(I said "Wow!" in my head, if that means anything; I'm just used to games-designers of mid-1990s all being virtual recluses by now - or long into retirement).
May I ask a few things about SimTower that have been stuck with me since I was 9 years old (and my apologies if these questions have been asked already):
* What's stopping the source-code to the Win95/MacOS SimTower being released? I assumed Yoot retained core IP rights because Maxis was largely a re-packager and distributor... but if Maxis did buy the copyright to the source then it would sit with EA now - and EA themselves have been surprisingly cool with open-sourcing lately (Command & Conquer, etc) so could we see something happen on this front?
* Why did SimTower's ground lobbies and sky-lobbies get completely different artwork - but only for the first few hundred pixels - if you build offset from the left-edge of the map? And what are the different objects in the lobby artwork meant to be? I'm not sure if I'm looking at a row of green cash-registers or payphones - or something else.
* What inspired the endgame victory condition? (...do any towers in real-life have a consecrated cathedral on their summits? it just seemed an odd thing overall, even moreso given that Japan and Japanese urban (and urban-planning) culture doesn't make me suddenly think of Christianity.
(I now feel embarrassed for getting all fanboyish around you, lol; sorry!)
My preference, however, is for a voice-control UX just like I get with my Amazon Echo and "classic" Alexa like I have been for the past 10 years I've been using it: I think I can best describe it as a "voice-driven command-line" just like your OS' CLI shell, which makes its interactions predictable, even if it means I need to "know" what commands are valid in a given context. We all need predictability and reliability when it comes to my home-automation integrations.
...but computer interaction with a LLM / transformer-driven / "AI agent" is anything but predictable. When Amazon opted everyone into Alexa+ I agreed to give it a go and see if it really made things better or not - and it did not. I opted-out of Alexa+ and went back to something actually reliable.
Here's a question: I don't understand the gap between these LLM powered voice agents vs CLI coding agents, the latter of which are obviously useful and quite resourceful at getting something done when asked in plain English.
Seems like an agent given 20-30 tool calls like "read_sms" "matter_command", and "send_email" would be able to work out what to do for things like "set the house to 72° and text Laura that I did it."
> Seems like an agent given 20-30 tool calls like "read_sms" "matter_command", and "send_email" would be able to work out what to do for things like "set the house to 72° and text Laura that I did it."
Incidentally, a major headline in the news this past week was about a coding-agent that wiped its company's entire system, including backups; which the company's staffers were confident was utterly impossible (as it didn't have any access to that system), and yet somehow, it did[1] (the TL;DR is the agent randomly came across an unprotected God-tier admin API-key/token saved to a personal text-file in a filesystem it had read-access to). If an agent can do that with only read-only access to a company's routine/everyday storage area then there's no way I'm giving it the ability to deactivate my house's fire-alarms and security-cameras via Google Home/Matter/Thread/HomeKit/X10/OhFfsNotAnotherCloudBasedAutomationScheme.
If you are really worried about that, the agent already has that access since itll go find that key anyways.
the HN thread about that case was much more of a "why are you putting your prod keys in random text files" and "the sota in prompt engineering is that putting DONT FUCKING DO THE BAD THING" makes the agent more desperate to get stuff done
putting limits at the harness level would do just fine. one LLM call, one tool call per voice message.
Siri's one job I care about is doing exactly what I want while I'm driving. I need it to check my text messages, take dictation, start phone calls and deal with music. I don't need to have conversations with it, I need deterministic responses to known commands.
Whenever I see one of these comments, it's always from someone that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience. And many times there are more people commenting back that this was essentially the 1.0 version and that the current 2.0 version is much better. So as someone that uses none of these products (old voice assistants vs. ai ones) it's really hard to evaluate if any of these anecdotes mean anything.
You could have tried Alexa+ at the start when it was shitty compared to plain Alexa, and maybe it's better now. But equally none of the people that comment that it is "amazing" in its current iteration qualify their statements with their experiences comparing and contrasting the old version vs. the new version making them seem either unqualified to make statements based on how much "better" it is than the old version or at worse they are shills (paid or not). The best take is that they are comparing (e.g.) day-one Alexa+ vs. the current Alexa+ without a comparison to the original Alexa.
... which is to say that it really feels like there are no clear conclusions that could be drawn from all of this.
