fzeroracer

This is just false, considering I've lived across the US. My experience has been pretty universally the same whether or not I lived in Texas, Virginia or Washington. People that are incredibly sheltered like to believe that it's unique to their city, or the result of partisan politics but the reality is that the rot is deeper than that. One of the most famous examples was in deep red Texas: Ethan Couch.

Living in Seattle, people focus a lot on the homeless because it's an obvious problem. The guy screaming at the corner, or the people sleeping on the sidewalk.

But I personally think people miss that its a symptom of greater social rot. I've had more issues with antisocial car drivers than any homeless individual. People screaming profanities because I'm crossing the street with the walk signal active, people narrowly missing me as they speed to work. Just yesterday my entire block lost power because a drunk asshole tboned another car going 75mph, killing a family of four while nearly shearing a utility pole.

The reality is that even if the line is drawn with the homeless the undercurrent of social rot is still there and it's not getting better. And I don't see people calling for car drivers to be institutionalized, quite the opposite in most cases even when they commit homicide.

The wealthiest Americans aren't buying shit from China, I have no clue where you managed to get that point from but they're buying boutique shit from Europe or elsewhere.

American-made goods have the worst cost:quality ratio for multiple reasons. Capitalism hollowing out quality, businesses capturing markets. They sit in an area which are unaffordable for your average American as a result of the middle class vanishing and not boutique enough for the wealthier ones.

People voted for a wealthy man to loot everything and he's doing exactly that.

> We do architecture reviews now. Code reviews are going away because agents handle it.

So you already failed the first part of doing your goddamn job as an engineer which is reviewing and owning code. Code review is a vital part of that, because code ownership is a responsibility shared by your entire team. We used to say that cowboy coders were a disaster for your team and now you're saying everyone on your team is effectively a cowboy coder.

If it turns out claude or whatever LLM you're using pulled in a bad package and now your companies data has been exfiltrated are you going to be the one willing to be fired for your blunder?

How much extra do you get paid to drink the corporate koolaid? I ask this because some of the most miserable people I know were the kind of people that were all-in on serving the corporation at all costs only for it to burn through everything else in their life, especially when they get laid off.

FYI, Opera didn't fail as much as they sold out. It was still sustainable, but the former founder/CEO left over this spat and formed Vivaldi over it.

> Yes, I understand you want to dismiss works based purely on provenance without actually evaluating it on its merits.

I have gone over almost 20,000 games on Steam because I focus on indie game curation. If you have actually paid attention around you to the kinds of things people are throwing out there then you would understand. I have seen games that literally do not function with a bunch of generated assets [1], games whose sole providence is combining generated hollow art with a generated hollow story [2]. You are dealing with thousands of people who are doing exactly the same thing as you, with the same quality and the same reasoning. Your work can and will get filtered out along with the rest of them because you are using the same signal in the same way.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2832640/DEAD_GET_REKT/

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3694060/Manos_The_Hands_O...

If you're a gamer: Have you seen the amount of AI slop on Steam? Or the amount of poorly created translations banged out with AI? Or the amount of shitty decomps appearing daily developed with Claude? People are looking for signals because AI usage is a strong signal of poor quality trash. You are not going to overcome that barrier by complaining it's being made obvious of it or complaining that people are being 'prejudiced', the only way you will overcome it is by proving you have something of actual worth. And if you can't prove that, then maybe you need to reevaluate what you are creating.

Hiding your use of AI will only make things worse when people find out. Look at how badly the CEO of Saber Interactive is crashing out after they lied about firing a writer to replace them with AI.

> Games are literally one of the absolute best uses for this tech. Someone is going to figure out a way to leverage this stuff as a first class function of the gameplay. Player directed assets or procedural world creation, dynamic quests like never before seen. They're going to hit the nail on the head and produce a banger with this tech and the landscape is never going to be the same again.

I see the AI boosters say this over and over again. People do not want it. Games have tried the whole dynamic NPC stuff along with generated quests and it's immersion breaking and more importantly, not fun.

The US has long gone in the direction of abject mistrust in government agencies, which means large projects are just not feasible. Companies can't pick up the slack either; if they can't build out a new shopping mall without falling over themselves and cutting extreme corners then we shouldn't expect them to handle nuclear power either.

And companies frequently ignore city-wide noise ordinance thanks to corruption and kickbacks.

It's close enough when you consider that the noise from a poorly built data center (ie: most of the ones being stood up rapidly in the current AI craze) can carry noise upwards of a mile plus depending on a bunch of different factors. So a lot of homes in that area would potentially be within the blast radius of data center noise, especially at night.

This is false and easily provable by simply looking at the location on the map [1]. It's very clear that it's being built near housing and schooling. Especially a big deal as there's been more recent cases of exceedingly loud data centers carrying noise quite a distance.

