mcv
@mcv@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Sid Meier's Civilization VI is currently free (Epic via Prime) 2 days ago:
I like Civ 6, but it helps the set it to ‘online’ speed.
- Comment on Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions 3 days ago:
This is the big issue. LLMs are useful to me (to some degree) because I can tell when its answer is probably on the right track, and when it’s bullshit. And still I’ve occasionally wasted time following it in the wrong direction. People with less experience or more trust in LLMs are much more likely to fall into that trap.
LLMs offer benefits and risks. You need to learn how to use it.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
I’m just saying that your comment started out superficially looking like an argument justifying guns in some situations, and then turned out not even being that.
I have no doubt that there are situations that would justify carrying a gun, but “you will need to shoot yourself” is not it.
And of course most people would simply prefer to avoid dangerous situations like that, or prefer the danger to be addressed in a more systemic way, if necessary. But not all danger needs to be made safe. Nature in particular just needs to be left alone sometimes.
- Comment on I've never been in a situation where me having a gun would have made things bettter. 1 week ago:
I think it’s indeed fair to say that the vast, vast majority of people have never spent time near Ship Rock at night.
Not that a gun would do much good against them
So even that is not an argument for guns?
- Comment on Today in “Google Broke Email” 1 week ago:
Can’t you redirect that email at the DNS level or something? Email for my domain get redirected to different mailboxes, which I can configure at my registrar.
Although personally I’d take this as a perfect opportunity to move away from Google entirely.
- Comment on Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 4 Years 1 week ago:
This is my main concern. I will believe they can regrow lost teeth, but can they regrow them in the correct shape and location? Teeth can take some weird shapes. We’ve got millions of years of evolution tweaking exactly where and how they grow, and it still goes wrong sometimes. I suspect messing with that process can lead to Cronenbergian results.
- Comment on Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 4 Years 1 week ago:
Why? More teeth to clean, fill, check and care for.
- Comment on ‘All is fair in RAM and war’: RAM price crisis in 2025 explained 2 weeks ago:
Deals between AI giants and ram manufacturers. That’s what’s creating the shortage and driving up the real prices.
- Comment on ‘All is fair in RAM and war’: RAM price crisis in 2025 explained 2 weeks ago:
I’m sure those tariffs have some impact in the US, but ram prices are outrageously high outside the US as well. They’re not the real factor here.
- Comment on AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output 2 weeks ago:
It’s certainly the option I’m rooting for, but it would still be a massive drama and disrupt a lot of lives. Which is why they’ll probably get bailed out with taxpayer money.
- Comment on AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output 2 weeks ago:
It is great for boilerplate code. It can also explain code for you, or help with an unfamiliar library. It’s even helped me be productive when my brain wasn’t ready to really engage with the code.
But here’s the real danger: because I’ve got AI to do it for me, my brain doesn’t have to engage fully with the code anymore. I don’t really get into the flow where code just flows out of your hands like I used to. It’s becoming a barrier between me and the real magic of coding. And that sucks, because that’s what I love about this work. Instead, I’m becoming the AI’s manager. I never asked for that.
- Comment on AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output 2 weeks ago:
They might. The amount of money they’re pumping into this is absolutely staggering. I don’t see how they’re going to make all of that money back, unless they manage to replace nearly all employees.
Either way it’s going to be a disaster: mass unemployment or the largest companies in the world collapsing.
- Comment on AI-generated code contains more bugs and errors than human output 2 weeks ago:
This is the real thing. You can absolutely get good code out of AI, but it requires a lot of hand holding. It helps me speed some tasks, especially boring ones, but I don’t see it ever replacing me. It makes far too many errors, and requires me to point them out, and to point in the direction of the solution.
They are great at churning out massive amounts of code. They’re also great at completely missing the point. And the massive amount of code needs to be checked and reviewed. Personally I’d rather write the code and have the AI review it. That’s a much more pleasant way to work, and that way it actually enhances quality.
- Comment on Tencent ‘Horizon clone’ pulled from stores as Sony settles lawsuit 3 weeks ago:
That’s the 80s for you. Big on awesome.
