ReallyActuallyFrankenstein
@ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com
- Comment on 60% of Teachers Used AI This Year and Saved up to 6 Hours of Work a Week 1 day ago:
Thank you for submitting your final exam for AP American History. ChatGPT 5-TeacherEdition graded your Llama 6.3o answers to be 25% incorrect. This determination is only appealable by confirming an error in grading with Gemini X-5-level with a reliability rating of 7.5 or higher, which our system notes from your records is not available to your income tier.
Your future profession is selected as: Meat packer.
Have a nice day.
- Comment on Tesla loses $68 billion in value after Elon Musk says he is launching a political party 2 days ago:
Well, I’ll give my own impression: I was never a fanboy, but I think his PR team did a good job making him seem vaguely non-threatening and focused on bringing the sci-fi ideas into reality. I remember rolling my eyes when he appeared in Iron Man 2, and the “Tony Stark” comparisons always seemed, to be charitable, aspirational. But then he started tweeting about that cave diver being a “pedo guy,” fired his PR people, and it quickly became obvious who he really was.
Basically standard tech bro protocol. Appear neutral on politics and vaguely altruistic in motive, until they have so much money nobody can stop them from being their worst techno-fascist selves. (Altman seems next in line for this transition.)
- Comment on Tailscale addressing concerns over potential enshittification of the platform 3 days ago:
Yeah, this post started as a reassurance that Tailscale wouldn’t enshittify. But it turned out to just be an argument about how to avoid enshittification that boiled down to two principles:
- You shouldn’t make your product worse because it’ll eventually harm the company; and
- Founders are magic and need to never turn over control of the company to others (be it new CEOs or VC) to resist enshittification.
Both are partially right and partially wrong.
For #1: Yes, making your product worse eventually harms the company. No, you can’t expect CEOs to accept that as a reason to not make their product worse because even if it harms the company, short-term incentives that lead to enshittification are eventually going to become irresistible. His comment about reaching “zen” with leveled growth and profit will never stop VCs from calling in demands and favors.
For #2: Yes, founders typically “get it” more than their VC- or failure-initiated replacements. No, that doesn’t mean founders are uniquely resistant to enshittification. This is your point too, and it’s why I don’t believe this person - they lose all credibility here because they doesn’t acknowledge they aren’t special. Every tech bro out there thinks they’ve cracked the code to permanent tech hegemony. That exceptionalist thinking turns into enshittification, since the product-worsening or overcharging is easier to justify as temporary/justified/rationalized (until it isn’t).
And “all of this” doesn’t explain why Tailscale specifically gets immunity if the principles are true.
So interesting post, and a lot more self-awareness than most founders which is still a little reassuring, but a lot of warning signs too.
- Comment on Sleeping beauty bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2 billion 4 days ago:
That’s some quality conspiracy thinking!
But there are too many people who could have been early adopters and have any number of random motives for this to be “likely.”
Heck, I was watching Bitcoin when it was like $0.002 a coin and someone spent 10,000 (presumably home-CPU-mined) BTC to buy a pizza. There were a ton of people there at the beginning, the barrier to purchasing a ton was very low, and unlike me, a lot of them certainly had $20,000 to spare and believed in it enough to buy.
- Comment on Large Language Model Performance Doubles Every 7 Months 5 days ago:
Is it just me, or is this graph (first graph in the article) completely unintelligible?
The X-axis being time is self-explanatory, but the Y-axis is somehow exponential time but then also mapping random milestones of performance, meaning those milestones are hard-linked to that time-based Y-axis? Then individual models are mapped onto it, indicating that the Y-axis is some abstract performance metric, but none of it makes sense in relation to the property of time? What?
- Comment on 32, f. Are there any dating sites that are actually free and don't suddenly force me to pay to actually use the site? 6 days ago:
Yeah, Match.com isn’t satisfied until everyone is miserable.
It’s weird to think about how dominantly successful any app that took a principled position and resisted enshittification starting in 2010 would be now.
- Comment on 32, f. Are there any dating sites that are actually free and don't suddenly force me to pay to actually use the site? 6 days ago:
I think civilization is probably just ending after these last few generations, frankly.
Probably for the best…
- Comment on So you want to start playing Castlevania games (a giant primer) 1 week ago:
Thanks, this was a fun read.
I do think the GBA and DS Castlevanias (since I’ve been replaying them lately) have distinct/unique gameplay mechanics - the most impactful of which involve collecting souls/etc from enemies to junction in new abilities - but until I replayed them I would have said the same thing. I started my replays of them by picking them at random because I couldn’t remember anything except “that was pretty good!”
- Comment on Hesitating getting a Switch 2 (1st game console in 15 years)... 1 week ago:
I’m in the same boat. The only reason I’m considering getting a Switch 2 now is because the first gen consoles always end up the easiest to hack.
- Comment on Lemmy devouring the artist 1 week ago:
You raise a good idea - replace this as Trump’s official portrait wherever possible.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Don’t worry, I’m sure the FTC will investigate this obvious and pernicious false labeling bait-and-switch scheme!
- Comment on Teamviewer Terminates Perpetual Licenses 1 week ago:
I switched to Rust Desk after I got repeatedly flagged for commercial use of Team Viewer and access disabled. I was doing nothing of the sort, but it happened after I accessed my personal computer on my personal phone while at work. They must have IP address checks that are extremely aggressive.
I followed their process to “verify” I was non-commercial, which was invasive and insulting, and then was flagged again.
