ricecake
@ricecake@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 4 days ago:
Yup, that’s a good one.
Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances. - Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 4 days ago:
It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.
You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.
The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 days ago:
www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 days ago:
Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.
All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 days ago:
Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.
Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 days ago:
But that’s just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you’ll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn’t enable the feature. I don’t feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 days ago:
A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don’t actually know what absolute portion cares. I’m personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don’t feel particularly worried they’re going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don’t want.
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 2 weeks ago:
Contrary to popular belief, the US isn’t actually unusually litigious. European countries are just as litigious and Germany, Sweden and Austria all have higher numbers.
The reason we have more “nonsense” lawsuits is because we have a culture that says caveat emptor is a sound defense and negligence on one parties side is equally the fault of the injured party.
“Why didn’t you look at your food before biting the metal fillings? It’s your responsibility to make sure what you eat is safe” and “you walked on my icy sidewalk, you slipped, and now you want me to pay for your ambulance? I should have put down salt, but you should have known better than to walk there” are both reasonable statements to a lot of Americans. Hell, we have special derogatory terms for lawyers that work with individuals who have been non-criminally injured by someone else.On paper, paying the other parties legal fees if you lose sounds good, but what it does it keep individuals who can’t afford to pay legal someone else’s fees to withold valid legal complaints. In an ideal world they would proceed because they were right, but we live in a world where sometimes the person in the right looses, or they reasonably thought they were and were wrong. Due diligence or actual correctness is no assurance of justice, so a lawsuit is a gamble and a more expensive one if you also have to pay the other parties costs, and if they’re a business which has lawyers on staff they might not even view a crippling legal cost as an increased expense.
On the other side that business just tells their lawyer to file the paperwork, they’re already paying for the legal consult so they’re advised going in if it’s a good idea, and if they lose they’re out a few weeks of lawyer salary.Lawsuits are a mark of people using societies tools to resolve disputes. There being more in places with higher trust in social institutions makes sense. People are willing to use the system and they trust it’ll deliver justice.
The US is up there because people need to use lawsuits to make up for our lack in social safety nets, and our preposterous number of businesses are constantly using them to settle disputes.We should eliminate the court fees entirely and provide the trial lawyer equivalent of a public defender.
A bolt in your oatmeal is a good reason to sue, and if you can’t afford a lawyer to help you pay to get your tooth put back in it doesn’t seem unreasonable for society to give you access to someone to help you find a path to remunerations. - Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 2 weeks ago:
99% agreed, but I’d increase the number a bit. With inflation and rising costs $10 million in net worth isn’t always an obscenity.
It’s unquestionably wealthy, but still in the realm of attainable by an individual without being a bastard. Owning a single family home and a gas station in the San Francisco region and planning for retirement could put you in that realm.I don’t begrudge someone who worked hard having nice things. I don’t even begrudge luck, inheritance, or nepotism getting luxury. It’s when it’s beyond luxury and no one could get it with any amount of work.
Tie it to the consumer price index or some such.
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 2 weeks ago:
Right? I work for an actual megacorp and our policy is almost the exact opposite on every point.
Sick workers make more sick: don’t work and feel better faster. Distracted workers makes mistakes and cause problems: don’t work and take care of your kid. Rested workers work better: take the time around the holidays off entirely. Productivity is crap then anyway and with so many vacations it’s easier to plan around a block where nothing happens than to deal with random teams having unpredictable delays. Car broken? Expense a Lyft. We have a corporate account and your ride to work is a rounding error compared to the sales visits.If you’re going to invoke money you should actually understand how big companies function and view money.
- Comment on Do you ever feel like your life is "scripted"? Like everything is written by some entity controlling your life? Like you live in a fictional universe? Is this feeling normal/common? 2 weeks ago:
We’ve actually figured out that that one is basically a “stutter” in your memory encoding system. Consciousness isn’t as continuous as it feels, and so you can get a situation where your memory says it just put some stuff in working memory and consciousness thinks it means your current thoughts or observations. So you end up with a feeling of a past recollection of a current awareness. Because it’s tagged “past” you can’t do anything other than understand it to be in the past, even though you’re actively experiencing it.
A related phenomenon is how you “always” wake up just before the loud noise. Even though you’re asleep you still hear things and process audio. A loud noise happens and your audio processing tells you to wake up. Conscious you wakes up, creating that new memory, and then processes the noise that woke you.Consciousness is a process that takes place over a duration, not an instant.
