He had help from another developer specifically for that issue.

I also think the enlightened have a habit of underestimating how much of an audience the status quo has, and I think that's an ignorance of its own.

And because it's the internet I feel the need to subtext that this is by no means a supportive comment toward Blows personal beliefs. I don't know what they are!

I only wonder because I recall the reason they built an engine from scratch for The Witness was to achieve certain lighting goals, and that specific feel and style I have never encountered quite like that in any other game.

A lot of that is down to art and direction, but there's a raw quality of the lighting that just feels different to any game I have played. You can often feel a game's engine out if it's one of the big ones, through the feeling of its lighting. I suspect since all engines have certain default approaches and settings in their lighting setups and devs only move the knobs as far as they need to meet their artistic goals, leaving much alone.

That problem solving aspect is being replaced by AI, and that means anyone in a position like that is losing the piece of the job that they enjoyed. The more apt analogy is that the farrier worked in a farrier factory, and the horses were actually mass produced statue horses with no purpose but making money. He still enjoyed working with his hands, but now they have replaced that part of his job with a button to press. Now he presses the button in the horse statue factory. He still has a job but now no joy, and eventually they will automate the button too. The outlook IS bleak, and many of us will move on to totally new industries and that's fine. Some will stay because they have a rare job where they have agency to problem solve on the layer above code. Many still just press the button to feed their family.

Feom a fictional perspective I also dig the rugged blend of electric industrial equipment and utilitarian design. Like a mad-max solar punk, rather than a utopian one.

I picture them pulling up to a makeshift solar outpost en-route, in the middle of the wasteland desert, covered in red dust, the thick sheet metal scarred from raiders...

More recently effort is also going into series hybrids for public road haulers, which I personally think is a great application for it since you can potentially put a lot of the equipment into a hot-swappable dolly.

I drove a Nissan Note (Nismo esition) with ePower and it could happily spin the wheels when taking off, not something you normally get out of a tiny economy hatchback. I think it has 140kw electric drivetrain? 140kw is pretty sporty when delivered instantly.

It was a surprisingly repairable light except for one catch: I could not find a pouch cell LiPo with this kind of connector nor shape anywhere. Not even in part catalogs let alone for sale. So I have snipped the leads of the connector and will revisit this when a cell that suits shows up.

I would be surprised if they rolled their own but perhaps their factories have a B2B supplier that was able to.

You still need to keep an eye on it, because the components necessarily lack context of 100% of the project, but you the human can actually keep it all in your head and can catch the nuances.

Otherwise my 3 could be someone elses 7, as someone who has had chronic pain and a shifted pain tolerance it's proven pretty useful as even doctors struggle to convey what a worrisome level of pain would be without knowing what you have been through.

I also enjoy trying to find where photos are taken from. Especially fun are photos from a tall building, and trying to get the exact building and recreating the angle of the shot. That often takes lining up railways, roads and other buildings in order to first find the right tall building.

It's probably changing now as VC cash floods into AI instead of web app startups, but I am not talking out of my ass, it's a well known phenomenon.

The industry does not incentivise or reward lean software, the software input for a lot of "software" companies doesn't require it, that's fine. Exactly as you said they're businesses, they do what makes money and go where incentives take them. That cuts both ways, they are not disincentived to have a lot of wasted dev hours, at least not historically.

HN is already a waterfall of AI meta conversations and bike-shedding, now we have to discuss service outages about the AI too?

Can we talk about stuff people are building again, with or without AI, and stop gasping at every minute detail of LLM service providers.

You can't answer the posed question with 100% certainty, ever. Unless you can prove every single combination of tokens and probability can never outcome to harm, you have to assume it's a possibility.

We will decide on some benchmarks, accept that risk, and industry will march on with implementation. Insurance and risk will find their acceptable meeting point.

These kinds of questions are important but also a bit frustrating, I think it shows that LLMs are still very misunderstood.

Scale in headcount was a tactic to get investment, then you had to find stuff for everyone to work on. Suddenly people have the time to engineer so hard that we get runtime JSON defined CSS rendering engines to produce the same buttons we've had since 1995, instead of just writing a stylesheet and html.

Code output velocity from AI threatens to be useful, except it's also prone to over-engineering and burning tokens on the unnecessary. It's learned from the best after all. My suspicion is there is a lot getting done, but it's just not that impactful to flagship products.

As others have noted, there is a lot of new work going into passion projects that would have never happened otherwise, and that is cool. But I wouldn't hold my breath for SV tech to become super pragmatic and effective.