The problem isn't the maps being static and finite, it's that nobody designs maps for emergent and dynamic gameplay anymore. CoD might have dozens of maps but they're all designed for perfect sterile balance with the same lane concepts.
Some of my favorite multiplayer games have only 3-4 maps but each is distinct and plays well to different tactics. Usually they're based around strong points and webs of approach which gives more options for fresh experience each time you play ("wow never noticed that flank" - "oh this window gives a great angle over this courtyard" - "oh a grenade can be thrown just perfectly over that building" - etc...)
In a sense, good progression isn't flat mechanical unlocks but building up game and map knowledge. You can choose to explore different facets of the game and it always stays interesting. Competitive ranked multiplayer ruined this because going off meta means losing the game for your team.
Hot take: single player games are lame, co-op is where it's at. That's not to say there aren't good single player games or I didn't enjoy them in the past, but my evolving tastes and circumstances make me mostly skip them.
Games in general have no respect for my time, so if I'm getting on for an extended session it's going to be with my friends. If they do respect my time, why should I pay $40+ for an 8 hour experience when I could buy a dozen used books for that price and get more content and variety?
Even games with compelling storytelling suffer because there's a core conflict between who's in control of the pacing and scene focus. What do I gain from holding a controller during the 8 hours of cutscenes in MSG4? Why play Dark Souls if I manage to miss out on 80% of the subtle world building? Does having a branching plot really make a story better?
Putting aside narrative, games without a human element are either dopamine toys or simulators. Most games aren't honest about that and are a palette swapped Total War, a tweaked 2D platformer, a fighting game with [gimmick], etc... It's very rare to see innovation because innovation is hard. Even harder when you're spending time on assets like character art, music, and world lore instead of the one thing that make games games: mechanics.
I'll still play the odd rogue like or crusader kings to kill time, but I generally don't feel the need to expand my catalogue unless a game looks fun as a platform for social play (friendslop as some might say).
The reaction to sports pseudo-stats is what really separates casual viewers from real fans. It's the only way to raise stakes on otherwise forgettable games.
"This team is on a 5 game win streak": 🥱
"This player has never lost an away game in June": 😯🍿
Someone should make a site that quizzes you on time travel knowledge. Go through the ages: how do you start a fire, how do you make steel & what's the best method of smelting, what is germ theory & the best methods for preserving food, what are the causes of common diseases, how do you make a steam engine, what is penicillin & how do you produce it at scale, how do you make a battery, how do you make a solar panel, how does nuclear energy work, etc...
The ai bubble is currently being subsidized to an unimaginable degree. If you were to actually pay true cost for your token usage, you wouldn't be saving that much over an engineer's salary. Probably even worse once AI companies start to extract a real profit. 95% of companies diving into agentic labor will be in for a rude awakening when they balance next year's budget.
The cost to keep ai useful in its current form has a high floor. Unless you keep up with expensive training, your models will drift. You can only scale your model intelligence with more hardware (roughly). In two years, Claude opus 4.8 will still be bloating context to learn about the latest cloud platforms and libraries. A human engineer will get those passively at no cost to the company.
As the complexity of the task grows the complexity of the ai babysitter must match it. Even if Ai stays cost effective, companies can now save money by spinning up bespoke in-house software to cut out vendors (think observability platforms, task tracking, product design, marketing systems, etc...). No matter how many adversarial reviews and sub agents you spin up, an Ai can't grasp the full context of your company and it's shifting priorities. The software engineer role transitions to a pseudo-sysadmin + product architect.
C-suites don't want know about software and don't care about non functional requirements (security, availability, audit ability, etc...). They just want to wave a magic wand and have a product appear, which is what Ai provides the illusion of. That's why all current Ai software is garbage, but the smarter companies will catch on
I once had a professor who claimed she passed a high level language course without attending a class or studying it. She was fluent in an adjacent Romance language and knew a little of some other overlapping languages. Basically walked in to the final and got a C+ on cognates alone.
I don't doubt it's possible to get better consistency but the juice is really not worth the squeeze for me. You end up churning through huge expensive models, orchestrating sub agents, writing out boilerplate hand-holding instructions ("please don't break this, stop trying to commit to main, please lint ffs...").
