They’ve both worked on AAA games before.

I’m not trying to discredit them, I’m just saying that it’s not like they’re AAA veterans who have shipped many titles from start to end, in that particular space.

Before that he founded a 14 person game studio in the pre dotcom era. Back then that was a decent sized team.

Casey worked on Dungeon Siege.

They were also very involved in the AAA community. And after 3 AAA games the vast majority of high impact devs would have moved into leadership roles or started their own studios.

Cyberpunk was released 20 years after Dungeon Siege, so I don’t know what you mean this era.

Also Thief Deadly shadows had close to the same size dev team as Assassin’s Creed and a similar budget.

If you’re trying to make the claim that he doesn’t have much experience in modern $500 million dollar games. Then sure because they didn’t make $500 million games 20 years ago when either one was working in AAA gams.

$20 million is roughly 200 person years, so a 900 vs 300 is likely largely due to crediting differences.

A quick glance shows that assassins creed has extensive individual credits for translators, recording staff, and actors across multiple languages.

While thief deadly shadows largely only lists translation companies.

Assassins creed also list far more worldwide publishing staff that would have had little direct impact on development.

> Jon or Casey may argue, and they'd be right in their respective domain — but it's not really applicable in mine; even if I were to theoretically drive _my_ service latency down to zero, my end-user would notice no difference as most of the latency is spent on downstream services. Etc, etc.

I don’t know that I’ve heard Jon talk about this, but Casey has multiple talks on it and Casey would tell you that if you’re aware of the performance trade offs of the decisions you’re making then whatever decision you make is probably fine.

1. Hardware advancements mean that you can get the same results with less optimized code (this is what allowed 3rd party engines with GC scripting languages to become popular)

2. The proliferation of learning resources and open source code.

3. The budgets and size of indie studios as well as total time spent on the games. Seriously look at some of the games these days that get labeled indie.

Warcraft 1 (my first RTS) had just 4 programmers. And only one of them was on the project the whole time. And the entire project was only 14 months.

> Warcraft 1 had just 4 programmers

This to me sounds like the market for games has changed, such that larger projects are now more viable. Smaller projects with a handful of people may still be viable, but look tiny in comparison.

One of my favourite games of that era, Thief, also had a very small team.

Nice but this isnt even the half of the story: According to ChatGPT, the whole team was "32 people in professional roles", so 8x times of number of programmers. And that ratio even became extremer in the last decades.

If you look at one of the games the OP mentioned. The scouring. It has 1 primary programmer, I can’t find how many artists (except to say there are multiple outsourced artists). But it’s been in development for 5 years. So far more programmer years than WC1.

The desire to sleep around is obviously a desire to feed your own selfish ego.

This is where I have a problem when people try to defend this. If you’re honest that you like to sleep around and you found a partner that likes to sleep around, fine.

But the I have evolved beyond the quaint social mores of the unenlightened bit is silly.

That being said, it is - whether we like it or not - an observed biological mechanism that humans, like a lot of other species, like to sleep around and that they are attracted to new sexual partners after being with the same one for a long time. [0]

Once we accept that, the question becomes one of management. Do we use our free will to override these urges to fit social norms better or or do we instead trust each other to uncouple the biology from the emotional bond? Different couples might come to different conclusions at different times, but they are both not without risks and both require thoughtful compromise and communication.

The superiority is not towards people in monogamous relationships - that's how ours is structured right now too! It is towards people that use language like "cuck", that implies somebody's worth is defined by their monogamy, language that brings all sorts of weird vibes of male ownership of female bodies and a lessening of men who do not subscribe to such views.

There's nothing wrong with either monogamy or ethical non-monogamy, just do what works for you and your partner and don't be a dick about it!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolidge_effect

I appreciate that.

>Do we use our free will to override these urges to fit social norms bette

I don’t find that argument very convincing. Using free will to override urges is just describing existing in society.

I have the urge to eat everything I see, to sleep with nearly every woman I see, to fight men I disagree with, to kick my dog when he misbehaves, to take things that aren’t mine, to sleep till noon, to cut in line, to drive 100 mph when I’m late, and countless other urges.

The cultural norms that tell us to resist those urges have evolved just like our biological urges. They make civilization possible.

If you could snap your fingers and remove the cultural norms that favor monogamy. All the data we have from societies that don’t have this norm, from studies of dating apps, from other animals says the mostly likely result is that a small percentage of men have a large number of partners. The likely result of that is a much less stable society, which is probably why socially enforced monogamy has become the norm so frequently.

I don't think all of those are the same. I don't think we should be telling you how much to eat or who to sleep with, and I don't think those are comparable to actions that endanger or hurt other humans or animals.

