"All it takes to run" might be fair if you paid $2400, but right now the total price is way closer to $10k (almost 5k for the RAM and 2k each for the GPUs). Today that is a lot of expensive hardware.
512gb 2400mhz ddr4 ram = $1600 not $5000. https://www.ebay.com/itm/188284985172
You can get creative and source 2-3 2080ti 22gb from China for about $250 a piece. You can either be resourceful and find a way or find a whole bunch of excuses.
> You can either be resourceful and find a way or find a whole bunch of excuses.
How about addressing this false dichotomy with the likelihood that someone who is new or interested in a tech isn't willing to drop thousands of dollars on used hardware for a whim or learning exercise.
I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.
No but lots of republicans vote for them actually hoping for smaller less interventionary government, believe it or not. The voters that give them power do not view it as that euphemism.
It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.
Most of these republicans/libertarians only want the government to leave them alone. They don't care when a company they aren't affiliated with is regulated. You can see Marc Andreesen celebrating the government's decision on Anthropic. Similarly, when Silicon Valley Bank went bankrupt, libertarians such as David Sacks were loudly calling for government bailouts. It's just hypocrisy all the way up.
The entire movement of conservatism in America is a propaganda operation oriented around manufacturing consent for a return to the Gilded Age. It is entirely bankrupt of morals and has been from the beginning. If you personally are a conservative, now is a good time to take a good hard honest look at the history of your movement in American politics. There might even still be time to realign yourself with a movement that isn't actively seeking to harm you.
This is garbage reposted in every HN article that starts to talk about any related to politics.
I will gladly live in a conservative county over progressive one. And reading this paragraph in a article about AI is complete nonsense. This is a go touch grass moment if you needed one.
I personally repost it everywhere because it is an hypothesis that I believe has strong weight of evidence behind it, and I think it's important to repeat.
Your personal preferences and beliefs have little to do with conservatism at large and the motivations of the powerful people who promote it. If you want to reach a place of open minded debate and discussion in which there can be different legitimate approaches to governing, you have to start with an honest assessment of the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.
The reason it's relevant in an article about AI should be self-evident. AI is powerful, the industry is already massive, and the leaders in that industry are involved in quite a bit of political maneuvering. You may choose to ignore politics, but politics will not ignore you.
The Democratic Party are the one losing elections they should trivially have won therefore it is clearly the Republicans, vile as they are, that have a more "honest assessment of the world as it is".
How is that relevant? I never mentioned any political party. But now that you mention it, look up the Southern Strategy, a lot of this stuff dates all the way back to Goldwater.
"The entire movement of conservatism in America is a propaganda operation"
This is nonsense. I could easily say the same thing about progressives highlighting/cherrypicking some of the worst living situations in America today.
The label of libertarian is thought of as a binary by non-libertarians, leading to this perception of hypocrisy, but that is not the way actual libertarians think with the exception of a tiny minority. Libertarianism is a spectrum, just as any other political affiliation or belief system.
This idea that if some group isn’t all reading from the same sheet of music you imagine they should be reading from means they are hypocrites is just wrong.
That's exactly right. The US Government is ruthlessly efficient - yeah, people don't want to hear that. Sure, there are Pentagon-related boondoggles, but that's different.
Try working in a government office - you will be lucky to get a water cooler - BYOW.
"Small government" means "fuck you, I got mine, now let's gut the IRS so I can do some white collar crime".
I miss the days when that was the argument. Maybe I'm getting old, but growing up the general categorization was that Democrats were for the working class, opposed to large corporations, and for individual freedoms and Republicans were for a small federal government, balanced budgets, and a grab bag of "conservative" views that often rolled up to traditional family and christian values.
Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.
The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.
In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?
There's vastly more to politics than that. There's even more to "small" vs "big" government than that, or to who really promises and delivers what. This convenient reduction to handy little words obscures all that, to the point where it stops mapping to reality in a meaningful way. It's a fictional abstraction.
If anything, your question reduces to making one party sound incompetent or deceitful, I don't know if that's intended. (And considering that aspect of the party is another fun can full of real-life worms.)
Based on the parent comment, I think it's more "one party sound incompetent and the other deceitful". There was a senator who used to say that American politics was a contest between the stupid party and the evil party.
It's stupidly obvious. Politics is about how we organize government and distribute power to solve the problems of living together as a society of individuals. "Big" vs "small" government is a particular way of interpreting one aspect of that. It's an important aspect and a useful perspective, but even if taken at face value it completely neglects other important things like the rules for making policy and their actual content. Of course, the face value of big vs small has become a mask for something else.
