A half-ton truck is a consumer pick-up truck, not a commercial shipping vehicle. Much much smaller.

Is that margin enough to cover the NRE of model development? Every pro-AI argument hinges on the models continuing to improve at a near-linear rate

Yeah but the argument people make is that when the music stops cost of inference goes through the roof.

I could imagine that when the music stops, advancement of new frontier models slows or stops, but that doesn't remove any curent capabilities.

(And to be fair the way we duplicate efforts on building new frontier models looks indeed wasteful. Tho maybe we reach a point later where progress is no longer started from scratch)

People never cared about delivering Alices; they were an implementation detail. I think the article argues that they're still an important one, but one that isn't produced automatically anymore

The article is talking about science research in the context of astrophysics, not coding sweatshops.

I was also talking about producing researchers for academia.

But if Bob doesn't know rust syntax and library modules well, how can he be expected to evaluate the output generating Rust code? Bugs can be very subtle and not obvious, and Rust has some constructs that are very uncommon (or don't exist) in other languages.

Human nature says that Bob will skim over and trust the parts that he doesn't understand as long as he gets output that looks like he expects it to look, and that's extremely dangerous.

Then perhaps Bob should have it use functional Scala, where my experience is that if it compiles and looks like what you expect, it's almost certainly correct.

Sure, but bob is very unlikely to do that unless his AI tool of choice suggests it.

I don't know about screen studio, but if I were looking for a way to edit screen recordings I wouldn't be searching for an "open source alternative", I would be searching for "open source software"

Defining your project as an open source alternative to another program is a mistake I think

The reboots are very much about growth -- she starts off as a scared teenager but grows into an unstoppable killing machine by the end. I could see them being less appealing to women though just because of the intense amount of violence in those games (as compared to the original ones)

That's not growth, that's a regression. That is trauma and suffering.

Nathan Drake is similarly presented as a hero, but requires a deep psychopathic disconnect from reality to exist as a character.

Everything is trauma and suffering. But with those comes perseverance. Perseverance requires strength, and survivor trilogy Lara Croft finds out how strong she is. That's growth.

I would not call her "pathetic" by any means

Toca Boca World is a game my daughters (8 and 10) love, and i completely don't understand. It doesn't seem to have a goal or any mechanics --they're just playing dolls on a screen, which is cool but with so little interactivity i think i'd rather they just play with dolls (which they do also...)

Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a *game* there...

> It doesn't seem to have a goal or any mechanics --they're just playing dolls on a screen, which is cool but with so little interactivity i think i'd rather they just play with dolls

> Animal crossing has very recently started to take over as "favorite video game", and at least there's a game there...

A large part of the problem here is that folks believe that "game" necessarily implies goals and mechanics.

From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/game

> 1. a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other

vs

> 2. activity engaged in for diversion or amusement

Lots of folks see it as definition 1 (cooperative is still a contest against some non-player), whereas your girls seem to be operating under definition 2.

The equivalent to your statement from the other side of the fence would be women that deride male competition.

At the end of the day, we likes what we likes. Doing fun things is the fullest definition of a game. So the application of the priciple looks different depending on what the people enjoy.

I touched on it in my way-too-long post elsewhere on here, but I think this is exactly it: there's a (fuzzy at some boundary, sure, but useful) distinction to be drawn on something like where the game happens. Does "the game" (the software) supply most or all of "the game"? Or is "the game" (the software) a toy in service of a game that the player brings and gives shape?

Both types of software plausibly "are video games" but can take extremely different forms, and their appeal may diverge wildly—someone who likes one to an extreme, may have zero interest in the other. Others may like both sorts of play, but not regard them as interchangeable (i.e. if what you're wanting at the moment is an e-sport, a visual novel may not be any amount of a satisfactory substitute, even if you like visual novels).

We tend to draw a "toy/game" distinction (with games perhaps being a subset of "toys", but still its own sub-category, anyway) with physical objects to divide those with built-in goals from those without, and that seems to serve us well, but we've not translated that to the digital realm very well (and maybe we shouldn't, I dunno)

It might be a generational thing; my kids get touchscreen laptops from their school, and they interact with them almost exclusively by touching the screen. I agree, I'd much rather use a mouse (or even better, a trackball; i wish most laptops still had those)

Languages don't write code, people do. No one has rewritten LLVM because it already exists, and such a project would be insanely expensive for little benefit.

I think you need to spend more time with literally any tool -- "Haven't seen anything I'd rather used" reads like "Haven't gotten over the initial learning curve with any other tool"

C++ is sub-optimal for almost any task. For low level stuff plain C or maybe Rust. for higher level Python, Lua, or some Lisp. C++ is a weird in-between language that's impossible to hold correctly.

> For low level stuff plain C

The nice thing about C++ is that you can more or less turn it into C, if you want. My C++ code is closer to C than idiomatic, modern C++, but I wouldn't want to miss the nice parts that C++ adds, such as lambda functions and the occasional template for generalization. Pretty much the only thing I'm missing from C are order-independent designated initializers, which became order-dependent in C++, and thus useless.

> "Haven't seen anything I'd rather used" reads like "Haven't gotten over the initial learning curve with any other tool"

What an odd thing to say. I simply don't like certain design decisions in other languages that I've checked out and tried, and therefore do not see any reason to switch. E.g. I tried Rust, but it's absolutely terrible for quick&dirty prototyping, which is my main job.