I don't use it for Java but that would make sense with rigid enterprise patterns and VeryVerboseNamesThatAreEasierForAModelThanAHumanFactoryClazz {...
I don't think our career is boned, moreso that all juniors trying to get in are boned. Everyone who knows what going on transition to a more hands-off architect role.
But like I said, our tokens are heavily subsidized right now. When they pull the rug, code monkey jobs will start to get listed again (with lower salaries of course).
Things I've realized while working with AI (Claude code):
It's fantastic for very small macros and medium length scripts. Think dev ops stuff, pre-commit hooks, transforming data. Keep it small enough to manually review and something you can run without destroying anything important. This can massively boost your codebase QoL. [Double bonus for not wasting tokens to solve the same problem over and over]
It's decent-to-good at debugging but not consistent with fixes. It can find some utf encoding edge case that might have taken you 1hr+ but suggest the dumbest bandaid fix you've ever seen. Also very good at spinning up unit test suites for basic edge cases.
Due to obvious training bias, it's pretty good with common libraries and cloud platform infrastructure. It could probably help with writing a complex cron call, debugging regex or fixing an IaC config. On the flip side it won't bother to use the latest package version or know your niche/new library.
It does better with greenfield because exploring your codebase introduces a ton of bias. It might try to fit in an ugly hack when a refactor to simplify everything is way easier.
It's absolutely garbage with UI, just throws the most disorganized HTML together that isn't reactive or reusable. OK enough for ugly internal stuff but God help anyone relying on it for that.
This is setting up to be the biggest rug pull in history. People that buy into it heavily just to save a couple bucks on engineer payroll are going to be fucked when they start ratcheting up the token price.
All in all it can be useful when used with care but will never be a magic bullet.
Very interesting, the lube experiment that was cited in the article was kind of shocking when you stack up the chain lifetimes. But when you start adding up all the lifetime maintenance and replacements, doesn't a carbon belt setup start to make much more sense for most riders?
Ask it ten times to make list of 20-30 random words
This is true on ootb models but not the universal rule. You could adjust the temperature all the way up and get something way more random, probably to the point of incoherence.
The trick is balancing that with keeping the model doing something useful. If you're clever you could leverage /dev/random or similar as a tool to manually inject randomness while keeping the result deterministic.
Though to be honest I don't usually use a recipe or cook anything. I cube a block of soft/silken tofu, dump on some chili oil, add some kind of vinegar (and maybe sesame oil if I have it), and eat it raw and cold.
You could probably do it with any kind of sauce you like and put it on rice if you're feeling fancy
Photos are the same as most other data, you can store them pretty easily long-term in a physical medium. Of course, capturing an image is much easier and more convenient with a digital device, but that doesn't mean it has to live digitally indefinitely. It's simple enough to have an instant digital camera with a built in printer and access to a high quality scanner.
If you held a gun to my head, I could pick out a few dozen personal photos that I own that are worth saving physically. If you allowed me a modern flash drive's worth of storage (64-128GB, ~5000 good quality images), I could pretty easily store every picture worth a second look from my entire lifetime.
Apple's marketing driven perception that every single person needs a cinema quality camera (and cinema sized storage) in their pocket is ludicrous. Only a tiny fraction of people actually truly need that. Let them borrow that gear from a library if we want to preserve fair access.
Uncle Bob is a piece of shit
The problem isn't the maps being static and finite, it's that nobody designs maps for emergent and dynamic gameplay anymore. CoD might have dozens of maps but they're all designed for perfect sterile balance with the same lane concepts.
Some of my favorite multiplayer games have only 3-4 maps but each is distinct and plays well to different tactics. Usually they're based around strong points and webs of approach which gives more options for fresh experience each time you play ("wow never noticed that flank" - "oh this window gives a great angle over this courtyard" - "oh a grenade can be thrown just perfectly over that building" - etc...)
In a sense, good progression isn't flat mechanical unlocks but building up game and map knowledge. You can choose to explore different facets of the game and it always stays interesting. Competitive ranked multiplayer ruined this because going off meta means losing the game for your team.
Hot take: single player games are lame, co-op is where it's at. That's not to say there aren't good single player games or I didn't enjoy them in the past, but my evolving tastes and circumstances make me mostly skip them.
