a1studmuffin

I’m in the games industry and by chance have worked at both Chinese and US-owned companies over the last couple of years. My observation on this statistic from colleagues and friends is that software engineers pretty much everywhere are using it more and more, with uptake increasing steadily by the month. Not in a “make 10 games and put them on steam” kind of way, but in a “I can get more done each day” kind of way. Not saying it’s a good or bad thing, just reporting what I’ve observed.

This definitely lines up with my experience. I’m in the 0.2%, where work pays for us to have access to the latest frontier models via a CLI that lets the model essentially use our computer as if it were us. I’ve seen several colleagues transition from the 20% to the 0.2%, and it’s always amusing seeing their excitement as they realise what’s possible.

I remember that moment for myself too, and with the excitement came frustration. Until then I was convinced AI was always going to be slop, Will Smith Eating Spaghetti, the next corporate metaverse push to try and sell something people didn’t need. It was very easy to hate, along with the environmental, social, cultural and financial problems it was causing. But suddenly my world view was in conflict. This technology got good. Really good. Like being given superpowers 25 years into my career. Suddenly I was a hypocrite, and it took me a while to get used to the idea that these problems weren’t going away, and we’d need to solve them.

Hey thanks for replying! It’s a great question, and one I don’t have a good answer for.

My immediate gut instinct is that we SHOULD still be teaching kids coding, and everything else that was on their curriculum previously. Just as calculators helped us work faster, we still want to understand what they’re doing. Even if AI can augment or replace some of our knowledge in future, it’s still important to think for yourself and be able to vet what you’re generating with AI. But this is an answer built around what’s happening right now, not tomorrow.

When I think about an answer in relation to my experience over the last year, it feels a lot more hopeless, at least to me. I don’t think we’re going to know what adults should be focusing on in the short term, let alone what kids are learning for their future careers.

The situation is changing so rapidly in my workplace (at least for software engineers) that AI workflows we were using 3 months ago feel ancient. By not being on the latest frontier model, we’re losing productivity. We’re all rolling our own custom software to speed up our personal workflows. It’s faster and cheaper to do this in many cases than to buy an off-the-shelf product and learn/master it.

So already, I feel like the days of companies selling software subscriptions feels very numbered. Adobe and Atlassian are going to have their business model completely destroyed IMHO. But that’s not even the scary part.

Have a look at the number of Linux CVEs found this year compared to previous years - it’s humbling. Governments are paying very close attention, and export controls on AI models are in full swing. They’re very capable cyberweapons.

So the future I’m seeing is an incredibly uncertain one for everyone due to the exponential nature of it all, both from a geopolitics standpoint as well as a career standpoint for many industries. Last year I thought we were somewhere through the hype cycle and it was starting to slow down, but now I’ve had more hands on experience with the frontier models, these days I’m thinking we’re still at the beginning of an exponential curve, an explosion of change that’s going to happen so fast many of us will struggle to cope, and our slow legal and economic systems will struggle to keep up.

I think a lot of people are just assuming it’ll all blow over once the bubble pops, but like all the other bubbles, it’s formed because there is a very real technological leap happening, and it’s not going away.

So right now I’ve never been more sure of one thing: that it’s harder than ever to see what’s coming. So to try and answer your question just feels impossible, it’s all still moving too fast.

Perhaps on reflection one thing we should be teaching our kids is the importance of continued learning and bettering ones self. I fear the world is in for a rough decade from all this (not to mention climate change and late-stage capitalism), and anything we can do to prepare our kids to roll with the punches in that future would be wise.

Another software engineer of 25 years here. I’m really surprised to see how badly you’ve been downvoted here for simply telling the truth. I suspect anyone who downvoted you either hasn’t used a paid frontier AI model to write code (so they think the free browser-based models are as good as it gets), assumes you’re pro-AI, or simply jumps on the AI-bad-downvote train.

For anyone that downvoted, tell us, why? Let’s have a conversation about it. Us software engineers are on the bleeding edge of this seismic shift. We’re seeing firsthand what it’s capable of, and how fast it’s improving. It doesn’t mean we’re in favour of the AI companies, or ram shortages, or data centers being rolled out in your backyard, or being turned into engineering team leads overnight. It’s been thrust into our lives just like yours, but if we don’t use it we’re throwing away a massive productivity boost and one of the most transformative technologies of the last few decades.

A perfect example of how going public destroys a company from within.

It’s also not fair to put all the blame on AI. The bar to entry for making a game has been getting lower and lower over the past two decades. First we got free middleware like SDL, Cocos2d etc. Then we got full game engines available like Unity and Unreal with flexible licencing options. Then we got content stores for those game engines that let you bolt something together in no time. Then we got Fortnite, Roblox and the birth of the YouTube-style microgame within a game. AI was just the next step in this process. The slop is just a symptom of a free and open marketplace, whether it’s human or AI-driven. We saw the same thing happen with music once it started going digital. Less barrier to entry = more content, whether it’s good or terrible.

It is, but it’s been branded Linux Subsystem For Copilot 365 Enterprise Service Pack 2.

Perhaps this is more for you: https://makerworld.com/en/models/3134457-steam-machine-style-tissue-box-cover-1-1-replica

Plus you don’t know what you need to hide until it’s a problem with a future government. Look at what’s happening with ICE and immigrants right now. Based on America’s positive history with immigration, nobody in their right mind would have expected such a U-turn. See also Jews and personally identifiable census religious data during WWII.

“But Homer, the grocery store sells sugar for a dollar a pound. And it doesn’t have nails and bits of broken glass in it.”

“Those are prizes”

Using it for upscaling and frame interpolation was reasonable - that felt like a good use of AI to emulate higher performance for a lower cost. But using it as a filter over the entire vision of the game? Utterly insane and strongly smells of NVIDIA targetting other companies for more investment/sales, not gamers.

Given how big the LGBTQ+ community is in the games industry, they really need to host this in Vancouver or Toronto until things settle down in the USA.

It always surprised me they never invested properly into building a decent Steam competitor that gamers actually want to use. Instead they’ve persisted with the free games dangling carrot. It’s a shame, we could have used some competition there.

What do you say Lemmy, should we all put in $20 and make an acquisition offer? The people in this thread should cover it.

Since it sounds like you’ll be using it for more than just a NAS, I’d go with TrueNAS, Proxmox or Debian headless (in order of easiest to hardest to install and maintain).

I really hope they come up with some kind of certification system for games targeting Steam consoles, in the same way Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo do. All the boring stuff like making sure controllers connect and disconnect gracefully, the console can be slept/woken at any point in gameplay without bugs, consistent language/UX etc. That stuff goes a long way to making things “just work” on a platform. IMHO it’s the one edge console still has over PC gaming. Even if it was an optional certification, it would give players some decent guidance as to what will work well.

The Instapak stuff I’m thinking of was basically medium sized bags that acted like a heat pack, where you break something inside the bag to combine two chemicals then shake it, which makes it expand and harden quickly.

I think the stuff is called Instapak expanding foam. Personally I think I’d remove the GPU and any mechanical drives to play it safe, but I’ve had a PC shipped to me before fully assembled with Instapak around the GPU (no HDDs, only SSDs) and it was fine. Ideally ship it in the original box for the PC case.

It’s also the fact that AAA budgets demands a huge return on investment, so you end up with gross monetization schemes designed to keep players paying as long as possible. Imagine if Stardew Valley had a Farming Pass subscription each year.

If you’re looking at collaborating in game jams, you’ll find it handy to have some Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot under your belt. Don’t worry about becoming an “expert” at any of them, just do a few intro tutorials and read the starter docs on each.