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.

I had that issue so I told it to refactor the tests to a smaller more concentrated significant set.

> But if LLMs are capable of that, they will also be capable of virtually any other job, and the entire way we think about the economy and work is going to fundamentally change.

This is the reason why there are billions upon billions of dollars being invested in AI. There isn't enough return if it just replaces software developers.

I'm not saying that it will replace software developers and/or everyone else but that's the implication behind the investment.

Except that chat is a fixed monthly fee. More tokens = more cost for them.

It appears to me like an emulator where the binary is just compiled in based on the huge amount of code like this:

https://github.com/jessicanataliagta/PSPRecomp/blob/main/pro...

Nobody really needs a perfect Photoshop clone, they need an image editor for their particular workflow. Photoshop excels, in a way, because it handle almost every potential workflow -- one product for many users.

But if I'm vibe-coding an app for myself, I only want it to what I want it to do. One product for one user.

People are already vibe-coding some of my extremely niche open source projects onto other platforms.

This is my impression as well; ChatGPT/Codex is very affordable for what you get.

> Interesting, I don’t see this very often with the latest models.

Strange response. I agree with the parent comment here, plan mode lets me ensure that I have specified everything correctly before it gets built which is far too late. I don't see how an improved models even matter to this workflow. Is Fable going to read my mind?

This is not much different for hiring a contractor to build your personal blog. What happens when something breaks and you have no mental model of the code to know where to look? You call up the contractor to fix it. You have simply outsourced the problem.

The mistake in logic here the assumption that having AI build your personal blog means that you build the personal blog. You did not. There should be no more expectation of having a mental model than if you got another human to do it.

(I assume downvoted because people didn't get that this was joke)

Summarizing large PR documentation sounds like a job for AI...

I don't think so. Google's customers are phone OEMs and as long as they are happy, things will continue as is. The precedents here are Microsoft with Windows and maybe Apple with iOS.

Anything Oracle doesn't have much relevance. They were not really interested in growing any marketshare of those products for anyone.

In reading the article, it did feel somewhat wrong in a way that I couldn't quite describe. But after reading this comment, maybe it just seems old and maybe obsolete.

Taking the example provided in the article, I don't feel like the new code is meaningfully less complex. In fact, since it added some additional indirection, I could argue it's slightly more complex.

The core code with the nested if statements is something that I would probably refactor in some other way entirely. Maybe by taking advantage of other language features. It is a toy example so it's hard to say but that's part that feels like it needs simplification and untouched in this example.

> Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see.

As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists.

Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.

You get into vintage computer collecting and regret all things that you tossed...