Absolutely. I look forward to a time where we have on-device small models as an OS-level service you can rely on (a bit like what Apple's doing with Foundation Models). I was recently playing around with some game dev prototyping where I wish I could rely on a player having access to a local model for doing some classification tasks or generating small amounts of playthrough-specific copy without just populating the same few templates.
I think the enthusiasm for Codex coincided with the extended period of degraded quality CC was experiencing around a couple of months ago? During that time I cancelled my Claude sub and tried out Codex, which by comparison was feeling significantly better. I haven't tried them out side by side since Claude has been de-borked but even if Codex is objectively poorer I could believe that flattering comparison has stuck for people who switched?
I've always loved using a (simulated) Mellotron when making music, without being consciously clued in to which songs first got me hooked on it, but you've just made me realise it was Dinosaur Jr, not Strawberry Fields Forever. Thanks!
In my experience, it's not so much that the power user has disappeared, but their power user "surface" has been squeezed. I work in an environment where I see journalists using clunky Windows-based CMSs with 30 years+ of baggage that I assumed would be killing productivity through their awkwardness.
They might all hate the tool, but are able to navigate between entering and editing copy, editing layouts and running orders, searching wires then adapting it into stories etc. with great speed with shortcuts, saved workflows and yes, awkward cludges like always-open text files of boolean searches they frequently re-use.
The minute they need to leave their tool to do a peripheral task though, all of those gains are lost. The new web-based video subtitling tool might be better than their old workflow and something they use several times a week but there's an instant assumption that it's a mouse-only task, even if the tool is a11y-aware enough to not be. Lots of "oh is it ready? Ok now I...think I click this bit" because things like communicating status and progress aren't consistent or ubiquitous. It just doesn't have the efficiencies of their ugly old thing.
On the one hand they could learn how they could automate their browser to actually integrate these tools with their workflows better, but nothing about the browser environment seems to give the impression to this class of user that it can be used in this way.
I don't know if that's just about tools that each have their own look and feel, or that the browser metaphor is too overloaded (because that feels like a very 2003-era concern :p)
Not the commenter you're responding to, but I've found quite the opposite. Content on Netflix is increasingly trending towards one narrow "woke" way of seeing the world, and nothing that falls outside of the narrow, American left perspective, or encourages any diversity of thought is available anymore.
Can you proviede some examples of this narrow way of seeing the world? TV shows tell stories. Occasionally those stories aren't going to be towards one's liking.
For example, Amazon Prime is constantly spamming me with ads for Jack Ryan. My take is that they do so because they paid a lot for the IP. Not because it's trying to shove the benefits of American militarism abroad down my throat.
They're shoving the agenda down our throats. A lot of shows become overly politicized, with messages of trans rights, BLM, and other stuff being injected to such a degree that it becomes too much and frankly artificial.
I'm not against political and societal messages in TV shows and movies - that has been done for decades, but not if it takes away from the writing and quality of the show. We see that in extreme levels at the moment.
Is "the agenda" not a bit of a conspiratorial way of looking at it though?
It's been notoriously difficult for creators to find mainstream outlets to tell stories about, to use your examples, trans and black lives, that aren't watered down out of fear of alienating a white, heterosexual audience. It's politicised in so much as defending your right to exist in the public sphere is always political, but is that a problem?
I love that we're starting to see stories that show more perspectives. It doesn't mean every show or movie will be amazing, but when has that ever been true? I don't think it follows that doing this "takes away" from the quality of the writing. A badly written show is a badly written show.
> I'm not against political and societal messages in TV shows and movies - that has been done for decades, but not if it takes away from the writing and quality of the show.
I think if you replace the last part of this with "as long as it doesn't bother me" then your statement is probably more accurate. From my experience bad shows are bad because of terrible writing overall, not because one of the characters is a minority.
> We see that in extreme levels at the moment.
Compared to a decade or more ago when you weren't seeing trans people on TV, I guess you could say it's "extreme" nowadays.
I'm going to front-load this by stating that I 100% agree that representation matters, and absolutely welcome a diversity of perspectives in media. Furthermore, I do believe that much criticism of "woke" media is a knee-jerk reaction to new, unfamiliar values and shifting power.
That said: Netflix's deployment of "wokeness" can feel completely shoehorned in and utterly arbitrary, a cynical technique that affirms the viewers' perspective, thereby increasing engagement.
I'm not "outraged" by it in the slightest. It tends to align with my own worldview. But at the end of the day it just makes for crummy content.
I think this was an art choice rather than technical inexperience.
The proportions of the field models are more similar to the chibi sprites of the SNES games, so we’re seeing the gradual evolution of FF’s style with VII the first transition from 2D to 3D.
That VIII and IX used more realistic proportions is just a later stage of that stylistic transition.
Personally, I find them quite charming. There’s a fair bit of slapstick in the game that IMO works better with the low poly models.