But if you've spent the time since your teens to come to the opposite conclusion in spite of everything going on around, then I suspect there will be very little I can say to you that will make sense to you.
Oh everything you said makes sense so long as I imagine wrongly that everyone is doing what's best for society, and that's why they got into politics.
But politics is really about negotiating ownership in companies that the politician will approve for government projects. And if you aren't doing that, then no other politicians will care to work with you, because it's not profitable for them. You'll be an irrelevant politician that accomplished nothing.
Which side of the aisle you sit on is more typically about where your lobbyists' marketing team agreed would better depict their brand, actually having very little to do with big or small government. Both sides want big government because it means more money for big projects for companies that they will or do own in part.
Sorry to dishearten you if you planned on going into politics.
Well, you could stop undermining what you seem to care for.
You don't have to "wrongly imagine" anything. Everyone not doing what's "best for society" is how the world works, authoritarianism and the rule of rich elites is the default that everything wants to regress to. There are only ever islands where people managed to push this back towards the corners and make room for more of us.
Human societies have taken millenia to come up with a system (or a few similar systems) which have a chance of holding things somewhat at bay. Is it perfect? Far from it. Does it work? Just honestly compare how things are for disadvantaged or even normal, ordinary people in places that work differently. Could it be better? You bet, there's lots to criticize. But notice that you _can_ criticize. Usually, elsewhere, you can't. Is it getting worse? Yes. The lesson is that you have to keep defending this system that gives you a chance to hold people to account and remove them from power.
Comments like yours above, which claim that everything is maximally bad and rigged, do nothing but help things decay further. "There's nothing that can be done! It's the same everywhere! Why even try?" That's how you get other people to stop caring, too, and then the real assholes take over. You're playing right into their hands. You think it's already as bad as it gets? You think you're no longer naive? Well, then maybe you're doing this on purpose; or you're just a new kind of naive. Either way: you are an active part of this problem.
> You think people pointing out problems in a broken system are the problem.
Not what I said, nor does it follow from what I said. Also, not really what you were doing. There's a difference between pointing out problems, or using the existence of problems to trash the reputation of something or someone. Problems are easy to find. It's a convenient excuse to hide behind. But in the end, you can tell from how things are being presented and contextualized, and from what conclusion is actually being promoted.
I'm not going to keep discussing this with you. I think I've done enough to counter this corrosive narrative, no matter where it comes from.
If you're genuine and you do in fact care, you might want to ponder what you're doing, and if it's making things better or worse.
Okay, I've reflected on our conversation. Please let me try to explain my position. At the end, you'll have my answer to what you wanted me to ask myself.
You have your opinion, and you're free to express it. However, you chose to express it in a way commonly used by the enemies of democracy and liberty. That does not make you one of them, not at all. But it should give you pause. Why do they say the things they do? They are after a certain effect. Is this the effect that you also want?
They use it, have used it, are using it, because they know it's effective in undermining trust in the system and because it helps their agenda of replacing it with something much worse. This has worked in the past, and we can see it working in the present. Yes, the system is flawed, but your way of expressing opinions about it is demonstrably not helping to make it better, on the contrary.
As I tried to make clear, there are constructive and destructive ways to "point out problems". That's why I asked you to consider the danger of your words. So, of course you can provide opinions, but you are also responsible for their effect, and if you do care, you should be mindful of it. Criticism is fine and necessary, but a I said before, what conclusion it promotes matters a great deal.
My goal in this conversations was mainly to not let your position stand undisputed, to show up how unfairly reductive it is, and how much that only serves to undermine what we should all care for.
I did not intend to insult you. I did point out what I perceive as flaws and real-life consequences of your position, and I turned your heavy insinuation of naivete back at you. I stand by the stance that comments like yours above are problematic, for the reasons given.
I do realize you feel insulted nonetheless. I also realize that my comments were lacking empathy for your position. In the end, I do care more about pushing back this narrative than about how you feel, but maybe that's the wrong way to go about it. My words were harsh, and you must have felt bad. For that, I feel bad, and I'm sorry.
Differences of opinion exist, and discussing them and their consequences is a necessary part of dealing with them. This is in fact what peace looks like, and how you defend and preserve it: by talking it out. And having said that, I again wish you a nice day.
So to expand on your take, I would encourage you to consider, before you turn 70, that what you've suggested has been tried before. By me and many others before me. And thus far, it hasn't solved anything. In fact, it has empowered politicians ability to capitalize on the trust of the voter to further their personal gains.
