very_well_lost
@very_well_lost@lemmy.world
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 2 days ago:
Don’t be pedantic. Anyone with half a brain knows that when someone brings up “climate change” they’re referring to “human-made climate change” — and it’s completely uncontroversial that the changes we’ve made since the industrial revolution have greatly outweighed the changes of the Earth’s natural climate cycles.
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 2 days ago:
Are you really gonna use the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument to defend LLMS?
Let’s not forget that the first ‘L’ stands for “large”. These things do not exist without massive, power and resource hungry data centers. You can’t just say “Blame government mismanagement! Blame corporate greed!” without acknowledging that LLMs cease to exist without those things.
And even with all of those resources behind it, the technology is still only marginally useful at best. LLMs still hallucinate, they still confidently distribute misinformation, they still contribute to mental health crises in vulnerable individuals, and no one really has any idea how to stop those things from happening.
What tangible benefit is there to LLMs that justifies their absurd cost? Honestly?
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 3 days ago:
AI would be fine if we just changed everything about it
lol
- Comment on The PR Machine Powering Big Tech’s AI Energy Story 6 days ago:
“Google says it has calculated the energy required for its Gemini AI service: Sending a single text prompt consumes as much energy as watching television for nine seconds.”
That’s pretty staggering when you consider that it’s no longer possible to do a Google search without generating an AI summary. Google processes something like 8 billion searches per day, so if each one of those triggers a prompt equivalent to watching 9 seconds of television, every day the total power cost is equivalent to about 2200 years of TV watching. Per day. And that’s just search, for just one tech company.
- Comment on Let's hear it, little lemmings. 1 week ago:
I’d happily chat with Marie Curie for 3 hours while Einstein and Bohr argue with each other in the background.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong - Special Announcement Stream (starts in 48 hours) 1 week ago:
People are buying entire consoles for one or two games. If folk can afford a 450 USD switch 2 for mario kart they can afford a facebook (ugh) quest for 300 bucks that regularly goes on sale.
The difference is that you don’t need an entire room to play the Switch 2 (hell, you even need a TV). It’s easier to scrape together the $500+ required for a console than it is to afford a down payment and a mortgage, or the extra rent for a two-bedroom instead of a one-bedroom apartment.
Consoles and VR are both luxury goods, but the barrier for entry with the former is much lower than with the latter.
Space will always be the most expensive peripheral of all.
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 1 week ago:
A few weeks ago cloudflare announced they were going to block AI crawling (good, in my opinion). However they also added a paid service that these AI crawlers can use, so it actually becomes a revenue source for them.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that all of the big AI companies are burning through cash at an absolutely astonishing rate, and none of them are anywhere close to being profitable. So pay-walling the data they use is probably gonna be painful for their already-tortured bottom line (good).
- Comment on Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges. 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Caption this. 2 weeks ago:
For some reason all I can see when I look at this is this guy
- Comment on Best World-Building Game Coffee Table Books? 2 weeks ago:
This is slightly outside the bounds of what you asked for, but I think you might appreciate Vermis.
It’s an art book/game guide for a dark fantasy action adventure game, except the game doesn’t actually exists. The whole thing is entirely fake — basically all of the world building of a video game but without the actual game. The art is fantastic and there’s really nothing else quite like it.
I think originally it was only available in paperback, but a hardcover edition is available now as well for more of that “coffee table book” vibe.
- Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software 2 weeks ago:
demonstrating your power level
lolwut? I’m so tired of tech people acting like they’re the next Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar…
- Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software 2 weeks ago:
Before LLMs people were often saying this about people smarter than the rest of the group.
Smarter by whose metric? If you can’t write software that meets the bare minimum of comprehensibility, you’re probably not as smart as you think you are.
Software engineering is an engineering discipline, and conformity is exactly what you want in engineering — because in engineering you don’t call it ‘conformity’, you call it ‘standardization’. Nobody wants to hire a maverick bridge-builder, they wanna hire the guy who follows standards and best practices because that’s how you build a bridge that doesn’t fall down. The engineers who don’t follow standards and who deride others as being too stupid or too conservative to understand their vision are the ones who end up crushed to death by their imploding carbon fiber submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic.
AI has exactly the same “maverick” tendencies as human developers (because, surprise surprise, it’s trained on human output), and until that gets ironed out, it’s not suitable for writing anything more than the most basic boilerplate — which is stuff you can usually just copy-paste together in five minutes anyway.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Pre-order bonuses are a garbage anti-customer practice anyway.
- Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software 2 weeks ago:
The company I work for has recently mandated that we must start using AI tools and is tracking our usage, so I’ve been experimenting with it a lot lately.
In my experience, it’s worse than useless when it comes to debugging code. The class of errors that it can solve is generally simple stuff like typos and syntax errors — the sort of thing that a human would solve in 30 seconds by looking at a stack trace. The much more important class of problem, errors in the business logic, it really really sucks at solving.
