Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

I'm encouraged to use AI at work, and as remarkable as it is that it ever works at all, it's also hilariously quick to go off the rails when neither I nor the LLM actually knows how to do something. And, the longer we discuss it, the crazier it gets. And, fun feature of ChatGPT 5 is it seems to remember context across sessions, so the level of crazy just keeps ramping up even in a new session.

The worst thing about No Man's Sky is it doesn't have maps. It's a game about exploration, clearly and definitively a game entirely designed around exploration, but you don't have maps? What kind of deranged mind comes up with that? Maps is like the third feature I'd implement in an exploration game (after the proc gen world and the walky man).

It's a fun game, but there's this huge hole where maps should be.

I mean, there's always been something about her, but antifa, too?

Can I say something without people getting mad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeHviTKEqSo

See, this is what I hate about Dallas. People are opposed to HEB, one of the best things about Texas, opening a store here, and I just can't with these people.

Sure, Kimmel's coming back, but I don't like how eager they were to bend to Trump.

@InternetEh not only Harris (but, certainly Harris), Newsom, the ghoul who the Democratic establishment seems to have decided is their guy for 2028 already. He grins while destroying everything homeless people own. He invites Nazis on his podcast. And, he's happy to trade away civil rights for trans people for whatever boost in the polls that gets him, or maybe just because he enjoys it, I don't know.

@matt I remain free of Electron in my daily life. I mostly use NeoVim for editing (though I'm testing Zed lately, which is native software built with Rust), and run the usual suspect (Slack) in my browser rather than using the standalone app, which I think is Electron. I find JavaScript apps sluggish...but, maybe that's because I've got a five year old computer.

Firefox isn't tiny, but adding a couple of big VMs is usually where a problem arises.

@matt I could add swap to push the purchase out longer, but I strongly believe in investing in tools. My time has value, and this is slowing down my work enough to where it's either double the RAM for $300 or more than double the performance and the RAM for $1300...I think it's time for the latter. Five years is a long time for me to go between computers. The longest I've ever gone, probably. It is the primary tool of my job, after all.

@matt I have 32GB, which is usually sufficient, but I've been running a bunch of VMs lately for device bringup image building and testing (for robots and support hardware), and I just find I'm getting cramped either in the VM or in the host, if I give the VMs enough room to work effectively/quickly. It's not terrible, but it's enough to where I notice and even enough to where the OOM killer kicks in sometimes.

Also, the NewEgg builder is really nice. Shows compatible stuff, makes suggestions, show deals, etc. It wasn't able to reliably suggest Mini-ITX motherboards, for some reason (including ATX in the list even after I set it to only Mini-ITX), but otherwise it's super nice to have it show compatible stuff in one place. I don't remember it being this easy/quick to spec out a new computer in the past.

OK, so, turns out the benchmarks I was looking at were a bit out of date. The current AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D (or 9800X3D) quite recently released is a bit more than three times faster than my current CPU on most benchmarks. And, since the options were to spend a few hundred bucks to double my RAM or spend $1300 for a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM (but newer RAM is cheaper than RAM for my old motherboard), I opted to get all new. Three times the performance feels worth the hassle and expense.

@matt it will make things a bit slower for your users. I usually do 60 seconds for stuff that I expect to change regularly or when I'm planning a migration to a new server/IP, 5 minutes for stuff I don't have any plans to change.

Zero TTL would be, IMHO, for services that move around a lot via some dynamic mechanism. I can't think of any time I'd set TTL that low, or any benefit to doing so.

But, because Route 53 is very distributed with Anycast, it probably doesn't have a huge impact.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but it's never propagation. Not anymore.

Sure, maybe if you're updating glue records it'll take a few minutes, maybe an hour. But, DNS infrastructure is so much less aggressively cache-y than it used to be. It's not hanging on to old records for 24-48 hours, as lots of people say you should wait for propagation. If you're getting bogus records after an hour or even a few minutes, you did something wrong. Usually it's just the TTL, probably <5 minutes.

I should note I upgraded the GPU three years ago, not because I had any performance problems, but because AI was becoming a thing at work (computer vision and object detection, not chatbots) and Nvidia dominates in AI and I had an ATI (or AMD?) before. So, that's probably contributing to my general lack of urgency when it comes to building a new machine. Also, I rarely play games that need a lot of performance, so nothing ever reminds me my computer is approaching ancient.

Moore's law is dead dead, for real. My PC is five years old, and current generation CPUs aren't even twice as fast on any of the leading benchmarks. I built it to last, spending a bit more than seemed reasonable for all the components, because I don't like the disruption of switching to a new machine. But, it's probably the longest I've ever had the same primary computer in my life, and I'm surprised to find I probably ought to wait a bit longer, so the improvement is even noticeable.

@alilly bigger than before.

OK, so, I guess they've been doing exactly that. Apparently, there used to be a lot fewer biomes, more sameness, etc. And, it is an amazing game, and I do love it. And, I love that they're still adding stuff without nickel and diming users with various monetization strategies...it's still a game worth buying after nine years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmU3_6BK-Ro

But, it doesn't have to be a gimmick. Apparently they're working on a new game, Light No Fire, and maybe they're thinking the same way, and maybe the system that spits out worlds will spit out better worlds nine years later. Our computers are bigger, everything is cheaper, maybe they had technical limitations.

But, it's neat. And, I may like thinking about "how do you make billions of worlds that can be visited by any player, without storing billions of worlds" as much as playing the game.

7/7

They currently have seemingly about two(?) surface biomes, one cave, and two water (deep and shallow). That's cool and all, but it feels really samey when you spend any notable time on a single planet, like for bases and settlements. It doesn't really feel like "exploring".

So, I think what I'm getting at is that the the billions of worlds thing is a bit. A gimmick. They made a great game, but you're not going to spend time looking at each world...you're not gonna find a lot of surprises. 6/?