If you've already tried and succeeded, point to where that has happened.
But if you are zealous to push a solution, without considering what has already been tried before you, then you'll have set yourself up for disappointment. And you'll have only yourself to blame as many of us have already experienced before you.
The second biggest problem with this comment is that the conclusion we must take from it if we buy into your statement is that we shouldn’t bother voting.
We would not have a costly war in Iran, blockaded Strait of Hormuz, $6-7/gallon gas, or blanket import tariffs hiking up the prices of consumer staple goods if we voted for the “party that promises bigger government and does deliver.”
I would submit the idea that the latter party is consistently misrepresented and has been the only one that has delivered smaller budget deficits anytime recently.
See also: Tax Cut and Jobs Act, the Kansas Experiment.
The truth of the matter is, our elites are undertaxed at historic levels. At no point in our lifetime have the wealthy been taxed at a lower rate than they are today. There isn’t actually anything wrong with government spending outside of the endless/aimless wars (started by…). It’s the revenue side that deserves scrutiny.
Considering the Trump administration's policy on Isreal / Palestine / Iran seems to be a direct follow-on from the previous administration, I'm not so sure about that assertion.
US still has the second amendment and the most guns per person of any country in the world (more than 10x the average), yet I don't see anybody "fight back against the benefactors"
> You either have lost touch with reality so far to be unable to understand what "oppressed" means or you're just parotting someone else who suffers from that affliction.
This 100% applies to you. If you can’t see ICE actions as oppressive, you’ve definitely lost touch with reality.
ICE is just enforcing law. Also they're enforcing the law regardless of the skim color. There are plenty of white people which have been removed from the USA by ICE, consequently invalidating the previous thesis of it being about white/straight people.
"This changed in June 2025, just weeks after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, reportedly frustrated with the slow increase in ICE arrests, called the head of every ICE Field Office into a room in Washington, DC and ordered them to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” Following this meeting, the Trump administration launched its first splashy raid of an American city, sending hundreds of agents into Los Angeles and sparking fiery confrontations between protestors and federal agents." [0]
That's what you're talking about when you say "just enforcing the law"?
> Also they're enforcing the law regardless of the skim color.
"Publicly available ICE and research datasets show clear shifts in who is being arrested and detained—large growth in interior arrests and detention of people without U.S. criminal convictions and major variation across states—but they do not provide a consistent, complete public breakdown of ICE arrests and detention by race and nationality at the county level, so any precise county-level racial or national origin tallies are not available from the cited public sources." [1]
So how do you know that? Are you just guessing? You're accusing me of the exact thing you're doing. Honestly it sounds to me like you're the one suffering from some serious brainrot.
The US has plenty of guns. The idea that there aren't sufficient guns for some kind of armed resistance is absurd. The issue is cultural - we'd apparently rather fire them off in schools and malls and movie theaters.
> D takes away guns from the population so they can't effectively fight back against the benefactors
Please remind us when Democrats have "taken away guns", and while you're at it when were those small arms last used to fight back against a tyrannical government?
Not in the US, and not addressing whether the governments controlled were tyrannical or not (in many cases the rebels were definitely bad) but there are lots of wars around the world that were started by people with small arms and home made bombs that built up into full scale wars.
Neither of those are "taking away your guns" and you forgot to answer my second question. Is concealed carry essential to overthrow a tyrannical government?
It raises the risks for the enforcers taking a paycheck to oppress the [subset of the] population. Bullies think twice when they can be punched square in the face.
Riiiiight, it doesn't just make the bully invest billions in military grade weapons to be used against civilians. Soon you'll have superdrones with superguns patrolling the US and you will still be clinging to your right to carry a musket.
You're right they don't want to carry a musket, but that's because muskets are not sexy. They don't want superdrones either, because superdrones are not sexy.
2A people just like guns. Guns, culturally, are sexy.
I don't think it's sexy, though I wish people would stop using this word for things like... war machines. Gun culture is just a subculture in the US, and I agree weaponized drones aren't 1:1 with guns to gun nuts.
> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
Right, but both of those examples are terrible ideas on their face.
On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.
And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.
As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.
Not that I disagree, but it should be asked: Retribution for what? The answers are, generally:
>COVID restrictions
>The state of the economy
>The state of culture, broadly-speaking
>Letting a black man become president, and the attendant ramifications (intrinsic and extrinsic, cause and effect)
I'll leave it to readers to judge. (You can probably guess what I, as a progressive, think of these impetuses, in driving half-ish of the country to vote for everything Trump embodies. And, frankly, what drove the other half-ish of the country to vote for Biden and Harris.)
