CptFribble

Star Citizen will likely never be finished, precisely because the person in charge, Chris Roberts, is notorious in the game industry for being the human embodiment of scope creep.

Even the earliest games he directed or produced as far back as Strike Commander in 1993 suffered from delays. "His" most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer, was also delayed by nearly 2 years from its original release date, only reaching completion because he was fired from the job and only kept on as a consultant while the game was finished without his "direction."

I'm not a backer of Star Citizen, but I see Roberts as a "pure visionary," someone who is capable of generating large and interesting ideas, but lacks the ability to execute. If you search around the internet you will find stories from former employees of Cloud Imperium (Roberts' company making Star Citizen) who were let go or quit from burnout due to the constant feature churn and inability to ever make Roberts happy. As soon as a feature is halfway done, he's already come up with several more that are suddenly the Most Important Thing.

This is why the game is taking over decade to complete and will likely never be finished. Squadron 42 isn't even the core Star Citizen product - it's technically a "companion game" and even this is only just now finishing the campaign 10 (!!) years after it was first announced.

Something Roberts doesn't seem to understand is that the longer a game goes, the higher the expectations, with virtually no upper limit. Considering the quality of games that have come out in recent years, there is no world where Star Citizen or Squadron 42 are strictly a disappointment to everyone other than the sunk-cost-fallacy "investors" still huffing the copium of their 4-5 figure backing fees.

If you read The Fine Article, you will see it's not actually about security, but about police corruption - pressuring business owners of a certain skin color to hire off-duty cops as security under threat of losing their business license, when white business owners didn't appear to have the same requirements to operate.

The business owner quoted in the article goes on to say that a lot of the time the cops they had to hire weren't even there - they had minimum pay requirements for every shift they "worked" even if they left early or just sat in their car doing nothing.

Why are we still not talking about plasma gasification?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

As far as I can tell, the only real "disadvantages" if you can call them that, are:

1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere

2. need to clean it from time to time

3. not necessarily a profitable business

Other than that, it can handle just about anything that's not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers.

Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it's hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there.

In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too.

Does this signal that OpenAI is seeing the limits of their own technology being hit just around the corner?

There is already no shortage of investment and hype around their core product - but it definitely does not seem like something you'd want to cram into a physical product, and definitely definitely not something you'd need $1B to develop.

This smells like "Open"AI is on-ramping to the final stage, cashout.

1. Raise $1B for a device blessed with Ive cool-factor for maximum hype and sales

2. Launch this device for $999 ($1299?)

3. Record-breaking IPO shortly after

4. ???

5. Everyone realizes they don't really need a $1k device to tell them "As an AI language model, I can't answer that question" fifteen times per day

Some students will always try to cheat, that is inevitable.

But saying that whether schools are for teaching is "debatable," while a popular meme, is a false and harmful assertion.

Regardless of what you or any of us consider to be "proper education" or "good teaching," even if higher ed really is just about getting certified for jobs, the simple fact is that the purpose of school at any level is to learn various skills and facts, and any form of direct-to-the-answer interferes with that.

I saw this a lot when GPT3 first came out, many people on HN and elsewhere decried the existence of book reports and essays, rejoicing that such "worthless" tasks would go the way of the dinosaur. However, all who say such things miss the crucial insight: the point of the book report is to learn and display reading comprehension. Similarly, essay writing is only about learning to communicate with essays specifically in the first one or two classes you encounter such tasks. After that, essays are used to communicate your command of the material for subjects that cannot be easily broken down into multiple-choice or short-form exams.

Allowing students to use AI tools to do their homework for them is a massive step backwards, and an unimaginable risk to the future of our society. If we allow our children to use AI to do all their work for them, especially during crucial reading comprehension years, they will arrive at adulthood unable to process anything more complex than a menu.

And relying on AI to summarize and communicate information that would otherwise be written into a document of some kind is an even bigger risk - then the controllers of the AI would essentially control how we process information in general, because no one would be able to do it themselves.

