One thing I found especially dumb is this:

Jobs that require driving skills, like truck and taxi drivers, as well as jobs in the sanitation and beauty industries, are least likely to be exposed to AI, the Indeed research said.

Let’s ignore the dumb shit Tesla is doing. We already see self-driving taxis on the streets. California allows self-driving trucks already, and truck drivers are worried enough to petition California to stop it.

Both of those involve AI - just not generative AI. What kind of so-called “research” has declared 2 jobs “safe” that definitely aren’t?

This guy is always super duper clickbaity and has this holier-than-thou attitude all the time. Thank you for summing it up so I don’t give him the clicks.

I’m a little sad. My last studio was literally next to a Gold Line station here in Los Angeles. I could bike to the Gold Line and make it to work, and the Gold Line ran frequently and late.

My current job is a mile away from a Metrolink station. On the one hand - at least there’s a nearby station! On the other hand - the Metrolink trains are running the wrong direction for me, I’d need to make a connection at LA Union Station, and the latest one that goes the direction I need it to go (while still allowing me to make my connection) leaves at 5 (which is still considered core working hours for me).

The schedule is like… impressively bad. I’d use it if they ran it later, but they don’t seem to think anyone could possibly be headed in any other direction other than “towards LA” in the morning and “away from LA” at night.

Benefits matter, too.

I’m in the AAA gaming industry. EA laid me off earlier this year, and so I wound up looking for work elsewhere.

I’ve learned that really - the pay doesn’t matter if you hate your life every day. If I wanted good pay, I would learn COBOL and write software at a bank. What matters the most is the quality of the team you’re working with (primary), and what benefits your employer has (secondary).

If Meta were to call me up and say “Hey, we want you to be on a team with the greatest coworkers you’ve ever had,” then I’d at least hear them out. What is their culture? Do they believe in crunch? How do they handle sick days? Vacations?

And yes, WFH is part of that, too. But if they were willing to pay to relocate me, buy me a house near a metro station… yeah, I’d take it.

But if they were to offer me that exact same deal - except there’s no guarantees about production schedules/timelines, there’s the “bus problem” (where the project couldn’t survive someone important being hit by a bus), there’s a lot of crunch (or just bad experiences from friends who’ve worked there… Blizzard offered me a sweetheart deal and I said no because of that history)… I’m less likely to want to bite.

And everyone has different preferences. I’ve known some people who love the office. I don’t mind it myself, with the right group. But everyone has to make their own call.

Microsoft is bigger.

Nintendo’s market cap is about $56.7 billion.

Microsoft’s market cap is $2.44 trillion, with $111 billion worth of cash (not equity, cash) in the bank.

Microsoft is 43 times bigger than Nintendo. They can pay for Nintendo with only cash, if they desire.

These trillion-dollar players are an order of magnitude larger than anyone around them. They can do what they want, same as how Apple ($2.8 trillion) can easily buy Disney ($150.5 billion) if they wished.

This isn’t an exact science, but you can use market cap to ballpark these things and get an idea of how much an acquisition would cost. For example, Twitter had a market cap of $31 billion in August 2022, and Elon bought it a few months later for $44 billion. That’s a 1.4x increase, so applying the same math buying all of Disney would “only” cost about $214 billion - which both Apple and Microsoft (and Google) could do. Nintendo would cost about $80 billion, which Microsoft could do without even taking out a loan.

The issue isn’t necessarily the price; it’s the regulators.

Once per short rest makes no sense to me. It’s a cantrip. Why not just let it be a cantrip?

What are they going to do? Ban them?

Honestly if I was migrating away from Fandom I’d do everything I can to burn every bridge. Go through and edit every page to have every link redirect to the better wiki. Ignore their 2-week period, and don’t inform the Fandom overlords that the wiki is being shut down (it’s not like they’re going to check without being prompted).

I’d make them ban me, and then good luck finding an admin.

Football-brains gonna football.

Not easily, but if you become a game developer you can start to tell at a glance. Unity games have a very specific type of jank and look + feel. (So do Unreal, Source, and Godot games.)

