very_well_lost
@very_well_lost@lemmy.world
- Comment on Verizon is down, with many users seeing 'SOS' – here's everything we know about this outage 6 days ago:
Verizon has been laying off people like crazy since Q4 of last year… but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence and this outage has nothing to do with cost cutting…
- Comment on AI Is Scheming, and Stopping It Won’t Be Easy, OpenAI Study Finds 1 week ago:
But how would you use words to explain the phenomenon?
I don’t know, I’ve been struggling to find the right ‘sound bite’ for it myself. The problem is that all of the simplified expansions encourage people to anthropomorphize these things, which just further fuels the toxic type cycle.
In the end, I’m unsure which does more damage.
Is it better to convince people the AI “lies”, so they’ll stop using it? Or is it better to convince people AI doesn’t actually have the capacity to lie so that they’ll stop investing will stop shoveling money into the datacenter altar like we’ve just created some bullshit techno-god
- Comment on AI Is Scheming, and Stopping It Won’t Be Easy, OpenAI Study Finds 1 week ago:
It refers to when an LLM will in some way try to deceive or manipulate the user interacting with it.
I think this still gives the model too much credit by implying that there’s any sort of intentionally behind this behavior.
There’s not.
These models are trained on the output of real humans and real humans lie and deceive constantly. All that’s happening is that the underlying mathematical model has encoded the statistical likelihood that someone will lie in a given situation. If that statistical likelihood is high enough, the model itself will lie when put in a similar situation.
- Comment on Question about the Switch 2 port of Civilization VII: does it support multiple controllers for local multiplayer? 1 week ago:
“Hotseat” multiplayer isn’t in the game at all yet.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
I can’t remember specific examples (probably because I didn’t stick with any of them very long), but I’ve played several games that don’t even let you touch the options until after you’ve finished some tutorial section… which is especially annoying for players you play with inverted y axis.
- Comment on Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes 2 weeks ago:
Noooo, not even close. There may be some senior devs in AAA studios making bank, but the vast majority of people doing the day-to-day art and development work on games typically get much worse pay and benefits than similar roles in other parts of the tech sphere.
A lot of people are very passionate about making games, and the games industry heavily exploits that passion to short change its workers. A lot of (mostly young) devs are willing to accept less pay to work on games because they feel like it will be more fulfilling than working on other mindless corporate crap, and those who do get jobs in the industry are afraid to ask for more money or try to unionize because they know there are a dozen equally passionate candidates waiting to replace them for less money if they make too many waves.
The result is that wages stay lower than other tech jobs and hours worked are much higher. With AI on the rise the problem will no doubt get even worse as execs use it as an excuse to shrink teams and “do more with less”.
- Comment on Ubisoft Closes Canadian Studio After It Unionizes 2 weeks ago:
highly paid developers
Not in the games industry, lol
- Comment on First ever photo of the curvature of the Earth : December 30, 1930 3 weeks ago:
People aren’t lazy, we just all live in a social media landscape where, when someone posts a link with an intentionally provocative title, it’s rarely worth the effort to engage with it enough to find out if they’re being sarcastic or sincere.
Sometimes this means that well-meaning people get downvoted. Oh well. Learn to read the room.
- Comment on The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News 5 weeks ago:
What the post is describing sounds exactly like the post getting flagged by users, then uncensored by the mod team later on.
Ah, maybe that’s true. I confess I stopped hanging around HN years ago so I don’t really know how ‘flagging’ works and how much influence users have over post visibility. I thought the OP made it clear that something ‘inorganic’ was going on, but I guess that could be user reports just as easily as it could be moderator action.
Either way, it’s still true that getting your tech news from Silicon Valley’s most darling tech incubator is a dumb idea.
- Comment on The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News 5 weeks ago:
I don’t know, I think they make a reasonable case to suggest that someone is putting their finger on the scale.
But, honestly… duh? Y Combinator is one of the most influential investment firms in Silicon Valley. Of course they’re going to try to protect the image of their chosen investments.
Honestly the bigger story here is that people in tech continue to be so willfully ignorant of stuff like this. Big Tech is not benevolent. If you want unbiased tech news, don’t fucking get it from a company that has such a vested interest in the success of SV tech companies. You’d think that would be obvious.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Using an IDE to write code is like using a pie tin to help you make a pie.
Using generative AI is like going to the local bakery, breaking their window, and stealing the pie.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 1 month ago:
That perfectly describes what my day-to-day has become at work (not by choice).
The only way to get anywhere close to production-ready code is to do like you just described, and the process is incredibly tedious and frustrating. It also isn’t really any faster than just writing the code myself (unless I’m satisfied with committing slop) and in the end, I still don’t understand the code I’ve ‘written’ as well as if I’d done it without AI. When you write code yourself there’s a natural self-reinforcement mechanism, the same way that taking notes in class improves your understanding/retention of the information better than when just passively listening. You don’t get that when vibe coding (no matter how knowledgeable you are and how diligent you are about babysitting it), and the overall health of the app suffers a lot.
The AI tools are also worse than useless when it comes to debugging, so good fucking luck getting it to fix the bugs it inevitably introduces…
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 1 month ago:
Typical C-suite. It takes them three months to come to the same conclusion that would be blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain: if you build something that no one understands, you’ll end up with something impossible to maintain.
