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Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly. I’ve heard some true horror stories already from companies who claim they’re doing amazing things with great results. You should be especially on guard if it’s a publicly traded company, selling AI usage is necessary to appease the market (and thereby C-level stock value).

>Outwards communication and inside results tend to differ vastly.

This is a good call out, but I'm talking to a lot of friends at other companies. So my perspective is informed by both news and personal anecdote.


Sure, it goes both ways, I’m having great results at the startup I’m working at too.

And for a lot of folks that just doesn’t matter. Paying 50 or 100 USD for a server per month won’t be the thing that breaks you.

Before you get to a scale where Rails become a problem you need to have a product that drives a pretty significant engagement, that’s where most fail.


We’ve been doing AI research since the 1950’s, and as with most other fields there are peaks and valleys. History books are filled with promises of breakthrough that never happened, even though at one time they were all ”very close”.

So you’ve tried at least a hundred ideas by now, care to share fifty of them? I’m very curious as to what they are. Opus is too slow to even complete one idea per day for me, and that’s fine, I don’t have hundreds of them :)

I dont have big ideas. Some of the more interesting ones that I ended up using but can’t share: a streaming radio for my MP3 collection (runs behind the vpn); a lightweight and self contained webrtc conference server for talking with my family; a process-level virtualization based on KVM.

Of the ones I can share:

Browser-based network tester using webrtc unreliable data https://netpoke.com - use magic code “DEMO” to see what’s it about - the source is at https://github.com/ayourtch/netpoke

A port of the SOTA speech generation model from Python to Rust:

https://github.com/ayourtch/fish-audio-experiment

A study on LLM prompting techniques:

https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/kindness

My own coding agent that i use with my locally hosted LLM for experiments:

https://github.com/ayourtch-llm/apchat

Also LLM helped with a lot of code for my packet mangling library: https://github.com/ayourtch/oside - which, among other things, includes a now battle tested SNMPv3 stack.

A true “stochastic parrot” using hash tables: https://github.com/ayourtch/hashmem

These are the ones I remember. Feel free to scout my GitHub for more. Edit: And of course it doesn’t need to be said that out of ideas I try all of them make it to github. Many end up thrown away.


Only running one agent? You should have a distributed network of them at least, if you don’t you will get left behind! Running on the cloud? Stupid, buy hardware for tens of thousands of dollars to run it locally, own your tools. Etc etc, I haven’t seen a crazier rat race in tech ever, the JavaScript framework era is looking like the most stable of software times compared to where we are right now.

I’m a hard core rogue-like player (easily over a thousand hours at least in all the games I’ve played) but even so I can admit that hey have nothing compared to a well crafted world like you’d find in From Software titles or Expedition 33, or classic Zelda games for that matter. Making a great world is an incredibly hard task though and few studios have the capabilities to do so.

Rogue-like games use the most simple randomisation to generate the next room, and I burnt hundreds of hours in Mines of Moria before I forced myself to quit.

Now with an LLM I could have AD&D-like campaigns, photorealistic renders of my character and the NPCs. I could give it the text of an AD&D campaign as a DM and have it generate walking and talking NOCs.

The art of those great fantasy artists is definitely being stolen in generated images, and application of VLMs should require payment into some sort of art funding pool. But modern artists could well profit by being the intermediary between user and VLM, crafting prompts, both visual and textual, to give a consistent look and feel to a game.

The essay author is smoking crack.


Artists want to create. They do not want to tweak prompts and click "Generate" repeatedly until the output matches their vision. I would find this maddening.

But this wouldn't make sense anyway. Game companies won't foot the bill for real-time renders of your character, let alone a world of generated NPCs. If/when costs are low enough, and players accept a recurring subscription to play games, then this could happen, sure. No way in hell will artists be available in real-time to keep the generated imagery consistent.


Why would game companies be paying for rendering on my computer? My computer can fantasise player specific details, in a palette created by game artists, and render them itself.

Game artists could indeed be working in real time in MMORPGs to tweak the world, impresarios of the shared experience. Paying for live human shaped performance art is a great way to keep human creativity central to the experience.


It’s a different type of thing, really. I like rogue-likes because they are a… pretty basic… story about my character, rather than a perfectly crafted story about somebody else’s.

Even when I play a game like Expedition 33 or Elden Ring, my brain (for whatever reason) makes a solid split between the cutscene versions of the characters and the gameplay version. I mean, in some games the gameplay characters is a wandering murderer, while the cutscene characters have all sorts of moral compunctions about killing the big-bad. They are clearly different dudes.


They still need a lot of money and what their VC’s think is going to be more important than what Amedei does. Nothing more profitable than war and government.

App Store rankings are meaningless, I have Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all in top five, with a electronic mail app being 1 and a postal tracking service app (for a very small provider) being 3.


The value of hyperscalers' equity in Anthropic alone dwarfs their contracts with the government. Not to mention the revenue from hosting their models that helps justify the insane capex. Anthropic going to $0 would be a huge hair cut to all of their balance sheets.

They’ve only invested a couple of billions, like 20 or so split between them. Not really something that hurts them long or even medium term. Microsoft has multiple multi billion dollar government deals, I think Amazon is the only that doesn’t, Google also has a lot of government contracts, especially outside of cloud.

The AWS cli tool wants to have a talk… hard to find a more bloated mess of strung together scripts held together by tape.

I think all the SDKs and the cli tool itself are mostly code generated.

Looking forward to a Linux gaming PC, Windows 11 I can purge and run local account on, this sounds like a complete nightmare (because modular won't mean you can remove the stuff Microsoft is betting their company on, Copilot).

Agree, it’s strange, I will just assume that the people who say this are building react apps. I still have so much ”certainly, I should not do this in a completely insane way, let me fix that” … -400+2. It’s not always, and it is better than it was, but that’s it.

I'm an ML engineer, so it's mostly been setting up data processing/training code in PyTorch, if that helps.

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