21% of adult Americans are already illiterate, pre-AI. 54% read below a 6th-grade level. What kind of world are we building if we push those numbers even higher?

the difference is that grocery stores are easy to search completely - don't like the cereal options on the end-cap? just walk down the cereal aisle and see it all immediately.

Amazon on the other hand, actively makes it difficult to search for other products, by not only promoting their own brands at the top, but filling up the rest of the results with sponsored items.

It's more akin to an endcap with highest bidder items, but then every few feet you walk down the cereal aisle, the shelves separate and move farther away so another endcap can slide into view, pushing the cheaper alternatives farther and farther down the aisle the further you walk.

Not to mention the scale of the problem as well, grocery stores are finite, and amazon nearly infinite, at least in terms of how much time it takes to search through everything.

I think it's worth reframing this analogy:

An artist using an artbook as reference material = good

An artist with one billion arms, using every artbook ever published, creating millions of images per second in every possible style for fractions of a penny per image, outcompeting every other artist forever = bad

Proper bike infrastructure isn't just extra lanes next to cars. Typically "proper" includes things like protective walls, and bridges specifically for bikes + pedestrians separate from cars.

It is entirely possible to design bike infrastructure that removes car impacts from the equation - we have the technology, we only lack the political will.

NB: certain aspects of holding 2+ FT jobs are harder to parse out before being hired - particularly meeting times. It's not typical to ask what time morning standups are in an interview, but juggling overlapping meetings is one of the main difficulties of holding down multiple roles, so just be aware of what you're getting into.

Isn't it because of the beneficial SEO? I'm sure we all well understand the benefits of landing a product on the first results page of a well-known historical figure.

The first reason that jumps to mind is that cost is not a factor for everyone. For almost any given price level, there are actors for whom the cost is still worth it.

Some examples and their given cutoff point, at which the payments are no longer worth it:

Lower cutoff:

- Marketers selling a product -> when customer acquisition is more than the product margin, or investors decide the growth isn't worth it

Medium cutoff:

- Private organizations pushing an ideological viewpoint -> when the private money runs out, higher tolerance here because profit isn't the point, and actors are more likely to consider pushing the ideological viewpoint as worth spending money without direct profit return

High cutoff:

- State actors working against either other states or to squash internal resistance/political opponents -> virtually unlimited depending on how rich the country is

Requiring payment to prevent spam makes sense in narrow use cases, like Steam's $100 fee per game preventing the worst of the flood of cheap garbage. However, I don't think there is any price level that can "clean" general human communication online.

Without copyright, moneyed interests would be able to simply wait for promising new artists to create something that resonates with an audience, then copy that thing and aim their massive marketing budgets at dominating that audience with the new version owned by the [corporation, famous artist, etc].

Similar to how going viral with a new mobile game as an indie dev means you will almost immediately be cloned and pushed out by King et. al., removing copyright protections would mean that only the largest and wealthiest artists' and corporations' versions of art dominate the market. Creating something truly new and interesting would become simply a donation of that idea to the powers that be.

The main problem with copyright isn't it's existence, it's that technology has allowed the wielding of it to become too quickly and brutally applied a la youtube's automated DMCA system.

[removed by commenter due to incorrect information]

apologies, I was misinformed. consider this comment retracted

"State" in this context is the same as the state in "head of state," AKA "a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government." Other examples of this usage are "nation-state" and "city-state."

It is common to refer to the members of the EU as "member states."

there was quite a long period of pre-history where homo sapiens were living alongside other branches of humans - around 300,000 years ago there could have been as many as 8 (!) other species of humans running around. I imagine we developed the uncanny valley sense during a period like that.