I'm not an Alexa user myself but I have watched my wife interact with it for around 5years now.
The new Alexa powered by an LLM is objectively better that previous Alexa in a few ways. This much was apparently from day one and has only gotten smoother.
1. It can reliably execute direct or vague-ish commands "play X movie in app Y" or "play x show" and can infer X movie is only available in app Z so use that.
> It can reliably execute direct or vague-ish commands "play X movie in app Y" or "play x show" and can infer X movie is only available in app Z so use that.
...how does that work, exactly? (or rather: what's the context here?); there's no possible way for an Alexa+-powered Amazon Echo to control my AppleTV or interface with VLC on my desktop.
No matter how good the LLM features are, I just want to turn my lights on and off and check the time. A perfect LLM could maybe perform on par with a simple deterministic command system for these tasks, but not better. All an LLM does is introduce the possibility that a command that worked fine yesterday will randomly not work
Also, one of my first interactions with this Alexa+ thing was “how long is it until 8:45am”, one of only a few commands I use it for to work out how much sleep I’m getting, and it proceeded to ask me what the current time was… I immediately turned it off after that
> All an LLM does is introduce the possibility that a command that worked fine yesterday will randomly not work
Aren't hallucinations part of GenAI? I would assume that "AI" voice recognition doesn't have that baked in, but I'm not working in either of those spaces so maybe I'm missing the details. So many things are being looped into the "AI" umbrella that would have just been called machine learning or pattern recognition a decade ago (e.g. "facial recognition" vs "AI" at a time when "AI" also means chatbots like ChatGPT).
> that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience
I've had enough bad experiences with products that never got better, or just got worse (Exhibit A: Windows 11). Like most primates, I am capable of learning, and I've learned that once a consumer product/service goes bad there's little hope of a turn-around. I accept that you're telling me that it's gotten better, but of the people I know IRL who also use an Echo, none of them have told me that Alexa+ is worth trying, let alone committing to.
Yes, it's on me for not giving Alexa+ a second chance, but I'm not willing to give Alexa+ a second chance because, as a technology product/service customer, I just don't feel respected by the industry I work for (...lol); if Amazon, Microsoft, Google, et al won't respect me, why should I venture outside my comfort-zone for... what benefit, exactly?
> I accept that you're telling me that it's gotten better,
I'm not telling you this. I'm basically saying that with Alexa/Alexa+ and with Google's Gemini vs Goole Now(?) I've seen many posts like this. Where someone complains about the AI version, but then there are other posts that come in and claim how much better it is. Even for things like Claude Code you get people complaining about how many mistakes it makes, and then people coming in and saying that it's because they are "doing it wrong". Either "Claude has improved by 10x in the last 6 months. It's so amazing! If you used it a year or so ago it doesn't even compare!" or "You aren't using the most expensive tier of Claude which increases context and thinking abilities that are hobbled in the cheaper versions!"
I never really see a comparison on the same level and it sounds like people talking past each other or some people having legitimate complaints and then others coming in to shill for a product.
I'm not in anyway implying that "You should totally try this out now that they fixed everything" or anything of the sort. I even stated that I don't use any of these tools, and I was commenting as something more akin to an "outsider."
It's not the early 2000s where just messing around and wasting time on this stuff is cool in itself. None of that time wasted turned into much long term apps that stuck with me. Maybe a banking app and a trail running app.
I ruined multiple dinners with timers that didn't work (with a time/labor cost).
I had to get out of bed in the freezing to turn the lights out. It's easy to hit the lights when I go to bed but annoying having the tool fail and getting back out.
Music stuff didn't work well because I used Youtube Music not Spotify.
Those were my 3 use cases for Google voice, and it failed them all enough I just stopped using it all together. Who cares if it works today if in another month they just change something and break it again? They've shown it's not a tool to use for tool things, it's a 'gee wow' thing. I don't need to be impressed. I need not burnt food.
In contrast to Google, Microsoft, my former employer, probably has (had?) the best policy amongst big tech: moonlighting wasn't just tolerated, but actively encouraged! (...provided it runs on Windows, of course) ...because it's basically free training/experience if it means exposure to new APIs/platforms/libs/concepts - and definitely helps the morale levels of folks who love to build things but who ended-up with an extremely narrow-scoped job at the company (e.g. PMs who don't get to write code, or SDETs and SREs that only get noticed by management when they don't do their jobs).