- Comment on WHY??? 3 weeks ago:
Based on what I recall of the explanation by the person who figured it out: spinning makes fluid near the edge spin faster than fluid near the middle. The difference in speed creates a wave. Since it’s finite and moving, the wave interferes with itself and because of math, makes a hexagon. Something about how the wave pattern changes density and brings different glasses to the surface on the planets.
Then they showed an example by spinning a bucket, and it kinda fell flat because they had to explain that a bucket isn’t a sphere so you have to spin it just right to get it to work, but it did work in the end. - Comment on same shit every day, on god 3 weeks ago:
Oh, I was just joking around. What my water system is missing is molten salt.
Although for the sake of preposterousness, I’m going to suggest we use the molten salt to turn a giant water wheel.
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 3 weeks ago:
Molten salt. Lower pressure, higher efficiency, and I believe less reactive in the event of an uh-oh.
- Comment on Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking 3 weeks ago:
Insurance, benefits and labor expenses. Even in places with little worker protections there are costs that scale with the number of workers instead of the number of hours.
A brief look indicates employers in India can expect to budget on the order of 18% of an employees take home per year for those expenses.There are some circumstances and places in the US where you don’t need to provide as many benefits to employees who work below 40 hours. Then you see employers hire more people and schedule them for just under the threshold to give them benefits.
The answer is always because it’s cheaper for them somehow.
- Comment on Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production 3 weeks ago:
Ah, the good old fashioned “say a fallacy, refuse to elaborate and cut off discussion”. Truly the mark of someone who actually has a reply and isn’t just getting huffy because their notions aren’t being taken as gospel.
Protip: if you actually think a discussion is pointless, just don’t reply.
- Comment on Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification" 3 weeks ago:
I’m sad people seem to be giving flak for this. Regardless of your opinion on current AI tools, they definitely lower some barriers, which can result in more things getting made because of lower risk.
A good game will be good regardless of where an art asset came from, and some people really care about not buying AI utilizing games. Labeling only scares people peddling low effort crap.
If you’re looking for a way to not use ai for portrait art, one thing you can do is leverage combinations in your favor. Draw 10 noses, 10 mouths, 10 shirt collars, 10 hairstyles and so on. When you need a new character, paste together your pre-fab pieces at random , pallet swap the colors randomly and then touch up the details.
- Comment on The cloud is just someone else's computer, but the internet is just someone else's network 3 weeks ago:
You’re currently connected to your neighbors that intimately. Chances are a good chunk of your neighbors are on the same ISP as you.
What disconnect do you think a non-local ISP is providing that a local one wouldn’t? - Comment on Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production 4 weeks ago:
Those darn consumers having opinions on things that affect them without being experts in it. Next thing you know they’re going to want to ban smoking in restaurants despite not having medical degrees or knowing first hand how this will impact the tobacco industry! Or carbon emissions, food safety, or anything really…hell, cold calls are just part of the reality of marketing. Eventually consumers will grow up and realize that unprompted phonecalls at 7pm are just part of the reality of effectively offering them products.
If it’s not clear, I think the notion that people can’t have an opinion on something that impacts them without understanding the process that yields the impact is silly and paternalistic.
Attitudes like yours that are dismissive of consumer concerns are very much part of the reason why consumers are starting to increasingly reject AI products. - Comment on Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production 4 weeks ago:
I apologize if I misunderstood your point, but I truly fail to see how
It’s just a vocal minority that’ll eventually grow up. And public sentiment will grow up Isn’t calling the opposing view childish, which is a pretty strong sign that you’ve failed to actually consider what they’re saying. Same for calling them “brainwashed”.
Consumers fundamentally don’t understand the process
Do they need to? You’ll find that most consumers don’t know how a car works or how industrial design is done but they still have justifiable opinions and concerns about the impacts and quantifiable attributes of them.
If you actually look at what consumers are concerned about you’ll find that IP and copyright concerns don’t even make the list. People are concerned about the errosion of human connection and the diminishment of creativity. Privacy. Data usage and accountability.
And what’s more, even if they were opposed for those reasons the consumer is still intrinsically correct about what they value. If consumers respect your work less because you trace AI art it doesn’t matter if you still creatively contributed, the value has been reduced.
Telling consumers their preference is wrong because you want to be able to copy and trace AI content while viewing yourself as a creative is some backwards boomer shit. 30 years making casual games doesn’t give you lofty insight into the nature of the creative process. It’s just “trust me, I know more”. Same for trying to bolster your position by talking about betting on it.
- Comment on Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production 4 weeks ago:
Saying people who disagree with you are childish is a sure sign that maybe you’re not giving their argument proper consideration.
