I really don’t see it.

Think about a modern application. Think about the file structure, how the individual sources interrelate, how non-code assets are stored, how applications are deployed, and all the other bits and pieces that go into an application. An AI can’t know any of that without being trained - by a human - on the specifics of that application’s needs.

I use Copilot for my job. It’s very nice, and makes my job easier. And if my boss fired me and the rest of the team and tried to do it himself, the application would be down in a day, then irrevocably destroyed in a week. Then he’d be fired, we’d be rehired, and we - unlike my now-former boss - would know things like how to revert the changes he made when he broke everything while trying to make Copilot create a whole new feature for the application.

AI code generation is pretty cool, but without the capacity to know what code actually should be generated, it’s useless.

Well. That’s stupid.

Large language models are amazingly useful coding tools. They help developers write code more quickly.

They are nowhere near being able to actually replace developers. They can’t know when their code doesn’t make sense (which is frequently). They can’t know where to integrate new code into an existing application. They can’t debug themselves.

Try to replace developers with an MBA using a large language model AI, and once the MBA fails, you’ll be hiring developers again - if your business still exists.

Every few years, something comes along that makes bean counters who are desperate to cut costs, and scammers who are desperate for a few bucks, declare that programming is over. Code will self-write! No-code editors will replace developers! LLMs can do it all!

No. No, they can’t. They’re just another tool in the developer toolbox.

This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how generative AI works. To accomplish what you’re describing you’d need:

• An instance of generative AI running for each asset.
• An enclosing instance of generative AI running for each scene.
• A means for each AI instance to discard its own model and recreate exactly the same asset, tweaked in precisely the manner requested, but immediately being able to reincorporate the model for subsequent generation.
• A coordinating AI instance to keep it all working together, performing actions such as mediating asset collisions.

The whole system would need to be able to rewind to specific trouble spots, correct them, and still generate everything that comes after unchanged. We’re talking orders of magnitude more complexity and difficulty.

And in the meantime, artists creating 3D assets the regular way would suddenly look a lot less expensive and a lot less difficult.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Right now, generative AI is everyone’s really attractive hammer. But I don’t see it working here in 36 months. Or 48. Or even 60.

The first 90% is easy. The last 10% is really fucking hard.

Yep. I watched their demo clips, and the “good” ones are full of errors, have lots of thematically incoherent content, and - this is the biggie - can’t be fixed.

Say you’re a 3D animator and build an animation with thousands of different assets and individual, alterable elements. Your editor comes to you and says, “This furry guy over here is looking in the wrong direction, he should be looking at the kangaroo king over there, but it looks like he’s just glaring at his own hand.”

So you just fix it. You go in, tweak the furry guy’s animation, and now he’s looking in the right direction.

Now say you made that animation with Sora. You have no manipulatable assets, just a set of generated frames that made the furry guy look in the wrong direction.

So you fire up Sora and try to fine-tune its instructions, and it generates a completely new animation that shares none of the elements of the previous one, and has all sorts of new, similarly unfixable errors.

If I use an AI assistant while coding, I can correct its coding errors. But you can’t just “correct” frames of video it has created. If you try, you’re looking at painstakingly hand-painting every frame where there’s an error. You’ll spend more time trying to fix an AI-generated animation that’s 90% good and 10% wrong than you will just doing the animation with 3D assets from scratch.

Or the swamps of Dagobah.

Or the original Shatner episode.

“There’s something… on the wing!”

It’s more like you get some kind of weird construction multitool that promises to be a level, a drill, a hammer, and a dozen other things, and it turns out to be a really good, innovative, and helpful level… and a really bad everything else.

Yeah, I figured that out eventually, but also figure the same probably applies to the other Copilot. Same underlying technology.

Wish Microsoft would use different names for different implementations.

Copilot isn’t actually bad for developers, it’s just that you need to be careful with it and recognize its limitations.

Writing a bunch of REST endpoints for an API and need to implement all the typical http verbs, and you already have all the matching methods for reading, updating, and deleting values in a complex SQL database for each endpoint to call? Copilot can turn a ten minute chore into a ten second one. Very handy.

Writing those complex SQL methods in the first place? Yeah… Copilot will probably make a ton of mistakes and its work will need to be triple-checked. You’ll save time just doing it yourself if you know how. (And if you don’t, you have no business calling yourself a developer.)

Copilot is best for easy boilerplate and repetitive code. Problems arise as soon as you ask it to get “creative.”

I switched to Linux years ago, and have never looked back. Every computer in my house except one (my mandatory work laptop) runs some flavor of Linux, and my kids have never been forced to use Windows at all. And if I have my way, they never will.

Another Feedly user, here. Definitely the way to go after the death of Google Reader.

My only concern with it is that I’d prefer any advertisement revenue to go to the original website with the content I want. Fortunately, if the website’s ads aren’t intrusive, I just disable ad block on that site and click through to it, giving them the views they need to keep going.

There are a few bots, mostly spammers. If you mod a community, you can see them. They’re typically caught by the spam filters before I even notice they’re there.

They all got greedy. All of them. We wanted a streaming service to watch our shows and movies on, and they all decided to pretend that what we really wanted was a return to paying $100+ a month for a collection of channels with content that we mostly don’t watch on them, only this time with a bunch of additional apps you have to install for each one, most of them remarkably shitty. Like cable, but stupider.

Remember when the streaming setup was simple? There was basically just Netflix, it paid for licenses to content from Disney, Paramount, etc., and provided guaranteed income for those companies. Small income, sure, but steady.

Then each of them said, “Hey, why don’t we replace Netflix, only all we’ll stream is our own stuff! And sure, most of it’s trash, but people will stick around for the good shows!”

No. No, they won’t. They’ll go back to pirating it. No one is paying for Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, Max, Peacock, AppleTV, ESPN+, Prime, and whatever other shitty “exclusive” streaming service pops up.

I’ll be able to. But I most certainly won’t do it. No thanks.

This isn’t Steam’s fault. The OS is dead because Microsoft killed it (as part of their ongoing planned-obsolescence operating system program). There is no conceivable way Steam can maintain security for anyone’s account on an OS that hasn’t received security updates for three years.

I mean, it can be, if you do the right fine-tuning.

But yeah, I think they kind of missed the point. Arch seems to work pretty damn well for gaming with a completely vanilla, standard configuration.

As an Arch user myself… I feel seen.

How about… No?

I’m one of the folks who actually likes to go in to the office every once in a while, but I’m never making it a daily commute. Never again.

Hell, I’m on an international team now. Over the course of the pandemic, we built ourselves up with folks from multiple states and multiple countries. There is exactly one person on my team I could see regularly if we went back to the office. Literally everyone else is hundreds of miles away at a minimum. Many would need passports.

And that one person? He’s got an immune-compromised family member, so he’s never going back to the office and risking his loved one’s life.

Fortunately, my employer knows it would make zero sense to require all of us to go back to the office. My boss doesn’t even live in the same state as me.

Only the beginning. Their absurd attempt at a licensing money-grab backfired so badly, they couldn’t have screwed themselves over any worse if they’d just put it a statement saying, “Stop using Unity. Unreal is so much better!”

Again, it’s probably down to the hardware. They already had firmware that fully supported it, and they knew what they wanted to add and remove as far as features for this other use-case. It probably would have been more work to grab an off-the-shelf Linux distro and tune it to the same specifications.