wvenable

Hurry up, else we'll be late. You'd better leave now, else you'll miss the bus. Do what I say, else there'll be trouble.

XBox was fine up to the Xbox One -- that's when the XBox was co-oped for some broader push for the living room computing and broadcast television integration right at the time this was on the out.

The next failure was Xbox Live. The video game market is a hit-based market with big tent-pole franchises doing large launches. For a modern example, look at the hype around GTA6. Launches sold games and exclusives sold consoles. Microsoft put huge game launches on Xbox Live for their relatively low monthly cost and lost millions on those launches.

They also bought a bunch of game studios which is a terrible strategy for a console maker. Meta made the same mistake with the Quest.

It's was never the lack of commitment to a strategy -- it was just having the wrong strategy to begin with.

Even if another game was never released ever again, you could still find enough fantastic games to last a lifetime.

There are roughly 50-70 new games released on Steam every day. I think there's pretty good review metrics available that you can assume 2-5% of those could be categorized as "Excellent". So that's around 1–3 excellent new games per day on just one platform.

Even if we're over-estimating "excellent" by a lot, that's still more games that anyone can reasonably play.

So humans are the problem. I can't tell if this reply is agreeing with ToValueFunfetti or disagreeing.

> Why are we enabling a world that outpaces us?

Because we kinda suck. Wars, poverty, destruction of the environment, etc. Maybe AI will be worse -- the are plenty of movies on that subject -- or maybe it will be better.

> Is this going to lead to anything other than displacement in the long term?

We may have already damaged the environment enough that we're going to die off soon anyway. So without AI, we were already on that path to "displace" ourselves -- I don't think that argument is that compelling.

Perhaps this is the natural evolution of intelligent life. Eventually the sun will die and everything we are will be gone forever, maybe this is the only way that something of us survives.

> Do you ever stop and ask why we’re building the world we’re building?

We're not building a world. We're just ants. Individuals making individual decisions that have nothing to do with the rest of the world. You don't have to look too far to find humans that literally care nothing about humanity as a whole and everything about themselves.

> To what end does a world we cannot comprehend or rebuild from first principles serve us?

We already live in that world. You wouldn't even be able to build a toaster from first principles without the knowledge and infrastructure that already exists.

Perhaps humans have peaked due to the fundamental biological nature of our brains and AI will eventually surpass us in mathematical intelligence.

That has been the ultimate goal of creating AI -- not to simply match human intelligence but to surpass it. If it surpasses us, does that make it irrelevant? Everything around us is powered by mathematics, most of it I don't understand, and soon perhaps everything will be powered by mathematics that everybody doesn't understand.

My projects are so niche that almost nobody would ever care... but think that might be the point. Maybe there aren't any decent MS Office or Photoshop clones but there's also a bunch of really interesting niche software being created nobody else would ever care about.

I personally (no LLM) wrote some open source software a few years ago that maybe has a dozen to a hundred users and somebody used an LLM to port it to MacOS and Linux.

A year ago I was also doing major refactoring and it saved several months of time (probably wouldn't have even attempted it otherwise). But LLMs still weren't as capable as they are now for more interesting tasks than that. I struggled with an LLM assisted conversion project, eventually just shelved it, and started it again recently and the difference is quite noticeable.

But even so, the entire ecosystem has been changing over this entire time. You might be using an entirely different set of LLM tools now and/or those tools themselves have gotten a lot better and easier to use.

You'll need to backup the statement that we spend more money than ever on the same quantity of software but not getting more quality.

The quality of everything has gone downhill -- software is just part of that trend. Everything is about extracting as much value as possible for as little cost as possible. We've optimized everything, including software development, to that. Quality requires a level of care that society is no longer able to achieve.

Ruby seems like one of the worst language for LLM development for all the reasons that some humans tend to like it.

I think this comment is premature. It hasn't really been 2-3 years accelerated LLM development. Even 6 months ago, LLM development was much less refined than it is now. There's been a few years of figuring out how to use these tools (which are constantly changing) and maybe a year of using them effectively.

You point all these new software but some of them are literally only a few months to a few weeks old and complaining that they aren't up to standard yet. Even if LLMs didn't get any better than they are right now, these projects have barely even begun, and there is plenty of time and resources to build them up.

I've written a bunch of cool new software with LLMs in my spare time -- are you sure you even have a way to notice all the new cool software that exists?

I think the current world economic situation is clouding the actual economic impact of AI. People are losing their jobs due to the poor economy in all sectors, including software development, so how much of that is exclusively due to AI? We have no idea. It might be fuelling additional job-impact pessimism.

Oligarchs supporting the GOP is getting exactly what they want: personal gain. The fact that a much larger group is going to be worse off in every way doesn't matter.