The best and worst examples were in the same movie, IMO: Nedry's finger-wagging admonishment and all hell breaking loose, then later, "it's a Unix system, I know this!" and some exotic file manager visualization.

Mr Robot has some decent hacking scenes. At least they put up prompt windows with commands that are generic enough to not be hackTheGibson.exe type lame.

I used to work with a couple of the guys who consulted on the technical aspects of Mr Robot. From what I recall, the general idea was to use realistic hacks, but speed through the boring parts to keep the show interesting.

That exotic file manager vis was a real SGI prog called fsn. Exists for sunos as well.

Are you thinking of the one shown in Jurassic park? The scene in hackers was much more CGI, and while I don't doubt it was inspired by fsn, I'd be very surprised if it actually was fsn.

The risk aversion in product is not a new phenomenon, though. Bigger producers have been following that track since at least the 90s. Adherence to brand, and even more so to basic game genres and mechanics, has been an issue complained about by devs at any big enough studio for decades.

What changed, I think, is all of the development studios being bought up by large producers. But, then again, I see steam as being a great counterforce on this, and the ease of releasing on web or mobile has been a boon for indie devs too. So maybe that hasn't changed that much.

The technology has advanced to where you can spend blockbuster budgets and get nearly film-quality results (not nearly possible in the cartridge and CD days). Meanwhile the price per AAA title has stayed relatively fixed at 50-60 USD for that same range of time, so production houses have had to try being appealing to ever-larger audiences. Fortunately, many people continue playing these games into their 30s and 40s so the market grows on its own too.

I'm trying to say you're right about the risk aversion being a big part of the industry's problems but that's been an issue for a while, it has gotten terribly enhanced with the growth of the industry.

Now I wonder which is worse.. extracting money one quarter a time with punishingly difficult timing tests, or extracting money via cosmetics that have no actual game impact but are marketed very compellingly.

A Klemperer rosette of galaxies instead of planets? That would be more impressive than a ringworld.

It also only addresses the substitution of high skill labor as it pertains to generating text/image/etc. and not the assessment nor integration of that output.

It's been my experience that GPT can help with the generation and can try to help with the assessment. But it is not consistent on assessment and is very lacking in integration of the output.

This varies some based on the task and the kind of high skill being considered. Generating copy or stock images? Re-rolling is easy enough and integration is already heavily assisted by existing tooling. Writing business logic for a low risk backend system? Integration is a little harder but overall I could see it lifting a low skilled worker to nearer high skill. Designing a large system with many moving parts? Prepare to re-ask your questions a lot and your assessment skills had better be already in the high-skill area for that task, I wouldn't trust GPTs beyond a certain scale or complexity.

I think that we'll see a lot more solopreneurs and we'll see people use it to help learning things that they would have otherwise thought were beyond them. And the bifurcation of high skill workers will be more about those who use it in their work and those who can't or don't. But I'm not as confident as this article is about high skill jobs like programming entirely replaced by GPTs.

Agreed, but to add to this:

media queries are still useful, and since a media query may hide/remove entire containers in the view then the remaining containers may have widths that are no longer a simple proportion of the viewport width (or other property being selected for).

So container queries can also enhance styles with media queries, not just replace them.

If by fixed you mean "elaborate measures for specificity and saliency but still the same order of undefined behavior & bugbears" then yeah? It's gotten a lot more... more.

Oh good, I’d hate for the industry to have stagnated :P

Even still, you could argue for a sub-$5 per-account value based on what the going rate is on the black market for stolen accounts. Some platforms it's in the $1-2 range.

Ah, hidden in plain sight, the seventh letter of the alphabet being G.

Even proof of work was not novel, there were proposals for fighting email spam with similar techniques. Bitcoin's fortune is combining the right pieces at the right time and getting sufficient buy-in to become relevant and more difficult to ignore.

I wonder how much of this is syntactic familiarity (from training) and how much of this is needing to attend to balanced parentheses.

I don't use lisp often enough to have played with getting GPT to lisp with me, but I have played a bit with getting it to read and write Datalog (which I suspect is even more scarce in The Pile dumps). It's ok at recognition but misses details. I haven't seen it produce much of value yet. But it can write JavaScript for days, and has no problem balancing parentheses and brackets there, even without compiler/tree-sitter support.

If I had spare experimenting bandwidth I would look into whether fine-tuning for Lisp format and conventions would show a significant boost in performance..

I find its Lisp generation to not just be syntactically wrong but conceptually inadequate. It's inability to generalize across languages is one of the big reasons I'm skeptical about language models' general intelligence.