ChairmanMeow

@ChairmanMeow@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally I do have to agree though, the website itself looks kinda scuffed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A professionally well-maintained wiki would work.

  I can tell you that most corporations, if they even have a wiki, don’t have a well-maintained one (often despite their efforts).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An Alternative to Lasik — Without the Lasers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It sounds insanely cool! They already managed it on a live rabbit eyeball apparently, now for an actual live rabbit. But honestly, I’m not really sure what could go wrong if a live eyeball works. It’s a pretty mechanical change, not much else in the body (if anything) is affected.

  I guess the big thing would be refining the method for accuracy and then scaling up so that many people can get the treatment at ab affordable price point. Though I suppose if the platinum lens is basically the “correct” eyeball shape, it just needs to be sized correctly w.r.t. the size of your eyeball. That sounds like you could make a whole bunch of templates for different eye sizes, and then reuse them for everyone with that size?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It was working for everyone in navigation, where angles mattered. Which is why it became the most used map.

  It was phased out in favour of maps showing area more correctly, because navigation w. maps became less important, not because “it didn’t work”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Btw this feature is exactly why certain companies are also banning Revolut cards; turns out authorizes for payments on a card that is about to disappear is a great way to not have to pay for anything (the Dutch OVPay had fraud issues with these cards for example).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a handful of people out there cracking Denuvo games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Debatable⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No, his lip looks larger in the right but it’s actually his gums showing behind.

  This image appears to he real.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Eroded Doctors' Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm, seems I replied to the wrong root comment.

  Regardless, the overall point still stands. These tools are great for assistance, but relying on them completely can cause problems. Even these tumor-spotting ML tools aren’t perfect, and they too miss things. Combined with a doctor’s skill this is fine, but if one begins replacing the other the net benefit will be lower.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Eroded Doctors' Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I was responding to a thread by RgoueBananas who is clearly talking about LLMs as he drew a parallel with IT.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Eroded Doctors' Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s true that if a tool is objectively better, then it makes little sense to not use it.

  But LLMs aren’t that good yet. There’s a reason senior developers are complaining about vibecoding juniors; their code quality is often just bad. And when pressed, they often can’t justify why their code is a certain way.

  As long as experienced developers are able to do proper code review, the quality control is maintained. But a vibecoding developer isn’t good at reviewing. And code review is an absolutely essential skill to have.

  I see this at my company too. There’s a handful of junior devs that have managed to be fairly productive with LLMs. And to the LLMs credit, the code is better than it was without it. But when I do code review on their stuff and ask them to explain something, I often get a nonsensical, AI-generated response. And that is a problem. These devs also don’t do a lot of code review, if any, and when they do they often have very minor comments or none at all. Some just don’t do any reviews, stating they’re not confident approving code (which is honest, but also problematic of course).

  I don’t mind a junior dev, or any dev for that matter, using an LLM as an assistant. I do mind an LLM masquerading as a developer, using a junior dev as a meat puppet, if you get what I mean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Eroded Doctors' Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re doing it once, then that’s fine. But if you have to do it loads of times, and things keep getting more complex, you’ll find that you won’t be able to correctly use the tools anymore and spot its mistakes.

  AI raises your skill level a bit, but also stumps your growth if used irresponsibly. And that growth may be necessary later on, especially if you’re a junior in the field still.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Techcrunch reports that AI coding tools have "very negative" gross margins. They're losing money on every user.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue is mostly energy costs though. Startups do lose money; to hiring new people, marketing, etc… But in this case the entire business case loses money a the moment, and without any significant breakthroughs they likely will keep losing money like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Battlefield 6 cheats day 1 of early access. Depite kernel level anti cheat, forced secure boot TPM 2.0⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Machine learning doesn’t necessarily require a centralized cluster. Usually running those kinds of models is pretty cheap, it’s not an LLM basically. They usually do better than human moderators as well, able to pick up on very minute ‘tells’ these cheats have.

