I guess the question is what is "truly creative" for you? Does Half-Life Alyx count? How about the original Half-Life? Pong? Outer Wilds?
To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?
While the philosophy is always interesting on what an original thought is, in this context most folks use terms like "truly creative" as a proxy for "something folks enjoy that doesn't feel like a copy of something else". Emphasis on _feel_.
yea, if thats the case then I feel that AAA studios release creative things all the time. GTA for example, Alyx to name two. I guess it is always easier to buy creativity when you are a giant studio.
I think there is still roughly the same number of worthwhile games that get released each year, they are just buried by a ever increasing pile of shit.
Or what the indie space is complaining about recently: copycats as soon as they show anything of their ostensibly original idea, vibe coded and released with a similar name as soon as possible.
Which isn't a new problem, it's just a lot faster and more prevalent. I really hope Valve (the premier marketplace for PC and indie games, alongside Itch) cracks down on it and hands out things like a "seal of quality" to separate slop from serious attempts at making games.
(because they earn money from everything and they have no real competition they don't actually crack down on slop, just like the various app stores don't care much about shovelware as long as it earns them money).
This has been my feeling as well. Even less so actually. There are realllly good games release nowadays. Like literally insane level of quality. But you also get an insane amount of stinkers. And those stinkers are increasingly coming from AAA studies.
There is shovelware at any level, but at the same time I think indie games have been a more consistent stream of good memorable entries than big budget studios the last 10 years.
I really have to rack my mind to find think of anything that I feel has been memorable the last decade, and even then half of them are AA titles. Nioh 2. KCD2. Expedition 33. Yakuza: Like A Dragon but not the sequel. The Elden Ring DLC. Prey 2017. Doom 2016 and Eternal. I guess Stalker 2 has been getting pretty good too.
For good indie games I can drop dozens of names without stopping to think. There's Hollow Knight and Silksong, Hedon, The Drifter, Lunacid, Cruelty Squad, Voin, Paradise Killer, Blue Prince, Fallen Aces, Not For Broadcast, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Immortality, Axiom Verge, The Blind Prophet, Cross Code, Cultist Simulator, Astalon, Dread Delusion, The Witness, The Signifier, ... I can keep going.
I don’t understand some of the things he’s writing in this article.
Why does it matter if the author is Jewish? He mentions it multiple times as if that fact would make himself unfitting to be the lead in the movie…
Like there’s this sentence which is confusing to me:
”I remember thinking, They’re trying to take the Jew off my face, and it ain’t going to happen. All I wanted to do was go home, to ethnic New York, where I belonged. I knew I was no leading man. I knew my place.”
This is very confusing to me. I don’t understand where the author is coming from.
There’s even this part:
”“You’re saying you’re not right for it because you’re Jewish,” Mike said.
“Well, because Benjamin’s so not Jewish.”
There was a pause. Then Mike said, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.””
What the heck does any of this mean? Jewish inside? What?
> Why does it matter if the author is Jewish? He mentions it multiple times as if that fact would make himself unfitting to be the lead in the movie…
Perception on this has shifted quite a bit. Today, I don't know that this would be an issue (but maybe I'm wrong). In the early days of Hollywood, Jewish people tended to work behind the scenes and not as leading characters. In the 1960s things were changing.
Media or events from outside your living memory need an annotated guide providing context if you want to reason about them.
We watched The Bad Seed in class and spent some time talking about the drinks cart as a plot point until it was explained to us that people actually drank that much.
As Hoffman points out, he looks ethnic, i.e. Jewish. He's pointing out that, in the 1960s, someone who looks like him would absolutely not be named "Benjamin Braddock" or live the kind of stereotypical WASP-y California life depicted in the film. In that sense, he's an unconventional casting choice for the character.
> What the heck does any of this mean? Jewish inside? What?
Nichols is saying that he's made an intentional decision to re-characterize Braddock's character using more stereotypically Jewish qualities. Hoffman's portrayal is anxious and alienated, and this has special resonance with a Jewish audience (particularly in the 1960s) watching a movie that's facially a drama-comedy about polite, WASPy society.