- Comment on Xmas at the mega church 3 weeks ago:
I’m afraid I still don’t quite get it. Do you pay less taxes now? Do members of this church pay more taxes?
It all sounds completely at odds with the concept of freedom of religion.
- Comment on Xmas at the mega church 3 weeks ago:
How does that work? How can you be made to pay? That does not sound legal to me. Can’t you just leave and ignore it?
- Comment on Xmas at the mega church 3 weeks ago:
There’s definitely a difference between faith, and organised religion. I think the worst thing that can happen to any religion is to become an official state religion. At that point it becomes a tool for politics and social control. It unavoidably gets corrupted in some way. People aren’t part of it because they believe, but because they have to.
- Comment on Xmas at the mega church 3 weeks ago:
Then what would you call the people who actually follow the teachings of Christ? What would you call the Christians in other countries? Why would appropriators of a word get to own it?
- Comment on Xmas at the mega church 3 weeks ago:
Everything is business, everything is entertainment, everything is about money.
There is still real Christianity in the US, but this isn’t it. I recently read about someone asking for help from various churches, mosques and temples, and everybody offered help, except the churches. The churches that did help were predominantly black.
- Comment on Data centers need electricity, utilities need years to build – who should pay? 3 weeks ago:
I would suggest requiring these datacenters to also invest in sufficient green energy to power them.
- Comment on Typeframe 3 weeks ago:
Looks a lot like the BBC Micro. Cool design choice.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 4 weeks ago:
They’re systems trained to give plausible answers, not correct ones. Of course correct answers are usually plausible, but so do wrong answers, and on sufficiently complex topics, you need real expertise to tell when they’re wrong.
I’ve been programming a lot with AI lately, and I’d say the error rate for moderately complex code is about 50%. They’re great at simple boilerplate code, and configuration and stuff that almost every project uses, but if you’re trying to do something actually new, they’re nearly useless. You can lose a lot of time going down a wrong path, if you’re not careful.
Never ever trust them. Always verify.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 4 weeks ago:
Who cares about the money of people when they have all the money?
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 4 weeks ago:
OpenAI’s mounting costs — set to hit $1.4 trillion
Sorry, but WTF!? $1.4 Trillion in costs? How are they going to make all of that back with just AI?
I think there’s only one way they can make this back: if AI gets so good they can really replace most employees.
I don’t think it will happen, but either way it’s going to be an economic disaster. Either the most valuable companies in the world, offering services that the next couple of hundred companies in the world depend on, are suddenly bankrupt. Or suddenly everybody is unemployed.
- Comment on Oracle made a $300 billion bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price. 4 weeks ago:
I’ve been telling my employer that they should be moving away from the Microsoft cloud for a whole bunch of reasons. Someone said they’re aware of it, so with the speed stuff here is moving, we might actually move to something else in 10 years.
But personally I wouldn’t lose any sleep if the whole bubble collapsed next year.
- Comment on That's interesting 4 weeks ago:
Is he saying that AI mentally crippled him? Because people have been figuring this out for millennia.
- Comment on RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components 4 weeks ago:
I remember when they changed the backronym for Emacs from “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” to Eighty. Megabytes. Or when a Netscape developer was proud to overtake that memory use.
What’s the point of more RAM and faster processors if we just make applications that much less efficient?
- Comment on Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure 5 weeks ago:
A big problem in computer security these days is all-or-nothing security: either you can’t do anything, or you can do everything.
I have no interest in agentic AI, but if I did, I would want it to have very clearly specified permission to certain folders, processes and APIs. So maybe it could wipe the project directory (which would have backup of course), but not a complete harddisk.
And honestly, I want that level of granularity for everything.
- Comment on Samsung reveals first tri-fold phone 5 weeks ago:
This technology is wasted on smartphones. We need this on laptop screens.
- Comment on Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds 5 weeks ago:
That joke, about just uploading everything and letting others decide what’s worth saving, is one I first heard decades ago. Might still have been him who first made it.