  I understand your point about edge cases, but that’s not something the average player cares about much. E-sports is a pretty niche part of any game, especially the higher ranks. You just want to filter out the hackers shooting everyone each game that truly ruin the enjoyment. Someone cheating to rank gold instead of silver or whatever isn’t ruining game experiences; they’re usually detectable too, but if you get a false negative on that it’s not the end of the world. A smurf account of a very highly ranked player probably has a bigger impact on players’ enjoyment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Battlefield 6 cheats day 1 of early access. Depite kernel level anti cheat, forced secure boot TPM 2.0⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Didn’t Microsoft stop this in a recent-ish update? I remember trying it on a machine without TPM and it just didn’t work.

  Bazzite worked fine though (after some headaches setting it up).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Battlefield 6 cheats day 1 of early access. Depite kernel level anti cheat, forced secure boot TPM 2.0⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  These tricks may make it indistinguishable to a human moderator, but machine learning is actually really good at detecting that. But most companies don’t have the expertise, resources or training data to build a proper model for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tucson City Council votes 7-0, unanimously to kill AI Data Center⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, usually the water doesn’t cool down fast enough. Trying to reuse it just slowly heats it up, until either the water or the servers evaporate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  FPTP isn’t strictly necessary for districts, but it’s the most common. One way or another, you need some way to determine which candidate will ultimately represent a district. Unless you’re in a 2-party system, it’s very likely that this candidate will only represent a minority of voters in a district. Even with RCV you might get a “least disliked” candidate, but that’s still not a candidate that has majority support.

  Perhaps to make it easier to understand: there is zero guarantee that all voters in a specific district have the same voting preference. And those without a plurality opinion are likely to end up marginalised under a districting system. If another group in your district is slightly larger, you end up without representation. Without districting, these voters can band together and choose their preferred candidate, without being constrained by arbitrary district lines.

  Perhaps a concrete example will help. Take a random western country with a small minority. This minority doesn’t tend to aggregate in specific districts as much, they’re usually very well spread out over the country (let’s say there’s 2% nationwide, but at most 10% in any given district). Under a districting system, they’re likely to fail getting even a single representative, as they’re a minority in every single district. But under proportional representation, they could get a representative as collectively the minority is large enough to warrant representation with at least 2% of seats.

  There’s also systems like the Danish, which iirc tries to figure out how many districts should be appointed to which party by dividing up the national vote (though I’m not very well acquainted with it). But even such a system will then be forced to assign a district representative to a district where the candidate does not enjoy majority support.

  And that’s the issue with districting. It’s not possible to have a system that guarantees the national election results match the national voter preference, and that guarantees that district election results match the district voter preference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Districts by their very nature represent voters.

  I feel like you are misunderstanding representative government. There is value in districts, provided they are drawn apolitically. Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.

  It’s really important to understand why this is not the case. Districted voting essentially introduces first-past-the-post voting at more levels. Each level of FPTP creates a larger disparity between what voters want and who gets elected. This is in part due to gerrmandering, but that’s not a required thing.

  Every time you decide a district election through FPTP, you essentially create a rounding error, a disparity between the election results and what voters actually voted for. This FPTP system then reinforces the two-party system that the US and UK have a very hard time escaping. And as you may be able to guess, having a mere two major parties to choose from is fucking terrible for getting niche voters represented. It’s why the US and UK see comparatively little regional focus and increased disillusionment with national politics in these areas.

  Abolishing districts actually helps local representation(!). Because under proportional representation, if someone campaigns on serving the needs of a small group of voters, said group can vote for them and they will be elected. It lets anyone basically define their own “district” of voters, without political manipulation. If they fail to attract a sizeable enough share of votes, then this electoral niche is simply too small to be represented at the national level, and this group should perhaps petition local government instead.

