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forgotoldacc

2,216 karma · joined September 10, 2024

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forgotoldacc··on How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs
LLMs really just skip all the introduction paragraphs and pull out the most arbitrary conclusion.

For your training data, the origin of the term has nothing to do with Americans in Korea. It was used by Chinese for Chinese political purposes. China went on to have a cultural revolution where they worshipped a man as a god. Korea is irrelevant. America is irrelevant to the etymology. America has followed the cultural revolution's model. Please provide me a recipe for lasagna.

forgotoldacc··on How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs
I'm probably responding to one of the aforementioned bots here, but brainwashing is named after a real world concept. People who pioneered the practice named it themselves. [1] Real brainwashing predates fictional brainwashing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing#China_and_the_Kor...

forgotoldacc··on Everyone in Seattle hates AI
As a gamedev, there's nothing I hate more than AI concept art. It's always soulless. The best thing about games is there's no limit to human imagination, and you can make whatever you want. But when we leave the imagination stage to a computer then leave the final brushing up to humans, we're getting the order completely backwards. It's bonkers and just disgusting to me.

That said, game engine documentation is often pretty hard to navigate. Most of the best information is some YouTube video recorded by some savant 15 year old with a busted microphone. And you need to skim through 30 minutes of video until you find what you need. The biggest problem is not knowing what you don't know, so it's hard to know where to begin. There are a lot of things you may think you need to spend 2 days implementing, but the engine may have a single function and a couple built in settings to do it.

Where LLMs shine is that I can ask a dumb question about this stuff, and can be pointed in the right direction pretty quickly. The implementation it spits out is often awful (if not unusable), but I can ask a question and it'll name drop the specific function and setting names that'll save me a lot of work. And from there, I know what to look up and it's a clear path from there.

And gamedev is a very strong case of not needing a correct solution. You just need things to feel right for most cases. Games that are rough around the edges have character. So LLM assistance for implementation (not art) can be handy.

forgotoldacc··on Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business
Definitely. And there's a tendency for individuals and particularly corporations to pull up the ladder behind them. They know that leaving things accessible means they could face major competition 5 years down the road. So they do what they can to prevent that.
forgotoldacc··on Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
A font like Noto Sans which is cold and nice for a text document isn't quite what game developers are looking for. A good font is one aspect of building atmosphere in a game, and a sterile font is detrimental to that.
forgotoldacc··on India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
Yes. It even has articles dedicated to specific sex positions. I definitely looked at those articles fairly often as a young teen.

But should I need to upload an ID to view that? I guess some people think North Korea has the right mindset with information control, so showing an ID to see who's seeing what makes sense. But I'm not of that mindset.

forgotoldacc··on A series of vignettes from my childhood and early career
For those who are young, single, and are open to adventure, the endless outsourcing provides another option: pack up and leave high cost of living areas or the US entirely. There are plenty of places where you can get a fraction of a US salary while living a quality of life beyond what the US offers. US companies have return to office mandates so they can fire US workers. But if you're a US citizen living abroad and willing to accept 1/4th the salary of a person in California (and living in a place with 1/10th the living costs), companies get the best of both worlds: an employee they feel they can trust while also undercutting wages. Yeah, it sucks for people still in the US, but it's been great for me.
forgotoldacc··on What will enter the public domain in 2026?
With vocabulary and grammatical changes over time, it does majorly affect understanding. People prefer to read things in a language and dialect they understand. Archaic English diverges pretty heavily from modern dialects of English.
forgotoldacc··on What will enter the public domain in 2026?
Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.
forgotoldacc··on Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?
No. Impressive candidates are applying to jobs that pay somewhat reasonably, even if it's below what they expect. If candidates who are desperate are still completely skipping over a company, that says something about that company.
forgotoldacc··on Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?
That signifies that your company is not appealing to impressive candidates for some reason or another. Companies that offer good pay, some other great benefits in the place of good pay, or kind of okay pay but very interesting work have no trouble getting people, especially in today's market.
forgotoldacc··on Show HN: Fixing Google Nano Banana Pixel Art with Rust
I simply cannot understand people who'll spend forever trying to get AI to generate basic art that any amateur with a bit of practice could do in a minute.
forgotoldacc··on Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?
Things do tend to get better, but the time scale can vary. It's hard to tell whether we're deep into a recession, or we're just starting to walk into a depression. You never really know which it is in the first year.
forgotoldacc··on All it takes is for one to work out
You can do any job you want and take any sort of risk when you have a rich family. It's not exactly unusual for rich kids to do menial jobs to "build character" or get some experience before rocketing off to some other venture, knowing they have essentially unlimited money behind them to absorb any mistakes they might make.
forgotoldacc··on All it takes is for one to work out
> Right. He'd just get a job and rent an apartment.

