2025 wasn't really a good reading year for me. I was out foraging at the Arts & Architecture library the other day and brought back Great Planning Disasters by Peter Hall
which I should have finished by the end of the year.
I must admit that Arknights has ate into my reading time, but I have a big project I'm working on that I call "foxwork" which involves animal behavior and physiology, character acting, shamanism, coaching, martial arts, physical culture, Eastern religion, meditation, Ericksonian hypnosis, etc.
The reading queue for that project is long but I've mostly been doing rather than reading. Next in queue is Tracking and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Signs because we often have fresh snow on the ground this time of year and it's a good time to see things like the tracks of a rabbit being followed by a fox.
It’s a little shocking to me that this sentiment hasn’t floated higher in the discussion. Regardless of how he feels, this is the way he wants you to feel.
Big picture it’s about emotional intelligence and if you are losing your shit you’re going to flail around. I think you should pick up some near-frontier tools and use them to improve your usual process, always keeping your feet on the ground. “Vibe coding” was always about getting you and keeping you over your head. Resist it!
given that the 3 hares seem to currently lack a signification, I'd be up for squatting? Or would Paul prefer 3 fennecs? Should anyone wish to oppose us, as Bigwig said: "silflay hraka, u embleer rah"
a slightly more pragmatic story for shunya as better mousetrap: just as we now routinely have our calculations done for us in binary, but record results in decimal (in PDF invoices, say), ancient romans (among other cultures) would have someone do their calculations on a counting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_board board, but recorded (only the non-zero) results in roman numerals.
(these days we can spot the algebraists via a sibboleth: they start their papers and books with section/chapter 0)
> « Les hommes sont comme les chiffres : ils n'acquièrent de valeur que par leur position. » —NB
To be fair I did have just a touch of thought disorder which led me to write "vive" instead of "vibe" and I did correct it when it was pointed out without explaining it which made that comment seem even weirder than it originally was.
I actually read their comment as "vibe vibe live" which combined with the unknown terms in the next line (a reference to Dune combined with something else, I guess?) made GGP's question fit quite well.
In everyday life I am a plodding and practical programmer who has learned the hard way that any working code base has numerous “fences” in the Chesterton sense.
I think, though, that for small systems and small parts of systems LLMs do move the repair-replace line in the replace direction, especially if the tests are good.
Politics -- the bias for the old vs the new. It's taken forever for them to get the lead out of general aviation fuel in the most dangerous, bioavailable and highly dispersed forms there is even though (perhaps because) general aviation is a dying business that could reasonably be taken behind the woodshed and shot (with a lead bullet!) to make way for new industries like drones.
On the other hand, new and dynamic industries can bear the burden of switching to more ecological materials.
I don't have a lot of patience for this sort of take because my north star is project management and in my normal moving forward model I work in milestones where I stack up my tools and get something specific done and screwing around with tools is heavily timeboxed. If A.I. tools help me make progress great, if they don't, I will fall back to manual methods, get that phase of work done or (rarely) give up on the subproject. After I get some distance from it I can consolidate my learnings, try a different approach.
It's death though to be excessively reading tweets and blogs about this stuff, this will have you exhausted before you even try a real project and comparing yourself to other people's claims which are sometimes lies, often delusional, ungrounded and almost always self-serving. In sofar someone is getting things done with any consistency they are practicing basic PM, treating feelings of exhaustion, ungroundedness and especially going in circles as a sign to regroup, slow down and focus on the end you have in mind.
If the point really is to research tools than what you do is break down that work into attainable chunks, the way you break down any other kind of work.
That’s what people thought 20 years ago, careful accounting seems to show climax ecosystems of all kinds still capture carbon if undisturbed, I met someone who helped prove it by measuring trees with calipers year after year.
I like to think it's a plan to kill off video games. I mean, make it so uncool that parents will be worried that the kids won't sit in front of the game console and insist on playing outside all the time.
(To be fair, game consoles outgrew kids by the Xbox 360 generation if not earlier, they'd have to ruin mobile games to change childhood)
I used to hate everything GAME PASS stood for but couldn't deny it was good value for the money and if you could find a game you wanted to play on it every month go right ahead.
With this year's price hikes though that's not the case anymore, you are better off just buying a good $20 game every month or buying a good $50 game every other month.
