wccrawford

As a senior developer, I use the new AIs. They're absolutely amazing and a huge timesaver if you use them well. As with any powerful tool, it's possible to over-use and under-use it, and not achieve those gains.

However, I disagree with the comparison to knowing how hardware works. There's a pretty big difference between these 2 things:

Letting a company else design and maintain the hardware or a library and not understanding the internals yourself.

Letting a someone/something design and implement a core part of your code that you are responsible for maintaining, and not understanding how it works yourself.

I am not responsible for maintaining ReactJS or my Intel CPU. Not understanding it means there might be some performance lost.

I am responsible for the product my company produces. All of our code needs to be understood in-house. You can outsource creation of it, or have an LLM do it, but the company needs to understand it internally.

My wife and I are planning to see the movie this weekend, and I play a lot of games. This is the first I've heard that it's based on a game.

It wasn't even just that. In the companies I worked, it seemed like nobody other than me understood how to escape things for XML. I couldn't even convince them to just use the right libraries/functions that auto-escape and parse things properly. They keep deciding they were smart enough to do it by hand. And it always ended up biting them.

JSON, like Javascript (vs C++ or Java) is a lot more forgiving. It either works or it doesn't, and the values are just strings or numbers. And some people even do the numbers as strings.

All of the exploits against Intel processors didn't help either. Not only is it a bad look, but the fixes reduced the speed of the those processors, making them quite a bit worse deal for the money after all.

It doesn't have to be a "brand new AAA game". It can be a somewhat-recent AAA game on sale. Some of the discounts in the first year are ridiculous.

And I've been surprised at how many games in the past few years were more than my 3070 could handle on high settings, let alone "ultra".

I was playing Destiny 2 and the lag was only noticeable to me when I compared it to not using Stadia. While I was playing, I didn't feel like there was anything to complain about.

I think I saw less lag when connected to my house over Parsec, and definitely had less lag when playing locally at my house. I actually considered continuing to use Stadia, but by that point they had pretty much proven that they were not going to bother improving things further, and it didn't make sense to pay for a service that didn't provide an advantage over what I could do for free.

I think it really depends on circumstances. I tried GFN and Stadia, and found them to be adequate, and used Stadia for a few months. After comparing input latency with streaming from myself (across town) and playing locally, I decided it wasn't worth it and left Stadia. I'm still mad at their ridiculous promises that they broke, and killing the service without ever really trying to hit its potential.

IIRC, there's still a free tier with a limit of 1 hour playtime at a time, and you can't play during peak hours because there won't be a slot for you.

The pay tier is still a 6 hour limit, but of course you can just come right back in.

I don't think the article means dogfooding. I think they mean that you can't design a system unless you're intimately involved with coding it.

And of course that's still wrong. It happens all the time. And things end up working out the majority of the time.

Yes, you're effectively renting a powerful computer.

Previously, you could just use it without limits, and the math worked out for everyone. It's something like 3-6 years of service to cover the cost of a decent-to-great computer.

Now, if you're a hardcore gamer and go over 100 hours a month, that value changes, and the break-even point is sooner. If you play for 40 hours a week, that time is effectively halved.

At the current rates, it continues to seem like a really good value, so long as you aren't bothered by the slight input lag or the video compression.

But if more people use the service for more time, they're going to have to charge more money. Either higher base rates, or lower limits. And it's eventually going to show that it doesn't really make sense for anyone except as a temporary measure, and then the service will disappear because it didn't work well enough.

That's the problem with edgy, experimental projects. You can't really tell if they'll succeed until a lot of work has been put into them.

Most of the people I hear being critical of AI Coding are very clear about what it's good for, and what it isn't.

If someone is wholly for or against something, their advice generally isn't very good.+