> All the data we have from societies that don’t have this norm, from studies of dating apps, from other animals says the mostly likely result is that a small percentage of men have a large number of partners.

If women were to choose this arrangement out of their own volition, then why shouldn't they be allowed to? If they'd rather be the second partner to an especially appealing man than first partner to some schlub, why should we force them to settle? For the crappy man's sake? How about he work on himself and become better at attracting mates? We already design everything around mediocre dudes, why should society be providing them with women that apparently would rather be with somebody else?

> The likely result of that is a much less stable society

We do all sorts of things that result in a much less stable society. Think of income inequality, racism, gun ownership in the US, lack of mental health support, legal alcohol etc etc. Usually, though, some dudes benefit and so the instability is a price we all must pay. But if it increases the agency of women? Nah, that'd be a bridge too far.

If this is an example of the kind of buildout we want to streamline, I say no thanks.

And both are much easier than getting permits for a high voltage transmission line to another region of the country where it might make more sense to build a wind or solar farm.

The scale the data centers want to operate at maybe way out of spec. to the existing infrastructure.

https://www.iberkshires.com/story/84456/Town-Residents-Conce...

we're honestly screwed as a country, funny to see.

The road might see 200 cars a day. The physics for a logging trucks are beyond the roads capabilities. They may come in spurts. There are no stop signs and none are needed.

The prevalence of dirt roads in VT is an intentional policy decision.

The snow plow as two axles

Didn't describe that population at all. EMT, Nurses, college professors, generational farmers, trades people. The main point is why should the town be burdened with the cost. The road satisfies the community needs. Vermont gave up on their side of the road when the commercial roads were developed 3/4 of mile over. The forest service should budget for the impact on the local roads.

Sure sounds like a service economy that feeds upon retirement and tourism money to me....(I know what they look like, I grew up in one)

>The main point is why should the town be burdened with the cost. The road satisfies the community needs. Vermont gave up on their side of the road when the commercial roads were developed 3/4 of mile over. The forest service should budget for the impact on the local roads.

I don't care exactly who winds up holding the bag but when you drive from literally anywhere bordering Vermont into Vermont it's pretty clear what the level of investment in transportation infrastructure is. And this infighting over how some petty amount of truck traffic is gonna destroy a dirt road is exactly what's downhill of that under-investment.

A biomass plant harvesting existing timber would only be better if the alternative were building a new coal plant.

This isn’t replacing anything though. We don’t need an extra 1.5GW, so if this project doesn’t go through the alternative will be that we continue moving towards more solar and wind.

There is more excess data center power demand than there is capability to build plants over the next 10 years, so if this plant isn’t built the likely result is 1 less data center and not releasing carbon from 5.5 million tons of timber per year.

The UK's largest CO₂ emitter is an ex-coal now-biomass powerplant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Power_Station

Wind turbines and hydroelectric dams don't do much for enhancing biodiversity either, which is fine because their purpose is to generate electricity.

> The UK's largest CO₂ emitter is an ex-coal now-biomass powerplant

Only by counting burning biomass as emitting new CO2 while not counting the CO2 it removed from the air from being grown.

Coal isn't part of the active carbon cycle. It would stay locked in the ground indefinitely if you didn't dig it up.

Moreover, that plant appears to be getting biomass as compressed pellets from sawmill scrap wood and sawdust, i.e. it's the refuse from trees that were already being logged to make lumber. If they didn't burn it then it would go into a landfill to rot and release the carbon anyway.

Sure they will get sawmill scraps if they can, but if built this will be by far the largest biomass reactor in the country. When I did the math there’s not enough available scrap in the entire country to power this thing.

They’ve explicitly stated that they need 5.5 million tons of timber from the surround 250 miles of forest annually.

>Burning them does the same thing as the second one, which was going to happen on its own.

Over 50-100 years for short lived species. And much longer for longer lived species.

So yes better than coal but over the lifetime of anyone alive today it’s essentially the same thing, so it’s only really better than coal if you are looking 100 years into the future and if you stop doing cutting down existing trees at some point.

Which tracks since it's in England and they're getting pellets from the US, Canada and Europe.

> Over 50-100 years for short lived species. And much longer for longer lived species.

But who is logging old growth trees for biomass?

In if someone is cutting down a tree in a first world country it's generally either because the tree was grown intending to cut it down and they immediately start growing new trees there, or because it's going to be cut down regardless of what you do with the tree because they're removing it in order to make some other use of the land.

Moreover, you can always find that one asshat doing something ridiculous, but the world also generates a lot of scrap wood or cuts down a lot of trees just to clear the land. Burning them to generate electricity is never going to be large proportion of world power generation, but doing it to the extent that the trees were just going to rot anyway seems pretty hard to object to.

