And there's another group, grifters, who are neither living to work nor working to live. They are the parasites, and our current society rewards grifters by not putting them in check. Probably because so many want a piece of the grifting pie, in the same way many people see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Don’t forget another group, permanently disenfranchised, who are working to barely live. They are the unsung heroes of our society, who for a brief year or two recently got celebrated as key workers, got claps and applause, and then forgotten again once normality resumed.
"Show HN: I drive a garbage truck" wouldn't make the front page, but the world would grind to a halt tomorrow if those people stopped showing up for work.
The NYC garbage truck people are more than content to be paid handsomely in dollars instead of claps and cheers. Their union has the city by the balls and they know it, and they abuse that power to block modern trash containerization improvements. I wouldn’t have any qualms about personally automating their job
> Or you have a leader above who has no idea and goes with the quickest/cheapest option.
This leader is not going with the quickest or cheapest option. Doing so would probably be laudable. They are going with the claims made by someone that a certain way is going to be quicker or cheaper. It doesn't matter if it actually is, or ends up being, quicker or cheaper. One plan is classified as meeting the requirements while another plan is classified as being cheaper, the cheaper one will be chosen even though it doesn't meet the requirements.
You can blame whoever invented the word "if", as soon as you can branch based on data you can just write an interpreter that turns data into instructions, no matter the architecture.
FWIW, you can make software that runs on Harvard architecture chips. They feature distinct address spaces for ROM and RAM. It's been a while, but it's how Atmel/Microchip AVR micros work.
Not really, most of these configuration as code systems are not executed directly on the CPU but rather interpreted in which case a separate data-only memory would not stop anyone.
Sometimes achievements speak for themselves and provide the marketing for the actor. But that requires both the achievement to be extremely outsized, so as not to get lost in the noise, and very obviously the result of a singular actor. Only one person can step up to the plate and swing the bat.
> When I open a PR without discussing it at all beforehand with anyone, I expect the default to be that it gets rejected.
TNG S2E8, "A Matter Of Honor" is about this topic. The submitter introduced risk on the maintainers (the risk being here largely eating up the maintainers time needlessly) by working in isolation and only presenting the finished work without any feedback or awareness from the rest of the participants.
The compose key on Linux makes deliberate use much easier (rather than automatic replacement which often triggers when I don't want it). There's a compose key utility for Windows, but has some minor annoyances like many input (mouse or keyboard) macro extender applications.
That's almost more damning. The list was created by humans, who presumably read the books, but then couldn't be bothered to summarize the very books they read? Either the human is really lazy ("read" the book but can't be bothered to write a short summary) or really really lazy (didn't read the book but felt a summary was necessary). Either way, it makes this list less interesting, at the very least because it doesn't need to exist at all if someone can just ask an LLM "list and describe books that A16Z might think are valuable to read" and get the same quality output.
"Automating agency" it's such a good way to describe what's happening. In the context of your last paragraph, if they succeed in creating AGI, they won't be able to exercise control over a robot army, because the robot army will have as much agency as humans do. So they will have created the very situation they currently find themselves in. Sans an economy.
> they never go into buildings, the buildings all have similar size, the towns have similar layouts, there’s numerous visual inconsistencies, and the towns don’t really make sense
These AI generated towns sure do seem to have strict building and civic codes. Everything on a grid, height limits, equal spacing between all buildings. The local historical society really has a tight grip on neighborhood character.
From the article:
> It would also be sound, with different areas connected in such a way to allow characters to roam freely without getting stuck.
Very unrealistic.
One of the interesting things about mostly-open world game environments, like GTA or Cyberpunk, is the "designed" messiness and the limits that result in dead ends. You poke at someplace and end up at a locked door (a texture that looks like a door but you can't interact with) that says there's absolutely nothing interesting beyond where you're at. No chance to get stuck in a dead end is boring; when every path leads to something interesting, there's no "exploration".
The other extreme, where you can go inside everywhere, turns out to be boring. Second Life has that in some well-built areas. If you visit New Babbage, the steampunk city, there's almost a square kilometer of city. Almost every building has a functional interior. There are hundreds of shops, and dozens of bars. You can buy things in the shops, and maybe have a simulated beer in a pub. If anyone was around, you could talk to them. You can open doors and walk up stairs. You might find a furnished apartment, an office, or just empty rooms.
Other parts of Second Life have roadside motels. Each room has a bed, TV, bathroom, and maybe a coffee maker, all of which do something. One, with a 1950s theme, has a vibrating bed, which will make a buzzing sound if you pay it a tiny fee. Nobody uses those much.
No plot goes with all this. Unlike a game, the density of interesting events is low, closer to real life. This is the fundamental problem of virtual worlds. Realistic ones are boring.
Amusingly, Linden Lab has found a way to capitalize on this. They built a suburban housing subdivision, and people who buy a paid membership get an unfurnished house.
This was so successful that there are now over 60,000 houses. There are themed areas and about a dozen house designs in each area. It's kind of banal, but seems to appeal to people for whom American suburbia is an unreachable aspiration. The American Dream, for about $10 a month.
People furnish their houses, have BBQs, and even mow their lawn. (You can buy simulated grass that needs regular mowing.)
> The other extreme, where you can go inside everywhere, turns out to be boring
But that's the point! Daggerfall is like this too: huge areas (both cities and landscapes) with nothing interesting in them. That's what makes them feel so lived in. They're not worlds designed for the player to conquer, they're worlds that exist independent of the player, and the player is just one of a million characters in it.
The fact that I pass by 150 boring buildings in a city before I get to the one I care about both mirrors reality and makes the reward for finding the correct building all the greater!
>Unlike a game, the density of interesting events is low, closer to real life. This is the fundamental problem of virtual worlds. Realistic ones are boring.
Reminded me of this clip of Gabe Newell talking about fun, realism and reinforcement (behaviorism):
You must live in a different reality. The one I live in has fractal complexity and pretty much anywhere I look is filled with interesting ({cute..beautiful},{mildly surprising..WTF?!},{ah, that's an example of X..conundrum}) details. In fact, so far as I can tell, it's interesting details all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in any direction I probe.
No, the fundamental problem isn’t the recreation of real life. Rather it’s that real life isn’t mirrored in ways that are important like having agency to pull of systemic changes something I’m having a hard time articulating. What I can say is that Eve online pulls off certain aspects of this pretty well.
Corporations pouring millions into flashy, pointless projects using a bunch of Excel seems pretty realistic to me, the lasers and starships aren't, sure.
It’s not but there is an aspect of complete freedom to do things outside the bounds of prescribed interactions is what I’m getting at.
For instance second life might be a lot more interesting if you could kill someone, assume their identity and pull off other such shenanigans. At the same time there should be real user “law enforcement” continually tracking down criminals of this nature. Being arrested should mean real jail time/account suspension for a fixed amount of time etc. Criminals should get a real user driven trial where they can argue their case, real user lawyers you can hire etc.
This comment kind of reminded me of a YouTube channel I completely adore. AnyAustin (https://www.youtube.com/@any_austin) has quite a few videos exploring and celebrating open world video games.
> when every path leads to something interesting, there's no "exploration"
While this sentence makes sense from current game design perspective, I have to say it strikes me as very unrealistic. Facing dead ends has always ruined the immersion for me.
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