New Ed! Not much particularly new info, just a general lament and summary of the state of tech and how much has been pinned on magical thinking. Has some wonderfully quotable sections.
What if what we’re seeing today isn’t a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn’t actually capable of doing much more than what we’re seeing today, and what if there’s no clear timeline when it’ll be able to do more? What if this entire hype cycle has been built, goosed by a compliant media ready and willing to take career-embellishers at their word?
Please forgive my addition to the title, as it’s meant to be a play on “Waiting for Godot”, not a comment on the Godot game engine. Wanted to make that more clear than the title alone would.
It’s a poorly chosen title, especially in tech, where godot is overwhelmingly understood to be a game engine.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives.
“In popular culture” section coming in clutch per usual:
The two Argentine developers, Jaun Linietsky & Ariel Manzur, were repeatedly tasked with updating the engine from a period of time from 2001 to 2014, and chose the name “Godot” due to its relation to the play, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but would never actually be completed.
Ed is presuming a high school education from his readers, where kids get hammered with the play whether or not they have any idea what it is
out in the world, ~nobody has heard of the game engine
in my texas high school we read atlash shrugged1 and the davinci code
1: don’t tell my teacher but i sparknotes’d this one
Throwback Thursday: Atlas Shrugged: The Cobra Commander Dialogues
(Based on blog posts now available here.)
I assumed it was an AI company I hadn’t heard of. But the play was my next guess. I have not seen or read the play. I do know that Gandalf and Picard were in a production.
Ed is presuming a high school education from his readers
Hmm, I don’t think ignoring the American audience like that is a good idea, but maybe he has his reasons
Came here to say something like that. Made me raise my eyebrow on why Ed might be talking about the best game engine.
Well maybe tech should stop taking over perfectly good words grumble grumble.
Well half joking; there are much worse culprits than Godot (looking at you Apple) and something like “Still Waiting For Godot” may have made the reference easier to get.
Or a secret, third option:
Glad to hear that the game engine hasn’t shit the bed!
Ed really brings home the feeling that all of the AI-boosting VCs have taken their billions to the roulette table and bet it all on green, doesn’t he?
(Obligatory, “oh thank God it’s not the game engine”)
I like where Ed’s at on this issue, and have all along. I wonder if there’s any analysis to link NFTs and blockchain boosters back to the AI pushers as well? In both cases, you’ve got technology that require huge amounts of GPU power. How much AI hype was over-leveraged NFT scammers trying to shift their compute power into the next profitable scam?
Metaverses too are GPU hungry, not as much though, too consumer focused.
Maybe next we’ll see a return to streaming games, but in VR with rented/subsidized rigs?
Shall we brainstorm other ways that running GPUs at 99% capacity at all times can be used to bilk suckers out of their money?
I wonder if there’s any analysis to link NFTs and blockchain boosters back to the AI pushers as well?
literally the same VCs
compute power to some extent, or repurposing wired-up crypto mining data centres
(Obligatory, “oh thank God it’s not the game engine”)
that was my exact reaction when the thread popped up — it took me a couple seconds to realize the article was authored by Ed and not some asshole in the gaming-to-fascism pipeline still upset because the Godot engine rightfully bans assholes from their collaborative spaces
Shall we brainstorm other ways that running GPUs at 99% capacity at all times can be used to bilk suckers out of their money?
I expect there will be a big push to figure out how to use GPU as generic compute resources, regardless of the drawbacks or inefficiencies. No way these corps are just going to let hundreds of thousands of high end GPU modules sit idle after how much damn money they spent.
I saw this linked in the weekly thread and thought it was about Godot at first, but I thought that was just me. Didn’t expect to see 90% of the people here thought the same thing lol
Ed’s intended audience is probably more familiar with Beckett’s play than some random indie game engine.