That’s not all that much unused wood scrap, so if you’re building a large biomass plant you’re going to end up harvesting timber.

> In if someone is cutting down a tree in a first world country it's generally either because the tree was grown intending to cut it down and they immediately start growing new trees there, or because it's going to be cut down regardless of what you do with the tree because they're removing it in order to make some other use of the land.

In Europe maybe. In the US and Canada it’s very common to harvest timber from naturally grown forests (vs managed plantations) that are being cut primarily for the timber.

But that’s a feedback loop that could lead to more supply being built. Or it could lead to regulations that put enormous surcharges and low limits on data center power consumers, which effectively shield consumers directly from the lack of supply. Which in turn removes the incentive for consumers to expand power generation capacity to keep up (or to allow data centers to expand it themselves).

There is enormous opposition to a new data center project 30 miles outside my city because they want to build a 1000MW natural gas power plant and a 500MW biomass plant (that will take millions of acres of forest to sustain).

If that opposition continues, I see little chance of anything but electricity cost rising as a percent of inference.

This would be the largest biomass plant in the US. 5x larger than the next largest plant.

A 500MW plant would require almost 50x the amount of available waste material from logging and sawmill operations in the entire state of TN (where the plant is being built).

The developer of the project said that the plant was designed to create demand for low grade pine timber following pulp mill closures in the area and that the plant will burn between 350-500 truckloads of logs per day.

Obviously an AI agent can perform a simple surgical procedure. The question is how to get it to perform reliably.

The reason AI agents work as well as they do with code is because they get feedback and retry in a loop. Surgery is inherently inflicting “harm” on a patient, so there’s no bright line guardrail to apply to the agent loop.

Agents performing surgery won’t be possible until models get much much more reliable or we develop a simulation that matches reality close enough that we can use that in realtime for their feedback loop. I think we’re likely very far off from either solution.

So I don’t agree that it had any measurable chance at all of helping anyone other than the author.

And if you’re being purely utilitarian, you need to weigh the opportunity cost of what else the money spent on this could have been used for. What else the researchers and peer reviewers could have done with their time, and what they else the mice could have been used for.

>eating meet

I agree this is probably not as bad as you punching babies though.

It’s just a way to show one’s virtue

Also don’t go outside your house because you may stamp on ants smh

The way you act here makes the world just a little bit worse.

I get that telling you this isn’t likely to be constructive, but if there’s only a 0.000001% chance you reconsider acting in such an unpleasant manner in your next interaction, it was worth it.

1. You clearly aren't reading thoroughly before replying. Please go back and reread what I said, and find where you think I said anything about someone getting killed.

2. You are arguing with your perception of the collective consciousness of Hacker News, not discussing something with an individual.

I don't have a problem with experimenting on a mouse if there's a reasonable chance the end result will save lives or meaningfully help people, and precautions are taken to prevent suffering.

I just happen to think this experiment was stupid and unlikely to provide useful data, and the only reason the researcher used a live mouse was for publicity.

>That’s a non sequitur

The it might somehow kill someone is a non sequitur because you just made that up. My actual argument is that if you say that if you are going to make a utilitarian argument that something provides more benefit than harm overall, you need to weigh the possible benefit against the possible harm.

Your argument was that we can't say for sure there will be a benefit, so lets assume some minute expected benefit.

My argument is that you can't do that without assuming some minute expected harm also exists.

Sure you can essentially ignore the minute expected harm if you believe the expected benefit dwarfs it. But that wasn't your argument, your argument was "let's agree on this minute expected benefit". I believe the expected benefit to be so small as to be immeasurable. And my belief is that it is more likely that the publicity from this result leads other people to perform similar experiments also without any measurable benefit, than that anyone benefits from it.

> so lets assume some minute expected benefit.

Crucial part: all of humanity enjoys the benefit so you must multiply it by the population. So lets assume the expected benefit after adjusting for uncertainty is around 10^-6. And assume the benefit of eating a chicken is around 10 units.

Lets assume the pain felt by the mouse is around 2 pain units and the chicken's pain is around 2 as well.

Assume the benefit you get for generating 2 pain units after eating a chicken is 10 units.

Whereas the benefit from the mouse experiment after generating 2 pain units is 10^-6 * 10^9 = 1000.

Lets also put a subjective factor: eating meat is mostly hedonistic and testing on animals doesn't really have alternatives. I'm being honest here, if AI can eventually do surgery by itself then I'd like it to be tested on animals first and I'd prefer people don't protest against this especially those people who already eat meat.

