's definitely places where I could see it being useful. I just wonder if it's too marginal to justify it. I felt the same way about the touch bar.

I think my comment was internally consistent with my phone use.

My comment was not about touchscreens in general, it was about touchscreens on laptops. The phone touch experience is excellent because everything is designed for touch. Correspondingly, if you plug a KBM into a phone, it's a very poor experience.

If my phone's display is oil repelling, it simply doesn't work very well. I regularly wipe the screen to keep it clean. Luckily, this is very easy to do since my phone is the size of my hand and the display is attached to a solid box with no hinges involved. I can clean it with my shirt when I notice smudges and am in the habit of doing so. A laptop screen is much more annoying to keep clean.

I have never wanted to touch my laptop screen or felt any sort of desire to do so. In fact I try really hard not to touch it so that I don't get smudges on it.

The laptop touch screen always felt like an awkward use case to me because the ideal UX for touch and KBM are so different. If you're designing for use on laptop/desktop you need to design for KBM-first -- since the majority of devices will be -- and therefore the touch experience suffers, and users with a touchscreen just use the KBM.

I don't think the average consumer cares that much about this either. I've noticed my grandparents often buy laptops with touchscreens accidentally and then proceed to mostly interact with it by accident.

Part of me wants to believe that a company like apple must/would do this right if they were going to do it but on the other hand there's the whole touch bar debacle and it doesn't seem like their foldable phone is starting off with the best reviews either.

Eh but if Milwaukee was to then invent a power tool that it claimed could soon do the contractors' whole job... OPs question would correspondingly exist there too.

HDR support on Apple TV is fairly hit or miss depending on the player you are using.

HDR10+ is supported in some players (infuse) but not others (plex) and will fallback to HDR10. Profile 7 DV files do not play properly on Apple TV period even though it will display the DV logo (though frankly very few devices can do this). Profile 5 and 8 DV files will play properly depending on the player and the content mapping level in the content (2.9 is well supported but 4.0 causes HDR10 fallback or black screens in some cases). Apple TV also doesn't support HD audio passthrough great.

Thanks, I am not a musician so I found your comparison to it very interesting. I otherwise agree with everything you've said and I think the creative aspect is something that is absent from my alternate communities

In my defense I didn't suggest I cannot :)

I have not been attending as many tech meetups or keeping tabs on tech news like I used to. I've been spending more direct time with friends (tech and not). I've also found enjoyment spending a lot of time in more niche internet communities that are not actually about software dev but tend to attract a lot of software dev people. I've definitely noticed I'm spending far more time on other, non-tech hobbies of mine. It has been a while since I've done any OSS stuff or organized a tech meetup.

There's the whole component of identity you mentioned. I've considered myself a 'computer guy' since elementary school and it's been a bit odd to think what I would be if not that. I'd never have even entertained that idea until recently, but in the short term I think I have developed enough of a product mindset and business skills to stay useful in tech. Maybe I need to think of myself as a 'product guy' or 'entrepreneurial guy' instead.

If AI is soon able to replace everything we bring to the table as the maximalists are claiming then honestly all knowledge work go out the window pretty quickly. If that happens then that is its own scary thought and I don't think we're really ready for that economically / socially. I pay a lot of attention to my retirement funds lately.

So frankly, I think I'm instinctively doing what you suggest... But I think it's also natural to feel some weird feelings about it all!

I did my Masters in ML and a decade ago it seemed AI was so exciting. You could build relatively good models at home. Our university had a cluster that could train SOTA models. It seemed like every year we were discovering a breakthrough new neural net structure.

Nowadays all the development is done at a bigtech lab, and you aren't going to be able to tell anyone about it. Everyone else is relegated to interacting with slightly larger and larger LLMs over an API. On one hand it's cool that the tech is now far more accessible and impactful, but on the other AI has become immensely boring.

It's a little uncharitable take as I know some people are doing some cool innovative stuff still, and not every tech needs to be new forever anyway. I would feel less strongly if it wasn't impossible to not keep hearing about it :)

This is well put and something I think a lot of us struggle with.

The internet itself seems filled with the AI maximalists who have no end of hype for the latest prompt 'technique' or AI doomers that would skin you alive if you mention you used AI to make a photo once.

Quietly among peers I talk to there seems to be a very different group that exists: those that recognize AI is super valuable for getting a lot of work done but also feel that suddenly the work is so much less exciting than it was before.

Sure, there's the obvious "I enjoy the mechanics of programming" component that's gone but then there's also this general feeling that is hard to shake which feels a little deeper. I've wondered about it. Is it all the layoffs? The suddenly shaky economics for a lot of our companies? The uncertainty of the career's future in general?

I think the author has put their thumb on it well to describe it as a lack of intellectual community. That feels like at least part of it.

I agree. Neural networks are proven to be universal functions. If we can describe human intelligence as a model, there exists a neural network to replicate it. This doesn't guarantee that our current training methods are able to build such a network or that we're able to model "intelligence" effectively.

> What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?

Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.

I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.

1956 CE: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1409269740-1599827252-31263759...

I suspect LLMs would actually struggle significantly with doing it consistently if given purely as a prompt instruction, but you could always constrict the sampling to force words that create a legitimate chain or fine tune / RL in some signal that would assist with it.

> I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there

I don't know about China but this was the opposite of my experience in Thailand. The majority of public toilets I encountered had an attendant you had to pay for access. Shopping malls / hotels / other places were you were already paying to be there were the exception of course.

Last year estimated spend was $380 billion and this year it's $680 billion [0] just for the big five. Given global projections through 2030 being as high as 7 trillion [1], OPs comment seems at least the right order of magnitude.

[0]: https://futurumgroup.com/insights/ai-capex-2026-the-690b-inf...

[1]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...

