Depends on the studio and position. A very well paid senior programmer might make $150k-$170k in the US. But that's pretty much the top end of the scale. Salaries in the game industry are infamously low because it's so FUN. Aren't you grateful to have such a FUN job? It's FUN, be grateful that you make any money at all so you can be creative!

Designers make less, Artists make less. QA makes WAY less (which is a travesty, because we depend on them so much in the development cycle. As a programmer, I probably talk to QA as much as I talk to design).

But if you're a Canadian programmer, you might make $150k and live in a city like Vancouver which has insanely high housing costs. Maybe you have kids, or pets.

You've kind of hit the nail on the head with regards to the issue, though: many developers aren't paid particularly well, even by huge companies that make billions of dollars (and indeed, that's why the companies are so profitable).

I interviewed at Roblox, and their salary ranges STARTED far beyond where most studios ranges ENDED for my position (Senior Programmer, 20 years experience). They told me that they consider tech companies like Google to be their competition for talent, not other game studios, so their salaries are adjusted accordingly.

So yeah, very easy to believe that people are feeling the pinch after getting laid off. It's not a lucrative industry for the workers.

This comment is very stupid for a lot of reasons.

1. Not every developer needs help
2. Not every developer wasn't able to find a new job
3. The intention is not to distribute money to every person that lost their job in the layoffs, it's to extend a lifeline to people who are struggling
4. The thing that would meaningfully change things is to implement strong labour laws, tax the wealth of the extremely wealthy, and make it easier to form unions. The number of roadblocks to unionizing have increased over the decades, which is one of many reasons there's been such an obvious, ongoing, inexorable transfer of wealth from the working class to the owning class.

When the government is in the pocket of these huge companies and actively make laws diminishing the power of workers, it's an obvious bad-faith question to ask why people don't do something about it.

I have lots of ways to meaningfully change things, but I can't buy a politician because I'm not a billionaire, so changing things take longer. Don't worry, though, we're making some progress despite that.

No amount of forest management can help a forest that's tinder dry the whole year.

I live in the Okanagan valley in BC, and this winter we got so little snow, and the snow pack had melted off extra early. A deeper snow pack lets the water feed the water system over a longer period of time, keeping the ground wet for longer. Our early summer was a little cooler and wetter than usual, but our lake levels are the lowest in recorded history. (My city is in between two lakes: Okanagan and Skaha.) I talk to the farmers at the market every week, and every farm exists in a different microclimate, so sometimes 10 minutes between farms is the difference between ground so wet you can't walk in the fields and dusty-dry conditions.

But overall, it's hot and dry here, and getting hotter and drier. We've been on level 2 water restrictions since early May, if I remember right, and we've had a campfire ban for about the same time. There was no ice on the lake over the winter--the long-distance outdoor swimmers swam the whole winter this year. 40-50 years ago (long before I moved here, this is just what the older folks around town say) the lake froze over so solid that you could drive a car across it.

The tinder isn't the issue anymore, even though it's true that we ignored the indigenous people here for too long and should have adopted their land use practices. I wish it were as easy as you say.

As someone with aphantasia, the settings never really stick with me (or that may be separate from the aphantasia, honestly, I don't know) but the vibe is very much what I was hoping for.

I read the book again a couple years ago, and it's aged really well, honestly. The things he gets wrong aren't that critical, in my opinion. I've read a lot of scifi that has done a much worse job of hanging together, even though it's only 10 or 20 years old. Neuromancer was published when I was a kid, and even the NAME is still cool as hell.

Labor is also cheaper than AI.

Companies need to burn thousands of dollars in tokens to get agents to do even vaguely equivalent work. Sure, the agent works all night and doesn't need breaks, but it also costs money literally every second you use it, and the end result STILL needs to be checked to make sure nothing insane happened.

Humans--even if you pay them a fair wage--are remarkably efficient at turning food (and coffee) into code and systems. The so-called 10x or 100x programmers (guys like Carmack) really DO exist. And while they're a nightmare to work with, generally speaking, they'll code circles around any agent. If you want something that nobody likes working with that will also give you hard to maintain code, hire a 10x programmer. At least you'll get a working system at the end of the day, and he didn't use a swimming pool full of water an a small gas power plant worth of energy to get it done.

Interestingly, literally the only person in my friend group that still drives stick is a woman. It's a relatively modern Honda (like, new enough that it has a backup camera in it). She's also one of the smoothest drivers I've ever ridden with. Her shifts are impeccable.

I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.

If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.

Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.

