I wanted to say that some animations look choppy, but it's yet again the Chrome's prefers-reduced-motion css feature mapped to Windows's Animation Effects knob, which is completely outrageous.
I noticed Pluto is running on a simple CPU? If so, that's very nice for future RTS games. You just ship (or use a server-client arch) a bunch of models of various difficulty levels to let players practice. Could we even get models tuned to specific campaign levels? I wonder how costly the creation of Pluto was.
The top players were losing a bunch to Pluto when it first came on the scene because they didn’t realize it was not a human and were playing normal strategies against it. Once they realized it was an AI bot they developed strategies to exploit it and can now win very reliably against it.
Pluto is very good at assessing relative army strengths based on units within its vision and will always engage when it judges that its army strength has an advantage, and it uses superior micro and targeting to win battles efficiently. The key weakness of Pluto is that it has no memory of units that are not in its line of sight, so it can be easily exploited with fast skirmishing and harassing units, drops, and spreading out artillery units to deny it from seeing the full army strength all at once.
Its other big weakness is that once you get an army advantage you can force it into a turtling position where it will never try to attack you and you can safely colonize the entire map with expansion bases, giving yourself an insurmountable snowballing resource advantage.
With respect, the wins you're describing are exploits that the next iteration of bots will fix. The "AI forget the Reaver exists", "AI doesn't understand how dark swarm works", "AI doesn't know what nukes are" are bugs that can be corrected, not big gaps in reasoning.
From what I've seen: the Pro's wins mostly rely on exploits, not superior gameplay. Those who fight without exploits lose pretty bad, just in the last few hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xga636MBOns
This is an interesting hypothesis but I'm not sure it's proven.
Obviously chess bots can beat anyons but this involves a situation where you're making 1 move at a time in a highly constrained environment: exactly 64 squares and a set number of pieces and so in. You also have, relatively speaking, near infinite time to plan your next move and as a result AIs can use a combination of databases and simulation algorithms to derive the best next move.
Almost none of that applies to starcraft.
We can talk about "teaching" the bot to handle other situations but that word covers a gigantic realm of complexity, like how do we encode this information in a way that the ai can actually draw from to apply to its current situation? If people talk about "more chess positions than atoms in the universe" or whatever, this is so many orders of magnitude smaller than the number of valid starcraft positions that we need to invent new numeric notation to accurately describe it.
StarCraft is in between, where faster actions can be a big advantage but choosing good enough actions for that to matter is hard enough that it took many years to achieve.
At least when I first heard about trying to make AI play StarCraft against humans (not the built-in AI of course, which the pros wouldn't have any trouble with), there was a lot of talk about limiting their "actions per minute" to the same level as high-level human players. What confused me was the premise that someone hitting 200 APM would be doing 200 useful things per minute; as far as I was ever able to observe, a huge portion of those actions were either just to look at different things by hitting a hotkey for a unit or building in a different area or even just keeping their fingers in motion so that when they did need to do something it could flow from the movements they were already doing rather than having to actually think through starting and stopping.
People have been arguing about how useful apm actually is since roughly 5 minutes after people started measuring it.
That being said, there is a substantial difference between humans playing at anywhere from 50-500 apm and a robot that can literally micro every single zergling on the map at the same time and do things like avoid ever taking the splash damage portion of a siege tank shot.
Fair enough, that's a pretty stark difference. It sounds like the exact precision of the actions that a bot can do is pretty much beyond human abilities.
When I was younger, I used to think most people were dumb as well. But then you realize that you are just as dumb sometimes, and your most cheerished people can be as well. It's just human nature. Thinking everything and everyone is dumb can probably be characterized as being stupid, since you're not thinking about this very deeply.
It's unfortunate to think that some people may want to restrain themselves from sharing as much in the form of blog posts, but on the other hand, if you're still using AI in your day to day work from cloud providers, perhaps we'll still benefit from that data in one way or another.
I mean, OpenAI couldn't guarantee that someone's data was not used for training, even though he had the "don't train on my data" setting turned on. I still don't understand what that means. And Anthropic probably does a similar thing, right? Did they share details how they derive from our data for training purposes?
What is the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture? Is it the same as the Silicon Valley subculture? What defines both?
Are LLMs really the product of brogrammers?
The distinction is even easier to make these days -- brogrammers aren't actually programmers.
There is an emerging coterie of people whose entire approach to software startups is to vibecode an MVP, raise enough seed to hire a real programmer (or get one interested enough to become their "cofounder") and move on to the next MVP. To them, doing one company at a time in the era of LLMs is a sucker's game.
I fell into this career because I programmed as a kid, hacked on pre internet bboards, and understood how to drive a computer via the command line. I like solving the problems. GED, college dropout. I never planned on making this much money, but I'm certainly not giving it up. I don't feel like I fit in either camp tbh.
