Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46361166

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/should-we-use-llms-for-ch...

He argued, persuasively I thought, that "this is an area where truthfulness is of paramount importance" and consequently would be extremely ill-suited to AI.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456588

Points: 39

# Comments: 23

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44323421

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

We take a slightly different approach: we don't do any up-front in the launcher but do as much as possible on the level loading screen; it's not perfect though: due to the way some legacy code works we can't always anticipate all permutations ahead of time so you get the occasional micro-stutter as missing shaders are sent to the driver.

You can get away with being lazier with modern drivers because they will cache the compiled result for you (if you don't cache the pipeline state object yourself in DirectX 12) but on older DirectX drivers for Intel IGPs there wasn't a cache at all so the first 30 seconds after loading into a level would be very busy.

  53.6% Windows 11
  43.8% Windows 10
   1.59% WINE
   0.79% Steamdeck
   0.13% Windows 7
   0.03% Windows 8

Organic produce was the first metaphor the came to mind: it's probably more healthy for you even if it isn't as pretty, but many people aren't willing to pay a premium it and I suspect economics isn't often the reason. Is that a straw-man for live music? I don't know that it is because plenty of people are content to listen to recorded music -- sure, they might enjoy going to a live concert but they'll still listen to the radio on the drive to work.

Then I got to thinking about something more crass: while breast implants and other cosmetic body surgery may be as much for the benefit of the subject self-image I imagine there are plenty of people that find it very attractive despite what is often obviously fake.

So do we crave authenticity? I think I do but I'm not sure if that's a safe generalization to make.

Edit: deleted C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\No Man's Sky\Binaries\SETTINGS and I can boot again.

Edit 2: crashed again after playing for a bit; back in the cellar it goes -- needs a bit more time to mature I think.

One CDN vendor didn't even offer a tiered distribution system so every edge called home at the same time, another vendor did have a tiered distribution system designed to avoid this problem but it was overwhelmed by the absurd number of files we'd serve multiplied by the large user count and so we'd still end up with too much traffic hitting the origin.

The interesting thing was that no vendor we evaluated offered a robust preheating solution if they offered one at all. One vendor even went so far as to say that they wouldn't allow it because it would let customers unfairly dominate the shared storage cache at the edge (which sort of felt like airlines overbooking seats on a flight to me).

These days we run an army of VMs that fetch all assets from every point of presence we can cover right before launching an update.

Another thing we've had to deal with mentioned in the article is overloading back-end nodes; our solution is somewhat ham-fisted but works quite well for us: we cap the connection counts to the back end and return 503s when we saturate. The trick, however, is getting your load-balancer to leave the client connection open when this happens -- by default multiple LBs we've used would slam the connection closed so that when you're serving up 50K 503s a second the firewall would buckle under the runaway connection pool lingering in TIME_WAIT. Good times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound_(Grateful_Dead)

Again, it's a matter of taste, but I was an espresso bar a few weeks ago and had the worst coffee I've had in many years because I decided to wait for pour-over (and they roasted the beans in-house so I assume they were fresh!)

FWIW I had Clover coffee once and I hated it too; maybe I just have bad taste in coffee.