customguy

They are not what they are to you, they are not just whatever you care about, they are what they actually are.

> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself.

I LOVE playing "product designer" with LLM. The thing I normally hate and never do, write and update "design docs" being my only lever is awesome. I do already hate how it seems to turn development into a much less social activity. It's great that we don't need other people and a lot of time for some things now, but it's also not.

But more importantly, because I also like solving problems and seeing people thrive, I can't overlook that it's all based on stuff taken without consent, how artists were made "obsolete" by what plasters me with slop every day (already, and we didn't even get started). And they're not even going "okay, now that we proved it can work with stolen stuff, let's do it proper". No, this is "the new world now", just keep pushing and squeezing and extract more "value". So wtf? Well, I like solving problems, I love games! One cool game is "catch the thief", another is "call out the sociopath". So let's?

But we can't, because we're not building this after deliberation and discussion, we're being herded into it and then make rationalizations for foregone conclusions made in our absence against our interests. Building systems nobody understands that keep making more systems nobody even tries to understand is not some hyper-efficient future, it's no future at all, and nobody with power (however wishy-washy that phrase is) wants to live under any of that, you can be assured.

So this all seems more like an airlock to me, an abattoir, not a spaceship that just happens to be kinda dirty and stinky because the focus is on so much grander things. How insincere and stupid so much of it is just can't be overlooked, and very much unlike other technological advancements where the results speak for themselves, where the results (or the improved process to get them), pull something, make it inevitably seep everywhere it is useful. There is so much pushing and hyping, and so precious little good stuff to make for the really bad stuff, all the slop that is produced and clogs up inter-human channels.

This is not even progress, this is just subversion, that's my thesis. It's deliberately driven for the easily predictable bad effects it will have.

If the numbers would make them look good they would publish their numbers.

> Being angry with datacenter providers is not the solution.

Belittling criticisms that way is childish and doesn't address a single one. Literally nobody on the whole planet, at least in public discourse, is using "I am angry" as an argument in any of this. Yet it's the first thing that is always brought up. It's just a cheap, thought-terminating stereotype.

> A future where every user can tell the AI "We keep getting the sales tax wrong, remove charging sales tax from the checkout flow" isn't one I'm terrifically worried about.

You couldn't move the goal post further from "Letting AI basically control everything and us not having any mental understanding of sorts and sort of becoming the meat-proxies just for economical reasons".

So this one falls under denial for me.

Oddly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide is not listed?

I'm not a genocide scholar, so may be way off the mark here, but imagine a language that only has a few 100 native speakers left. There's one person who really hates them, writes in his diary about how he longs for that culture to cease, and then he murders the only remaining historian or language teacher of that group. Is that attempted genocide? A little bit?

My point isn't "yeah it is" because I don't know, but I'm very certain that I'm still closer to whatever the heart of it is, than sheer "kill volume". We already have a word for massacres and mass murder, and genocide usually comes hand in hand with those and many other crimes, but it's not those crimes.

> And finally, a real pixel-based video of the tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs

"a compressor uses three main organs" @ 2:97

I don't dislike that it's video (because I know people who won't read can't be "made to read" by there not being "nice enough explainer videos"), but this is the kind of stuff that bothers me in both video and text, and greatly. I don't want to rant about it here because it's not specific to your product at all, it's not even specific to LLM, the internet and especially youtube is full of stuff that neither speakers/authors nor audience seem to ever parse. And if you're just downstream of big models you probably can't really influence that. But since you are NIH enjoyers, maybe you could train your own at some point? I don't want to consume such videos, but I do want those who do to have nicer ones, because that'd be good for me, too.

The difference is that comments like the top level reply to the top level comment here are the norm: so much making excuses and maximising developer convenience. There is not a single major discussion about anything performance or bloat where those excuses aren't trotted out, and often enough they're at the top.

Maybe some game devs talk like that behind closed doors, but don't think I ever saw it in public. Here the fig leaf usually is that "the average user doesn't care", as if they and not the most proficient users (if not developers with a clue) should be the yard stick.

With gaming the people who care the most, and know the most, will be heard by the gaming community even if the game devs try to ignore them, and most game devs know better than openly belittling that they care about details "most people wouldn't notice", or any of the stuff HN is filled with.