I'd be more impressed if an Xbox executive said that they weren't working on a new console, I mean I can't see how it can work as a business unless they change their attitude 200%. I trust those YouTubers more than I trust mainstream game journalists.
In the current market for electronics I can't imagine a quantum leap in consoles at a sub-$1000 price point, it is not like NVIDIA or AMD gives a damn about gaming in this environment where it is all about selling as many GPU for AI as they can while they can.
Steam Deck is long in the tooth. I think PS and XBOX portables could muscle into that space, XBOX is already licensing their name, but balancing size-cost-performance-power does not look easy but the PS Vita was my favorite dedicated game system I ever owned. I like my Deck but it is too big and I have to think long and hard if I want to pack it in my t̴a̴i̴l̴ backpack on any given day or pack something else.
A realistic plan is shut down most of Activision and sell the rest to Tencent, take an $80 billion goodwill loss so they won't pay tax for half a decade, Wall St won't care so long as they keep making noises about AI, do right by Azure, Windows, Office and the enterprise stuff. Keep Windows great for gaming and keep the brand alive as part of that and if they want to sell XBOX branded body wash or something, bully for them. Set free from Activision those developers will be able to make good games again.
What do you think of mid-tier Android handhelds like the Odin 3? I think these things are starting to look very interesting, especially when you factor in things like Winlator, Moonlight streaming, etc.
I think that's part of the convergence, too. A perceived war between scrappy honest influencers and legacy journalism, some long fallout from game journalism controversies a decade ago. Why would someone read a mainstream games journalist about this story, either? Same for tying a hardware console's fortunes to whatever Microsoft is doing with Activision.
All three (four counting Steam) consoles update every several years. A quick Wikipedia skim tells you almost everything you need to know about that. They're all packaging the AMD and Nvidia hardware available along some price-performance point (they all have access to the same tradeoffs) and releasing developer SDKs. Each one has a store, some deals and a slightly different take on how they integrate streaming and retro games.
I have trouble seeing how attitude affects executing any of this. The attitude only comes into play because Xbox has to respond to this meme in a way that placates gamers.
I don’t see what the point is for consoles that aren’t PCs. Pair an XBOX ONE controller with a decent PC and install Steam and it is not the sweaty experience that PC gaming was in the 1990s, but a lean-back “just works” experience, you can play the same games with the same controller. Instead of waiting for the upgrade cycle you can get the latest hardware from AMD, Intel or even Apple. If you want to spend more and get a top flight graphics card you can get high frame rates at 4k. And it’s a PC, you can hook up a keyboard and a mouse and do all your PC stuff too so it better justifies the price.
The PS5 has sold a respectable number of units but when I needed a mostly media box to sit next to a TV I got a used PS4 Pro because the PS5 was much more expensive, I have Steam on a few machines. There are only 15 exclusives for the PS 5, one is a remake of my favorite game from the early 2010s but that’s not worth it to me.
Microsoft should come out with XBOX gaming PCs, whether it is own-brand like the Surface or are licensed through partners like ASUS and Dell.
That said, my kids got a Switch 2 for Christmas and we just got done with a super fun session of Mario Party Jamboree and boy are Mario, Bowser, and the gang looking GREAT! Super fun, everyone was laughing and having a great time. They’ve always operated in a different universe than the other console makers.
If we want to play the sorts of games XBOX and PlayStation offer, we’ll just load up the Steam Deck, or if it’s a super graphically intensive game we’ll use my RTX 5090 I use for local LLMs anyway. With a few console commands and config hacking, I was able to get Portal 2 to run split screen across 2 full screens for each player, which was super fun!
Imo it is just a matter of time until linux replaces Windows as the primary gaming OS. What ripple effects that will have idk, but I def think Windows will primarily become a casual computing OS
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppx64
which I should have finished by the end of the year.
I must admit that Arknights has ate into my reading time, but I have a big project I'm working on that I call "foxwork" which involves animal behavior and physiology, character acting, shamanism, coaching, martial arts, physical culture, Eastern religion, meditation, Ericksonian hypnosis, etc.
The reading queue for that project is long but I've mostly been doing rather than reading. Next in queue is Tracking and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Signs because we often have fresh snow on the ground this time of year and it's a good time to see things like the tracks of a rabbit being followed by a fox.
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