I like the format! Something about organising your thinking into tweet-sized chunks lends itself to a nice pace for telling stories. Your TLDR certainly doesn’t retain any of the accessibility (to non-developers) or whimsy of the original.
It is amazing how what might seem like fairly routine engineering jobs become completely nightmarish once you do it underground.
I used to commute via Goodge Street every day. A few years ago they replaced the four lifts (in twos so that two were still in service) which ultimately took two years. I could never really fathom what it was that specifically slowed that down so much but hey the lift congestion every morning was fun
From experience in construction (both open air and underground) the key difference is not about something being underground, but rather with something being "in use" while the building site is doing the whatever work is needed.
Particularly when it is something of public use, be it a highway or a railway, the amount of precautions, limitations and safety risks (in some cases for both the public and the workers) grows incredibly, slowing down considerably any intervention.
Over the last 4 years our team has achieved a lot: huge numbers of valuable changes and improvements to our platform. But it's been much harder than it might otherwise have been because we've had to make those changes with the systems in use. Had we started from scratch, or been able to take downtime, there are a lot of projects we could have done much more quickly, but we had to keep the business running - it is, after all, what was and is paying all of our salaries.
24/7 is table stakes for many Internet companies, but lots of outfits which think of themselves as delivering that sort of service actually cheerfully carve out hours or even days of down time as "necessary".
One of my banks decided it was going to do a "major upgrade" one weekend. Advertised I think maybe 8 hours outage like hey, who needs a bank for eight hours right? And of course their team can't actually hit that schedule, but nobody wants to choose "Roll back, fall on my sword at breakfast time" so an hour after the end of that supposed 8 hour outage their telephone support were telling me it ought to be fixed "soon" and any problems are only "temporary" and I can try again in a few minutes.
They got it back later that day, no noticeable improvements and you can bet that even if there was some enquiry about what went wrong nobody learned anything from it. Like NASA after Challenger. And they will still send representatives to the IETF who will say well, we can't afford these random outages like you Internet people, we're a bank, we need high availability. And those representatives will look around wondering why everybody is laughing.
Unlike most metro systems, many London Underground (tube) lines are bored, and at a much greater depth. The Northern, Victoria, Bakerloo and Jubilee lines go under the river; while most systems route trains over bridges.
The history of the tube is fascinating. The most recent lines (Victoria, Jubilee, CrossRail/Elizabeth) were built by a centralised authority. The older lines were built by various railway companies wanting to extend their lines into London. Over the years, railway companies dissolved and merged, leaving the fairly awkward map (the two branches of the Northern line share a platform at Camden, a stations at Euston and Kennington, and usually nothing else).
Because of the depth and lack of foresight when building anything, changing the network is nigh on impossible without major disruption.
For example, a new terminal is being built at Bank, meaning the Northern Line platform is no longer a ’bridge’ between Bank and Monument. Most of the work is done, but a substantial amount of the line will close for 3 months to finish it off. (Unfortunately, this is my commute. It’s annoying but I’m ok with it.)
As dramatic as line closures are, the impact to commuters can be minimized if the transit agency supplies shuttlebusses servicing the line in its place. When LA metro closed substantial sections of the Expo and Blue lines a few years ago, the shuttle routing only added a few extra minutes to commuters trips along those corridors.
You need 187 buses per hour to have the same capacity as the Piccadilly Line has on-peak (using the capacity of the New Routemaster), or, alternatively, three buses per minute. It's hard to imagine any way in which that is practically workable. I think the most frequent bus service in London currently is scheduled for 30 buses per hour, by way of comparison.
Add to this the fact that average road speed in Central London is about a third of average Underground speed, hence you're quite possibly looking at making journeys three times as long, even ignoring the extra congestion that all those buses would cause.
Unfortunately, that's unlikely to work in London where there are already more people on public transport than private transport [0]. The London Underground has roughly twice the overall capacity of the London Bus network [1].
Underground does present challenges but there are many reasons why these seemingly straight-forward jobs take time. You need qualified/certified workers, a load of up-front work related to ventilation, noise, structural movement, surveys etc. Some of this can only be done in engineering hours.
You have issues around the lack of space in central london for work vehicles, the need for removal of rubbish which can't block up emergency staircases, exits.
Then add in the challenges of unknown unknowns and needing to be able to revert any change quickly that can't be done to plan so you don't end up with a closed station and you start to get there.
I assume they had to do them 1 at a time to completion as well?
I once negatively reviewed a drone on Amazon. Their EMEA boss emailed me out of the blue wanting to set up a phone conversation to convince me otherwise. Really needy and gross! I reported this to Amazon who said that wasn’t “meant to happen”, but I doubt any sanction came from that.
I reported this to Amazon who said that wasn’t “meant to happen”
The simple fact that third party sellers can contact buyers by email is enabling this crap.
All Amazon has to do is build some messaging system so all communication between sellers and buyers happen on Amazon instead of by email. In case of abuse, it could be reported easily.
