A customer paying a recurring subscription just to do their job.
Local models will win. They’re half-assed, but the big boys only provide fractionally more ass. LLMs will become just another tool you can call on when you’d rather read code than write it.
Can’t spell “resources.”
May not be human.
But if you asked, gun to my head, ‘what was the best console?’ - it’s the PS2. It’s not even a contest. The video chip had such a disgusting fillrate that Xbox 360 remakes had to tone down the overdraw. Licensing remained dirt cheap, so weird shit could get on shelves at like two dollars per copy. The controllers were practically the platonic ideal. Just an incredible environment where innovation could look and feel complete.
What little was missing from that machine is abundant in its competitors. The Gamecube is a party toy with four controller ports and the wildest shader pipeline that’s not technically programmable. The Xbox showed the full potential of hard drives and online connectivity. PCs could increasingly take internet access for granted, where Flash games offered instant access with negligible oversight.
Through this period, cross-platform engines started abstracting away any hardware differences. “Ports” stopped being from-scratch recreations or high jank at low framerates. It was the inflection point for all hardware becoming a generic compiler target. The fact the PSP was supposed to get an Oblivion port, and it wasn’t just the PC game, already felt kinda weird.
I could call this a golden era for software - for developers making a game once-ish, and selling to nearly anyone with nearly any platform. Yet at the same time, the RTS genre was dying, EA killed a lot of important companies, and Bethesda had this silly little idea to sell you armor for your horse. It’s never just one thing.
Deep respect to Microsoft for the Xbox 360 Arcade. That SKU forced damn near every game to work without a hard drive. I think even GTA V could run off a USB stick.
But hoo boy did they fuck that up with the Xbox One launch. And Sony capitalized.
It’s never just one. They’re localized. They tend to occur when the industry finds a groove and leans into it, so the focus is more on quality and iteration under criticism, and less about rough experimentation. The early PS1 era was a Cambrian explosion of weird 3D nonsense… and I don’t think anyone nowadays would put that above late SNES releases. The defining titles of the PSX didn’t come around until the very late 90s, and several of them sold like crap. Nobody wanted Symphony Of The Night until their friend would not shut up about it.
But over on PC, the 90s were a smooth ramp of increasing power and relevance. The 3D accelerator era laid the groundwork for the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race mindset, with visual quality and variety unmatched until the late PS2 era. (By which point Crysis had advanced PC graphics ten years into the future.)
And in 90s handheld gaming, there was the Game Boy, and nothing else mattered. Sega kept the Game Gear limping along until 1997, but nobody noticed, because everyone and their mother already chose the monochrome brick that sipped batteries. Several companies eventually gave up and released greyscale machines just in time for Nintendo to fuck them with the Game Boy Color. All the while, the platform went from twee single-sitting high-score fare, to bespoke long-form RPGs and major franchise sequels, to essentially-complete demakes of Super Nintendo games. Nothing changed except ROM size. It was the last 8-bit console, and it took developers a decade to recognize they could go hog wild on it.
Right after that, the Game Boy Advance’s brief lifespan was essentially all golden era. Doom was practically a launch title. Homebrew devs kept teasing Quake, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, etc., alongside whole-ass GTA3 clones. Commercial releases were awash in good-to-great RPGs and metroidvanias. But then - the PSP scared Nintendo into creating the DS, and that platform went through some awkward years struggling to use better hardware. That wasn’t the end of “the” golden era. For the PSP it was briefly fantastic, especially if you count its use for emulators. But it fell as the DS found its legs, while some completely unrelated trends happened to consoles and computers.
All we can say for certain is, nothing inside a video game should cost real money, and DRM is delayed theft.
2000 is outdated; XL was designed for 2040.
Stop letting cocaine make decisions.
Fuck software patents. You don’t have to make anything - it’s not a specific mechanism - it’s just claiming an idea.
With real patents, tiny workarounds are treated as completely different. Nintendo’s sturdy and reliable d-pads from the Game & Watch through the N64 used a hollow cross pivoting atop a dome. Some years later, Sega put the dome on the cross and had it pivot on a divot.
That sort of silly bullshit distinction is endemic to mechanical design patents. But I only know one case where it happened in software patents, and it’s why image and video codecs are such a clusterfuck. IBM patented arithmetic coding - assigning short codes to frequent values. JPEG and ZIP software had to dance around this for decades, by using Huffman coding, which does the same god damn thing, but slightly worse. When the patent finally expired and ultranerds were free to improve on arithmetic coding, Google tried doing the same bullshit with their improvements, which is part of why JPEG XL went nowhere.
And that’s for hard math! I had to sit and think about describing what arithmetic coding even does, instead of instinctively explaining how to balance binary trees. Namco infamously patented the idea of minigames during load screens. Any minigame! And then they used it, like, once. Warner patented the idea of hyping any NPC that beats you, so you won’t be allowed to do that until 2033. Nintendo’s trying to patent the parts of Pokemon they copied off Megami Tensei.
Imagine if Nintendo had patented sidescrollers. How many games would not exist, if they decided to own that concept? No iteration, no competition, just a handful of Marios and the worst Zelda. The very first third-party example would be Braid. A whole genre, wiped out, because a piece of paper says going left to right is theft.
I don’t think that’s an accurate use of the format. They’re more like the big flat layer right above that: fairly small, behind almost everything, and completely unnecessary.
Or: strenuously avoiding a national ID system, because of how obviously that could be abused. And probably still hacked anyway.
It is possible to do such an ID system sensibly, fairly, and for considerable net good. But we wouldn’t.
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Presumably “a house costs more than a chicken.”
I keep trying to manually write code that I’m proud of, but I can’t.
That’s normal. That predates LLMs. Honestly, that predates compilers.
Basically every aspect of LLMs has been overblown - positive and negative. They obviously have some utility… which the self-proclaimed haters will never acknowledge, and want you to feel bad about using. But the robot will never match Sam Altman’s cocaine fantasies. It is buck-wild that ‘what’s the next word?’ works anywhere near as well as it does.
When Microsoft was still pussyfooting around, training on Github’s GPL projects, and their model occasionally spit out entire stolen files, it all seemed pointless. Now, years later - there’s a guy on Youtube who built a camera that visualizes laser pulses in-flight, and halfway through the video he laughs and hand-waves the code for it. Another guy builds video-game aim-bots that physically move the mouse, the table, or his musculature, and similarly brushes off the part where the computer does stuff.
We have programs that write programs. That’s just a thing, now. If the bubble pops tomorrow, it’s not going anywhere, because local models will run on a Raspberry Pi. (Admittedly that example was an art project where the AI waxes poetic about mortality until it runs out of memory and reboots.) We’re in a stupid manic phase, but a decade from now, spicy autocomplete will be just another tool. F7 for spellcheck, F8 for grammar check, F9 for the Dixie Flatline to do his best at whatever you ask while he’s kinda drunk.
The answer remains, this tool is not flawed, it’s just not the one you want.
Vim could be feature-complete and formally verified and I’m still using Xed.
Notepad in Windows 7 occasionally did some weird shit.
You cannot criticize a good knife by asking why it’s not a hammer.
Didn’t help Bleem.
which is how they killed Ryujinx.
Plus sending goons to his house.
Allegedly.
If you think Democrats should be the worst we can do, we have to stop doing so much worse.
A Raspberry Pi can run local models. You don’t need 64 gigs and a 5090.