To the best of my knowledge zero of the people passionate about programming that I know have spent a meaningful portion of their career at non-tech companies. Internships or first jobs out of college are common, but the passionate people end up going somewhere where the thing they're working on is more than an incidental cost center for their employer.
I'd guess it makes sense that if programming is a passion for you then probably a non-tech-centric F500 company probably isn't where you'd choose to work.
For context: my current company with ~400 employees (not just engineering) is the largest company I've ever worked at.
Sure, and that's a big shift in industry culture over the last several decades.
While there had long been perfuctory white collar programmer analysts filling the ranks at some dry divisions at IBM, it used to be way more common to have a software engineering department full of Asimov-steeped Omni-reading nerds who had genuinely passionate interest in the field that had taken hold even before they started working in it.
But later the career increasingly came to be treated more like law, medicine, or finance and you started to see those rooms fill with people that were often generally bright but not really "called" to the field in the same aay.
I wonder if carpenters, plumbers and electricians, etc have the same kind of love for their jobs in comparable ratios.
I certainly don't ask when I hire one.
I mean I got into it because I loved it as a kid in the 80s and 90s. And I still loved it in college. Turning it into a job quickly crushed any love I had though.
If you don’t have style rules baked into the PR process, you should. Tabs vs. spaces is a team decision and needs to be matched by everyone to reduce code churn. It’s correct to reject a PR if it violates the team style guide (although it should be automated and have tooling locally to enforce it as well.)
I worked for twitter and there was a guy like this. I made a big stink that "yo, everything this guy says just needs to be in a linter" and they actually implemented it.
Personally, I love the current Firefox.com design and see the simplicity as a feature. And it's designed to be responsive to any screen size. A design like this would have been incredibly challenging to build with CSS 2.0 in 2008. That's the point of this post. But if you find the design boring, just like the CSS Zen Garden, you can design your own user stylesheet to re-style the whole site, hundreds of pages in dozens of languages, into any design you want, with one stylesheet, because the styles are cleanly separated from the markup. Have fun!
Yeah... I was trying to figure out what he was pointing to, and was like.. oh, the Firefox website... went there and was pretty uninspired by the design, at least in desktop.
I actually think they’re pretty nice even when I was viewing it on a restricted resolution device like an iPad mini, it’s not apparent at first but he does include a check box that allows you to turn off the stickiness of the animations, it’s a few lines or paragraphs below the first animation in the body
> The stock market is breaking records. Corporate profits are booming. And yet plenty of us look at our paychecks and don’t quite feel the boom.
It is a shame that many people are so risk averse in general that they don't invest in the stock market, getting richer along with the rest. Investors aren't a special class of people, so I don't get why society should look down on the fact that the stock market is breaking records while your paychecks doesn't substantially increase. Your investments do!
> To be clear: I’m not saying that workers are poorer than they were 30 years ago. On average, they’re doing better. The size of our economic pie has grown, and so a smaller slice of a bigger pie still adds up to more pie.
> My point, instead, is to focus on the change in how we slice that pie. It matters because the split between workers and owners is one of the most important factors driving who gets what from our economy.
The author should expand on why he thinks it is actively bad that some people are getting more while everyone is better off anyway.
> The author should expand on why he thinks it is actively bad that some people are getting more while everyone is better off anyway.
If you ask this from a perspective of fairness, you will have to consider scenario 1: A worker's labor is getting worth more. Great: then the worker could ask you: why shouldn't I claim a greater total percentage from my labor's worth if the owner is better of anyway?
Scenario 2: I have a hunch the owner does not like that, even if the owner gets richer that way. Instead, the owner and the worker could also decide to keep the workers key at 75%, splitting all the new proceeds between them with the same distribution key. This sounds like the most stable option.
Scenario 3, aka reality. The worker's labor is getting worth more, but the proceeds from this increase goes mainly to the owner. Sidestepping the fairness issue, this is a problem on a macro-economic scale. Wealth will accumulate within a few families who invariably are going to thwart the democratic process to gain more influence than one person=one vote. The system will tune to the needs of a few families, it won't optimize for a global maximum. You can look at the healthcare industry in the USA to understand how a local optimum is disastrously lower than the global optimum. Which by the way has effects on the economy itself (workers will choose to stay in a bad job out of fear for medical costs, or they have to live in bad health, etc). Sociology and economy are deeply intertwined.
> many people are so risk averse in general that they don't invest in the stock market
You have to be doing pretty well compared to the average person before investing in the stock market is even a consideration. Most people, if they had any surplus income, would use it to pay off debts or save against emergencies.
It’s not risk aversion, it’s lack of money and access. Half of Americans can’t afford a $1k surprise bill. How do you expect them to invest? With what money?
People don't invest the bloody stock market because they can't afford rent and groceries.
If labor's share of GDP were more equitable, and more akin to what it was during the US's "Golden age" then sure, us regular folks might have some money to invest, but since the rich are gobbling up literally everything these days, a lot of us out here are struggling just to get by, and don't have money to pay our bills let alone invest.
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