Even if a game is highly stylized, a Unity game always “feels” like a Unity game. Kerbal Space Program, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, Pokemon Go, Cuphead, Untitled Goose Game, Cities Skylines, Valheim, etc. It’s a combination of physics, shaders, and input latency that’s hard to put into words.

The closest I’ve come to seeing a game that breaks out of the “made in Unity” feel is Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, which was made in Unity but pretends to be made in Source (the original Stanley Parable was made in Source).

Unreal has explicit licensing terms that forbid them from doing this. Terms which people are going to pay very close attention to.

Not to mention that Epic gets their money from Fortnite, not necessarily the engine. They have no reason to squander their goodwill like that.

On top of that - if you want to release on a console, you need to write all the console-specific code yourself. This is quite a lot of work, especially for an indie developer.

Godot is a great start, but it’s got a long way to go before it’s a commercial-ready engine.

Does Jellyfin allow you to bring in your music libraries?

Also, does Jellyfin have Samsung TV clients, or do you need to cast from your phone? I’ve been trying to de-Google myself and I don’t want to have to keep investing in Chromecasts, and part of the reason why I’ve stuck with Plex is because their app is everywhere.

Do you agree that retrievers are bred to retrieve things?

Do you agree that herding dogs are bred to herd things?

Do you agree that pointer dogs are bred to find things?

Surely you’ve been around these kinds of dogs before. It’s not something that they learn; they are specifically bred to do a job and they will do that job even without training. You’ve seen or heard of how a sheepdog will herd small children, I’m sure. It’s why the breed exists; they are specifically bred to do a certain thing and genetically their instinct is to do the thing that they were bred for over the course of thousands of years. You can remove them from their mom and not give them any training and they will naturally do the thing that they were bred to do. You don’t have to train a golden to bring you back a ball.

So is it a surprise that a dog bred to kill things will want to kill things?

That’s not simply because of “a poor owner”, although the fact that people refuse to train their killer dogs to not be killers is part of it. It’s because their dogs are genetically predisposed to kill, just like a pointer dog is genetically predisposed to find things.

It is absolutely a bad breed. Killer dogs should be banned worldwide. Every single pitbull, rottweiler, etc. should be spayed/neutered and the breed should end. They’re too dangerous and dumb owners have proven that you can’t rely on humans to keep them under control.

It’s not the dogs’ fault, mind - it’s their instinct. But that doesn’t mean that future generations should have to deal with it.

Freedom of speech. Everyone is able to be heard, even if their opinions are distasteful. It’s what the US was built on and why people can fly swastikas and wear klan hoods without being arrested.

They can only be arrested if they commit a crime, not because their views are horrible. You can walk down the street yelling racial slurs at everyone and that’s perfectly legal as long as you aren’t being violent or inciting others to violence.

That doesn’t mean society has to tolerate them - counter-protesting is alive and well, and Nazis have been fired from their jobs for their views. But the government can’t arrest them simply for being Nazis.

Unreal is much more entrenched than Unity is. At the AAA level, more places hire Unreal devs than Unity devs.

Unity is popular with indies because it’s dead simple (Unreal is a complex monster of an engine). But even Unreal doesn’t have a monopoly, between things like Source, Lumberyard (which is now FOSS and run by the Linux Foundation), etc. Not to mention you can always roll your own engine, which many places already have.

Depending on how much money you expect to lose, that may be the more prudent option for some.

At the very least you’d have something to work with - it’s not truly “from scratch”.

I work in the AAA industry and I’ve ported code from one engine to another - it’s not fast by any means, but at the very least you can assume the code that’s there is largely correct. The killers are materials/shaders, porting over design work, and fixing timing issues. If you have netcode that can be tricky as well.

But at the very least you can have the core of your game running again reasonably. It’s how things like Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe went from Source to Unity, and how Pokemon BDSP went from the proprietary Pokemon engine to Unity.

Indies and AAs can hire some extra hands to work temporarily with their existing engineers to port and they’d probably lose less money than Unity is charging.

Unreal licensing is explicitly tied to the version you use. So if you use Unreal 5.3, you are bound to the license attached to the code for Unreal 5.3.

