HarkMahlberg
@HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth
People keep asking me, and I haven't really had an answer, but now yeah, I'm thinking I'm back.
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 13 hours ago:
Beyond the copyright issues and energy issues, AI does some serious damage to your ability to do actual hard research. And I'm not just talking about "AI brain."
Let's say you're looking to solve a programming problem. If you use a search engine and look up the question or a string of keywords, what do you usually do? You look through each link that comes up and judge books by their covers (to an extent). "Do these look like reputable sites? Have I heard of any of them before?" You scroll click a bunch of them and read through them. Now you evaluate their contents. "Have I already tried this info? Oh this answer is from 15 years ago, it might be outdated." Then you pare down your links to a smaller number and try the solution each one provides, one at a time.
Now let's say you use an AI to do the same thing. You pray to the Oracle, and the Oracle responds with a single answer. It's a total soup of its training data. You can't tell where specifically it got any of this info. You just have to trust it on faith. You try it, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't, you have to write a new prayer try again.
Even running a local model means you can't discern the source material from the output. This isn't Garbage In Garbage Out, but Stew In Soup Out. You can feed an AI a corpus of perfectly useful information, but it will churn everthing into a single liquidy mass at the end. And because the process is destructive, you can't un-soup the output. You've robbed yourself of the ability to learn from the input, and put all your faith into the Oracle.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Others have explained the unicode-in-URL aspect sufficiently, but I can speak to the author of the site somewhat. His or her blog posts have hit the fediverse several times before. They're often insightful and skeptical, highly privacy conscious. I hope they don't mind if I take this part from their FAQ:
Can I trust the information on this website?
No. And you should never trust any single website or entity. Especially not the ones that have sponsored content or have no academic/professional background in the topics they post about.
Take this information as mere pointers into different directions, that scratch the surface and ultimately provoke your itch to find out more about the individual topics. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
- Comment on Nvidia Sales Jump 56%, a Sign the A.I. Boom Isn’t Slowing Down 2 days ago:
I think you should apply to Burger King, I think that might be more your speed.
- Comment on Nvidia Sales Jump 56%, a Sign the A.I. Boom Isn’t Slowing Down 2 days ago:
"I don't know any typescript but I'm gonna submit pull requests and waste my team's time by making them fix my mistakes."
This kind of rhetoric would make you unhirable in my industry, AI or not. What a disrespectful way to work with other people.
- Comment on Instagram Caught Hiding Posts That Say "Immigrants Make the Country Great" 5 days ago:
So does purchasing groceries at Walmart, but many Americans have no choice in that matter.
I do appreciate that you had a more empathetic comment for the guy whose girlfriend is still on Facebook. Thank you for having the civility to not call her a fascist sympathizer to his face. But don't worry, your true feelings are safe with me.
This is not how you make allies btw.
- Comment on Instagram Caught Hiding Posts That Say "Immigrants Make the Country Great" 6 days ago:
- Comment on Instagram Caught Hiding Posts That Say "Immigrants Make the Country Great" 6 days ago:
Fascist techbros were already somewhere between wealthy and ultra wealthy.
There are plenty of non-fascist tech-savvy Americans, they just don't control Scrooge McDuck amounts of money.
- Comment on [Episode] My Dress-Up Darling Season 2 • Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru Season 2 - Episode 8 discussion 6 days ago:
The viewer isn't supposed to know yet. Manga readers already know.
- Comment on 4chan refuses to pay UK Online Safety Act fines, asks Trump admin to intervene 6 days ago:
A game would keep people entertained or engaged in some way, some kind of focused shared activity. But to 4chan, coordinating with other anons about what YouTube comments to spam, what subreddit to brigade, that was the game. Organizing a personal army of trolls (yes that personal army) was the whole point of being there.
In your analogy, a game of LoL takes place where all 10 players don't play the game, they use global chat to decide on raiding Battlefield, DotA, or Overwatch. They then make a bunch of accounts, join some games, and rile people up with hate speech. Then they go back to LoL to share how angry they made other people.
- Comment on 4chan refuses to pay UK Online Safety Act fines, asks Trump admin to intervene 6 days ago:
Believe me, they've already been everywhere you've been. It's not like once you post on 4chan you're forbidden from making accounts on every other website.
- Comment on U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel, as Trump expands control over private sector 1 week ago:
So did Bush. It's only bad when their enemies do it. It's righteous and just when they do it.
- Comment on The Looming Social Crisis of AI Friends and Chatbot Therapists 1 week ago:
"You look like a good Joe."
- Comment on Harvard dropouts to launch ‘always on’ AI smart glasses that listen and record every conversation 1 week ago:
What a gaping, wretched asshole.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong - Special Announcement Stream (starts in 48 hours) 1 week ago:
Almost had me, not gonna lie!
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 1 week ago:
Maybe I missed something, but ublock still works very fine for me, even on mobile. And running a pihole, while not trivial, also takes care of some ad traffic. Firefox coems with a reader mode (a feature I really like even with the adblockers!).
So why do people not want to visit pages anymore, if all these tools already existed?
- Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall 1 week ago:
In a better timeline, we wouldn't need to cheer the victory of one megacorporation over another, they would both be the losers. But also people are still capable of holding two thoughts simultaneously.