The oil from the tar sands isn't really good for petrol that you put in a car, and we let our refining capacity wane over the years as it is.

Everything we're doing here in Canada (I'm also Canadian) is such a boondoggle. The pipeline that Trudeau bought will never be profitable, and any other pipeline we pay for will be a similar money-loser. (If pipelines were as good investments as Danielle Smith claimed, oil companies would pay for them.)

I'd be willing to see EV subsidies go away if the government would also get rid of oil and gas subsidies, AND get rid of the tariffs on Chinese solar panels. Like, everything the government does right now is a tilt towards some ultra-profitable oil and gas donor, and we could save a lot of tax dollars just doing a reset and not subsidizing anything. On that basis, EVs would almost certainly win on their merits.

(I bought a used EV. It was still the most expensive car I've ever bought, inflation adjusted. But it costs $2/100km to drive for the electricity. The only other thing I need to maintain are the tyres. The running costs are ridiculously low.)

I think the global numbers are low, honestly, and that's mostly down to this misadventure in Iran. Countries that had to ration oil and gas are seeing people flee to solar panels and Chinese EVs.

I actually kinda think that's what's going on already, tbh. My Ioniq 6 gets 100% of the claimed range at 90% charge, as near as I can tell. They've definitely fudged it a little.

Used EVs are such a good buy. My Ioniq 6 came with 40k km on it, and that's basically brand new. Certainly the interior and exterior look pristine, and without many wearing parts, the thing rolled off the lot with 100% of the claimed range (actually, a bit more) and hasn't given me any trouble at all.

It costs me about $2/100km of driving. I've seen petrol and diesel up to $2/L here on bad days, and even in a very efficient car, you need 5L/100km.

(One hiccup: someone literally stole my charging cable while the car was charging in my driveway. My fault, though. I didn't see the setting to keep the cable locked to the car unless the doors are unlocked. They just disconnected the power and it unlocked itself. But L2 chargers are so cheap, I'm only paying a 30c premium over home charging.)

Actually, yeah. Their reputation is on the line, and they won't survive as a company if they're wrong. It's not anonymous, it's not a think-tank generating faux reports to bolster some politician's opinion. Their name is now attached to this information, and if they're lying, that's it for them. They're not big enough to eat that kind of bad press and come out okay on the other side.

Valid concern, though the reality is that'll just leave the door open for 3rd party battery swaps. I bought my EV used knowing that the battery would probably outlast the body of the car, but in the off-chance that it doesn't, I'm actually a bit hyped for the potential to put a better battery in, with either longer range or less weight (though I assume a lighter battery would mess with the driving dynamics the car was designed for).

Image models take a lot more memory, as one would expect. If you want to run a text-only generative model for coding or knowledge, or as a database for all your books or manuals or whatever, that works great. Fits in 8GB of memory, has more than enough context for simple projects. The more memory and CPU you have, the better it gets.

You've just got the most expensive use case that takes a lot more hardware. It's still not actually out of reach per se (or it wasn't, before the price increases) but the outlay to start is much bigger.

You're right, it's NOT free, it's SOMETHING YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.

The really insane thing is that the USA spends more money per capita than ANYONE and still gets worth healthcare coverage and worse overall results, with lower life expectancy. There's even this effect where rich people don't get as good care as average people in other countries for a number of common conditions or procedures, because the whole system is so bad you can't even PAY for great service.

But that aside:

Solar is so gobsmackingly cheap, it'll pay for itself in almost zero time. The real cost is the grid, but generating enough power is so stupidly trivial it hurts. You put a solar panel out in a field and it collects electricity and that's the end of the story. You pay for that panel once every 20-30 years and it generates electricity for you. You don't dig things up out of the ground or fight wars, you just let it collect the electricity.

Technology Connections did an excellent video on renewable energy, and using just the figures for putting solar panels on corn farms that produce corn for ethanol and not food, his back of the envelope calculation was that you could produce 7700 TWh of electricity a year, which is considerably more than the 4100 TWh that the US grid currently produces.

The reality is there doesn't need to be any energy crisis at all. AI data centres don't even need to be an environmental problem, you can just hook solar panels and batteries up and run them and they'd even use less water than the corn fields that were displaced for the solar farm.

The whole discussion is ridiculous. More solar panels. Solar panels everywhere. It's effectively free. The only reason governments don't do it is so they can keep lining their pockets with oil and gas industry kickbacks.

Here's the video link to the right time stamp, if you want to check what I'm saying and review his math.

https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?s...