SaraTonin

@SaraTonin@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Go to Steam page. Scroll to bottom. Filter out negative reviews. Read 5-10. Update filers to only show negative reviews. Read 5-10.

  That’s never let me down when it comes to determining whether or not a game is one I’ll enjoy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a few replies talking about humans misrepresenting the news. This is true, but part of the problem here is that most people understand the concept of bias - even if only to the extent of “my people neutral, your people biased”. But this is less true for LLMs. There’s research which shows that because LLMs present information authoritatively that not only do people tend to trust them, but they’re actually less likely to check the sources that the LLM provides than they would be with other forms of being presented with information.

  And it’s not just news. I’ve seen people seriously argue that fringe pseudo-science is correct because they fed a very leading prompt into a chatbot and got exactly the answer they were looking for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hundreds of public figures, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Virgin’s Richard Branson urge AI ‘superintelligence’ ban⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay, firstly, if we’re going to get superintelligent AIs, it’s not going to happen from better LLMs. Secondly, we seem to have already reached the limits of LLMs, so even if that were how to get there it doesn’t seem possible. Thirdly, this is an odd problem to list: “human economic obsolescence”.

  What does that actually mean? Feels difficult to read it any way other than saying that money will become obsolete. Which…good? But I suppose not if you’re already a billionaire. Because how else would people know that you won capitalism?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside Amazon’s Plans to Replace Workers With Robots⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I certainly hope you’re right. But let’s not forget that when the industrial revolution eliminated a lot of jobs for a lot of people, those people were allowed to just starve to death in the street. It took a full generation before new jobs were created.

  Basically what you’re saying is that this time round the wealth disparity is so much worse and there are so many more people living in or near poverty that the entire global economy couldn’t withstand the poorest being out of work. That feels like a weird thing to say that you hope someone is right about but…I hope you’re right about it.

  But, I dunno, we’re talking about the same attitude that saw several large corporations try out a 4-day/32 hour working week, discover that productivity stayed the same or even went up…and then went right back to the 5-day working week. The same attitude that sees people seriously suggesting that people who work from home should work extra hours unpaid because otherwise they’ll be able to have the time they otherwise would have spent commuting for themselves.

  Also, of course, there’s the fact that a large number of people live in poverty and already can’t afford basics like 3 meals a day, let alone buying take-out, or a TV, or going on holiday. And Jeff Bezos isn’t campaigning to end child poverty even though doing so would enable people to spend more on Amazon.

  I really think the only way that we’ll ever truly get something like UBI is if one of two things happen - governments who are genuienly invested in the welfare of their people introduce it, or there is enough mobilisation to put enough political pressure on governments to force them to introduce it. At least there are places that are trialling it, so it’s not unthinkable, but I don’t think the “there will be nobody to buy goods” argument really holds up, because those that that affects already demonstrably don’t give a shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity? - Slashdot⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup. Makes me wonder if they teach people rubber duck debugging any more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity? - Slashdot⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There was a Twitter exchange Erich did the screenshotted rounds a year or so ago, which went something like this:

  Tweet 1:

  Sometimes i spend so long crafting the perfect prompt that i realise what the solution is and don’t even have to ask ChatGPT

  Tweet 2:

  Bro just discovered “thinking”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI launches an AI-powered browser: ChatGPT Atlas⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I downloaded Comet to give it a fair go, loaded it up, and then went “…now what?” Couldn’t think of a single thing i could use the AI interface for.

  My personal favourite with Atlas is when he demonstrates searching your history. It takes him longer to type out the command than it would to open your history and search manually, and then it takes It like 10 seconds to find a result, when a manual search would be instantaneous.

  The future is here!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Inside Amazon’s Plans to Replace Workers With Robots⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, robots doing drudge work is exactly the future we were promised. It’s just that that’s supposed to allow humans to have more free time to pursue their interests, not die in a ditch from starvation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will allow mature content, including erotica, to verified adult users as of December⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If this means you can ask it to pretend to be a busty nurse with a limp, that already exists. If it means that you can say “what’s the name of that video with the busty nurse with a lisp?” and it’ll give you a link, then that’s potential, right there. I can imagine them right now torrenting every porn video they can and getting one llm to transcribe it to create training data for another llm while a third llm does image/scene analysis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You never missed anything important⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re a relatively large mammal. Your body is not designed to be productive all the time. It’s designed to have frequent periods of doing absolutely nothing. You’re also a pack animal whose survival depends on being social with other members of your pack.

  So, wasting productive time by conversing nonsense? That’s how we evolved. It’s good for us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which game would you erase from your memory, in order to experience it fresh once again?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. If there’s one answer to the question of what game can you only play for the first time once, is Outer Wilds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Either that’s paid, or my browser’s being funny and not letting me download it. I found what appears to be a breakdown of those stats here: streamlabs.com/…/streamlabs-and-stream-hatchet-q4…

  The numbers match up to your claim, give or take. You’ll notice, however that that’s only talking about gaming streams.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Acknowledging it was assault is not the same thing as not blaming the victim. People who say “she deserved to get raped” are acknowledging that a victim was raped.

  I’ve not looked into Amouranth. This thread is about Emiru. Who is not culpable - in any way - for her assault. This is not something “backfiring” on her.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I blame google. Seriously.

  I almost exclusively use Perplexity to search for things now. When it gives me reliable information and actually answers the question I ask it, it’s fantastic. But that’s still only around 80-90% of the time. That’s actually not very reliable at all by any metric which is worth paying attention to.