Also lets not forget the extent of animals being killed for meat: its around 100 billion animals a year for mostly hedonistic reasons that can be fully avoided. Compared to that, animals being killed for medical research is around 100million. That's around 3 OOM less than for meat.

So yes, I think it is a complete non issue that a single mouse is killed for non hedonistic reasons and for benefit of science and I think a person has lost sight of reality if they think it is comparable to eating meat.

I'm preempting a reply like "haha you just made those numbers up so I won't respond". Ok you can do that. But this has been my point from the start - the benefits of animal research diffuse to all of humanity whereas eating meat is a purely selfish and hedonistic experience.

SAMSA Helpline -If you're addicted to drugs and feel like you need help...

But they also want to build an on premise 1000MW natural gas power plant and a 500MW biomass plant that will take millions of acres of forest to sustain.

It feels like at some point our society forgot that the government is supposed to pass laws, and not just block things we don't like. Data centers are being built with polluting power sources, why is the instinct "stop all the data centers" and not simply, you know, require them to not use polluting power sources?

Also, while I'm glad you're focused on what matters, 90% of the outcry I've heard about DCs is about water. Or noise pollution, or them looking ugly... for buildings that, again, are mostly being built on razed industrial land or empty fields. According to the OP, "electrical grid" is the fifth most common concern, and air pollution is wayy down the list.

To the extent that it does require showing up, we should do things like hold multiple sessions at different times of day.

But none of those issues is what the OP is talking about.

“public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally”

He’s saying public comments are inherently biased towards no even given equal opportunity to participate.

The stats in TFA are such that it makes you wonder what the total numbers are, for that there are different methods (for instance, surveys).

A few years ago they were planning a massive overhaul of a roundabout nearby. Half the neighborhood showed up (weekday, after work), pretty much all of my neighbors were there. Some out of interest to see what was going to happen, others for input. I made the case that I thought that the sight-lines for bicycles were terrible with the way they had planned the new roundabout, traffic would be going faster than before (which was the goal of the change) so it really would relieve congestion but it would make it much less safe to cross the road there. There were two options, one would have been very costly (a bike tunnel under the road, also not without problems of its own), the other was more practical and required a change in the angle of the bike path and a change in the design of the center of the roundabout. They listened, took notes, redrew the whole thing, had a second round of feedback and that too was incorporated as much as possible within the budget. Then they went ahead and implemented the change. Everybody reasonably happy. Note that this was not even a municipal thing, technically that roundabout is just outside of the municipality but they had this hearing anyway (and on the other side of the road, so everybody going there had to cross it which really helped my argument, they had all just experienced how hard it is to see if there was a car coming).

This kind of process can work. They could have done it online as well (and during COVID that is how such meetings were held here). I'm sure this is not typical and that there are many examples of where objections were overruled by this was one case where I felt I was both heard and that something was done with the feedback. Nobody said 'no' to anything, not the locals, nor the province who govern that stretch of road.

Now, if you planned on putting a datacenter in between the village and the highway I'm not so sure that would get the same kind of constructive feedback. Because there wouldn't be any plus for the locals that they could perceive so likely they would be categorically against it. But that position would be fairly broadly shared unless some jobs would be created.

If you set up a process that selects for people who can show up at random times on random days and that samples exclusively from people who pay unusual amounts of attention to policy and have high-amplitude opinions, you are going to get disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, owner-class participants who are sharply skewed towards opposition.

You don't have to take my word for this; you can look this up in the literature, too. But I was just at a large public meeting about a rezoning we're doing; turnout around 150 people, and I was one of the youngest in the room.

Which may not may not be true, but you could say the same thing about votes on a referendum, or names on a petition. One side or the other is in most cases more likely to turn out. That is just how democracy works. You can’t divine the true will of the people, you can only act on their public participation.

Anything else is just a license to politicians to push through anything they please.

A company is trying to push through a very large wood burning power plant a few miles down the road that will impact air quality for half the state. If people convince politicians that dissenting voices are overrepresented, that’s one less tool we have to stop things like this.

I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.

>local political participation

Voting skews older as well. If you don’t participate you don’t get a voice. We can’t try to divine the public’s true intent.

We should be making it easier to participate, not giving politicians an excuse to ignore those people who do participate.

I’m saying do things like hold town meetings multiple times at different times of day so people with different schedules can attend.

Not try to guess about people really believe. Give them easier opportunities to tell you what they believe.

I’m this very thread he is asserting that we should get rid of the public comment process which in many cases is just filling out an online form because it is biased towards naysayers.

The naysayers inherently feel more strongly, and so are more likely to make their feelings known regardless of the process. What other alternate is there than making a (maybe educated) guess.

What would we call such a thing‽