IMO the real danger of good AI is that we don't have the collective intelligence to safely manage our expectations writ large. This train of thought is a little messy, so apologies in advance:

- Just like the fusiform gyrus responds to human faces at a subconscious level (see: uncanny valley faces just "feeling" wrong, because they are detected as inhuman below the level of conscious thought), the Wernicke's area responds to human speech when reading text. I believe that grammatically-perfect speech is subconsciously perceived as human by most people, even tech people, despite attempts to remain impartial - we are biologically hard-wired to assign humanness to written language.

- ChatGPT and its peers do not report confidence levels, so the typical interaction is information that may or may not be correct, presented confidently.

- Average (non-tech) people interacting with chat AIs are aware that it is connected to vast stores of training data without understanding the limitations of statistical LLMs or the need for confidence values in responses, lending them an air of "intelligence" due to the volume of data "available."

- This leads to a non-trivial number of people interacting with chat AI and taking its responses as gospel.

Anecdotally, if you traverse social media you will see an unending stream of people reporting their experiences with how amazing chatGPT is, using it for everything from writing emails to writing school essays. The problem is that when a non-tech person interacts with ChatGPT, they assume based on the above listed factors that what they get back is correct, valid thought from a semi-intelligent being. Even knowing it's a robot, the perfect correctness of the grammar will instill a feeling of validity in a non-trivial segment of the population over time.

This is leading to a scenario where people trust what GPT says about various topics without bothering to question it, and I believe this is already happening. When I bring this up to other tech people, it is usually dismissed with "well, everyone knows it's just an AI," or "people will learn it's limitations." However, at the risk of being glib, consider George Carlin: "think about how dumb the average person is, and then realize half the population is dumber than that." What happens when the average person turns to a statistical LLM for advice on relationships, career moves, how to vote, or other nebulous topics where there is no real correct answer? How will we control where ChatGPT is steering vast numbers of uninformed petitioners?

We already struggle as a society with collective action on existentially important topics like controlling microplastic dispersion, regulating toxic additives in consumer products, and climate change. And those topics are "merely" complex; imagine how much harder it will be to control unintended or unforeseen consequences of a human-like intelligence-adjacent being delivering information of questionable value to an unquestioning audience of 20-40% of humanity?

Addendum: I am also very worried about schoolchildren using AI to write their essays and book reports, skipping critical reading-comprehension time and arriving at adulthood unable to comprehend anything more complex than a menu without asking AI to summarize it.

> China will be more than happy to sell us chips

this is a narrow view of the possible outcomes. a huge amount of our military and intelligence capabilities, as well as much of our advanced manufacturing (i.e. the things that make us relevant on the world stage), completely depend on TSMC's chips. China controlling TSMC could remove the USA from the world stage in a single decade by simply refusing to sell us the best (or any) chips.

Similarly, military and intelligence sources would likely volunteer to stop using TSMC chips immediately since Chinese control could mean those chips are compromised through-and-through.

Basically, Chinese control of Taiwan represents an existential threat to US global power and the US would likely go to the mat over it. Paradoxically though, I think this fact also reduces the likelihood of open conflict over Taiwan, because unlike Putin, Xi does not appear to let his ego drive bad decisions.

The most likely outcome is a new Cold War, with smaller conflicts around the chip industry in Taiwan, most prominently seen at the moment with China's continued expansion into the South China Sea. They cannot risk open conflict over TSMC directly, but they can try to flex their growing naval power over the shipping lanes.

If there will be a conflict over Taiwan, it will likely not happen until the 3nm fab in Arizona is operational in 2026 (planned). We'll likely see a huge shift in the dynamic once we have US chip supply lines secured inside our borders. The paradox will be resolved and Taiwan will be vulnerable to invasion since the US won't need to risk lives and material defending it's chip supply chain, but China will still want to control advanced chips at the level of TSMC's production since while they have made huge strides to catch up over the last several decades, they are still struggling to match TSMCs level of expertise (as we all are).

I see the most likely "bad outcomes" more narrowly focused:

- total loss of trust in online content due to unending torrent of AI content leads to either a return to traditional media for news & etc, or leads to the end of online anonymity to try to figure out who's an AI and who's not.