For instance, we'd all be happy to see Apple lose the Epic Games lawsuit and be forced out of their monopoly on app stores on iOS. But those same people are aware it would allow Epic to continue being a disgusting company.
bait the anti-ai crowd
Oh I see lol
- Comment on We hate AI because it's everything we hate 1 week ago:
This is fantastic description of Dark Patterns. Basically all the major AI products people use today are rife with them, but in insidiously subtle ways. Your point about minimal UX is a great example. Just because the interface is minimal does not mean it should be, and OpenAI ditched their slider-driven interface even though it gave the user far more control over the product.
- Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software 2 weeks ago:
we must start using AI tools in our workflow and is tracking our usage
Reads to me as "Please help us justify the very expensive license we just purchased and all the talented engineers we just laid off."
I know the pain. Leadership's desperation is so thick you can smell it. They got FOMO'd, now they're humiliated, so they start lashing out.
- Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software 2 weeks ago:
It's true, the tech will get better in the future, we just need to believe and trust the plan.
Same thing with crypto and NFT's. They were 99% scam by volume, but who wouldn't love moving their life savings into a digital ecosystem controlled by a handful of rich gambling addicts with no consumer protections? Imagine, you'll never need to handle dirty paper money ever again, we'll just put it all in a digital wallet somewhere controlled by someone else coughmastercardcough.
And another thing, we were too harsh on the Metaverse. Sure, spending 8 hours in VR could make you vomit, and the avatars made ET for the Atari look like Uncharted 4, but it was just in its infancy!
I too want to outsource all my critical thinking to a chatbot controlled by an wealthy insular narcissist who throws Nazi salutes. The technology just needs time to mature. Who knows, maybe it can automate the exile of birthright citizens for us too!
/s
- Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software 2 weeks ago:
I saw an LLM override the casting operator in C#. An evangelist would say "genius! what a novel solution!" I said "nobody at this company is going to know what this code is doing 6 months from now."
It didn't even solve our problem.
- Comment on AI start-up Perplexity makes surprise bid for Google Chrome 2 weeks ago:
Google, being evil: "Sold!"
- Comment on "I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint 2 weeks ago:
Fuck Vitalik Buterin.
- Comment on Net neutrality advocates won’t appeal loss, say they don’t trust Supreme Court 3 weeks ago:
I uh, I hate the be the one to tell you this.
The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
Slavery never went away, it just needs an extra step. It's why Republicans criminalize "being Black," why they love to criminalize lots of things they don't like. In fact they probably would love to keep the 13th exactly as it is because it gives them perfect cover for the rubes. "We're not racist, we just don't like criminals!"
As for the 14th, they don't have to burn it, they just have to constantly reinterpret it around White Grievance politics. See the redistricting fight currently happening today. Drawing voting districts to accurately represent minority populations in Congress is "akshually racist against white people."
- Comment on Net neutrality advocates won’t appeal loss, say they don’t trust Supreme Court 3 weeks ago:
A case still had to make it's way to them. They will drop that pretense soon enough.
They'll just reveal "the Willard case", a 6-0 decision, that the 19th Amendment to the Contitution is Unconstitutional. It cites the Pragmatic Sanction, a foundational text to our Republic, as the reason that women are not allowed to vote or hold property.
- Comment on Net neutrality advocates won’t appeal loss, say they don’t trust Supreme Court 3 weeks ago:
Inconceivable!
- Comment on Google Gemini struggles to write code, calls itself “a disgrace to my species” 3 weeks ago:
You're thinking of Tay, yeah.
- Comment on Net neutrality advocates won’t appeal loss, say they don’t trust Supreme Court 3 weeks ago:
I wouldn't be surprised if this SCOTUS starts handing down "rulings" for Null v Null cases - completely unsolicited and unprompted bans and overturns of settled precedent. In other words, literally lawmaking from the bench, the thing that fascist conservatives have been disingenuously railing against for years.
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 3 weeks ago:
logged out YouTube to a single row of recommendations and a button to login
I got this update on my smart TV, and I don't think Google realizes how much of an improvement it is. It's unintentionally the best thing the app has ever done.
Finally, no more fucking clickbait clutter all over the screen. I already just search for the channels I want to watch anyway. I love it.
- Comment on What anime pleasantly surprised you the most? 3 weeks ago:
Bocchi the Rock!
I don't know who decided that a 4koma should get some of the most inventive and expressive animation of this decade, but they're a fucking genius.
I only learned about it from seeing a webm of the Blender scene, and I thought "ok, this is kinda hilarious, I gotta give this a shot." I was watching happily until episode 5, when I thought "wait, are they gonna play the whole song? They are aren't they. Wait a minute, this song fucking rules." And every single episode after that was banger after banger. One hilarious bit, stylish animation cut, and kickass song, one after another.
- Comment on [Update: Valve Responds] Mastercard Denies Pressuring Steam To Censor 'NSFW' Games 3 weeks ago:
If they do, that includes them. Decision makers at all levels, nobody gets to say "hey I didn't make Mastercard act this way." Because the status quo would have been to carry on processing video game payments, even in the face of a minority faction like Collective Shout.