There's a lot of frustrated designers out there who can't accept that their job is to make the company more money. It's not an art project! If you get to have fun and express yourself, that's a nice bonus, but your job is literally just to make the company more money... that's it. Personally, I've never had any problem with that. I think it's a fun challenge - the need for revenue is just another creative constraint. I blame the "design media" and art schools for a lot of this, because they sell the dream that designer = artist when we all know that's just not the job.

I've done a complete U-turn on my opinion on open source AI. We should be careful (and probably disallow release) of models on par with current open source Astra/Opus level models. AI is now reverse engineering games from binaries and remaking them. Reverse engineering games is a very hard problem. If this is possible then reverse engineering banking software, ID systems (Aadhaar), flights, etc is possible too. A game ships its binary to every player. Bank and Aadhaar backends are protected by servers, but it's unlikely the security teams at these are smarter than advanced AI that can do this to games. We are protected rn because a Claude will refuse to tick "I'm not a robot" on websites. When OSS models don't respect that, we have a looming cybersecurity problem. Apologies I didn't see this earlier.

My guess is the ring is already “dead” and John is keeping the hologram out of pure will. Hal’s hologram knows it. When John asked how much juice was left, the hologram didn’t answer. The only reason I can think of is that it knows John’s reaction could make him lose concentration. I feel John is about to fly next episode, so I’m curious if he’ll just make his own battery.