If that license changes in Unreal 5.4 and you disagree with the new license, you don’t need to follow the terms as long as you never move from Unreal 5.3.

Ah, yes, the peak argument.

“Here are reasons why you’re wrong”

I’M NOT READING THAT

Glad to see you were here to have a discussion in good faith.

It’s like you didn’t even read the last half of my comment.

Of course it’s not good right now. I admitted as such. I even said the same things you said.

But do you really think capitalism will just sit on its hands and let this stuff stay bad forever? Do you really think this is the apex of this tech? Half your arguments are “well don’t give them your business then”, disregarding the fact that change is already happening on the ground from AI drive-thrus to self-checkouts to the death of concept artists.

It’s like the people saying the Internet was a fad, or people insisting climate change was overblown. Sticking your head in the sand and assuming that “it’ll never be good” is opening yourself up to being blindsided - because what if you’re wrong?

Arrogantly assuming that this stuff will never get better is how we’d wind up with large swaths of the workforce kicked out of their jobs as they get replaced by robots. Assuming the status quo is always going to be the same is what we did with climate change for decades, and now we’re here and fucked.

Could you imagine what would be different if we took climate change seriously in 2002? We’re dealing with the same sort of threat now. We should lobby for protections and legislation like UBI to ensure that the threat can’t come to pass - or if it does, that a broad social safety net can take care of everyone.

You may work in FOSS, but I work in AAA game development as an engineer, primarily C++ - otherwise I have the same qualifications as you.

I cannot talk about what I do but trust me when I say I see this stuff on the horizon from within the capitalistic beast. Things are in motion that I don’t think we can come back from. Execs have dollar signs in their eyes and R&D is full steam ahead.

But let’s say I’m wrong, and for whatever reason all of automation is somehow a dead-end. What’s wrong with having a better safety net? What’s wrong with preparing workers better for large shocks to the economy?

If we prepare and I’m wrong - then at least there’s a net benefit that will stick around next time a large depression or economic shock happens (e.g. COVID). If we don’t prepare and you are wrong, then huge sections of the economy are absolutely fucked.

Which would you rather have?

I’ve been saying this for years now.

Within 20-30 years, most things as we know it will be automated.

• White Castle is buying 100 robots that can flip burgers and man fry stations.

• Amazon has shown off a cashierless grocery store.

• Wal-Mart is deploying tech to identify when stock on a shelf is low and was looking at robot stockers.

• Waymo, Uber, etc. are working good progress on self-driving taxis.

• Domino’s has a pizza delivery robot they’re working on.

• Amazon is deploying its automatic delivery drones.

• Russia is actively using self-driving semi trucks in Siberia, and there are multiple startups working on the problem elsewhere.

• Journalists are slowly being replaced by AI.

• Both WGA and SAG-AFTRA are striking because of the threat that AI will take their jobs in the near term.

• There was that dumb AI lawyer thing a little bit ago.

• Blizzard is replacing concept artists with AI image generation.

And so on.

The point isn’t that the tech is good now - it isn’t. Wal-Mart didn’t keep their stocking robots. The AI lawyer got in a tremendous amount of legal trouble. AI journalism has been rolled back after quality issues.

But do you think the technology will stay this bad?

Like, remember what phones were like in 2003? People still had landlines. The closest thing to a smartphone was a Blackberry (which came out in 2002). 3G networks were brand-new (and spotty). None of it was very good, yet they got better and better and now here we are 20 years later where smartphones are an indispensable part of daily life for most people.

What will automation look like in 2043? 2053? That’s within our lifetime. What kind of jobs will today’s kindergartners have available to them when they reach their 20s and 30s?

There is nothing to indicate that automation will always be bad forever. There is money to be saved by cutting out the human element and replacing them with robots. It’s looking more and more reasonable to invest in R&D that eliminates human jobs, in every industry - from Uber and DoorDash drivers to semi drivers to tutors to artists to cashiers. It’s coming, and we have to think about how we’re going to support all the people that won’t have a job anymore.

Where do you live? In California it’s commonplace that self-serve station refills are free.

The main exceptions are touristy places like Disneyland. But most places have the dispensers on the dining room side (not the cash register side) so you can get free refills.