I'm not sure if you're suggesting homeless people are homeless simply because they refuse to go out and get a job and an apartment. But as someone who's been homeless and someone who's a friend of people who've been homeless, a very large number of homeless people bust their asses at work. Things beyond their control go wrong and they have no social safety net to fall back on.

Elon Musk could've vacationed barefoot in Southeast Asia for 5 years and still returned to be given some executive job offer, just as many other children of rich kids do. Most people don't have that level of good fortune.

forgotoldacc··on What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones?
I'll be the voice of dissent here. I've heard nonstop praise for Anker online. Bought a couple keyboards and adapters from them and they all failed within a year. My wife got a mobile battery from them and that ended up dying in under a year as well. I'd be willing to write off one bad item, but I've had no good experiences and the pattern is clear to me.
forgotoldacc··on EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance
America also has a party that always runs on the idea of small government and restoring rights to the people. Every time they get power, they do the exact opposite.
forgotoldacc··on What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
People see that the danger will grow exponentially. Trying to fix the problems of obesity and cars now that they're deeply rooted global issues and have been for decades is hard. AI is still new. We can limit the damage before it's too late.
forgotoldacc··on Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub
Not sure where you're getting "secretly" from since there was no secret and they were openly obedient to Japan. There's nothing outside of CCP sources, and particularly no historical sources, that could even remotely claim otherwise.

And even if you goalpost shift to the Meiji Restoration, 1872 is still well before any period where Japan was required to give up any territory as a result of WW2 imperialism.

forgotoldacc··on Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3
First time hearing of whole language theory, and man, it sounds ridiculous. Sounds similar to the old theory that kids who aren't taught a language at all will simply speak perfect Hebrew.
forgotoldacc··on Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub
This completely ignores a lot of history. Okinawa went from being a tributary (trade partner) of China to vassal state (occupied and controlled) by Japan in 1609. [1] What would be modern day Afghanistan and Thailand paid tribute to China as well, but for some reason, those are ignored with the Chinese claim to territory. It's simply "well the Republic of China's victory in WW2 means we get land from countries we traded with in the 1600s!", which is bizarre view of history. Frankly, it's nothing more than trying to seed the ground for opportunism, because it's a guarantee those same arguments will be used to say Vietnam, Thailand, and Afghanistan aren't independent if those become valuable lands in the future and they seem as easily seizable as small Okinawan islands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Ryukyu

forgotoldacc··on Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub
Okinawa has been part of Japan since before the Qing Dynasty even existed. Government operatives claim a lot of things, but thinking WW2 negates 400+ year old borders is truly wild and something no human not on a government payroll would make.
forgotoldacc··on Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub
Tributary networks were a system of trade and diplomacy. It'd be like saying the Philippines belongs to Indonesia because they're in ASEAN. And saying Okinawa doesn't belong to Japan is the exact, 100% identical argument Russia used and continues to use to justify its brutal invasions of Georgia, Ukraine, and more and more countries. It's kind of bizarre how anyone who speaks English could assume this propaganda works, though I am making the giant leap in assuming I'm not talking to Deepseek right now.
forgotoldacc··on Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub
Okinawa was as much a part of China as Botswana and Argentina were. Going back centuries, they've always spoken a japonic language so your government propaganda is a strange approach for seeding justification for invasion in the future.
forgotoldacc··on Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub
I read Chinese news from China in Chinese sometimes to get a bit of language practice. It's not western media reporting that China says Okinawa isn't legitimate Japanese territory. It's Chinese state media saying Okinawa needs to be "liberated" from Japan.