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
> I wonder how long it'll be before all AI costs are flat unlimited monthly fees or even free across the board, without compromise.
That's already the case if you can self-host an LLM; you don't even need a mythical H200: gamer-grade GeForce cards can get you a long way there (if this page is to be believed: https://www.runpod.io/gpu-compare/rtx-5090-vs-h200 )
...after RAM prices return to normalcy, of course - and then wait another 2 or 3 generations of GPU development for a 96GB HBM card to hit the streets - and also assuming SotA or cloud-only LLMs don't experience lifestyle-inflation, but I assume they must, because OpenAI/Anthropic/Etc's business-model depends on people paying them to access them, so it's in their interests to make it as difficult as possible to run them locally.
That page compares models that easily fit inside the ram on either GPU. The biggest difference comes when one card can fit a model and the other cannot.
> Claude is pretty good at designing data models in my experience
Yesterday, Claude decided to go with nvarchar(100) for an IP address column instead of varbinary(16), and thinks RBAR triggers are just-as-good as temporal tables.
So, no. Claude is not good at designing data models in my experience.
Yes; more depression and anxiety about an uncertain future.
The SWE people I know at SW companies now heavily using these agents complain to me how their workday is nothing but code-reviews of the agents output and tedious prompting to prod it back into line; they say they don’t get to actually write code until they get home to work on their personal projects.
3 years ago I never would have believed this capability was possible; I’ve since adjusted my expectations to now assume that in another 3 years the models/agents will have improved enough to reduce the amount of code-review required, leaving us with precious little else to do for our shareholders, or the opposite: they don’t improve and we’re stuck doing thankless PR reviews until the end.
Please tell me where and how in this future I’m supposed to find satisfaction and pride in my work when what-gets-produced isn’t my own work anymore?
Not OP. Sounds like he was considered to be a manager and wasn't allowed to get into the weeds. So instead of just managing the off shore team, he wrote some of the code for them and then let them take credit for it.
Which also means that he wasn't doing his job (management) and instead micromanaging his staff by doing their job.
This is such a common problem with highly technical managers because they can't seem to understand how to change focus or scope and do their jobs better. Instead they fall back on trying to ship features thinking that this is productive and to pat themselves on the back for staying technical.
Yes and No. My job title was "Software Engineer," though my management chain told me my role was "Product Owner." Agile was fine at the beginning when it was a few people who knew what they were doing, but it's become a load of horse-shit.
The issue was that my management chain was concerned that my time was too valuable to be spent writing code. And there's a yes-and-no in this one. I was a reasonably well paid US-based software engineer, so yes, my time was valuable. And yes, some of the non-coding tasks I performed were probably more impactful than writing code. But... code + machine parsable specifications + docs + tests are very good ways of communicating exactly what you want.
I'm just sort of laughing thinking about what my old management chain would think if they knew our India based devs and I were using TLA+ as the core of our specification / documentation. Actually, I doubt they would understand it.
(I said "Wow!" in my head, if that means anything; I'm just used to games-designers of mid-1990s all being virtual recluses by now - or long into retirement).
May I ask a few things about SimTower that have been stuck with me since I was 9 years old (and my apologies if these questions have been asked already):
* What's stopping the source-code to the Win95/MacOS SimTower being released? I assumed Yoot retained core IP rights because Maxis was largely a re-packager and distributor... but if Maxis did buy the copyright to the source then it would sit with EA now - and EA themselves have been surprisingly cool with open-sourcing lately (Command & Conquer, etc) so could we see something happen on this front?
* Why did SimTower's ground lobbies and sky-lobbies get completely different artwork - but only for the first few hundred pixels - if you build offset from the left-edge of the map? And what are the different objects in the lobby artwork meant to be? I'm not sure if I'm looking at a row of green cash-registers or payphones - or something else.
* What inspired the endgame victory condition? (...do any towers in real-life have a consecrated cathedral on their summits? it just seemed an odd thing overall, even moreso given that Japan and Japanese urban (and urban-planning) culture doesn't make me suddenly think of Christianity.
(I now feel embarrassed for getting all fanboyish around you, lol; sorry!)
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