For those problems, it very confidently identifies the wrong answer about 95% of the time. And if you’re a dev who’s desperate enough to ask AI for help debugging something, you probably don’t know what’s wrong either, so it won’t be immediately clear if the AI just gave you garbage or if its suggestion has any real merit. So you go check and manually confirm that the LLM is full of shit which costs you time… then you go back to the LLM with more context and ask it to try again. It’s second suggestion will sound even more confident than the first, (“Aha! I see the real cause of the issue now!”) but it will still be nonsense. You go waste more time to rule out the second suggestion, then go back to the AI to scold it for being wrong again.
Rinse and repeat this cycle enough times until your manager is happy you’ve hit the desired usage metrics, then go open your debugging tool of choice and do the actual work.
- Comment on Help. 2 weeks ago:
It’s literally that.
- Comment on Cat soap operas and babies trapped in space: the ‘AI slop’ taking over YouTube 3 weeks ago:
If you’re using Firefox, there are several plugins available that remove YouTube Shorts completely.
- Comment on ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine 3 weeks ago:
the thinking model
Ugh… can we all just stop for a moment to acknowledge how obnoxious this branding is? They’ve already corrupted the term “AI” to the point of being completely meaningless, are they going to remove all meaning from the word “thinking” now too?
- Comment on ChatGPT Is Still a Bullshit Machine 3 weeks ago:
This has been my experience as well, only the company I work for has mandated that we must use AI tools everyday (regardless of whether we want/need them) and is actively tracking our usage to make sure we comply.
My productivity has plummeted. The tool we use (Cursor) requires so much hand-holding that it’s like having a student dev with me at all times… only a real student would actually absorb information and learn over time, unlike this glorified Markov Chain. If I had a human junior dev, they could be a productive and semi-competent coder in 6 months. But 6 months from now, the LLM is still going to be making all of the same mistakes it is now.
It’s gotten to the point where I ask the LLM to solve a problem for me just so that I can hit the required usage metrics, but completely ignore its output. And it makes me die a little bit inside every time I consider how much water/energy I’m wasting for literally zero benefit.
- Comment on Lessons from Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion House 3 weeks ago:
80 years ago, the ‘kit’ cost $6500, delivered.
That’s about 120k in today’s money.
- Comment on Upset about progress 3 weeks ago:
That’s like saying that advertising has become a “pillar” of society.
Like… yeah, I guess… but that doesn’t change the fact that anyone with a functioning brain fucking hates it.
- Comment on GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out. 3 weeks ago:
Sadly a lot of us are stuck with GitHub. Enterprise loves it because it has “Metrics”, and most companies aren’t about to jump ship over something like AI — especially when so many of them are already doubling down on AI in other areas.
- Comment on AI in Wyoming may soon use more electricity than state’s human residents 4 weeks ago:
Oh, right… Well, probably still worth it. This decade is balls anyways.
- Comment on AI in Wyoming may soon use more electricity than state’s human residents 4 weeks ago:
1.8 gigawatts
Damn… think of what you could do with that much energy! That’s enough to go back in time, shoot Sam Altam before he founds OpenAI, and make it back home with 600 megawatts to spare!
- Comment on "Steam Did Not Respond To Us": Collective Shout Defends Calling On Payment Processors To Ban Adult Games 4 weeks ago:
Whoosh
- Comment on On Tuesday afternoon, ChatGPT encouraged me to cut my wrists 5 weeks ago:
Last time I checked, no car actively encourages you to drive into a wall.
- Comment on On Tuesday afternoon, ChatGPT encouraged me to cut my wrists 5 weeks ago:
This has sadly been the norm in the tech industry for at least a decade now. The whole eco-system had become so accustomed to quick injections of investment cash, that products/businesses no longer grow organically but instead hit the scene in one huge developing and marketing blitz.
Consider companies like Uber or AirBnB. Their goal was never to make a safe, stable, or even legal product. Their goal was always to be first. Command the largest user base possible in the shortest time possible, then worry about all the details later. Both of those products have had disastrous effects on existing businesses and communities while operating in anti-competetive ways and flaunting existing laws, but so what? They’re popular! Tens of millions of people already use them, and by the time government regulation catches up with that they’re doing it’s already too late. What politician would be brave enough to try and ban a company like Uber? What regulator still has enough power to reign in a company the size of AirBnB?
OpenAI is playing the same game. They don’t care if their product is safe — hell, they don’t even really care if it’s useful, or profitable. They just want to be ubiquitous, because once they achieve that, the rest doesn’t matter.
- Comment on People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis" 1 month ago:
I doubt it. The bots amplified natural human tendencies by automating bad behavior at a vast scale, but all of that stuff was already there before the bots hit the scene. Maybe they’ve accelerated the decline, but they definitely didn’t cause it.
- Comment on Nintendo refuses to repair water damaged Switch 2 console 1 month ago:
Mario and Luigi’s lesser known cousin, Pagliacci.
- Comment on Planck units 1 month ago:
10^9 Joules is roughly the chemical energy of a full tank of gasoline. The mass-energy of the car (or even just gas itself) would be many, many orders of magnitude higher.
- Comment on The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon 1 month ago:
Also, what “nicer stuff”? It’s practically impossible to find anything on Amazon anymore that isn’t cheap, disposable garbage. Amazon sellers have been in a race to the bottom to deliver the lowest price for more than a decade, and the result is that everything on Amazon is crap.