- Education doesn't respond fast enough to redesign schools around in-person computerless teaching, and a generation of students use AI to do all the work that's supposed to teach them reading comprehension and communication skills, creating a generation that is totally at the mercy of the AI to understand anything more complex than a menu.

I'm more worried about the second one, honestly

On the contrary, as a fresh grad with (presumably) lower COL requirements, you can be more flexible on the salary front than a lot of recently-laid-off senior SWE who may have homes + kids that need to be paid for.

Take it from a millennial who graduated into the recession in 2011, even when everyone is saying the job market sucks, there are always opportunities for younger/fresher people out there, you just might have to be willing to take a "worse" position to get started - but in this industry you can always level up later once things calm down.

Don't get distracted by all the people you see on here or Blind talking about their $500k TC in their mid-20s, those people are far, far outliers. I've never worked in FAANG, self-taught my way into webdev in my early 30s after two other half-careers in my 20s, and I managed to find a job with 0 experience during COVID because I adjusted my expectations down to "normal" salary ranges (sub-$100k), as long as it paid my bills and gave room to grow professionally.

As a young person you have both lower salary requirements (requirements in the sense of "I need at least $XYZ per month to keep the lights on) and a lot of time, both of which are massive advantages when taking the long view of your career.

I think it's more an indictment of the idea that "bigger company == better company," the story typically told by Business People.

Managing large amounts of people is hard, and there are limits on how many can be effectively coordinated on a project. Therefore the larger the company, the taller and more complex the bureaucracy stack becomes, and as a company adds unbounded amounts of headcount, teams naturally reach their size limit and must fracture, adding another manager. Once the first management layer grows beyond a certain size, additional tier-2 managers must be added to coordinate the tier-1 managers.

Soon you wind up with a company like Meta, with thousands upon thousands of managers who are only managing other managers. Each of those people, being several steps up the management career ladder, are probably making well into six figure incomes. The on-the-ground employees doing the actual work probably account for a relatively small portion of that $13B.

It's an indictment not of the SE field, but of the current version of corporate structure: - managers valued (at least partially) by how many people they manage, so are incentivized to add unnecessary headcount - managers, PMs, and Tech Leads are rated favorably for driving a visible project forward by some measurable metric, but not necessarily for finishing projects or for necessary-but-unsexy work like bug fixing, reducing tech debt, or using political capital to stop wasteful projects before they start. This incentivizes the creation and abandonment of projects, or the churn of forever-projects that keep getting handed off to the next cohort to remake in whatever fashion they believe will the get themselves promoted, on and on forever.

I don't think you need to worry too much - those laid off workers are coming off hot SF salaries. Most of them won't really be at a "lower rate." A 5-year Googler laid off from $300k+ TC isn't going to just up and move to a low-COL area and displace someone for $100k-$150k.

I gather there are a lot of smaller companies in the tech hubs that are happy to pay $200k+ for a former FAANG'er, and moving is hard - most people won't want to move, so they'll probably stick around in the tech hubs. And now that remote-for-everyone has transitioned into remote-for-some-hybrid-for-most, I don't think the tech workforce is as location-fluid as some might expect.

Basically I think most people who aren't FAANG'ers, living outside the hubs and making "ok" money, are probably safe from getting displaced by the layoffs. A huge amount of the layoffs aren't even really coders, lots of recruiters/HR/support staff and so on are part of this, since they were making boatloads too but for arguably more replaceable work.

This assumes an equitable distribution of purchasing power among market participants, so the only barrier to truth-dominant news is whether a majority of market participants demand it.

Unfortunately this is not reality. There are many reasons why statements that are untruthful, or at least tangential to the truth like rage-bait, are paid to be distributed.

Sometimes domestic political parties seek to spread misinformation because it will drive their core voters to the polls, or convert on-the-fence voters to their side.