I agree that at some point you do, but again I think the fact that Sony Playstation is doing this with larger annual revenue, less studios, AND better margins is an indicator that it isn't the problem here.

Yes, I agree. I empathize with Phil in spirit on it. He's a real gamer and tried to create a space for the developers to do their own thing and create what they want. But it doesn't seem to have been great business.

> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year. Sure, this is going to a corporation, but that's more money than most people could possibly dream of earning in ten lifetimes.

That actually seems... tiny? Xbox is nearly 17,000 employees. That's like $8k in profit per employee. That's worse than big box retailers and like 1/100th of what is common in big tech and (to the letter's point) far worse than their biggest competitor.

Like sure at least you can say they aren't losing money, but Nadella can't be looking at that after just spending 75 billion on Activision Blizzard and be happy with it as the status quo.

EDIT: BTW these numbers you quoted from OP are quarterly, not annual

With due fairness, these are two different sets of leaders and two different strategies.

A lot of the strategy you outlined -- buying all these studios, replicating netflix, giving away day one games, raising game pass -- was a strategy put in place by Phil Spencer. Phil pushed for this investment with the promise it would pay off later for MS. He's talked publicly about having to convince Nadella to put up ungodly amounts of cash for these investments and about how the bar for expected return was very very high. It seems like it clearly hasn't worked out to Microsoft's expectations or they've lost patience for waiting, and Phil has now "retired to spend more time with his family" (i.e. been fired).

Now Asha is here and presumably has a mandate to fix this and get back the profit margins that were expected from xbox. Sarah Bond, the xbox president, has resigned, and with this letter it seems the previous Xbox COO is out too. There is clearly a huge shift in Xbox leadership happening and it shouldn't be surprising that Asha -- who is known as a business-driven executive and not a 'gamer' -- is going to be reverting a lot of previous strategy decisions.

My 2c is that Phil's strategy made sense on paper, but I don't think they were able to manage this many studios in practice: nearly all the studios they bought have failed to produce the number of games expected on time or on budget. It also turned out that overly cheap gamepass would cannibalize their business and overly expensive gamepass turned away subscribers. I think the netflix model isn't something you can speedrun and execution of it turned out to be very hard and expensive. Maybe it would've worked out with more time but it seems Nadella didn't think so anymore.

I don't really blame the researchers here but this is yet another article that is happy to have a clickbait headline which any reasonable reader is going to assume will include a picture of "treetops glowing".

At least personally I scanned the article for it and only found the picture at the top, which I was then frustrated to learn that's just a lab photo, and I came here wondering where the actual image is of it in the field so I found OPs comment helpful to indicate that the suggestion there would be a beautiful picture of glowing canopy somewhere is basically a result of editorializing.

I have to believe that what we're seeing is a minority opinion that feels like their uniquely backwards logic justifying this is somehow worth sharing as if its new and insightful, while the vast majority of us think "holy crap, that's horrible" but aren't adding it because of course that's already been said and there just isn't any more nuance needed.

Happy to help. This is the official methods description for the Canadian gov's FM3 data, it's probably the best place to start although the details are mostly covered in much longer publications that require some digging: https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/background/dsm/fm3

We do some similar work with hotspot analysis but (as a Canadian company) are more focused on Canadian data where the government already does a fair bit of false positive detection and filtering. It generally gives pretty clean data and we can scrub historical data over time like this: https://imgur.com/a/gCJGzqd

The dataset includes US coverage but it's not filtered the same way and FAR more noisy, so I appreciate efforts like this. We haven't got there yet but if you were looking for something deterministic and automatable the Canadian gov's process is potentially worth learning about.

They also produce perimeter estimates based on the hotspots which we can extract and put into a physics-based fire growth model like Prometheus or FARSITE to estimate future fire behaviour based on forecasted weather. This gives very actionable and deterministic estimates of future fire behaviour. We also have worked on a risk model that determines the likelihood of that future fire growth interacting with various assets on the landscape (urban interface areas, power lines, fuel pipelines, forest inventory, etc) and calls out high risk areas. One thing we've been wondering if where LLMs fit into any of this (if at all) so appreciate seeing what others are doing.

That's a good point.

Well it is a professional sport -- there's tournaments worth tens of millions of dollars. But honestly it is probably easier to catch cheaters in that environment. The real issue is that cheaters suck the fun out of the game, and matchmaking doesn't fix this because cheaters just cheat the matchmaking (smurf accounts, etc) until they're stomping regular players again. I don't think throwing our hands up and letting the cheaters go on is a real solution.

I agree with what you're saying, but given the egos involved in the current admin there's a practical interpretation:

1. Department of War broadly uses Anthropic for general purposes

2. Minority interests in the Department of War would like to apply it to mass surveillance and/or autonomous weapons

3. Anthropic disagrees and it escalates

4. Anthropic goes public criticizing the whole Department of War

5. Trump sees a political reason to make an example of Anthropic and bans them

6. The entirety of the Department of War now has no AI for anything

7. Department of War makes agreement with another organization

If there was only a minority interest at the department of war to develop mass surveillance / autonomous weapons or it was seen as an unproven use case / unknown value compared to the more proven value from the rest of their organizational use of it, it would make sense that they'd be 1) in practice willing to agree to compromise on this, 2) now unable to do so with Anthropic in specific because of the political kerfuffle.

I imagine they'd rather not compromise, but if none of the AI companies are going to offer them it then there's only so much you can do as a short term strategy.

Good point. By 'technical garbage' I largely meant the dated visualizations it associated with all the hacking scenes (the rapid hacking speed I can forgive for the sake of story) but TBH I never fully made the connection between 'the gibson' and william gibson -- I kind of like the idea of the hacking scenes as an exploration to gibson's ideas around cyberspace.