Anthropic has pretty consistently been shitty about how they roll out their software. Extreme lack of engineering rigor and thoughtfulness.
The answer is probably as simple as "no one thought not to do that."
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I know different people work on these things so I can't do more than guess about how engineering culture cuts across teams, but given the sheer amount of carelessness and sloppiness in Anthropic's software I have to imagine they're burning investor money in training and inference because the code to do it is as bad as the rest of their software.
Global freedom of movement was an inalienable right until European colonial powers noticed some of their colonies' peoples wanted to move to Europe.
Large scale global movement is indicative of failure to uplift the globe from violence, poverty, and climate change. It makes a lot more sense to me for the global powers who don't want mass migration to do something to fix its causes instead of retreating inward and succumbing to nativism.
> Global freedom of movement was an inalienable right until European colonial powers noticed some of their colonies' peoples wanted to move to Europe.
What an absurd assertion. Where did you learn that? Read up about Roman border control and immigration policy, and what they required of immigrants into Roman territory.
> It links to a .so file which reads the executable header, allocates memory, loads the program, gets it ready to run, and starts it. The program loader runs in user space and is unprivileged. This is probably the right way to do it.
aiui this is what exec does, the problem outlined here is the split between process creation (expensive, kernel space, has to be done each time even if spawning the same process "template" repeatedly) and loading (cheap and in userspace).
Of the 7 AAA games I’ve been part of making, not a single one used HTTP (well, not as a primary driver of anything), HTML, CSS or anything that could be construed as a “web technology” so, what are you talking about please?
What I'm saying is you have programs running on user machines, and programs running on your machines. There's an interface between those two over a network. There's a problem that consumers face today where they pay to play games that are not functional without data flowing over that interface.
There's a claim that implementing the backend side of that interface is so complex and impossible or too difficult/time consuming/etc to design in a way without 3rd party dependencies.
I'm asking: what are those 3rd party libraries doing? And why can't you design server APIs and client code in a way to provide a different backend if consumers need to do it themselves when you stop supporting the game?
I'm not interested in hypotheticals. In AAA games that you have worked on, concretely what 3rd party code did your servers rely on that would prevent you from distributing either the server itself or sufficient description of the servers' behavior to allow a reimplementation?
And even if we're talking hypotheticals: stupid example. I haven't worked on a backend where the actual server infrastructure wasn't open source, trivial to open source because it was first party, or irrelevant because the only thing that matters would be the API and protocols, which again, trivial to make open.
I'm actively trying to remove my own ignorance of the domain which is why I posed the question! You're not breaking confidentiality by saying "I need X to solve Y problem which is offered by Z and we can't expose even the application layer interfaces." Right now it sounds like you don't have an answer, or even understand the question.
Getting all defensive and not answering it doesn't really help your industry's case here.
Web servers, message brokers, physics engines, anti cheat, fraud detection, flood mitigation, ranking systems, chat moderation, match making systems. There are thousands of possible components which may have been licensed in any given game server system. In some cases the entire game engine runs on the server.
I guess what surprises me here is how much of this is 3p code that couldn't possibly be distributed. Like why would you not be using an open source web server, or widely available message broker? Things like chat moderation/match making/anti cheat/etc seem like add on services that would be implemented per game (well, maybe not match making) and aren't relevant to the problem that the "stop killing games" people are trying to solve.
Frankly it's none of your business why, and it's completely irrelevant. The fact is that this 3p code exists and this law needs to account for it or it's unworkable.
This is kind of needless aggression that doesn't help non domain experts understand.
I've worked on a lot of complicated and deeply optimized networked applications. They're almost all closed source. I know exactly how I would design a system to support these kinds of initiatives. What I'm curious about is why that's impossible for game developers, because either I'm missing something, or game developers are just bad at software design.
The "server" being the computer program not running on a user device. The intent of the initiative is to allow people to substitute or replace that program to allow the game to continue to function even if the original publisher/developer disables access to it.
It's pretty obvious to me as a gamer and engineer what the intent and design constraints are here, so I'm just wondering what makes this seem impossible?
I'm as big of a skeptic on these AI companies and question deeply the long term value of data center buildout as a land use policy in the communities where they're being built. But:
> So let me ask the question directly: if AI data centers are such a tremendous benefit to communities, why are so many of them being built without meaningful community input?
Because of this (emphasis mine):
> They’re watching their utility bills climb, finding sick animals they can’t explain, and worrying about the long-term impacts on their health and property values
How are you supposed to have reasonable discussion about land use, economic impacts, zoning, etc when you're getting flooded with input from crockpots?
Can you say with absolute certainty that sick animals and long term impacts on their health are not caused by data centers? Certainly we have long list of examples where industrial activity contaminated areas with little oversight and it did kill animals and cause long-term impacts on health. I think you're saying that data centers do not pollute in a way that would cause sick animals or long-term impacts on health, but I don't think that can be stated confidently.
So this might be controversial and I'm unable to phrase it better, but you can't always engage in good faith to address claims when the claimant themselves are incapable of engaging in good faith to make them.
I could be convinced on negative environmental impact of data centers in a few ways. I could believe there's additional strain on water purification infrastructure if the open loop cooling systems are using additives and creating additional volume of water that existing treatment plants weren't designed to handle. I could believe that additional power demand and on-site generators using fossil fuels could create pollution where it didn't exist before. I could believe that in a rush to build quicker, construction crews take shortcuts.
Basically all industrial activity on this planet creates waste that can harm people. That's why we create zones for it away from residences, and why land closer to it is cheaper.
This is all stuff you can engage with good faith. The problem is these are not the claims that the crazy people are making, and not the ones it sounds like the author of TFA is bothering to investigate. There's a large group of people that will believe "thing bad, thing hurt" with zero evidence besides vibes, and you can't meet with psychosis on shared ground.
As you wrote it, it really reads as "everybody who says datacenters have health impacts is a crackpot" but I think your intent was "some people who say datacenters have health impacts are crackpots".
Bills are not hard to read. Especially the closer to local government you get. The problem is that bills are worth the paper they're written on until courts affirm what the language means in the context of the legal system.
Bills are not hard to read because they are complex, but because they are poorly written. They generally contain lots of comma-separated lists in sentences, as well as nested conditional clauses.
If they were written in a structured format instead of in prose (think nested bullet points, conditional blocks like a programming language, etc.) then they'd be _significantly_ easier to understand.
The answer is probably as simple as "no one thought not to do that."
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I know different people work on these things so I can't do more than guess about how engineering culture cuts across teams, but given the sheer amount of carelessness and sloppiness in Anthropic's software I have to imagine they're burning investor money in training and inference because the code to do it is as bad as the rest of their software.
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