I've never forgiven Reagan for removing the solar panels from the White House. That idiotic decision has cost us decades of lost progress toward renewable energy and -- because it forced us to remain dependent on oil -- has strongly influenced our international policies and military decisions. We've paid an enormous price for that act of arrogance.

On to the present: generating power isn't just about "how": it's also about "when" and "where". Addressing the "when" means dealing with energy storage -- for nights, cloudy days, peak demand, all that things that result in a mismatch between "power we can generate right now" and "power we need right now". Addressing the "where" means dealing not just with generation facility locations, but power transmission...and that last one is where nuclear has a big problem. Most people are okay with the idea of a solar farm near their homes, almost nobody is okay with having a nuclear plant nearby. (And with good reason) Power transmission means more infrastructure, more maintenance -- and more energy loss, increasing monotonically with distance.

There's certainly a subset of people pushing hard for nuclear, but it's a bad idea. We're much better off with solar and wind, with as much generation as close as possible to consumption in order to minimize transmission losses.

If AI services are becoming too expensive in the current environment, we can look to nature for help. There is a an abundant species of large mammals in the ape family that can be trained to do this kind of work as well.

I have no idea what you're doing with your phones, then.

The only Android phone that I used for any length of time was a Nexus 4 and it would die in 1 hour when I went to the pool because it would burn all of its energy desperately trying to get a signal from inside a locker.

My current iPhone 16 Pro lasts the whole day unless I'm using it actively and playing a game on it. It has notoriously poor battery life under load because it's not well cooled, but when idle? Days of battery life. I've been on trips where I've tossed it in my bag and not gotten back to it for hours, and the battery has basically not moved, even WITH the radios on.

Yes, that they're mad that you don't understand what a union is.

I'm not gonna make any claims that unions are perfect, but a union is just a way for a collection of workers to have more leverage for bargaining rights. The most prosperous times for workers in the last century have been during times of heavy unionization.

Reagan busted the unions, and with them, he busted middle-class prosperity. As is often said, we owe weekends and the end of child labour to unions.

As a long-term worker in the industry, I'd love a union, particularly if I were to go back to work at one of the huge game companies like EA (ugh) or Rockstar or Blizzard.

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.

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.

That's a good insight - we're essentially talking about art. There's no real indication that AI can do the actually creative part. But I wonder if a union can either? Art is about allowing inspiration to hit somebody like lightning and allow it to rise to the top. Unions are about making rules for everything to enforce fairness, and I wonder if that will be the most creative environment. Of course top-down corporations struggle with it too especially as they get bigger.

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.

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.

Why aren't they putting this information alongside the thumbnail so we can totally skip AI content if we want to. Only finding out once you've clicked on the video and the player has loaded is stupid -- being both a waste of the viewer's time and bandwidth.