I don’t understand this though. How can someone “look Jewish”? And why would someone “who looks like him” not be able to live the upscale California life?
I took a look at a young Dustin Hoffman on Google Images. He looks like a regular white dude with black hair? Somewhat similar to Al Pacino (who isn’t Jewish).
The same way someone can look like any ethnic group: there's some genetics, and a much larger heap of stereotypes.
> And why would someone “who looks like him” not be able to live the upscale California life?
It takes place in the 1960s. At that point, American Jews were not as fully assimilated into broader white American culture. That has changed quite a bit in the last 60 years.
(This is a trope from the period, and applies to other groups as well. The wedding scene in The Godfather has a similar message behind it.)
> Somewhat similar to Al Pacino (who isn’t Jewish).
Italians and Jews often look similar because Ashenazim (European Jews) are mostly Southern European i.e. Italian in their admixture[1].
I think maybe the confusion is that I’m an American of South Asian descent. My parents immigrated to the United States a few decades ago from South Asia. To me all these people just look like white people and I can’t really tell how they would look ethnic or different aside from maybe hair color. But plenty of British people like James Bond actors also have black hair. But maybe they look distinct to other white people I don’t know.
Anyway this is all pretty interesting. Thanks for taking the time to write those responses. I may not fully understand what’s going on with this article but I do feel like I know more than I did a few hours ago.
> I think maybe the confusion is that I’m an American of South Asian descent. My parents immigrated to the United States a few decades ago from South Asia. To me all these people just look like white people and I can’t really tell how they would look ethnic or different aside from maybe hair color.
Yeah, I can understand the confusion from your perspective. You don't have the context. The US has a broad history of discrimination.
In 2026, there's a lot less. In the 1960s it was still common for country clubs (fancy golf courses and social clubs, more or less) to prohibit Jewish people from joining; this was an issue at some clubs even into the 1990s.
(Since you brought up Italians), Italians were also discriminated against in the US, but more in the 1800s and early 1900s; by the 1960s, Italians were largely integrated, although as many were/are Catholic, they would be excluded from 'WASP' - White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Around the same time that Italians faced a lot of discrimination, Irish did too, as they were also largely Catholic.
If you're familiar with redlining as a discrimination practice, to give you an idea of popular discrimination targets, Wikipedia says:
> Redlining has mostly been directed against African Americans, as well as Mexican Americans in the Southwestern United States, Jewish Americans, and Italian Americans
But that's not an exclusive list of discrimantion targets, just those that were large enough to target when home lending started getting more organized.
You also had racial covenants prohibiting selling land to non-whites, where that would exclude African Americans, most Asians, often Jewish people, maybe Hispanics and Italians and Irish. Those were made void in 1968, but it takes time and effort to remove them from deeds, so you might run into them.
That makes perfect sense. It's all a question of what things you attuned to. To you they all look the same but to others not. Jews in the US faced a lot of discrimination. Even into the 1970's you'd find things like housing complexes that would not accept Jewish people. Country clubs that would not accept Jewish people. In the 1950's and 1960's universities would have "quotas" for Jews. Even up to the 1990's (and maybe even today) there were clubs and groups that discriminated against Jews. Ethnic Jews are somewhat genetically distinct and so do have somewhat different "looks". It can be minor stuff to you, certainly not as large differences as between people with an "asian" look and "white" (and what you consider "white" is probably different than what some other people consider "white).
No problem! I think it's actually pretty funny/interesting how these classifications, which are ultimately mostly socialized/arbitrary, shift over time. These days, there's certainly much less cultural salience to Nichols' executive choices in the film.
In Star Trek they don’t have television. I remember there was an episode where it is mentioned as a dead medium from the 20th century.
I’m guessing they don’t have films either.
They do have written books though.
Now the Star Trek TNG film Star Trek First Contact takes place in the 21st century and features rock and roll and characters talking in “modern” parlance.
I’m guessing that in between the 21st century and the 24th century mankind advanced and stopped watching tv and movies and went back to reading books.
Perhaps they advanced and abandoned social media as well. The Star Trek’s version of forums and the internet could be an idealized version of Hacker News where everyone actually follows the rules and Dang the AI moderator can just chill and not do much. It’s very possible.
Many people spend hours browsing Tik Tok rather than watching film or television.
Even long form YouTube videos are highly popular. Many folks spend time watching those rather than movies or tv. I believe Tom Hanks was speaking about this many years ago.
That being said….
I remember growing up and my teachers would always emphasize the importance of reading. I’m sure it would be a great thing for humanity if everyone spent their free time reading books rather than on film or television. In such a scenario would people complain about job loss then? This could be a fruitful idea for a science fiction short story come to think of it.
This is my thinking. TikTok is very entertaining. I can’t do hours, but 30 minutes to an hour is great. Compare it to an unswipable hours long sporting event, 30 minutes looking for the right movie you quit 30 minutes in or have to pause till another day because something comes up, or tv shows with unresolved endings that leave you feeling like you are in a toxic relationship-hating the commitment but afraid of the sense of loss.
Habitual use of shorter and shorter form content trains you to expect gratification faster and faster. There is most certainly a better reward for delaying gratification. A really good movie can leave you on a complete high or completely devastated. I'm pretty certain tiktok cannot. It's cheap quick entertainment but if you get used to that fast shallow enjoyment you can't hold on long enough for the good stuff.
I understand. The same arguments have been with us for a long time. See Conrad Gessner's arguments against the printing press.
Since rolling back to at least the pre-radio days is unlikely, we might focus on educating consumers in a way that empowers them rather taking a top-down approach to control what people are allowed to do because we know what is best for everyone.
Something I realized recently was that when I watch videos in any form (feature film, documentary, dramatic or comedy series, or short) I have this nagging feeling I'm wasting time. I think it's because watching is such a passive activity.
When I read, I don't get that feeling. Even here on HN where it is mostly wasting time.
I think this is why so much media has viewer comments. It's something to engage with and lose awareness of the passing time.
This isn’t true and this level of cynicism is really unhelpful.
They originally used Gmail in that way. Many years later they stopped. This was a major victory for privacy. The fact they seem to be doing it now again is bad. Saying they’ve “always done this” is the kind of empty conspiratorial cynicism that dampens action and makes people feel it is futile to notice these changes or speak up about them.
The fact that they did it in the beginning and are doing it now makes the whole “well, there was a period of time when they didn’t do this” seem like a minor footnote to the notion that “they’ve always done this”. Even though the statement isn’t strictly true, it sure seems like the cynicism is warranted now and, with the benefit of hindsight, was back then too.
Meta tracks you on every page that has any Meta script, such as a Facebook like button. They're just better at tracking than Google is, amazingly, because meta plays dirtier.
I don’t think it’s conspiratorial to question how strong the firewall was between your Gmail content and Google’s algorithms. Whether or not they actually leveraged that understanding for targeted ads is somewhat beside the point.
I think the way computers developed is kind of an interesting example of this in the real world. Babbage basically realized the idea of a modern computer, but tried to build a too-complicated 'supercomputer' (40 decimal digit precision!) because he didn't know how incredibly useful a much simpler, more limited computer could be. We had to wait another 75 years and spend an incredible amount of money to develop relay and vacuum-tube supercomputers, before realizing that the idea could be scaled down, and something like a PDP-8 / PLC / microcontroller was incredibly useful for industrial control and, with sufficient cleverness, even do a lot of scientific computing.
I think if you went back in time you could pay some power loom engineers to build you a pretty decent 4-8 bit microcontroller operating at 1-5 Hz (comparable to power looms at the time) and computer-controlled textiles would have paid for the computer revolution 75-100 years ahead of time.
Even after Babbage's failure to introduce us to the information age, there were a fair amount of competing approaches to how to build a computer. In a different world, a non-Von-Neumann architecture was selected.
Something like the original computers, Eniac etc, were actually generally useful. It was useful to very large enterprises that previously relied on an army of human "computers" but it was useful for them so it stimulated refinements like the PDP-8.
I think if you went back in time you could pay some power loom engineers to build you a pretty decent 4-8 bit microcontroller operating at 1-5 Hz (comparable to power looms at the time) and computer-controlled textiles would have paid for the computer revolution 75-100 years ahead of time.
Would it? You have to remember that the further you go back in time, the cheaper labor is relative to machinery. In the 19th century, you could pay a person for a multitude of customizations and so the market for custom cloth might not have been what you imagined.
There was an incredible amount of investment into high-speed programmable power looms, and there were a number of innovations (later rediscovered by computer architects) targeted at 'card-saving techniques' to reduce the labor required to card-punch the designs, and to reduce the down-time of the looms. 'Double Data Rate' card readers (with a design interleaved on two chains running at half frequency), SIMD-style one-reader/many-loom setups, 'cross-border' looms that switched between two separate card loops just like a 'branch' instruction, machines to copy chains of punch cards.
What you're saying might have been true in the 18th century or earlier, but things were highly mechanized by the 19th century, and there was a lot of motivation to keep the big expensive looms highly utilized and amortize investment in punch card sets across lots of production runs.
There's a plausible version where no matter what weird detours and dead-ends a human society takes on the tech tree, as long as there continue to be wars every few generations, the needed progress keeps getting made and the dead-ends or even just over-reaches get pruned afterward.
You can go down the wrong rabbit holes for a long while in peace-time (e.g. string theory), but war-time is a crucible for correct ideas.
I agree with you, though my own motivation is not centered on war, but (a long tail of) existential risks facing humanity, mostly centered around collective action problems.
Yes I was always taught in school that one shouldn’t cite encyclopedias. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are tertiary sources. When writing papers in school and college, secondary sources were what we were supposed to cite.
I find it interesting that, several years ago when discussing AI, folks used to focus on how automation would first come for blue collar work. Things like driving being automated and truck drivers replaced. And then eventually on the horizon we would see things like this.
But we still have no self driving cars. Seems like the automation came by in the opposite direction. Perhaps driving will actually be the final thing automated.
While I agree with your statement overall, as someone who drives everyday in LA alongside Waymos without anyone inside of them I must disagree with this aspect of it.
A better formulation would be: we don't know if we have self-driving cars.
Because if it became fashionable for pedestrians to wear large green dresses with red balls, and everybody would wear that, we have no idea what the AI would do.
This is a general point rather than an argument supporting the GP comment, but it can be shockingly hard to know what the correct response to particular situations is, or predict how a system will respond. For example, one system I know had difficulty differentiating people laying on the road from unmapped speedbumps (particularly at night), but was very good at recognizing them standing up. Someone spent a lot of time testing with dummies until perception improved. Another had no idea how to handle people in fursuits and halloween costumes, because it was incorrectly applying animal behavioral models to pedestrians.
That's why the latest self-driving systems include reasoning models that draw from the massive amount of knowledge embedded in LLMs. Language evolved to communicate things that are not here and now after all.
We still have no general self driving cars. What we have is a bunch of geofenced tests. While we are closer than ever, we are still seemingly a long way away from truck drivers being obsolete was foretold over 10 years ago now.
An LLM automating web developers with 99% success rate saves the company millions of dollars and allows them to launch products and features faster.
A truck or a car that has a 99% success rate would be the top threat to society and quickly rise to the leading cause of death under 30 if widely deployed.
“99% success” is too vague to be especially meaningful in such different use cases.
99% successful web development where the 1% missing is security that and the company leaks its entire repository of user data every few months is not good.
99% successful car driving where 99% of 5-year periods have zero accidents per car is an order of magnitude safer than the average driver. (And gut feeling, I suspect approaching the tail-end of the safest drivers on the road.)
>99% successful web development where the 1% missing is security that and the company leaks its entire repository of user data every few months is not good.
It feels like it's happening every Thursday and nobody cares. They just give people credit watch coupons or what's it called, and move on with their business. Worst case, a few pennies in fines.
Well 99.99% is you have a major data breach every decade or so, but there are lots of companies, so on aggregate across all of them it's every Thursday.
But if CVS leaks your purchases on a weekly basis, it's probably going to affect people's willingness to shop there. (Or at least to use non-cash.)
An LLM automating web developers basically puts the company out of business. Why would customers pay a developer when they can just build it themselves?
There are a lot of things that people are capable of doing themselves that they pay other people to do for them.
I agree that LLMs have and will continue to increase the number of activities that people can DIY. But I believe many people will still choose to pay for others to do things on their behalf.
The inconvenient truth is the “desk jobs” involving a human operating a computer are far easier to automate than piloting a physical vehicle through a complex environment… A desk job is doesn’t require lidar and cameras…
It was too easy to assume that an AI would never approach human intelligence and hence would only be used for “boring” jobs like driving.
I’ve long disliked the hype around AI but now see that human intelligence is perhaps slightly overrated, at least in terms of the loftier positions seemingly requiring such.
Claude Opus puts to shame any highly caffeinated “10x” software developer. Not saying it’s perfect, but damn good. It can knock out difficult code analysis/reverse engineering more than 20-40x faster than I can. There was even a time long before AI when people thought the same of me…
Hell, at this point, I’d rather deal with Claude than a low-cost offshore team that puts up crappy implementations with endless go-backs and rewrites. I say this from actual experience, not xenophobia. There likely are some high performing offshore teams, I just wasn’t lucky to have the chance of working with one. Have had a couple of local colleagues that were worse… Claude’s probably much cheaper too.
Unfortunately, the “knowledge worker” jobs historically tended to be higher paid.
On one hand, AI is a major asset to experienced professionals with access.
On the other hand, it robs junior engineers hard-fought experience - much like watching a movie instead of reading the book.
And longer term, I think the entire economic structure of society is going to change. Doctors, lawyers, software developers, engineers — none of these are safe from AI reducing the need for headcount.
human intelligence was always overrated, at least in terms of it's actual value to society. phds are often unemployed or "overqualified" for the roles they apply for, roles that pay the most are often roles which are less deskbound and more client-facing, roles that ai cannot replace.
alot of investment related roles, those require reading human emotions and pleasing people, a pretty face and pleasant demeanor with emotional intelligence helps more than raw iq.
Driving is heavily regulated, and there are a million interest groups lining up to sue to stop self-driving. Imagine all the people who make their money from car crashes, for example.
One way to think about this is that the parts of our brain that are responsible for spatial reasoning and the basic automatic stuff we do day to day to just navigate the worlds are evolutionarily the most sophisticated and oldest. Evolution has so taken over this job that most of the time it's automatic and we don't even think about it, which makes it feel easy even though it's wildly complicated when you actually sit down and try to analyze and intellectualize basic stuff like navigating a 3D space in which almost anything can happen.
Intellectual pursuits are, by comparison, relatively new. Part of the reason they might seem so impressive to us is simply because we can't rely as much on eons of biological evolution, so even though what we are doing most of the time is really simple it seems "smart and sophisticated" compared to the far more complex mental operations that we are lucky are just automatic.
Think about it, you have an entire complicated as hell biological interior system that your brain manages continuously without so much as a conscious thought.
This is also why this hubris around the idea that LLMs rival human intelligence is quite laughable. If anything one of the major reasons they are so "great" is because they don't have to deal with a host of issues themselves (their computation is not responsible for keeping their bodies alive and hearts beating 24/7, data center ops takes care of that, unlike our computational system which, in addition to solving all these intellectual problems, also needs to regulate the body continuously)
Human level embodiment took 10,000x longer to evolve than human level abstract and symbolic information processing, and is also probably 10,000x harder to replicate in an alternative form.
Developers are guilty of making reasonable projections based on contemporary industry trends, and they're getting slapped by unexpected revolution in computer science.
Yeah, as always in AI hard things are easy and easy things are hard. How many times have I heard condescending comments from programmers that radiologists are just about to be replaced by AI. And well, AI turned out to get kind of okayish at programming much faster than being acceptable at being radiologist.
Something I'm noticing a lot is that automation finds easy footholds in unregulated industries because there's no basis to push back on it. And there's a lot more tolerance for poor quality work in unregulated industries too.
I think fully automated driving is not so far off. Once the technofascists have their utopia, they will just allow full self-driving vehicles in every road in the country and the people will deal with it regardless of actual capabilities.
I see your point but if self driving cars existed, worked like advertised and were economically viable they would and should be in every country in the world.
Self driving in a winter storm? Self driving in torrential rain? Self driving when mud covers a sensor it needs? Self driving if it hits someone? Pretty sure Tesla would say you were driving it then.
Exactly. Everything below L4 is _incredibly stressful_ and unpleasant to drive, because you have to be constantly aware and alert without having anything to do.
In the case of Tesla, daring to call such a system "Autopilot" is a breathtaking level of irresponsibility. You are responsible for the vehicle you are driving, practically, morally and legally, even if a companies' marketing and the system itself does its very best to divest you from that simple and obvious truth.
> Everything below L4 is _incredibly stressful_ and unpleasant to drive, because you have to be constantly aware and alert without having anything to do.
Hasn't been my experience for the past year or so, give it a try sometime. Incredibly relaxing and frees up my mind to focus on potential hazards further than just one car length in front of me. Sometimes (don't hate me) frees up my hands/eyes to handle other things that need some temporary attention. Traffic jams, getting cut off by impatient drivers, being stuck behind slow drivers, none of it bothers me. I'm chilling out and talking to my kids and enjoying the scenery.
So basically, you're treating your Tesla as a Level 3 or Level 4 autonomous vehicle, even though its driving system is only Level 2. If you were endangering only yourself, that would be one thing. But you're also endangering other drivers sharing the road.
The "Autopilot" argument is ~5 years old. Teslas no longer have that feature.
The current FSD system has no relation to the old Autopilot, is enormously better, and very pleasant to use. A year ago FSD was nice, but I had to take over occasionally. This year it's much better, and I've yet to see a weakness, aside from some parking issues.
Yes, a "Full Self Driving" system which is not fully self-driving is certainly an improvement over an autopilot that does not auto-pilot. Ain't progress grand.
Pilots still are required to be able to take over immediately for an autopilot system and are responsible and accountable for all those items you list and more.
Calling it autopilot is precisely what it is, calling it self driving would be false marketing.
Shrug, assume bad faith if you want to. It’s exactly how I read it when it was first marketed. I didn’t think it met that definition then at the time, but these days it’s pretty close. Plug in a destination and it works until it hits an exception it can’t handle.
Autonomous driving is something entirely different in my mind. That would be a car good enough to work without driver controls or a remote operator. Nothing on the market meets this definition today.
With this line of reasoning I can sell any car as a plane without wings. It flies, but only off a cliff, and doesn't land, but I only said it flies, not that it lands.
Most people expect other things from something marketed as flying, but specialists know that this is exactly how most things fly. And lawyers know to read the fine print.
/s and argumentum ad absurdum, sorry for eristic tricks.
Broadly speaking, this is proof that there will be no jobs coming after AI.
All past inventions have put some of the most miserable humans out of a job. Farming by hand is hard, so is copying books and don't even get me started on the dullness of making clothes by hand.
Driving all day isn't all that far off, though still much better than the above and definitely better than riding horses all day.
Telegraph operators? Hell no. Dude sitting in an elevator all day? No thanks.
It's always been from the other end. This time around, there's gonna be some 10-20 years of robot manufacturing, then a universal lifetime of robots fighting misaligned robots until enough paperclips have been manufactured.
Or you know, we block out the sun and live in caves or whatever you fancy.
There are certain genres that the big AAA studios basically pump out and certain genres that indie devs basically pump out.
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