  But once upon a time you could search google and it’d look for the words that you searched for. But for years now it’s used “natural language” searches, which means that if you’re searching for a specific word it might not even look for that word at all. It might even take a definition of that word that you didn’t intend and search instead for a synonym to fit that definition.

  Add SEO, ads, and paid search boosting, and you end up with results that are far less useful than they used to be. Add to that the fact that a lot of the actual sites being searched are now AI-generated themselves, and google is now a bad way to try to find something. And every other search engine has followed suit.

  So I use Perplexity because even with an objectively bad hit rate - and the fact that it basically returns one answer from multiple sources, rather than multiple sources some of which might not be related to what I’m looking for, and therefore when it misunderstands is perhaps worse than google - it’s better than a traditional search engine for almost all text-based searches.

  It’s clearly unsustainable, though, and for many different reasons. It’s certainly an iteresting time to be observing all of this. I can’t help but wonder what the landscape will look like in 10 years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know where you’ve got those figures from, but according to this source, youTube has over 50% of the live streaming market, as measured in watch-hours. Then it’s TikTok, and then twitch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  What you’ve just done here is called “victim-blaming”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are AI companies suddenly opening up coffee shops?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I love how the photo of the inside of the place looks like it’s ai generated

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I remeber an article form a decade or more ago which did some research and said that basically, yes there are inaccuracies on Wikipedia, and yes there are over-simplifications, but** no more than in any other encyclopaedia**. They argued that this meant that it should be considered equally valid as an academic resource.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Many developers leave GZDoom due to leader conflicts and fork it into UZDoom⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Since it’s October, 3 recent horrors which are all great in different ways:

  Sinners, Heretic, and Companion.

  Try to go in to the latter with as little knowledge as possible. Like, try to avoid looking at the poster.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Weird. I thought I’d downloaded them a while back. I must be wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure they’ve been on GOG for a while now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  What I mean is I know that a lot of things done online in China are done with WeChat, including it being something that some apps run in. If the same is true for what’s being discussed here, then the Chinese government doesn’t need people to prove their ages first, because they already have that data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On January 1st of 2026, Texas will be required to give ID to download apps from the app stores. It doesn't matter if it's NSFW or not.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Would you need to in China? i genuinely don’t know if downloading apps is something that’s done through WeChat but, if so, the government’s got direct access anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Rules Could Force Tesla to Redesign Its Door Handles. That’s Harder Than It Sounds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, it was found that water pools in the chassis of the Cybertruck, corroding it. They dealt with this by telling consumers not to get it wet and make taking it through a carwash void the warrantee.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grab your pitchforks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also “LGB drop the T”. Once all the trans people are in camps, who do you think they’re coming for next, LGBs?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At the moment OpenAI can’t pay back anything, becuase they’re hemmorhaging money. Losing billions a year. And there’s no path to profitability.

  That’s why they make investors confirm that they’re considering their investments a donation. That’s also why it’s unusual.

  It’s not unusual for the opening phases of big tech companies to be “operate at a massive loss until the competition has gone out of business”, as companies like Netflix and Uber can attest, but it is unusual for that to be done where the investors aren’t expecting to make a profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  VCs typically want a return on their investments

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Not framed like that. You have to acknowledge that investments can depreciate rather than appreciate and that you may lose your money, sure. That’s very different to saying that you acknowledge that you probably will lose your money and that you consider your investment a donation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the AI Conveyor Belt of Capital About to Stop?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  FWIW, part of the OpenAI investment process is signing something to say that you understand that you’re unlikely to get any return on your investment and that you consider it more akin to a donation

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They say remote working less productive⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not just that. Employers think you’re “getting away” with…something…if you can manage to be productive while having something which advantages you.

  For one example, several firms - including Microsoft - have conducted experiments where they move an office to a 4 day, 32 hour week while paying people the same. They unfailingly found that productivity either stayed the same or went up. So, at the end of the experiment they…went back to a 5 day week. Because otherwise people are just getting an extra day off, aren’t they? When they “should” be working.

  Even if productivity went up and it was better for the company and for the workers, it was still ultimately seen as a bad thing because the workers were better off.

  Another example: at a previous job I had we got an hour’s break over the course of the day. 15 minutes 2 hours after start, 30 minutes 4 hours after start, and another 15 minutes 6 hours after start. On a Friday, however, the workday was 7 hours rather than 8. This meant that an hour before leaving people would have a 15 minute break, and then it wasn’t worth actually starting anything because before you’d have a chance to get into it you’d be getting ready to go home. So the workers went to management and said “let’s work through the last break on a Friday and go home 15 minutes early instead”. Management agreed, productivity went up, and everybody was happy at getting off an extra 15 minutes early.

  Then the old upper manager was fired and a new one took their place, and this arrangement was deemed to be “getting away with it”. Taking a final break & going home later was mandated. Suddenly none of the management who had agreed it had anything to do with the initial decision and they’d always thought it was a bad idea.

  So the workers were unhappy because they had a longer workday, less work got done because everybody was unproductive after break, and the company was getting less value for money becuse they were paying people the same amount for less work. But they thought it was a better situation because people were physically in the building for an extra 15 minutes, and therefore not “getting away with it”.

  There’s very often a mindset in management that employees are naughty children, and that strict rules must be good just because they’re rules, rather than because they actually lead to better outcomes for the company.