The distributed state associated with workflow systems like this makes observability and code upgrades a challenge compared to just having an application orchestrating workflows with progress persisted in a shared database. But if they solve those problems this would be really nice, as I've seen a ton of home-grown systems re-write checkpointing, retries, etc. and usually get it wrong.
Sounds like a step in the right direction. I would like to see an all-up dashboard of everything in the shared state, and good control over upgrades (maybe a mode where in-progress functions can complete on version 1, even if new functions are getting kicked off on version 2, etc.)
If you like this sort of content, I recently found Sandy Petersen (Call of Cthulu, Doom, Age of Empire, Halo) is extremely active on X. Lots of interesting tidbits about game design https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu
The Anthem one is very long, but is a really fascinating portrait of cultural misfunction. The biggest factor to me was the entire design was dictated by the 'ghost' of Casey Hudson. His initial high-level vision was sacrosanct, but he also was not around to actually clarify anything or take feedback from development since he had already left the studio.
Some people are a different level of productive, and game development sure was different back in the day:
> During his (Sandy Petersen) interview, John Romero (of id Software) introduced him to DoomEd and simply asked him to build a level. Romero was ultimately happy with the results, so Petersen was brought on to production for Doom. The level from Petersen's interview eventually became "E2M6". He was a fast level designer and produced all maps for the third episode of Doom, Inferno. Petersen designed 17 levels for Doom II, a little over half of the 32 total.
ha what an incredible consumer-friendly outcome! Hopefully competition keeps the focus on improving models and prevents irritating kinds of monetization
Wait, so all of that talk of ushering an era of innovation and new opportunities was just a lie, and the thing needs dinosaur-era stuff like ads and online shopping to survive?
Ads have a very high profit margin. Ultimately we all get to cool shit because some consumer somehwere is buying something. Depending on whether you work in B2B or consumer software you are just a step closer or farther from the consumer. But ultimately its people who dont write code who decide the fate of the software industry.
If they don't start on ads and shopping, they're going to go out of business.
I'd rather a product that exists with ads, over one that's disappeared.
The fact is, personal subscriptions don't cover the bills if you're going to keep a free tier. Ads do. I don't like it any more than you do, but I'm a realist about it.
What is the air quality like to actually breathe in your experience? I have noticed Jakarta on lists of poor AQI and it doesn't look great [1] but I think the AQI number is kind of an abstraction.
I found it probably the worst of anywhere I've ever been, you can taste it and just being outside slightly burns the back of your throat. I still really like visiting though.
Heh. To get a sense of what the page's numbers might mean, I checked on Kaohsiung, where you can taste gasoline in the air as you walk down the street.
And hey, reported air quality in Kaohsiung is abysmal, so that checks out. Jakarta even looks good by comparison.
AQI appears to have Jakarta pegged at an average "66", which looks pretty respectable for the region. They seem to have much more carbon monoxide than Kaohsiung or Shanghai, but much less fine particulate.
I don't feel that AQI in reasonably normal ranges corresponds at all to the subjective experience of how nice the air feels to breathe.
The best breathing I've done was in Mumbai. Felt like a silk blanket both in the lungs and on the skin. I'm sure it would be bad for me if I stayed there a few decades, but it didnt feel bad at all when visiting.
Are you from Mumbai? or a place with notably bad AQI? Do you smoke?
Mumbai is one of the most polluted cities on earth, many people report being unable to perform aerobic exercise or describe breathing the air as being similar to smoking.
I'm from a place with excellent AQI (semi-rural Sweden). I do not smoke. I usually don't mind when other people smoke, but I don't like how they smell just after finishing. :-)
I know that the Mumbai air is not healthy, but my subjective experience of it was very positive.
"In fact, the existing legal structure largely protects Valve’s ability to engage in this sort of digital market manipulation. Players and investors were simply out of luck."
Whew, as it should be. This is a game, and I'm happy that some cohort trying to make money off of it can't bully the creators into changing it.
IMO if you make something, and the terms are clear up-front when people pay for it, and they aren't forced to use it, you should retain full control over your work without some kind of legal regulation. This seems so obvious to me that I was surprised when Tim Sweeney prevailed against Apple and I'm not sure how I feel about that case (great respect to Tim Sweeney as an individual, but I am not sure I buy his arguments).
What the holy fuck are you talking about with "retain full control" without "legal regulation" as a divergent concept? Are you huffing paint? I'm seriously at a loss how you can possibly hold these two notions concurrently without being certifiably insane or a sociopath.
lol maybe to clarify: if I make something, just because you use it doesn't give you the right to compel me to change it for you... you can ask politely but can't force my actions
While maybe the model could do everything from first principles every time, once you have a known good tool that performs a single action perfectly, why not use that tool for that action? Maybe as part of training, the model could write, test, and learn to trust its own set of tools, rather than rely on humans to set them up afterwards.
I used Gemini instead of my usual Claude for a non-trivial front-end project [1] and it really just hit it out of the park especially after the update last week, no trouble just directly emitting around 95% of the application. Now Claude is back! The pace of releases and competition seems to be heating up more lately, and there is absolutely no switching cost. It's going to be interesting to see if and how the frontier model vendors create a moat or if the coding CLIs/models will forever remain a commodity.
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