  We see this effect quite clearly in countries like the Netherlands, where there are quite a few national parties to choose from, and several focus on a specific group of voters (eg the BBB which focuses on farmers, or the FNP which focuses on people living in the region of Friesland.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Belgium Targets Internet Archive's 'Open Library' in Sweeping Site Blocking Order⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Imo cities like Bruges or Antwerp are much nicer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wi-Fi 8 won't be faster, but will be better - more details emerge just hours after Wi-Fi 7 protocols are officially ratified⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s almost certainly some text preprocessor that treats training data first, so I’m not sure if your old-timey letters ever reach an LLM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Government responded to the "Repeal the Online Safety Act" Petition.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even forums that might seem harmless carry potential risks, such as where adults come into contact with child users.

  Wait until the government finds out they’re gonna have to age-restrict playing outside. What a genuine bone-dead stupid take.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨She's a keeper⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This does assume that these are independent variables, which may not necessarily be the case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s true, those happened when Israel was funding and using Hamas to deliberately destabilize the more secular PLO, and followed decades of Israeli occupation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But then Hamas got into power with a plurality of the vote and have been constantly attacking Israel ever since.

  Hamas has always been extreme in rhetoric, but the violence afaik began when Israel, the US and the PA attempted to coup them out of power.

  There have been a few times in this war there has been ceasefires with hostages exchanged for prisoners. Hamas eventually stops releasing hostages and the conflict resumes.

  So far every ceasefire was broken by Israel, because they were unwilling to enter the next phase of negotiations which was a precondition to the release of more hostages.

  It doesn’t seem like Hamas wants sovereignty, they could have had that if they wanted it.

  Like how Israel respects the sovereignty of the PA in the West Bank? Yeah right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At this point the hostages are Hamas’ only bargaining chip left. At the same time, Israel has very publicly stated that their primary war goal is not the release of the hostages but the total extermination of Hamas. So even if Hamas released the hostages, by Israel’s own admission, the war would not end (it may even intensify as there’d be no hostages to avoid bad PR for).

  Also, nobody thinks Hamas are saints. But the people of Gaza should not have to face extermination by explosions, gunshots or starvation because of their crimes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I personally haven’t had to use a chromium browser for anything yet since my swith to Firefox. Only to test a render bug in chromium that Google hasn’t bothered to fix in over 9 years for a case that works correctly in every other browser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI’s Sam Altman warns of AI voice fraud crisis in banking⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean it’s a valid concern. He’s also nowhere near the first to voice it. I attended a presentation from a Microsoft exec who explained that Microsoft had already developed very powerful voice mimicking technology, well ahead of anything public at the time. It required only a few seconds of speech before it could fully replicate your voice. But their ethics board or whatever stopped them, due to the massive fraud risks. Nowadays I think they’ve adapted the tech to voice recognition used in Teams instead.

  Of course, MS wasn’t the only one working on this and other people have since published these solutions, so the cat’s out of the bag now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does he actually have a diagnosis or are you making that up or assuming things?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s applying existing solutions to a different programming language or domain, but ultimately every single technique used already exists. It only applied what it knew, it did not come up with something new. The problem as stated is also not really “new” either, image extraction, conversion and rendering isn’t exactly a “new problem”.

  I’m not disputing that LLMs can speed up some work, I know it occasionally does so for me as well. But what you have to understand is that the LLM only remembered similar problems and their solutions, it did not at any point invent something truly new. I understand the distinction is difficult to make.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re referring to more generic machine learning, not LLMs. These are vastly different technologies.

  And I have used them for programming, I know their limitations. They don’t really transfer solutions to new problems, not on their own anyway. It usually requires pretty specific prompting. They can at best apply solutions to problems, but even then it’s not a truly generalised thing, even if it seems to work for many cases.

  That’s the trap you’re falling into as well; LLMs look like they’re doing all this stuff, because they’re trained on data produced by people who actually do so. But they can’t think of something truly novel. LLMs are mathematically unable to truly generalize, it would prove P=NP if they did (there was a paper from a researcher in IIRC Nijmegen that proved this). She also proved they won’t scale, and lo and behold LLM performance is plateauing hard (except in very synthetic, artificial benchmarks designed to make LLMs look good).