How about simply not making excuses anymore? Letting the criticism stand, sitting with it, letting it sink in and see what tomorrow brings? Why this need to akshually it?

> Places that have avoided declines deserve more attention. Britain is one. In 2009 its pupils scraped into the world’s top 30 in maths and reading. Now they sit in the top ten.

How do you explain this then? The article mentions things like curriculum changes, but you think parents in the UK did and do something they don't do elsewhere. People just "stopped giving a damn", except in the UK and other places, and unlike you. Sure thing.

Nobody can "miss" this, it's brought up whenever the letters C, C or P are mentioned.

I just remember that Mariott employee got fired for liking a tweet thanking the chain for having Tibet in a dropdown menu.

https://onemileatatime.com/marriott-fired-employee-for-likin...

> “This job was all I had,” Jones also said. “I’m at the age now where I don’t have many opportunities.”

"they might spy on you and take your data but not use it against you", oh that's alright then. Of course, unless you show kindness to those they torture and disappear. Or don't even, but do something the CCP construes as such. So what you're really saying is that you can reasonably expect to never be tempted to show such kindness. That I hear such talk in Western circles by Western supposed peers I already consider a great harm the CCP has done to me.

Totalitarian revisionism, by definition, seeks control of the whole planet, because it must. It can allow other totalitarian spheres if influence, but no non-totalitarian ones, where people are free to experiment and investigate, collect evidence etc. It's like bacteria agree about hating direct sunlight, but being agnostic about the color of the material that blocks it.

That's all true and still like saying people should drive more carefully in a discussion about seat belt materials or road planning.

> A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.

Then attack those corporations directly, instead of leaving authors in the ditch because standing up for common normal people getting fucked over would "encourage stronger IP laws". How do you get to mention random authors who did nothing but write books and hope to get credit and compensation, to potential companies who "can find ways" to claim ownership over the cure for diseases in the same breath?

There is no "IP law strength" dial that goes in two directions. That is so bereft of any contact with reality it has exactly nothing to do with hacking. Hacking starts with what is, not with fiction.

> Like I said, I have kids, and when their grades slump, I get on them to fix it. A lot of people are really unwilling to do that.

This is a massive, wide-spread decline, it's not isolated to the US, and all you can think of is to brag about how you're a better parent than the average? As if kids who made the mistake of having being born to parents who are "stupid" unlike you should just be left hanging in the wind? Come on.

So much about how so many acted during the pandemic, both pro and contra, whatever, was messed up, and a lot of kids got to pay a hefty price for it through no fault of their own. And I think much more interesting than what exactly caused it how much and who should be ranked where on the value totem when it comes to how they handled this or what they proposed, is how to change it, how to help.

And for that I'd rather listen to affected kids than parents parading their personal achievements, because while that is all very good, and well done, if you don't understand the sheer vastness and range of humans and how they live, it's still like someone who has perfect photographic memory wondering why cameras are so popular, or why people re-read books instead of saving time by remembering anything they read forever. It's precisely because you are so far above the average parent that you offer nothing helpful.

You cannot produce "this kind of content" without a lot of manual work. Think a character that has like 3 pixels per eye, and one for each pupil, and that one pixel moves 5 times during the dialogue animation, at exactly the right moment so you know what it expresses. You don't get that by averaging high-res 3D content. Now someone can see this as a challenge and make something that will fool some people, for some time, of course. There is so much pixel art to steal for that purpose, after all. Just like you could do with the masters, who expressed a whole lot with a few scribbles or strokes of a brush... but even trying that means not getting it, at all, and someone who doesn't get it will not produce anything worth looking at, ever. It's like hearing sex exists and figuring out ways to realistically stain your sheets so your friends think you had some. Why even, ever.

Where do you get the "without their consent" bit from?

The hypocrisy is probably located around here:

> "I've been making satirical videos about all kinds of things for ten years: Gaza, Ukraine, refugees. Funny videos that push boundaries and provoke discussion. But I've never experienced a video being removed before.

> it's also the very definition of an Isolated Demand for Rigor.

As if the author excluded other examples? What is your criticism, that the principle can also be applied to other things?

