Absolutely. I look forward to a time where we have on-device small models as an OS-level service you can rely on (a bit like what Apple's doing with Foundation Models). I was recently playing around with some game dev prototyping where I wish I could rely on a player having access to a local model for doing some classification tasks or generating small amounts of playthrough-specific copy without just populating the same few templates.
I think the enthusiasm for Codex coincided with the extended period of degraded quality CC was experiencing around a couple of months ago? During that time I cancelled my Claude sub and tried out Codex, which by comparison was feeling significantly better. I haven't tried them out side by side since Claude has been de-borked but even if Codex is objectively poorer I could believe that flattering comparison has stuck for people who switched?
I've always loved using a (simulated) Mellotron when making music, without being consciously clued in to which songs first got me hooked on it, but you've just made me realise it was Dinosaur Jr, not Strawberry Fields Forever. Thanks!
In my experience, it's not so much that the power user has disappeared, but their power user "surface" has been squeezed. I work in an environment where I see journalists using clunky Windows-based CMSs with 30 years+ of baggage that I assumed would be killing productivity through their awkwardness.
They might all hate the tool, but are able to navigate between entering and editing copy, editing layouts and running orders, searching wires then adapting it into stories etc. with great speed with shortcuts, saved workflows and yes, awkward cludges like always-open text files of boolean searches they frequently re-use.
The minute they need to leave their tool to do a peripheral task though, all of those gains are lost. The new web-based video subtitling tool might be better than their old workflow and something they use several times a week but there's an instant assumption that it's a mouse-only task, even if the tool is a11y-aware enough to not be. Lots of "oh is it ready? Ok now I...think I click this bit" because things like communicating status and progress aren't consistent or ubiquitous. It just doesn't have the efficiencies of their ugly old thing.
On the one hand they could learn how they could automate their browser to actually integrate these tools with their workflows better, but nothing about the browser environment seems to give the impression to this class of user that it can be used in this way.
I don't know if that's just about tools that each have their own look and feel, or that the browser metaphor is too overloaded (because that feels like a very 2003-era concern :p)
Not the commenter you're responding to, but I've found quite the opposite. Content on Netflix is increasingly trending towards one narrow "woke" way of seeing the world, and nothing that falls outside of the narrow, American left perspective, or encourages any diversity of thought is available anymore.
Can you proviede some examples of this narrow way of seeing the world? TV shows tell stories. Occasionally those stories aren't going to be towards one's liking.
For example, Amazon Prime is constantly spamming me with ads for Jack Ryan. My take is that they do so because they paid a lot for the IP. Not because it's trying to shove the benefits of American militarism abroad down my throat.
They're shoving the agenda down our throats. A lot of shows become overly politicized, with messages of trans rights, BLM, and other stuff being injected to such a degree that it becomes too much and frankly artificial.
I'm not against political and societal messages in TV shows and movies - that has been done for decades, but not if it takes away from the writing and quality of the show. We see that in extreme levels at the moment.
Is "the agenda" not a bit of a conspiratorial way of looking at it though?
It's been notoriously difficult for creators to find mainstream outlets to tell stories about, to use your examples, trans and black lives, that aren't watered down out of fear of alienating a white, heterosexual audience. It's politicised in so much as defending your right to exist in the public sphere is always political, but is that a problem?
I love that we're starting to see stories that show more perspectives. It doesn't mean every show or movie will be amazing, but when has that ever been true? I don't think it follows that doing this "takes away" from the quality of the writing. A badly written show is a badly written show.
> I'm not against political and societal messages in TV shows and movies - that has been done for decades, but not if it takes away from the writing and quality of the show.
I think if you replace the last part of this with "as long as it doesn't bother me" then your statement is probably more accurate. From my experience bad shows are bad because of terrible writing overall, not because one of the characters is a minority.
> We see that in extreme levels at the moment.
Compared to a decade or more ago when you weren't seeing trans people on TV, I guess you could say it's "extreme" nowadays.
I'm going to front-load this by stating that I 100% agree that representation matters, and absolutely welcome a diversity of perspectives in media. Furthermore, I do believe that much criticism of "woke" media is a knee-jerk reaction to new, unfamiliar values and shifting power.
That said: Netflix's deployment of "wokeness" can feel completely shoehorned in and utterly arbitrary, a cynical technique that affirms the viewers' perspective, thereby increasing engagement.
I'm not "outraged" by it in the slightest. It tends to align with my own worldview. But at the end of the day it just makes for crummy content.
I think this was an art choice rather than technical inexperience.
The proportions of the field models are more similar to the chibi sprites of the SNES games, so we’re seeing the gradual evolution of FF’s style with VII the first transition from 2D to 3D.
That VIII and IX used more realistic proportions is just a later stage of that stylistic transition.
Personally, I find them quite charming. There’s a fair bit of slapstick in the game that IMO works better with the low poly models.
I like the format! Something about organising your thinking into tweet-sized chunks lends itself to a nice pace for telling stories. Your TLDR certainly doesn’t retain any of the accessibility (to non-developers) or whimsy of the original.