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/D5PDUa62B5weCcqZ7

> UBI is essentially redistribution from those who work to those who don't work.

If you believe this, then surely you also believe pension plans are the devil? If we can't have UBI then we can start by tearing away pension plans for all of the old people my tax money is being wasted on.

I think if the ethos of hackernews has become supporting the MIC because they create nerd shit or to be contrarian then this site has long since lost the way.

I came here to say the same thing. ModRetro is like if Palantir decided to start selling board games. The company is poison by association and Palmer Luckey certainly doesn't hide it (the drone part, for example).

Waymo cannot ever be fully sustainable because cars are subject to variable and constantly increasing size. As more individuals own cars the throughput of a transit network relying on ride-sharing or autonomous cars gets less and less efficient.

It's far easier to add additional capacity to other forms of transit. But the end result of Waymo is that it will just converge into being a bus network that took decades to get to.

I've colloquially coined this as the contentification of everything. The goal isn't to actually engage with something, whether it's the writing style, flavor, or artwork on display. It's purely about consumption, and the most optimal way of consuming something is distilling it down into a short, bland summary.

It's why there are people out there that will use an LLM to summarize a book and pretend that they read the whole thing because they know the general outline.

There's been multiple 'unslop' contests [1] with a focus on AI 'writing' and I agree with the OP that AI writing makes me want to vomit. It's all hollow, bland writing that has zero zest to it.

[1] https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop-results

> Gamedev is a good example of where AI shines, since the risks of fucking things up are not so big

Hi, professional game dev here. No it's not. Thank you for reading.

AI IS the system; the speed with which the rich and wealthy have embedded it into every aspect of our lives and the way it has been trained off the stolen work of millions without care is only possible because it is directly entwined.

You couldn't just characterize them that way, they are using literally the exact same setup that Enron did in order to hide the massive amount of debt and liabilities they had that eventually sunk the company. People jumping in to defend this as being totally legit or not-fraud seem quite insane to me: companies should not be trying to hide these things to pump up their stock prices or to entice investors that otherwise might not see it.

Their own users voted for this.

Seems fine to me. It was decided by a community vote; it's their site and their rules. The people complaining about those damn ideologicsts or whatever seem to be missing the point in that they are equally as ideological just in a different direction.

We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.

> how ai slop is better vs book slop, at least with ai you can distill the idea

Why don't you just use whatever LLM you have on hand to summarize every book you could read instead of reading it? The idea that ai slop is 'better' because you can distill the idea is an insane point to me because it treats books as a pure consumption-based concept, where the goal is strictly to finish a book and move on.

I think even the worst book is more valuable than whatever garbage an LLM writes because you can at least learn from the intent. Where and why the author failed, where they got stuck, the points they failed to make. LLM writing is a void, there's nothing to be learned.

> I’d say that, in all the ways that matter, I understand the code. Sure, if I had to hand-edit it now, there’d be a serious learning curve. But I won't have to. And more importantly, I can reason about the system, share perspectives with my colleagues, and guide agents on future work.

If there's a serious learning curve to editing code then you don't understand the code. We used to call that 'on-boarding' when you brought a new engineer on the team as they got up to speed as to how the codebase worked.

I noticed this as well. A few days ago I was linked a game engine here when I similarly asked for proof and when I went to the repo and started reading it, the best way to describe it was keyword jargon soup and it seems to be the same for a lot of projects in this thread.

I think it's because it makes them seem...smarter? More technical? But they can't describe who it's for or what the actual design is without consulting an AI.

I don't think this is surprising at all. I'm pretty sure I've saved my employers similar amounts in the past, because what happens is something gets configured months or years ago, the dev leaves, everyone forgets and assumes things are how they are.

I've had to delete some really silly code that would slow things down or just force waits as a result of either dealing with legacy APIs or some other arcane reason. Not without testing or making sure it wasn't there for a reason mind you, but these inefficiencies can sometimes be hidden big problems.

There are some incredibly strange equivalences going on in here that make me think the person in question is indeed quite out of date.

The people pushing for the destruction of privacy and attested software integrity ARE the tech bros. I'm sure there are people here that will vehemently disagree with me, but we see the biggest tech companies pushing for age verification and we see founders and rich folk gleefully giving up their earlier pro-privacy stances in favor of supporting locking down identity. They're building up their moat in real time because not only does it let them kill that pesky FOSS, but also it means they can legally gather even more data from individuals in question.

It also goes hand-in-hand with the increasingly authoritarian bent a lot of those same people have taken and these resources will absolutely be used to crack down on minorities and things they don't like.

I think your head would have to be firmly planted deep underground to somehow not connect the two dots. As another poster here said, they're literally lobbying for these age verification laws because it benefits them.