There was like 70 million Americans who voted for Trump, most likely for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes multiple reasons and sometimes probably even conflicting reasons. People are complicated, saying that half a country did something because of some few reasons usually over-simplifies so much it gets harder for you to actually understand what is happening/happened.
Why would "EU perspective" make it look more or less complicated? People are people everywhere, regardless of country.
> the American electorate is relatively simple-minded
It's favorable for many people who don't agree with the current administration to believe so, I'm not sure how true it is in practice, and again, I believe believing so might hurt your chances of actually understanding things properly. That sort of bias really get in the way.
>belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
> Those days are long gone.
> Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.
So repubblicans have not been about small government for a long time and Trump is not even a pure-blood repubblican so it was to be expected that he would do the thing that repubblicans have not been about for a long time...what in the circular reasoning? Oh and please name one repubblican president who successfully reduced spending or "made government smaller"
I like systems programming work of all kinds. I have worked in telecommunications, interfacing with programmable logic controls and now work in shared web hosting infrastructure. In my free time I usually develop games and game technology. I would love to work on game technology professionally. Please have a look at my portfolio: https://joelschumacher.de/projects.
I feel like this whole problem is just made up. Back in the day, when I played lots of Counter Strike, we had community servers. If a cheater joined, some admin was already online and kicked them right away. I'm sure we hit some people that were not actually cheaters, but they would just go to another server. And since there was no rank, no league, no rewards (like skins, drops, etc.), there was no external reward for cheating. It annoys me that cheating in competitive video games seems like a bigger problem than it has been in the past for no good reason.
Well its because we don't use community servers anymore. Lobbies are created in real time, particularly where SBMM is involved.
It's a bigger problem because in a lobby of 100 people, 1 person cheating ruins it for 99 players. Whereas in a 20 person lobby you can just boot that one person and it only ruins the game for 19 others.
Counter-Strike has been doing this for years. It's called "Overwatch" (even before Blizzards Overwatch came out). And believe it or not it failed to reliably catch actual cheaters AND got non-cheaters in trouble (both repeatedly). A very good player is indistinguishable from a cheater with a good cheat. Sometimes people just get super lucky for a few rounds and you might get judged based on that.
> A very good player is indistinguishable from a cheater with a good cheat.
I played COD4 a lot, though not competitively. I used to say that I had a bad day if I didn't get called a cheater once.
I didn't cheat, never have, but some people are just not aware of where the ceiling is.
The cheaters that annoyed us back then were laughably obvious. They'd just hold the button with a machine gun and get headshots after headshots, or something blatant like that.
> some people are just not aware of where the ceiling is
True of everything. Getting good just lets you see the skill gaps. I've sunk a serious chunk of time into both pool and chess. In both I'd be willing to take a bet that I can beat the median player with my eyes closed (in pool, closing them after walking the table but before getting down on the shot).
And in both of those activities, there are still like 10-20 levels of "person at skill level A should always win against person at skill level B" between me and someone who is ACTUALLY good at pool or chess. Being charitable, in the grand scheme of things I might be an intermediate player.
I was imagining specific things that are impossible, not just things that would be unlikely.
For example, in NBA2k there are a lot of players running around who are like 12 feet tall. The client has to render that, and the client could have a “if another client tells us their player is more than 8 feet tall, it is a cheater”
I agree that use of trigonometry is almost always a smell, but e.g. in games there are so many cases where angles are just more useful and intuitive. I just grep-ed for "angle" in a game of mine and I find it for orienting billboard particles (esp. for particles a single angle is much better than a quat for example). Also for an FPS camera controller. It's much simpler to just store a pitch and a yaw and change that with mouse movement, than storing a quat. You can't really look at a quat and know what kind of rotation it represents without opening a calculator. And I also use it for angle "fudging" so if you want to interact with something if you are roughly looking at it, you need to configure an angle range that should be allowed. It just makes sense to configure this as an angle, because we have some intuition for angles. So I guess for computations angles are probably usually wrong, but they are great for intuition (they are low-dimensional and linear in amount of rotation). That makes them a better human interface for rotations. And as soon as you computations start with angles, of course they find their way into the rest of the code.
I'd pretty much always store pitch/yaw for a first/third person controller. This makes it trivial to modify the values in response to input - `pitch += mouse_delta.y` and to clamp the pitch to a sane range (-90 to 90 deg) afterwards.
