Not especially. Remember, Google pays Apple about $20 billion/year to be the default search in Safari. The reports are that Apple pays Google $1 billion for Gemini.

And if we're honest, Gemini is not the clear-cut best model, it's just that Google and Apple already have a pretty good relationship. Given the amount of Capex Google is putting into AI/Gemini, they need to make money from SOMEWHERE, and Apple is a reliable partner. I'm sure they're extremely relieved that Apple is going with them instead of Anthropic. Though, indeed, there's no reason for Apple to only rely on one vendor.

This whole thing shows that LLMs and models are already being commodified. Who knows if some of these companies will ever make their money back.

There's no such 'well known fact'. Apple Phones have historically had some of the best battery life in their generations, with occasional outliers. (If we compare the latest Samsung vs. the latest iPhone, for example, the iPhone has significantly better battery life.)

On the other hand, there are occasional Android phones with absolutely absurd batteries that last a couple days on a charge with the tradeoff of looking like a pound of butter. The fact that these have better battery life is not surprising and is the actual outlier.

Crucially, in all but a few languages, whitespace doesn't matter at all. The parser throws it out.

Whitespace is a HUMAN affordance for a HUMAN audience. If you think it looks kinda okay, that's all that's needed. You absolutely cannot do that with code that actually does something.

I suppose, fundamentally, all code is for humans to read; the CPU doesn't care how the bits got organized. But LLMs can't just jump straight to the compiled output, they have to come back to the intermediary of human-readable language, and that means they're bound by the limitations of the languages we've asked them to write in. That also means that they write bugs and bad code because they're trying to produce readable tokens that possibly do the thing you ask, and they're not writing the code and testing it and refining it in a tight loop before delivering it.

When I write code, a function may see multiple passes before I even show it to anyone else. If you don't understand the output the LLM is giving you, but it compiles and vaguely does the thing that you ask, you might take it at face value on the first pass. And since the code is only receiving "yeah, that looks right," level scrutiny, it's so much more likely to be bad.

It won't.

Making games isn't actually that easy? I've been doing it for 25 years, and making a game that's good that people enjoy requires, in no small part, that you yourself enjoy playing games, and that you understand what fun is.

It's not just the designers that make games fun, either, even if they're responsible for a lot of the mechanics. Every breakdown of job responsibilities I've ever seen (which we use come review time) has something in it about how you understand game mechanics and your ability to make contributions in that regard, and that's regardless of whether you're in design or art or programming. As a programmer, I'm not tasked specifically with making the game mechanics--I'm there to make a platform for designers to execute their vision--but I have made changes independently that have shipped effectively untouched in the final game.

So all that to say, if you use AI to write your games and you're not a solo designer, your games will probably be worse. The bigger the game gets, the more you'll feel the lack of scrutiny from individual contributors. Any of the small, interesting, fun details you've played in a game up until now was almost certainly put there by a real human that wanted that to be in a game themselves.

There's a possibility that AI will make my job easier or make me a bit faster, but I'm not losing my job to AI (though a greedy CEO may blame it on AI). There are ALREADY a zillion games out there. The barrier to making games is low. If all you want to crank out is slop, bad news: humans have been doing that for decades now. Slop by an AI agent isn't actually going to do any better.

And no, it's not good that a journalist was able to track her down using it. Or at least, regulations that prevent police from using it should also prevent them from using it by proxy via some third party. The facial recognition should be thrown out as inadmissible in court.

I agree that just labeling the AI-generated stuff *should* be enough, but I wonder if it really is enough. Yesterday someone sent me a video of Brian Cox describing some concept. Right in the text of the original post it said, "This video features an AI-generated voice for storytelling and educational purposes. It is not the real Brian Cox." So, fully disclosed, but it didn't stop people from forwarding it.

When I complained, the person who sent it to me said that the idea's interesting regardless of where it came from. Is it, though? Would you have bothered watching it if it was some unknown talking head with an anonymous AI voice? The presentation matters. The video used Brian Cox because he's smart, personable, and has a history of explaining difficult physics concepts in a manner most people can understand. People generally trust him in his area of expertise. Using his likeness in something he had nothing to do with is simply a dishonest way to ride his coattails, even if you do add a caption saying, "Not really Brian Cox". It's the academic world's version of stolen valor.

So in principle, I agree. Just marking something as AI-generated should be enough. In practice I fear it's going to be an asterisk and fine print so small people won't notice it, and even if they do the realism will trick their hindbrains into letting their guard down because it appears to be someone they trust.