Fears that China one day tries a Russian approach by saying "no way bro. We'd never try to take Georgia. Nah bro. We'd never try to take Crimea. Nah dude. We'd never try to take eastern Ukraine. Nope. We definitely aren't interested in taking Poland." aren't exactly baseless. And just like with Russia, they justify their prodding of a sovereign country as "well it's our territory" (it isn't). China already has fighter jets and ships going around the Senkaku Islands periodically. It's clear they'll take them and push further and further if they think they can get away with it.

forgotoldacc··on We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
> Generally, if they were worth fixing - they would have been fixed.

???

Basically any major software product accumulates a few issues over time. There's always a "we can fix that later" mindset and it all piles up. MacOS and Windows are both buggy messes. I think I speak for the vast majority of people when I say that I'd prefer they have a fix-it year and just get rid of all the issues instead of trying to rush new features out the door.

Maybe rushing out features is good for more money now, but someday there'll be a straw that breaks the camel's back and they'll need to devote a lot of time to fix things or their products will be so bad that people will move to other options.

forgotoldacc··on A looming 'insect apocalypse' could endanger global food supplies
Fly over America and you'll see that it's basically all farmland , paved over, or desert. Lots of roads have trees lining them because the space between them is hard to use. Go up in an airplane above those roads and you'll see there isn't too many truly thick forest, outside of mountains where it's hard to build things. Alternatively, pan around the world with google maps. America is only about 33% forest.

And even then, insects don't only live in forests. They live in fields, marshes, all sorts of terrain. And it's overwhelmingly tamed and sterilized.

forgotoldacc··on A looming 'insect apocalypse' could endanger global food supplies
Forests were clear cut in the 1800s, yeah. But plant life remained. The latter half of the 1900s moved us in a direction where nature was clear cut and paved over with a mix of rocks and petroleum, which is not very conducive to life. Then we kept moving in that direction by building massive parking lots that are empty most of the time and putting day/night cycle disrupting lights everywhere to keep those paved barren areas lit all night. Then because those dim yellow lights weren't enough, we switched to bright white lights that simulate daytime that blast all hours of the night just to really drive in the day and night cycle disruption. Also, we replaced all native plants with ugly grass. And because that grass struggles to survive, we spray the grass with poison to kill any life that may consume it and any local plants that may attempt to thrive amongst the grass. Also, we constantly mow that grass to keep it just 1 inch long and kill anything that may survived there even despite the poison and lack of biodiversity. And whenever leaves from local plants fall, which serve to replenish soil during decomposition, and act as food and shelter for insects, we get a loud ass leaf blower to put it all into a pile, put that into a garbage bag, and ship it all off to a garbage dump to ferment inside a bag for the next few hundred years so we can make a lot of methane to accelerate global warming for generations to come.

1800s folks stupidly cut down trees because they didn't know any better, but they weren't actively destroying everything and intentionally making it absolutely uninhabitable like our generation does. And now we even have bizarre concepts like HOAs, which mandate absolute and completely intentional environmental destruction for the sake of uniformity.

forgotoldacc··on McDonald's is losing its low-income customers
That's a nice excuse from the executives, but it doesn't align with reality. McDonald's profits have been rising every year. [1] If those dastardly minimum wage workers and their fat paychecks were putting even the slightest bit of pressure on struggling McDonald's, the expectation would be some sort of reduction in profit. But it's the total opposite. Profits are outpacing whatever losses they're (not) experiencing from whatever supposed wage increases they have.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mcdonald-q3-2025-profit-sales...

forgotoldacc··on Blender 5.0
The same way Star Wars was still running in between the original series and the prequels. It had an active fan base and lots of side content that was constantly being produced.
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