I'll still play the odd rogue like or crusader kings to kill time, but I generally don't feel the need to expand my catalogue unless a game looks fun as a platform for social play (friendslop as some might say).
The reaction to sports pseudo-stats is what really separates casual viewers from real fans. It's the only way to raise stakes on otherwise forgettable games.
"This team is on a 5 game win streak": 🥱
"This player has never lost an away game in June": 😯🍿
Retrofuturism as others have said, but probably more specifically cassette-futurism
Someone should make a site that quizzes you on time travel knowledge. Go through the ages: how do you start a fire, how do you make steel & what's the best method of smelting, what is germ theory & the best methods for preserving food, what are the causes of common diseases, how do you make a steam engine, what is penicillin & how do you produce it at scale, how do you make a battery, how do you make a solar panel, how does nuclear energy work, etc...
The post misses a few things:
C-suites don't want know about software and don't care about non functional requirements (security, availability, audit ability, etc...). They just want to wave a magic wand and have a product appear, which is what Ai provides the illusion of. That's why all current Ai software is garbage, but the smarter companies will catch on
I once had a professor who claimed she passed a high level language course without attending a class or studying it. She was fluent in an adjacent Romance language and knew a little of some other overlapping languages. Basically walked in to the final and got a C+ on cognates alone.
A [*squints*] ~20 gun frigate with a crew of only 30-50? That's sounds like a startup nightmare. You'd probably want double that to be comfortable.
"Get in on the ground floor of our fast paced, dynamic environment! Must be self starter willing to work watch-on-watch for the team. No sick days."
Used to be in that eternal battle but a squirrel baffle solved it.
I don't doubt it's possible to get better consistency but the juice is really not worth the squeeze for me. You end up churning through huge expensive models, orchestrating sub agents, writing out boilerplate hand-holding instructions ("please don't break this, stop trying to commit to main, please lint ffs...").
I don't use it for Java but that would make sense with rigid enterprise patterns and
VeryVerboseNamesThatAreEasierForAModelThanAHumanFactoryClazz {...I don't think our career is boned, moreso that all juniors trying to get in are boned. Everyone who knows what going on transition to a more hands-off architect role.
But like I said, our tokens are heavily subsidized right now. When they pull the rug, code monkey jobs will start to get listed again (with lower salaries of course).
Things I've realized while working with AI (Claude code):
All in all it can be useful when used with care but will never be a magic bullet.
Very interesting, the lube experiment that was cited in the article was kind of shocking when you stack up the chain lifetimes. But when you start adding up all the lifetime maintenance and replacements, doesn't a carbon belt setup start to make much more sense for most riders?
Alt: Copilot after dropping your production database
To save a click: May 20th
This is true on ootb models but not the universal rule. You could adjust the temperature all the way up and get something way more random, probably to the point of incoherence.
The trick is balancing that with keeping the model doing something useful. If you're clever you could leverage
/dev/randomor similar as a tool to manually inject randomness while keeping the result deterministic.Someone remake this but with Good-Bad-Fanservice
Chili garlic tofu
Though to be honest I don't usually use a recipe or cook anything. I cube a block of soft/silken tofu, dump on some chili oil, add some kind of vinegar (and maybe sesame oil if I have it), and eat it raw and cold.
You could probably do it with any kind of sauce you like and put it on rice if you're feeling fancy
ITT: OP argues for I2P but doesn't know it, asserts HTML can't serve static content, assumes static content can't be malicious or served by bad actors
Photos are the same as most other data, you can store them pretty easily long-term in a physical medium. Of course, capturing an image is much easier and more convenient with a digital device, but that doesn't mean it has to live digitally indefinitely. It's simple enough to have an instant digital camera with a built in printer and access to a high quality scanner.
If you held a gun to my head, I could pick out a few dozen personal photos that I own that are worth saving physically. If you allowed me a modern flash drive's worth of storage (64-128GB, ~5000 good quality images), I could pretty easily store every picture worth a second look from my entire lifetime.
Apple's marketing driven perception that every single person needs a cinema quality camera (and cinema sized storage) in their pocket is ludicrous. Only a tiny fraction of people actually truly need that. Let them borrow that gear from a library if we want to preserve fair access.