naet

I personally learn more and create more and generally live a richer social and intellectual life when I have extended periods off work.

I don't think AI directly leads to some kind of post scarcity UBI utopia, but if we did reach a post scarcity UBI utopia, I think life would be much better for many people and not the bleak dystopia the author finds. I don't think needing to go to work is driving most people's social lives; if anything, needing to work all the time is taking away people's social lives and the energy to maintain them.

I posted a link to an online game I made in the comments here once, and immediately got all kinds of good and bad traffic.

Some people liked my work, found me on LinkedIn and sent a connection with a positive message. Other people tried every which way to SQL inject or attack the site, posted slurs in every available input, etc.

Someone copied the site and hosted their own version with a couple minor changes. I only found that one because they had left one of the links in, which gave me referring traffic from their copy.

All that from one HN comment, very much pre-AI too, not to mention the standard daily slew of requests probing for what I assume are known vulnerabilities in Wordpress or PHP.

The internet is a floodgate of different actors, many of which are automated, and a link posted somewhere like HN opens the valve especially wide.

Fine tuning is a huge deal. I made some simple games and spent a lot of time on fine tuning little details about the movement trying to nail the right "feeling". The feeling of Mario's movement in Mario 64 is excellent. That feeling immediately makes the game fun even when just jumping around aimlessly.

It's very difficult to get right. Even with the exact same programming logic, tiny tweaks to certain numbers around velocity, acceleration, friction, impulse, etc all can have a huge impact on feel. So even without changing anything besides a single static value here or there you can make the game feel very different. (and then of course you can also add more logic and tweak things endlessly, like adding coyote time, jumping higher when you hold the button, nudging the player slightly into place instead of stopping flat if they are grazing an object... and then other things like sounds and animations can themselves completely change the feel without changing the systems at all)

Feel is also something that is very subjective. Some people might like something that feels very tight and responsive, some people might like something that feels more floaty or forgiving. I tweaked one simple game I made to be a bit quicker and tighter, which caused more casual players to feel it was too hard and quickly stop playing, but more competitive players got highly engaged and played over and over to climb the leaderboard.

I'm always surprised at the opposite. We have such distinct ethnicities. It feels like everyone should be mixed race, but so few are.

I will grant that by some historic definitions you could consider many people mixed race as neighboring cultures combine. But there are still very large and distinctly separate ethnic groups like black, white, asian, etc.

(I am not mixed race by my wife and son are)

I have the original trilogy's original version on VHS still, and just recently watched them. I would say they hold up very well and weren't really in need of any post release changes or updates. The effects look great today compared to some other movies that actually came out later, probably because Star Wars used more practical effects vs some early Sci-Fi CGI that ended up not aging as well.

The changes are mostly just window dressings around the original footage, like extra CGI in transition scenes. They don't really change much of the core movie experience. It does end up causing some funny side effects though. Like when the main characters move from one place to another you'll see a splashy dinosaur like creature or fancy robot, but once they actually arrive in the scene the background falls back to the original with a lot less of that added CGI action.

What is your workflow for making these?

On my older android phone I always have problems watching anything with bluetooth headphones adding so much lag that the video gets very desynced with the audio. So I will continue to use wired headphones (now via usb-c adapter since the dedicated port is gone)

It looks really good in the video uploaded, but when I tried it myself it didn't look the same and was hard to tell what was going on. Not sure what the issue is.

I loved math, chemistry, and physics, but I hated biology for some similar reasons to the author.

In chemistry or physics I felt like I was actively problem solving, learning about systems and how to manipulate them. By contrast in my biology class I felt like all I did was memorize different names of things.

In college chemistry I enjoyed lab work and I've always loved the outdoors and the natural world, so maybe bio would have been a good fit for me in some ways... but I never took another biology related course after the first one turned me completely off the subject.

I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer.

I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.

Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.

With Firefox on my windows computer I never get unsolvable recaptchas or have any issues with Cloudflare.

I believe it that US food is more expensive and lower quality.

