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.