Sometimes nation-state actors seek to spread misinformation to cause chaos and disrupt national unity.

Maybe an industrial lobby is seeking to obfuscate or misinform about products and their benefits (see the sugar industry's public campaigns for 'low-fat' foods packed with sugar as beneficial to your health).

In all three of these examples, the parties supplying the information have vastly more resources to spend on spreading the information than anyone does to combat it, even if it is a net-negative on society, because there is money to be made or power to be had. Business interests can sustain their propaganda as long as they are making money, possibly indefinitely. National political parties can sustain their propaganda as long as there are major interests that benefit from the party's actions, typically also indefinitely. And we all know the kind of resources a nation-state can deploy.

The point being made here is that "raw talent" is frequently the removal of barriers via socioeconomic factors. The best predictor of whether a child will graduate college is whether their parents also graduated college.

Most "naturally talented" people are "simply" people allowed to reach full human potential due to circumstances of birth, where "less talented" people frequently could have reached similar potential, but for:

- lower socioeconomic status

- less- or un-educated parents who don't know what opportunities to put their children into for maximum growth

- parents who themselves experienced significant trauma as children and didn't have the opportunity to process it due to lack of money or access to mental healthcare, and then subsequently inflict similar trauma on their own children

The lower socioeconomic status one in particular contains a host of other potential potential-limiters:

- less money for healthy food (or enough food at all) means less growth potential and worse overall health for the rest of your life

- if your parents don't have money for the equipment, you likely won't be allowed to participate in sports (happened to my wife) which means your brain will miss critical early wiring opportunities with the sport-specific mechanical tasks, which will result in lower potential skill ceiling later in life

- no money for travel means less exposure to world cultures, and unless living a in large city less exposure to foreign languages, and exposure to foreign languages as an infant is critical for later foreign language success due to pruning of connections for unused phonemes during early development.

There are many, many more things that go into the development of "raw talent" I haven't even touched on beyond "just" parent socioeconomic status, like poor people being more likely to have to live near major roadways and its influence on the rate of asthma in children.

The takeaway here is that very often people with "raw talent" weren't born that way, they were simply allowed to grow.

"Middle-class-ness" in this context shouldn't be the primary goal, because it's only a proxy for "have enough time and space to care." I assure you, poor people care about the environment, but we've structured our society to prevent the working poor from having enough free time and energy to advocate for things like the environment. Poor people generally don't even have enough time and energy to advocate for themselves for things like affordable housing and the end of food deserts.

Instead of just being like "lets burn more carbon to generate wealth first," we should skip the middle steps and go directly to giving people of all classes, especially the working poor that make up the majority of the human race, a voice and access to voting rights. Give the lower economic classes a larger voice in government and I think you'd be surprised how many would vote for things like investment in clean energy.

Respectfully, saying that you have to be rich enough to have time to care is missing the forest for the trees.

Common Core is not the problem, that's just a political talking point. Common Core is not a curriculum, it is a set of standards.

Before Common Core, there were 0 national standards for math (and language skills, but this is about math). The US "standards" were created accidentally, like how Texas sets the standard for many states due to being the largest customer of textbooks and printers not wanting to make separate versions for smaller states.

Common Core simply set the minimum knowledge and skills by grade level, basically saying "students should be able to do fractions by the end of 5th grade."

The major criticisms of Common Core are that it was too expensive to implement for states that were already so far behind in funding their educational systems, and that it's too test-driven, for example tying teacher evaluations to test scores.

In any case, over the last 12 years since it started in 2010, many states have quit trying to implement it and gone in other directions. Most experts agree the overall impact of Common Core is nothing to slightly negative due to the implementation problems.

This says more about our abject failure to properly fund and organize our educational systems nationally, by the way, since the people in charge of implementing the standards in various states and cities did things like LA spending 9 figures on iPads to deliver Pearson tests that only were licensed for 3 years. AKA typical American turn-government-initiative-into-private-industry-giveaway stuff.