Rust Desk works great, no problems, never using Team Viewer again.
- Comment on The bizarre, dismal page you see if you open YouTube without an account. 2 weeks ago:
I’m like, “Is this what normal people in 2025 watch?” I feel like an alien on earth, except the planet changed and not me.
- Comment on The bizarre, dismal page you see if you open YouTube without an account. 2 weeks ago:
Tried this on a private window, and yes, that’s what it looks like. Thought I’d click on Shorts and let the first 3 seconds of the opening auto-play video play. Then back to the home page and wow, full of absolute trash.
- Comment on How streaming changed the way you watch TV 2 weeks ago:
And for retro games, emulators have left even that in the dustbin of time.
Sick of the last RPG save happening 20 minutes before a boss fight? Save at literally any moment with save states.
That too much work? You can rewind the entire game.
- Comment on Study finds persistent spike in hate speech on X 2 weeks ago:
All very good points.
- Comment on Study finds persistent spike in hate speech on X 2 weeks ago:
He keeps trying. He seems to think that can be done by just putting his thumb on the system prompt, and then we end up with obvious nonsense like that South African white genocide preoccupation. It’s fortunate the Musk isn’t smart enough to figure out how to do it subtly.
- Comment on My dailies 2 weeks ago:
I spent months tweaking a retropie image and basically learning all the Linux config file issues and arcane knowledge to adapt retropie’s outdated Emulationstation fork.
… And then I built the next system with Batocera and wow, night and day. Save state UX and configs that work right out of the box, clean interface theme options, customization galore without needing a keyboard. I just wish Ruckage’s SNES Classic theme worked on it.
- Comment on Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real 2 weeks ago:
Here is the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary referenced in the article, by the same term we use to describe what’s happening: Hypernormalization.
It was a documentary I’d highly recommend when I saw it in 2017, during Trump’s first term. Now I think it’s required viewing, which is depressing since almost nobody has heard of it, despite living in the exact demoralizing and uncanny reality it describes.
- Comment on Here's your first look at the rebooted Digg | TechCrunch 2 weeks ago:
The article says an iOS app was released to testers.
- Comment on Classic Gaming: Retro Gaming Growing Up 3 weeks ago:
Guess I’m an outlier. For me, games were the way to disconnect from the stress of relationships. I’ve been an introvert since the beginning, and so games’ positive associations for me are a safe place away from social pressures.
I also imagine every “retro” generation thinks its games are the best. Like, there was a meme post about joy at finding a PS2 torrent recently with strong implied nostalgia, and that’s ok. People usually experience video games at an age where the games teach them archetypical feelings of intellectual pleasure, the first time they experienced joy at solving complex problems for example. That becomes a core association through life.
So I think we’ll all have strong feelings linking the systems we played at our formative years. And again, that’s ok. That we can form such strong associations is an expression of the basic human value of video games, as an art and modern cultural necessity.
- Comment on AOSP isn't dead, but Google just landed a huge blow to custom ROM developers 3 weeks ago:
Yup, the entire culture of Google has nearly changed. It used to be coder- and innovation-driven, and open-source was a natural thing to support. Make more money by growing the pie, creating markets with new tech.
Now it seems it’s middle managers and MBAs calling the shots, and their strategy is generic business zero-sum mindset - lock down, restrict, extract. They still see the PR value in open-source, but that’s it.
- Comment on Party like it's 1999. 4 weeks ago:
Is it powerful enough to use the more complex GB shaders in retropie?
- Comment on I've hated donald trump since day one but then I saw this and thought.... 4 weeks ago:
The federal agency ICE is completely captured by fascists. They are arbitrarily staging immigration crackdowns using hastily deputized agents who arrest people off the street while hiding their identity. They came to Los Angeles, a fervently anti-fascist area. It triggered massive but mostly peaceful protests. Trump is using the protests as a pretext to mobilize the federal military against citizens.
- Comment on I've hated donald trump since day one but then I saw this and thought.... 4 weeks ago:
I’m not sure what the hostility is for. The very thing the protesters are standing up for is the correct idea of America. The flag should be for real patriots who believe in the Constitution, not Trump and his insurrectionist ilk.
- Comment on Duolingo CEO on going AI-first: ‘I did not expect the blowback’ 4 weeks ago:
The Tech CEO Bubble is real and one of the most harmful, even if it doesn’t get talked about like our respective political bubbles, geographical bubbles, etc. I actually believe he was actually that deluded that people were as hyped about AI replacing workers as he was.
- Comment on Why do so many people delete their posts? 4 weeks ago:
Sometimes I do it, and it’s just because I don’t really like what I wrote. I read it and it’s just banal, and I’m like, “you’re not moving the discourse forward at all.”
What annoys me are people who did that to thousands of their posts after leaving Reddit to their posts. They’re their posts, they have the right to do it, but I’m like, c’mon, Reddit isn’t suffering from it. They’re selling the data for the same price with or without, and they have all the backups. No, all the users who are googling a one-place-on-the-Internet solution to their extremely specific problem are suffering.
I think that’s like getting angry at your boss and taking it out on your family.
- Comment on Google confirms more ads on your paid YouTube Premium Lite soon 4 weeks ago:
Ah, the grand circle of enshittification.
- Comment on Reddit sues Anthropic, alleging its bots accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times since last July 4 weeks ago:
You’ve fallen for one of the classic blunders!
- Comment on Reddit sues Anthropic, alleging its bots accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times since last July 5 weeks ago:
