mr_MADAFAKAGOG is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with C++ experience to modernize the GOG GALAXY desktop client and spearhead its Linux development
Chloé 🥕there’s a lot to be excited for, but
Job requirements
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- Active use of AI tools in daily development workflows, and enthusiasm for helping the team increase adoption
ew.
MagicShelThis is a “big part” of my job. In five months what I’ve accomplished is adding AI usage to jira along with a way to indicate how many story points it wound up saving or costing. Let’s see how this plays out.
If AI collapses as many expect it to, this job will still be there without that requirement.
froufox
wonderingwandererYeah, self-hosted open-source models seem okay, as long as their training data is all from the public domain.
Hopefully RAM becomes cheap as fuck after the bubble pops and all these data centers have to liquidate their inventory. That would be a nice consolation prize, if everything else is already fucked anyway.
addieUnfortunately, server RAM and GPUs aren’t compatible with desktops. Also, NVidia have committed to releasing a new GPU every year, making the existing ones worth much less. So unless you’re planning to build your own data centre with slightly out-of-date gear - which would be folly, the existing ones will be desperate to recoup any investment and selling cheap - then it’s all just destined to become a mountain of e-waste.
Maybe that surplus will lay the groundwork for a solarpunk blockchain future?
I don’t know if I understand what blockchain is, honestly. But what if a bunch of indie co-ops created a mesh network of smaller, more sustainable server operations?
It might not seem feasible now, but if the AI bubble pops, Nvidia crashes spectacularly, data centers all need to liquidate their stock, and server compute becomes basically viewed as junk, then it might become possible…
I’m just trying to find a silver lining, okay?
Google Stadia wasn’t exactly a responding success…
From a previous job in hydraulics, the computational fluid dynamics / finite element analysis that we used to do would eat all your compute resource and ask for more. Split your design into tiny cubes, simulate all the flow / mass balance / temperature exchange / material stress calculations for each one, gain an understanding of how the part would perform in the real world. Very easily parallelizable, a great fit for GPU calculation. However, it’s a ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ industry, and the AI bubble is currently ‘tens of trillions’ deep.
Yes, they can be used for other tasks. But we’ve just no use for the amount that’s been purchased - there’s tens of thousands of times as much as makes any sense.
So there would be an enormous surplus and a lot of e-waste. That’s a shame, but that’s going to happen anyway. I’m only saying that the silver lining is that it means GPU and RAM would become dirt cheap (unless companies manufacture scarcity like the snakes they are).
Industrial applications aren’t the only uses for it. Academic researchers could use it to run simulations and meta-analyses. Whatever they can do now, they could do more powerfully with cheap RAM.
Gamers who self-host could render worlds more powerfully. Indie devs could add more complex dynamics to their games. Computer hobbyists would have more compute to tinker with. Fediverse instances would be able to handle more data. Maybe someone could even make a fediverse MMO. I wonder if that would catch on.
Basically, whatever people can do now, more people would be able to do more powerfully and for cheaper. Computations only academia and industry can do now would become within reach of hobbyists. Hobbyists would be able to expand their capacities. People who only have computers to tinker with now would be able to afford servers to tinker with.
“Trickle-down” is a bullshit concept, as everything gets siphoned to the top and hoarded. But when that cyst bursts, and those metaphorical towers come crashing down, there’s gonna be a lot of rubble to sift through. It’s going to enable the redistribution of RAM on a grand scale.
I’m not pretending it’ll solve everyone’s problems, and of course it would have been better if they had left the minerals in the ground and data centers had never grown to such cancerous proportions. But when the AI bubble bursts and tech companies have to liquidate, there’s no denying that the price of RAM would plummet. It’s not a magic bullet, just a silver lining.