Sure, so why are you bringing your feelings into this?

You actually have no evidence that he's never asked, "how do I avoid memory bugs in C?"

If I had to make a bet, I'd say literally every programmer that has spent a non-trivial amount of time in C has asked that question of themselves, even if only in passing. It is a constant fight, but it's also a deeply stupid fight to have if you have a tools--including a whole, purpose-built language--that allows you to elide that fight almost in its entirety. Like, you can CHOOSE to do it for fun if you like, but if your goal is to write memory-safe code, use all the tools at your disposal.

I'm a C++ programmer (that's what the games industry runs on) and I have the extreme privilege of only having to worry about keeping games from crashing, the most trivial kind of memory safety. It's a deeply stupid language (IMO) that has only gotten better by poaching the best parts of other languages. But I'd love to not ever have to think about weird crashes that are caused by people kicking the stack 5 minutes ago in some other game system. If I was told that Unreal Engine was being fully reinstrumented in Rust, I'd learn Rust. What a relief it would be.

Anway, tl;dr: you're the one that's got feefees about this. Rust is a demonstrably safer language in real-world use. For you to rail against it this much is just your feelings, not anything to do with facts.

Almost anything that has a big battery would actually power your house for several days if it can handle V2L. My Ioniq 6 has a 77kWh battery. If you're just running some essentials like your fridge and the lights, I think you might be able to last a week?

Even being relatively more rare isn't an issue right now, or it might be, but only in a very few places. Most of the time, the chargers are empty. One presumes as EVs become more popular, there will be even more charging stations. One of the major gas stations in Canada (Petro Canada) even has its own chargers at some stations.

Also, I think PHEVs may be a good alternative right now, since something like 90% of people's driving is 50km per day, and most PHEVs can handle that on a charge. Then you plug in at night and you're gtg. They would represent a major reduction in fuel consumption if we just got that far.

Nobody wants expensive cars, and EVs are undoubtedly more expensive. But otherwise, that claim is horse hockey.

Since I charge overnight (from an outdoor outlet, not even an L2 charger), I never have less than a 60% charge on my car at home. I spend less time overall at stops if you consider the totality of my life than when I had a petrol or diesel car. I recently drove 400km each way to another city, and I spent about 20 minutes at one L3 charger on the way there, and maybe 30 minutes total charging on the way back, and I needed to walk around and go to the washroom anyway. There's basically no difference in my road trip times from before. I used to be able to get about 1100km on a single tank of diesel with my VW wagon (my Ioniq 6 gets "only" 520km on a 90% charge), but I still had to stop every few hours to pee and stretch my legs and take on food. The human body is not meant to drive 6 hour stints. (I raced bikes and had a girlfriend in the USA in my 30s so I would drive 600km each way on a weekend on a fairly regular basis. No regrets, but I don't recommend that as a way to spend your time.)

I just drove 400km each way to visit family in another city. I'm Canadian, and the distances between cities here are considerably longer on average than in the USA. I had no problem charging in the middle of large mountain parks where there was otherwise no mobile phone reception. This is such a stunningly brain-dead take, I can only assume you've never actually driven anywhere with your eyes open. There are L2 and L3 charging stations everywhere even here. I live in a town of 30k people and I could go charge at some Mercedes 800v superchargers if I wanted to. I have a very hard time believing that Canada is ahead of the USA in infrastructure in this regard.

Also, while my townhouse has a driveway, I'm only using my outdoor outlet to charge right now. It's fine.

It's just ordinary slang.

All of the chargers that I've stopped at in BC (in between cities) have been in big open areas or parks where you can walk your dog. The OnRoute stops also have green areas.

I greatly suspect that the thing you're asking for is actually not any sort of problem at all, you just haven't looked into it so you don't know. I'm not gonna do your homework for you (more than I already have) but you can actually just search for this stuff. Or, frankly, you can just set out and not worry about it, because a) your car isn't going to take 30 minutes to charge; and b) you're likely to end up near some green space anyway. Just pick up after your dog. That's what people walking their dogs in the city do when the dog doesn't wait for a park or a lawn.

Have you? We live in a society, my guy. Just because you lack planning skills doesn't mean that everyone else should have to choke on your exhaust. Electricity (even from coal plants) is cleaner and more efficient than burning petrol in an engine. It's also much cheaper than gasoline. But in all likelihood, your state has SOME mix of renewable power in there, which just makes it better.

Anyway, if you just plug your car in at home, you leave with a full charge every day. It's LESS time spent filling up.