You can then calculate a quaternion from the pitch/yaw and do whatever additional transforms you wish (e.g. temporary rotation for recoil, or roll when peeking around a corner).
Quaternions break down for other situations. They cannot represent a rotation greater than 360 degrees. In an engine like Unity (which stores rotation as quats), you can use arbitrary Euler angles in the editor and it will work fine, but the scene file has to store 2 things. There is an additional m_LocalEulerAnglesHint property that covers this edge case.
I quite like modern C++, so I really tried to make it work for gamedev, but I think you can't really do it. You can use all the modern C++ features that are not in the standard library though! I am working on a little game the last few months and after a while I just decided to not use any of the C++ standard library (I just use a few C headers) and make my own Vector, Array, Span, String, FlatMap. And using those the game compiles really fast. If I touch a header that is included almost everywhere (the big game state struct), I can compile and link (mold) in ~300ms. If I touch player.cpp I compile in 250ms. That is mostly good enough for me, but I am thinking about the "game code as dynamic library" thing myself.
I always thought CMake was good enough. I use FetchContent for all external dependencies and git submodules + add_directory for all internal dependencies. It took me a while to figure out that this was the simplest thing that works reliably though. I have used vcpkg and conan extensively and have completely given up on them.
I don't use C++ modules, because afaik they are still mostly broken. Without modules clangd works wonderfully and has been working wonderfully for a few years. I really, really like it. I think it can be done! I am missing reflection though, but if I would really want to use it, I'd probably just use clang -ast-dump instead of the new reflection functionality.
I think the standard library is good, but if you pull in ANY of it's headers you add a couple hundred milliseconds to every translation unit. So when making games (and only then), I avoid the standard library.
What I do like and use is overloading, references, templates, concepts, lambdas, enum classes, user defined literals, constexpr, operator overloading for math (!), little syntax stuff like structured binding declarations, "auto" and range based for. I also made my own little fmt (like https://riki.house/fmt). C++ is a much nicer language than C imo, even without the standard library.
Note that if you want to go a bit further, you should make your own minimal build system that replaces CMake. That alone will make your project compile much faster!
I've made my own in Python that generates Ninja files only - and it's surprisingly not that much work (especially if Claude Code can help you).
But CMake only reruns, when CMakeLists.txt has changed. That doesn't happen a lot after the core of the project has been set up for me. Especially not when I am tweaking a game mechanic or something.
Also if you want your project to compile with Ninja on Linux, but also with MSVC and you want cross-compilation (on Linux for Windows) and an Emscripten build (I do want all of those), then rebuilding CMake is quite a lot of work.
Sounds interesting! Have you published this somewhere? I wonder how well this works when you want to compile some complex dependencies. Have you compared compile times between your solution and when using CMake?
I loved the gym and it did help my psyche. That is very clear to me. But now I don't go to the gym anymore, because I have a very stubborn radial tunnel syndrome in my right arm and my knee osteoarthritis is worse than ever. Of course both of those things make me angry and anxious. While I am absolutely positive that exercise helps your psyche, I would not be surprised if the majority of this correlation is actually from a common cause (it might also be stress in general - i.e. no time for exercise), lack of financial resources or just a bad place of living, etc.
I feel like this is ultimately uninteresting. This doesn't change anyone's image of these companies. We know they are evil. They have done worse and they will do worse. They never got a meaningful punishment and I have no reason to believe they will. All they get is outrage on the internet, which is effectively meaningless to them.
The files being examined right now shows me that there is nothing bad enough to actually make anything happen, no matter how absurdly evil it is. Are we too easily distracted? Or are we too used to inhumanity now? Or are the powerful simply more powerful than most of the rest of the planet?
I am sort of questioning my use of LLMs again after, first reluctantly, starting to use them multiple times a day. This story seems like it was intended to be an allegory for LLM-use though I know it couldn't have been.
It's an allegory about trusting "best practices", standardized bodies of knowledge¹, and "that's the way it's always been done". Not that those things necessarily don't work, they do in the story as well as in real life, but they need to adapt to change and the story illustrates what happens when they harden from best practice into unquestioned dogma.
¹ There's even a BoK for software developers, the SWEBOK, but I've never met anybody who's read it.
I think it's more about social stratification than bodies of knowledge. The knowledge is treated as a class signifier, especially by the protanogist. In the bit with the friend, the new training he didn't have was practically useful, but, more than that, it sharpened the gap between the "haves" (went to a good school) and "have-nots".
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