And anyway, the oldest child that would have been "entirely educated via Common Core" would be 17 (5 y.o. kindergartener in 2010)

I went to a different school, but I've also experienced similar "teachers" only in chemistry, and even specifically OChem.

Difficult/opaque lecture style, very high difficulty tests, openly mocking students in a 500+ person lecture if he deemed a question not intelligent enough, and on top of all of it, forced to buy a textbook he co-authored (homework questions taken from the required book, refreshed every year).

For some reason this story seems to happen more often in chemistry than other disciplines. In my experience as a Biomedical Engineering major, my chemistry classes were by far the most difficult, almost like it was the point - just difficulty for difficulty's sake. And I had plenty of other hard classes, including AI/ML, Diff EQ, and a course on the physics of blood, but each of those professors, while rigorous, were also fair and kind, willing to help students understand the material, and definitely never refusing to answer what they believed to be a "stupid question."

I even remember conversations with friends about how the chemistry department seemed to have a very high number of massively egotistical professors who mistreated their students. My chem major friends confirmed it was like this all the time.

All of this is anecdotal, but soft-confirmed by multiple friends and friends of friends at the time. When this story broke I was honestly not at all surprised.

According to Google, a typical chainmail hauberk could have as many as 45,000 10mm rings - if we assume that 2cm rings are not excessively more difficult to make than 10mm rings, then 45,000 2cm rings linked end-to-end would stretch around 900m long.

Even assuming the chain didn't float in the air and instead draped down the rock and along the ground, it would likely take "only" 3-5 chainmail hauberks' worth of rings to cover the distance.

It wouldn't be an easy task, but there were far more than 5 people in medieval times with full sets of chainmail armor, so it's definitely not outside the realm of possibility.

Like most things, coffee is subject to diminishing returns. I have also owned nearly every device invented to make coffee - as I'm sure many others here have - and I've settled on a simple over-the-mug pour-over cone, but mainly because there's no moving parts or tubes to worry about cleaning. I don't even know what "correct" pour-over technique is, so I'm basically making bog-standard single-serving drip coffee with store-brand beans, and I couldn't be happier with it.

Ultimately I think fancy coffee is the same as fancy beer - it's not about the quality of taste of the thing, but rather it's about tribal membership and signaling. Among certain groups of people, caring deeply about 1% gains in taste value from small changes in coffee preparation or hop blends is a chance to prove your worthiness to the in-group.

The fact that so many can honestly profess that these tiny gains in subjective taste experience are Very Serious Business is a testament to humans' ability to convince ourselves of just about anything.

It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with Shopify dev, especially since many merchants are non-technical and there are an unlimited number of very cheap Shopify "dev" shops that will paste anything you want into your theme with no regard for bloat.

Many people running brands, either professional digital marketers or small business owners, have absolutely no concept of page weight. I continually fight battles about this with the various ecomm brands my employer owns, and yet when a marketer updates the home page content somehow we still wind up with 20 MB above-the-fold autoplay movie files.

Amazon judges how quickly/whether to issue a return based on an algorithm weighted by your lifetime total value. If you shop a lot on Amazon, occasionally returning an item will be 0 hassle for you. If you don't shop on Amazon that often and get unlucky, they will hassle you about the return (you can google this for confirmation). Prime customers are also generally treated much better, obviously because they have a much higher LTV. That third-party seller probably gave you so much grief about the return because their sales volume is much lower, so individual returns cost them a much more significant % of their revenue.

Also, easy returns doesn't mean the items are being reused/the process is good for the environment. Industry surveys show around 25% of returns wind up in a landfill, and this number varies greatly based on what the item is - clothes are thrown away much more often.

Basically, Amazon and other high-volume low-quality retailers simply sell so many products at so high a markup that they can absorb the cost of throwing away some XX% of the products that get returned as a cost of doing business.