- Comment on Everyone in Seattle Hates AI — Jonathon Ready 1 month ago:
The author of this article is literally the Principal Skinner meme
- Comment on Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure 1 month ago:
they still said that they love Google and use all of its products — they just didn’t expect it to release a program that can make a massive error such as this, especially because of its countless engineers and the billions of dollars it has poured into AI development.
I honestly don’t understand how someone can exist on the modern Internet and hold this view of a company like Google.
How? How?
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 1 month ago:
I’m sorry, but that article just isn’t very compelling. They seem to be framing the question of “is there free will” as a sort of Pascal’s Wager, which is, umm… certainly a strange choice, and one that doesn’t really justify itself in the end.
The author also makes a few false assertions and just generally seems to misunderstand what the debate over free will is even about.
- Comment on LET IT DIE offline version announced 1 month ago:
I’ve never played this game and don’t know anything about it that I didn’t just read in the article… but there’s just something so rad about a game called “Let it Die” having such a graceful end-of-life plan like this.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 1 month ago:
I think the reason we can’t define consciousness beyond intuitive or vague descriptions is because it exists outside the realm of physics and science altogether. This in itself makes some people very uncomfortable, because they don’t like thinking about or believing in things they cannot measure or control, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
I’ve always had the opposite take. I think that we’ll eventually discover that consciousness is so explainable within the realm of physics that our eventual understanding of how it works will make people very comfortable… because it will completely invalidate all of the things we’ve always thought made us “special”, like a notion of free will.
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 1 month ago:
Fusion neutrons are able to cause fission in ordinarily non-fissile materials, such as depleted uranium (uranium-238), and these materials have been used in the jackets of thermonuclear weapons.
Fun(?) fact: something like 50% of the energy output of thermonuclear bombs comes from secondary fission events in the bomb casing triggered by the high energy neutron flux of the fusion reaction.
- Comment on Sean Murray just crushed my hopes of playing Light No Fire anytime soon 1 month ago:
Considering the number of NMS updates that are just back-ported features that were created for Light No Fire, I suspect the game loop will be pretty much the same as what we already have in NMS
- Comment on OnLy tWo eLemEnTs 1 month ago:
Statistically, there are no small numbers.
- Comment on spongebob big guy pants okay 1 month ago:
I guess it makes sense that multicellularity would be more of a spectrum than a binary condition. If life evolved into it gradually, then it would make sense to find a lot of “intermediate” evolutionary states that don’t feel like they’re distinctly one or the other.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 2 months ago:
Nvidia down ~8% this week, Palantir down ~10%
Maybe the needle really is shifting.
- Comment on Reddit’s CEO Debuts As A Billionaire 20 Years After Cofounding The Company 2 months ago:
The guy that created the subreddit, Violentacrez, was also the “victim” of an expose by Gawker who found out his real life identity. Reddit tried protecting him by banning links to Gawker when the article came out.
I remember when this happened. Violentacrez himself showed up in one of the threads that didn’t get nuked and tried to defend himself. I remember his (heavily down-voted) comments all being surrounded by dozens and dozens of [deleted] comments — presumably people attacking him for being a pedo piece of shit.
I’d never heard of the guy before, but I was so disgusted by the story and by his attempts to justify himself that I went back through weeks of his old posts, down-voting everything.
The next day, I came back to a week-long temp ban from Reddit for vote manipulation. Fuckers.
- Comment on Reddit’s CEO Debuts As A Billionaire 20 Years After Cofounding The Company 2 months ago:
he lauded Reddit as being “for humans by humans” and seemed to take a subtle dig at AI slop (the low-quality AI content clogging corners of the internet)
That’s pretty funny coming from the CEO of a platform that was already overrun by low-effort bots even before AI slop became a thing…
- Comment on ‘It’s about redemption’: Peter Molyneux says Masters of Albion will make up for decades of ‘overpromising on things’ 2 months ago:
I always cringe a little bit when someone says a person has ‘become a parody of themselves’… but honestly, what else is there to say about Molyneaux?
Peter Molyneaux really has become a parody of Peter Molyneaux.
- Comment on ‘It’s about redemption’: Peter Molyneux says Masters of Albion will make up for decades of ‘overpromising on things’ 2 months ago:
I’m 1000% sure Molyneaux is gonna try to use AI to develop as much of this new game as possible.
- Comment on ‘It’s about redemption’: Peter Molyneux says Masters of Albion will make up for decades of ‘overpromising on things’ 2 months ago:
I’m not sure that Pete has actually played a game he wasn’t directly involved with since like… 2010?
What we’ve seen of his new game really isn’t that interesting in the modern landscape. Maybe a decade ago it would have been fresh and had enough of a hook to compete for gamers’ attention, but today? It looks pretty forgettable.
Then when you consider Molyneux’s propensity towards feature creep, it’s probably safe to assume that even if the game is a ‘success’ by most conventional metrics, it won’t be profitable because the amount of money spent to make the damn thing will have been completely insane.
- Comment on World would be a better place 2 months ago:
You may be interested in this new research from a few weeks ago! space.com/…/the-search-for-life-on-venus-just-too…
- Comment on ugly little cutie 3 months ago:
MFW my mom tells me I’m handsome
