14,582 karma · joined October 20, 2012
The difference between a junior and a senior is still very real. With agents, knowing what to ask them to do (or not do) is bordering on more important than it ever was. A curious junior might still go down rabbit holes for things that a person who had done this before. That’s what makes them a junior. Not everything we _can_ do we _should_ do
> Or is there some other emergent effect you're concerned about that you expect me to be able to infer?
Removing the unneeded snark, yes. A well intended, but poorly implemented law will not have the desired effect. If the law states that F2P games are exempt, for example (as Stop Killing Games has suggested), you'll find a massive swing towards free games with $60/80/100 in-game purchases to access the actual content.
> but documentation shouldn’t be an issue
Oh boy. I would bet that at any medium sized games company the number of people who can run the full stack of a game from client to backend locally is single digits, and that it is absolutely not documented.
The actual implementation is very important.
The problem _here_ is if you use steam, or psn, or epic, or any third party provider you need that. It’s a bit like the California cancer label.
I think if there was a better criteria for “multiplayer”, “single player” , “required”, “online”, and “offline” it would help, but I’m not sure if that’s really feasible either.
Adding insulation is expensive, and awkward. If you have cavity walls that are uninsulated, it needs to be done right. If you have single skim walls you either do external cladding (and change the outside of your building), or build an internal stud wall and insulate that, which is very effective but costs a decent amount, reduces internal floor space, and requires a full redecoration after.
Most of us don't. But smart meters are free in the UK, and if there was a way for my washing machine to have a 3h window overnight to run in to be done for 7:30 I'd do it in a heartbeat. Same for my dishwasher. Heating is a bigger issue.
That said, most properties in the UK don't have this problem. They _do_ likely need bigger radiators which comes with a cost, but a lot of these houses would benefit from just upgrading from their single panel rad with no fins.
You said that, not me. I am not complacent with the security issues, I just don’t believe that the security theatre of “curl | bash” is productive unless you have an actual better alternative.
> they are still better than a curl pipe because they are versioned
pip install is running setup.py which is more than capable of calling exec(requests.get(url)) - except to _you_ that’s secure because you’re assuming it’s trusted. In both cases, if the delivery of the package is compromised or you don’t audit the script, you are screwed. It’s no different to running a binary that you’ve not verified.
This is a crutch that people lean on to not use the right thing and use what they’re familiar with. Start with the browser default and change when it doesn’t work in that case.
There is a small, but very vocal group that complain about 30 vs 60fps, and yet there are games that push for 120/240 on consumer hardware (valorant and overwatch both run at very high frame rates on very low specs). As I said, it’s about prioritising it. _Why_ it’s being prioritised doesn’t really matter.
> also there was very much a culture of “the browser will handle it”
That is very clearly still the culture.
> most devs are using the hardware that is many times better than their consumers.
My last work PC was a 32 core 4GHz machine with 256GB RAM, a 4090, and 16TB of NVMe SSD’s with 10GB fibre. Our target platform was 9GB RAM, and an 8 core 1.1GHz processor, yet we still managed (just about).
You’re conflating scale with bloat. At large orgs the problem is that nobody is willing to step back and say “this sucks”. Trying to get this fixed involves getting 6 teams to agree upon something with no clear owner for the outcome and with everyone incentivised for not being blamed if one of the other groups tanks the effort.
> engineers should drop everything and work overtime on optimising performance
No, we’re asking for it to be taken seriously by the organisation. I work in games, and on large projects we usually have a small team (2/3 people of a team of 80-100) who are constantly working on this stuff. Their work is “subjective” improvements but often it’s just building tooling and telling other groups what they need to fix.
At my last job we worked in a large, but publicly available code base. My experience was that just giving an agent the prompt to look at area X to figure out how it works would use up half or more of the context window. And that was thrown away every time we started again. We had docs, agent generated overviews but the agents still filled their context windows way too quickly to actually really be any use.