Tuesday, May 27
Daily News Stuff 27 May 2025
Skunk Wax Edition
Skunk Wax Edition
Top Story
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang blasted US limits on the export of advanced AI chips to China, complaining that the rules are bad because they work. (Hot Hardware)
Unlike Nvidia's consumer graphics cards.
Tech News
- Minecraft in CSS. (Benjamin Aster)
Well, 0.001% of Minecraft. But it works without any JavaScript.
- Copilot isn't always bad. It's only almost always bad. (Deplet.ing)
Not specific to the Microsoft product, but equally applicable to any organisation that tries to "help" an expert by assigning them a companion idiot.
- GitLab had a bug that let you bypass security with a hidden comment. (Legit Security)
Oh. Oops.
- Vibe coding company Lovable says that Anthropic's Claude 4 - yes, the same one that calls your mother if you say something rude - reduces its rate of syntax errors by 25%. (Bleeping Computer)
If your code generation tool is generating a non-zero number of syntax errors you need to go straight into the volcano.
- Google claims that users find ads in AI search results helpful. (Bleeping Computer)
What?
- OpenAI plans to produce an interesting ChatGPT product by 2026. (Bleeping Computer)
Well, that will be a change.
- The CIA secretly ran a Star Wars fan site. (404 Media) (archive site)
Okay.
- The "deprofessionalization of video games" was on full display at PAX East, or, what anyone thing of the Political Officers? (Game Developer)
Recent high-budget computer games - so-called AAA titles - have pretty uniformly crashed and burned. Concord cost Sony $400 million to develop, and the company gave it a mercy killing less than two weeks after it was released.
Meanwhile games from small studios like Palworld and Expedition 33 are making money hand-over-fist.
This article discusses where things might go if small, competent, tightly-focused teams can deliver amazing products while big, bloated, incredibly inefficient corporations fail every time, and asks the question: What about the useless morons?I want to be clear here - no one I spoke with at PAX East should feel "obligated" to give anyone a job. They're small teams making the most of limited resources, and it's the acceleration in game development technology that's made it possible. What feels wrong is how few people seem to benefit from this status quo.
Get good.
Musical Interlude
Song is Na Na Na by My Chemical Romance. Anime is Panty and Stocking with Garter Belt. Those are the names of the characters.
Since yesterday's song turned out to be blocked in the US and Canada - sorry about that - here's an alternate version.
Disclaimer: Ultravox's second single, Salzburg, did not meet with the same success.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:28 PM
| Comments (3)
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 438 words, total size 5 kb.
1
I think the 'deprofessionalization' article today is the one most interesting to me.
Out of the way first, that claim about it not happening for books may simply be ignorance about the book market. I understand that it has happened to a degree, but maybe I am not understanding my sources or something. (My best bet is that this article's writer's source was wrong a bit, but maybe he is talking a degree beyond what I know.)
Deep background, I think the professionalization of more than one occupation was a destructive mistake that we are in the middle of paying serious costs for. The first occupation that comes to mind for that is teaching. Education majors seem to be obscenely terrible these days, even if this is quite unfair to the good people that the system is not stopping from being credentialed. Social work is an obvious second occupation whose professionalization was a bit of a dubious choice.
I think some of the existing professions, law and medicine, were okay when the universities were actually teaching from liberal arts, and the totalitarians providing government funding to universities were not insisting on capturing fields with political expedience. But, critical theory has pushed out liberal arts, and it is not clear to me that law or medicine functions as a profession or as an occupation under the current 'leadership'.
So game development is having the same organization problems that everyone else is having, because leadership was stupid enough to take 'consensus' seriously and weight it significantly in their modeling. They produced crap because they did not understand, or did not care about their market. And large organizations (in games would) only have advantages in known markets where knowledge of what will serve that market has not been pushed out.
So the big game companies worried about making banking, etc., happy with woke shit, and hired insane people, and maybe the jobs are going away soon.
Creative writers are exactly a university trained occupation that I would expect to be terrible enough from the 'training' that do not know that they are terrible, and to have trouble switching to a more functional industry that needs competent writers.
Anyway, I am much much angrier about universities, and the engineering profession than I am about an industry that I have not cared about as an industry for maybe at least a decade. I'm angrier about medicien and about law than I am about games.
Out of the way first, that claim about it not happening for books may simply be ignorance about the book market. I understand that it has happened to a degree, but maybe I am not understanding my sources or something. (My best bet is that this article's writer's source was wrong a bit, but maybe he is talking a degree beyond what I know.)
Deep background, I think the professionalization of more than one occupation was a destructive mistake that we are in the middle of paying serious costs for. The first occupation that comes to mind for that is teaching. Education majors seem to be obscenely terrible these days, even if this is quite unfair to the good people that the system is not stopping from being credentialed. Social work is an obvious second occupation whose professionalization was a bit of a dubious choice.
I think some of the existing professions, law and medicine, were okay when the universities were actually teaching from liberal arts, and the totalitarians providing government funding to universities were not insisting on capturing fields with political expedience. But, critical theory has pushed out liberal arts, and it is not clear to me that law or medicine functions as a profession or as an occupation under the current 'leadership'.
So game development is having the same organization problems that everyone else is having, because leadership was stupid enough to take 'consensus' seriously and weight it significantly in their modeling. They produced crap because they did not understand, or did not care about their market. And large organizations (in games would) only have advantages in known markets where knowledge of what will serve that market has not been pushed out.
So the big game companies worried about making banking, etc., happy with woke shit, and hired insane people, and maybe the jobs are going away soon.
Creative writers are exactly a university trained occupation that I would expect to be terrible enough from the 'training' that do not know that they are terrible, and to have trouble switching to a more functional industry that needs competent writers.
Anyway, I am much much angrier about universities, and the engineering profession than I am about an industry that I have not cared about as an industry for maybe at least a decade. I'm angrier about medicien and about law than I am about games.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, May 28 2025 12:02 AM (rcPLc)
2
Wait, is that a young Pink before he fell thru the thin ice of modern life??
Posted by: bob in houston at Wednesday, May 28 2025 01:23 AM (YBLgY)
3
I see Jensen Huang and Nvidia's leadership really wants to be charged with violating US export laws.
Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, May 28 2025 12:38 PM (ZLF73)
55kb generated in CPU 0.0676, elapsed 0.1455 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.1339 seconds, 362 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
58 queries taking 0.1339 seconds, 362 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.