Particularly when you’re arguing that the consumers are wrong about their feelings towards the product and need to grow up and adapt to how the producers want to make it.You’ve got a situation where people are seeing the assets, coding, design, and writing of games being moved from being human endeavors to being human supervised endeavors, while also being asked to pay higher prices.
The producers and vendors aren’t entitled to consumers happily letting them do less work to deliver an inferior product for more money just because the graphics card manufacturer says it’s the way of the future.I don’t think anyone thinks you’re spending your time doing corporate graphic design putting yourself into your work. No one calls you an artist either.
People buying art though have a reasonable expectation that the person they’re buying it from isn’t tracing ai content or random things from google.Keep in mind that if the “vocal minority” “grows up”, it means people stop paying you, because you’re the one not really adding anything to the equation.
- Comment on Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production 4 weeks ago:
Your anecdote isn’t as against expectations as you seem to think. People just also think that what you’re doing is grody.
If you traced a design you found from a Google result, people would object to you saying it was “your” creation. In the ai case, it just also isn’t anyone else’s.
People used to do your job by learning a bit about what they were designing and applying some creativity. You’re quite literally describing the AI enabling you to be less informed and creative as a creative worker.
No one much cares when the button layout for an accounting firms CRM is rote, but people do care when they hear that the designers for the game they’re playing kinda phoned in the art design and it’s significantly a mathematical approximation of other designs. - Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 5 weeks ago:
Entirely agree. Personally most of what I would want done would be better handled by a macro system that was easy to setup. Most of what I want is pretty usually the same so “remember this setup” is basically good enough.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 5 weeks ago:
If they hadn’t jumped the gun so badly and tainted the launch with crap results, Google would have been well positioned to do something profoundly useful.
If it could actually extract useful information with citations and pointers for next steps and work as an interactive search, that would actually be really really useful.
The whole “hallucinating health advice” and “being terrible” thing really set them back, even if they’ve improved.Like you said, I don’t really need help creating. I do need help remembering things or finding information: that’s why I’m using a search engine in the first place.
At work, there’s a person who knows everything about the job. He regularly gets questions where the answer is just the correct way to find out for yourself.
That’s what I want. “Oh, you mean X? Try looking at YZ. Oh, you wanted X, but in G conditions. That’s over in FOO. It’s confusing because reasons written down here…” - Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 5 weeks ago:
Some people do want to talk to their computer and would love it if it worked right.
The problem is that it often doesn’t work right,cans they’re setting it up as though everyone has that as their top priority for their desktop.
Instead of baking it in to the os, expose the bits needed so it can be an installable program. Now people can have it or not, and you open the door for different non-ai tools to also work on the computer.
It’s almost like a proper, consistent API would be better than a bot you try to convince to use a dozen bad ones. - Comment on Sam Altman and husband reportedly working to genetically engineer babies from having hereditary disease 5 weeks ago:
We have a code of conduct training at work that includes and anti corruption segment (nothing weird, just stuff like “a vendor buying lunch at a sales meeting is fine, but no gifts or having lunch at extremely expensive places”, and “some places give small symbolic gifts around holidays, usually a pastry. That’s fine. Do not accept a $500 pastry”)
A couple years ago they updated the module and the person engaging in non-obvious corrupt business practices became gay in passing. The overwhelming response by a lot of the company was “yay! We made it guys! They realized that we like bribes too! I feel so seen”.
- Comment on Is it gay to have pleasurable sex with your wife? 5 weeks ago:
And one of the first steps in artificial insemination is giving a guy a handjob.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 month ago:
Their streaming system works fine with desktop apps, and it already works with their VR setup on different headsets.
I’ve streamed desktop to a different headset. I was able to also do stuff like mounting an app in a picture frame on the wall of a little VR house.
Using the video player on desktop while streaming was a little jank, but since this is a proper desktop I imagine it’ll be easy enough to switch over and use a normal video player without streaming another computers video player.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 month ago:
They’ve been pretty great on Linux. They built on the great work of the wine people and have done a lot to push the state forward.
I believe they’ve had a lot of good things to say about the stability of the Linux platform from a development perspective. For all the jank and instability that Linux software exposes, it has a lot more stability in terms of things like kernel and driver interfaces as a point of deliberate design choice. So there’s a lot less work needing to code around the specific versions of drivers being used.
- Comment on CNC 1 month ago:
Well, less than the people who said “oh, okay” when they learned what the term meant. Getting hung up on how you feel about the words they use for their sex lives is really weird.