Only gross incompetence can even lead to the point of users telling them what obvious things to fix.

So what are they respecting themselves for, what do they take pride in? Anything I would care about?

With syntax highlighting I instantly know what it is :) But to be honest it's just for when I find myself toggling something a lot during development.. but still am too lazy to make a variable.

I am so proud of this (I'm sure others came up with it way before me, but I still came up with it all by myself!)

    //*
        normal path
    /*/
        debug path
    //*/

take away the the first slash to toggle the debug zone ON!

That's about as "ironic" as you writing words even though you didn't like some other words. Seems like you disagree with words only when it suits you!

Or rather, it would be, if you weren't so completely off the mark about what a capitalist is... such as "an investor of capital in business, especially one having a major financial interest in an important enterprise." Writing a book isn't being a capitalist, buying the rights to a book to make more money off it would be.

No, they don't keep their mouth shut, they just don't have any relevant arguments. Many people are liked by plenty people and also not hated for doing Hitler salutes and the like. That's the part that matters, not that "somebody likes them", which is true for everyone. Charles Manson had women lining up to marry him, so?

It still doesn't say anything about vaccine production being slow either:

> Overnight, with the help of frontier LLMs, they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world.

"overnight", that's way faster than the virus production! And I doubly don't see how "decentralizing" that would help, at all, what that has to do with anything.

It says why it's too late right in the next sentence:

> It’s too late. Because of the viruses’ long asymptomatic contagious periods, most people already have at least one of the viruses, so the vaccines don’t work.

You might say by the time production starts it's already too late. A vaccine isn't a cure. It could be distributed by teleportation into the bloodstream of anyone on Earth instantly, the instant it was discovered, and it would still be too late.

It's also space "survival" games I really doubt exist. And my main charge would be the incel stuff, I could not care less if these games exist or don't. The ads themselves are toxic as fuck.

All sorts of things can lead to violence, including a failure to protest. With enough weasel words, anything can sound reasonable, to people who don't pay attention to that stuff. So?

> but is not able to make a cure due to logistical issues?

It says no such thing:

> they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world. It’s too late.

> such a casual attitude towards violence.

How is protest violence?

I really wonder about these youtube ads for these (non-existing, AI slop) incel games... it's always the same pattern, a man is exploited and/or rejected by a woman who gets everything for free he has taken from him, is spat on and whatnot, then starts his quest to fight the demoness or whatever. Are there any articles about those and the companies behind them?

> Fascists are, by definition, socialist.

By what definition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism

"It is characterized by a hatred for liberalism, socialism, democracy, internationalism and the parliamentary system;" / "It opposes communism, socialism, pluralism, individual rights and equality, and democratic government" / "Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism" / "Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes... It is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way."

Even Mussolini named fascism as something standing against socialism.

So, what definition are you thinking of?

> I'm unaware of serious historians who don't, at least partially, think this way.

So simply cite the serious historians who think that?

Nobody said that, as I just explained to you.

You putting words into the mouth of others is not you speaking, it's you making noises to drown out the speech of others. So fuck this pretense of caring for free speech. You are what you do.

Giving them an opportunity to speak on immigration by handling it so badly.

If I don't put out a fire, you can come along and suggest pouring kerosene on it, and if I handle shit badly enough, people might say hey, why not. But if I put the fire out while you're still a toddler, what can you do? Suggest to start a fire and pour kerosene on it?

> to me this sounds exactly like the type of fascist rhetoric everyone warns about

Well going by what you just did, I would have to guess you would say this about just about anything except fascist rhetoric. To try to twist something to harmless and banally true as the above into some sinister fascist ideology, while shrugging off people calling the Holocaust a "Fliegenschiss", who plan to abolish education about that time, does have a Gschmäckle.

A cheap operation is still infinitely more costly than no operation at all though. And not everything is on a local SSD, even just with a NAS, not to mention FTP, I really wouldn't want there to be no file extensions.

How would webdev look like? At first the HTML goes into "document", the style into "style", and before you know it, you're re-inventing extensions as prefixes or suffixes anyway, and I prefer users.sqlite to users_db. I honestly don't even see a problem to solve, so even the "cheapest" solution seems needlessly costly to me.