I was just thinking about bread in the US specifically. When I go to the grocery store here the bread is relatively expensive, and the vast majority of it is full of chemical additives. It subjectively tastes like fake crap. It's mass produced in a factory and shipped across the country, and for all that it's not even cheap to buy.

There are one or two specialty bakeries in my city but they are far apart, and a bit expensive, though still so much better than what is available at the chain groceries. I'm sure there are lots of places in the country that don't have those local options at all. Feels like the basic unadulterated loaf of bread has in the US become more of a luxury item than a cheap staple.

In my limited European experience (Italy and France mostly), there were numerous small bakeries in every single neighborhood I visited. I could easily take a short walk and grab a baguette or loaf for 1-2 euro, far cheaper than in the US. The bread was delicious and fresh, locally made, free of all the questionable additives.

Then repeat that for other things like cheese, berries, cured meat... each available in Europe with so much less additive or alteration, so much less mass production, cheaper and more plentiful. My travel diet was excellent and felt both healthier and cheaper.

I'm not sure what lead to this cultural difference. Maybe centralization, car culture, difference in regulation, or something else entirely. But the end result is a bit depressing.

I think we are reaching a point where some kind of solid attestation that things are not AI generated would be very valuable, for all kinds of different media (printed word, photo, video, etc).

I'm not sure how you would actually do any of that attestation, if it's even possible. Text seems especially difficult. Maybe photo/video could be achieved with specialized hardware and cryptographic signing though I don't know much about either so I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe all that attestation would also tie in to some kind of universal personal identifier online, so that bad actors can be tracked or excluded and can't repeatedly spin up new accounts.

It might mean a big reduction in privacy for certain online spaces that opt in to such a system... but the alternative of all trust being eroded and voices drowned out by a sea of bots or generated content seems potentially worse.

There are definitely many open questions around things like what tasks is AI appropriate for, how involved should you be in the process (fully automated agent swarms, or planning steps back and forth with human input on every decision), at what level of usage might you hit diminishing or negative returns, will we be able to continue to use it at this rate / price, will it get cheaper or will energy use continue to rise, how much will AI improve in the future, how will AI use affect people's development or temperament, will skills atrophy, will people no longer learn critical skills, how will we deal with AI spam or a loss of "proof of work" in producing a lengthy written artifact.... in sum there is no shortage of AI related topics worth exploring and thinking deeply about.

Some people still suggest that AI flat out isn't useful though, and that angle to me doesn't hold much water. I was a slow AI adopter, but I have found plenty of benefit from using AI in various applications recently. I haven't come close to using on the level of some people who orchestrate agents and rarely read or touch the code they are writing, but there have been clear times when I popped into Claude and had it help me very successfully with something that would have taken longer to do without that help. So increasingly I am skeptical of anyone positing that there is no potential benefit to appropriately using AI assistance. I think the author could rewrite around the angle of their perceived negative externalities outweighing potential advantages, but to deny or ignore those potential benefits ultimately distracts or actively takes away from a serious discussion of said negative externalities.

I don't put much stock in the very very frequently cited study about AI productivity included in this blog. It's a single study. The study itself cites multiple other studies that did find a productivity boost in writing software with AI assistance. I don't see the methodology as being very sound, the sample size isn't very big, some of those developers had likely never used AI before so of course they were slower as they explored using a new tool for the first time (which the study more or less writes off as a non-factor). They also used "Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet", which is not the strongest model. I personally find the Sonnet family of models not that useful and much more inaccurate than something like Opus or Fable.

In my experience there is little you can do to "mitigate" that kind of thing outside of running the game completely server-side, which usually makes a tiny project into a much larger undertaking.

The only time I asked a question on stack overflow I took a very long time crafting it, and was immediately closed as a "duplicate" of something that it clearly wasn't a duplicate of. Tried explaining how it wasn't a duplicate and got closed again. Never bothered trying to ask a question there again. The amount of effort I had put into being a good asker was completely wasted on someone who seemingly didn't even read my query before eagerly shutting it down.

I tend to see the opposite problem. Some of the programming adjacent subreddits are completely swamped in posts that are clearly AI generated thinly veiled advertisements.

I was curious so to get a very rough ballpark figure. So I went to the Wikipedia List of largest mergers and acquisitions article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_mergers_and_ac...)

Added up all the free market enterprise section completed deals where the purchaser was indicated as US based

Obama era:

2009: 6,

2010: 1,

2011: 4,

2012: 1,

2013: 4,

2014: 5,

2015: 7,

2016: 6

Trump term 1:

2017: 4,

2018: 8,

2019: 13,

2020: 7

Biden term:

2021: 4,

2022: 4,

2023: 7,

2024: 4

Trump term 2 so far:

2025: 11*,

2026: 9*

Obama average: 4.25 / year

Biden average: 4.75 / year

Trump term 1 average: 8 / year

*Most of the last two years are indicated as still pending, so not sure if they will go through or not.

Not exactly the most scientific data gathering or study. But it does suggest that large mergers and acquisitions have generally been made more frequently under Trump.

I think the idea that AI leads to some kind of universal basic income or frees us up for leisure is misguided.

There was a point in time when the majority of people were basically required to work on producing bare necessities like food. But we have already come far past that, where we could easily produce more than enough food for everyone on earth with a relatively small amount of workers.

There is some work that is still more or less essential to a healthy society that humans must perform, but many many people are doing something non-essential (and those doing essential work are often not rewarded proportionally to the "essentialness" of that work). We invent different kinds of "work" to fit into the capitalist machine that we have built, not because it is required for human sustainability or enriching our lives in any way. Some work might be actively harmful to society in every way other than keeping capital flowing around in some circle, and more and more of that capital is being captured/hoarded by some ultra wealthy individuals or corporations and not recirculating at all.

The problem is allocation. We allocate everything via capital, which I recognize has had some very positive outcomes at certain points in history, but may be reaching a point of making less and less sense for the modern world. The work I do honestly does not contribute much of anything to anyone. I do it because I am paid to, and I use that money to pay for my families needs. If my job was automated I would not be freed up for leisure, I would need to find some other work or service to be paid for to survive, regardless of how "important" that work is.

AI eliminating a swath of non-essential work does nothing to help with that allocation issue, in fact it probably ends in a worse overall allocation. AI may legitimately assist with some slice of "essential".work, but probably not that much of it.

This reads to me as AI generated. Apparently it's still good enough to the general audience to be the #1 post on HN right now though. Which is honestly a troubling signal for the state of the world...

I have a PlayStation and I exclusively buy my games via discs. On the other hand, these days I exclusively buy computer games via digital download (mostly via Steam). I have more consumer confidence that digital games on my computer will remain accessible vs games on my console, maybe because Sony controls the entire console ecosystem.

Interesting timing to announce this at around the same time as the PS3 digital store is discontinued signaling that digital only doesn't last as long as physical.

My old Nintendo Wii is modified with homebrew software that keeps alive some otherwise inaccessible features since Nintendo shut off their servers. I hope the community can do similar for newer consoles when they reach the end of their life.

There's a popular quote: "good artists copy, great artists steal". I've always interpreted "steal" in that context as taking inspiration or technique from something, but making it fully your own (in contrast to direct copying).

Given that interpretation, taking someone else's website and changing 3% of it feels more like copying than stealing, even more so when you the side by side image. I love to take inspiration from all over the place, but I like to think I transform it more into my own vision than the author here.

As an aside: the current Mintlify marketing site reads to me as heavily inspired by Stripe's marketing website, though not as direct a copy as the article here.

I don't think we will in the HN snark sense of "this react site or electron app uses way too much memory". Those companies will continue to work in the same way, maybe even less efficiently as people chase modern UIs with extra animations or videos or effects, or with some AI code generation tacking on too many features or tech debt.

In specific sectors I do think we will see more optimization. If you're working on cloud compute or AI training / large scale data processing, there will be a big focus on optimization as prices are very large at that scale and shortages have a bigger effect.

Also in gaming I think the next cycle will be different. Big game studios used to push for the best possible graphics that might require the newest consoles or high end gaming computers, but the next releases might not be as much of an upgrade. The next gen of consoles or graphics cards themselves might be delayed, or be less powerful, or be too expensive and flop, as chip manufacturing companies continue focus on more lucrative markets and leave average consumers behind.

Both US Republicans and Democrats are successfully selling to their constituents that the other party is guilty of egregious gerrymandering, so those constituents will support aggressive redistricting efforts to "even things out".

I think the average member of either party generally understands gerrymandering to be bad, but with an redistricting arms race escalating nobody wants to be left behind.

I think gerrymandering generally is abhorrent and anti democratic. At this point we need a new, more fair redistricting aggressively enforced from the top down to change course, and I'm not sure how we can get that through when it would likely take a 2/3rds majority in congress to pass... but significant members of congress benefit from gerrymandering and would lose their position in the next cycle if it were taken away, so they are unlikely to support the measure.

I think it's not uncommon for good animations to cheat a bit while in motion, rather than look perfect on every frame. Like how cartoons can use smear frames that look bizarre when paused at the wrong time but when viewed as part of a larger animation help sell the motion visually.

I made my own daily golf game a couple years ago; honestly it isn't even really finished but it gets a couple thousand plays every day somehow.

It's more like a 2d platform golf: https://squigglegolf.com/game/

I had built out a custom level editor and some other fun features, but never really polished off the UI enough to release those. Someday I should really finish / update it.

I think starlink made intuitive sense; we already use satellites to transfer data for phone service and TV channels, a satellite can "see" a large area to service, the technology was there already, etc. Starlink provides a service you can't really get without going to space (coverage in remote areas).

The space data center doesn't make intuitive sense to me. Why put it in space? Wouldn't it be better just... on the ground? The technology doesn't feel like it's there either, and there would be significant competition from existing or new data centers that don't have all the drawbacks of orbiting the planet.

I'm in Oakland with a three year old and I'm looking to either move to a better school district or pay for an expensive private school. I used to be a substitute teacher for the Oakland unified school district and I straight up refuse to send my son there. I have seen firsthand that these kids are not being taught well and the shortcomings compound year over year until you end with high school level students that are unequipped to learn at the high school level, often only barely able to read. Completely unequipped to read critically at the level needed for a proper high school education. Students get passed on to the next level no matter what, even if they lack the basic skills needed to succeed at that level.

It has only gone downhill since I left, and is now facing something like a hundred million dollar deficit in budget which will likely lead to deeper cuts and worse student outcomes.

I'm not sure what I will do but the deadline to figure it out is fast approaching. Probably we will move, but not sure how to find the right place that isn't too far away or out of our budget but can offer a better future / stronger education for my children. I don't have the solution, but I know other places have done much better than my city sadly. I've read that states like Mississippi have been able to dramatically improve their educational outcomes with certain literacy programs.

Some kind of vouching or scoring might make sense to help qualify contributions and many people have suggested similar recently. If by "ELO-based system" you meant "some kind of scoring system (not based on Elo)".

The Elo rating system doesn't make sense in this context; it's designed around collecting zero sum game results for a given community of players and building a model around it.

What do you really want to use a tablet for?

The main use I see from people is watching netflix or youtube. There are lots of ipads that are basically just expensive youtube machines. So in that sense a cheap ipad might be seen by some as an upgraded larger screen vs watching TV on their phone screen... but there are already a lot of existing cheap tablets that can do that. Someone gifted my son an Amazon one that I think was around $50 and works fine for that purpose.

You can read ebooks, but e-ink is a lot more pleasant to read I think.

You could get a stylus and draw... but I think that's a more niche use that not as many people are into, and I think professional artists are more likely to buy an art focused product over the generalized tablet / ipad.

For serious work, you're probably better off with a small laptop and keyboard. I know you can get a keyboard for a tablet, but at that point why not just have a laptop?

I'm not sure I see the vision.