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fzeroracer

4,189 karma · joined April 27, 2016

software developer and indie game developer, opinions represent myself only
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fzeroracer··on Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI
What do you think prevents you from being literally enslaved? The government is (or was) one avenue of your leverage against capital, when they own the government and they write the laws what protection do you have against being forced into service?

The complete inability of people to learn that what we have now was written in blood as their form of leverage is enough to drive a man insane.

fzeroracer··on OpenAI Feared "Optics" of what might appear on Hacker News
And OpenAI isn't a lobby organisation?

Plus you somehow didn't even read the article properly, given that "sketchy russian website" is part of a direct quote.

fzeroracer··on OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says
No, that is false and depend on how breaking and entering is codified. Some states here in the US codify it as any unlawful entry into a building, others require minimal force to qualify.
fzeroracer··on OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says
If someone forgets to lock their door that suddenly doesn't make it legal to break into their house and steal their shit.

The same principal applies to government sites. If something is poorly secured and adversaries are using it to steal stuff then there are avenues to report it and get it fixed up.

>But the fact these governments making the noise are the ones promoting mandating everyone giving up their information to be then stored so incompetently,

The governments in these cases are bought by the very people you're defending. They're using it as a convenient proxy because they know people like you won't look behind the curtain and see corporations pushing this shit so that they can steal freely and just point elsewhere.

fzeroracer··on I don't want to read what you didn't write
I really, really despise this sentiment and the people that make it.

Writing has always been incredibly difficult for me, both due to incredible difficulties with handwriting and finding my own voice. That difficulty I find in writing is the friction that identifies what my voice is, the words I choose and the meaning I attempt to convey through my own understanding.

I cannot read AI-generated crap for the life of me because all of it simply has no meaning. I will go back and read through paragraphs, trying to grasp at the meaning of something that does not exist. If your argument is that AI-generated writing eases the pain then I will make the opposite argument: reading AI-generated slop increases the pain 10x. I would sooner read through an essay with endless punctuation issues and spelling mistakes than one passed through an LLM because one is an earnest attempt to communicate while the other is offloading all of the mental burden to me. Which gets to the root issue of a lot of the complaints around people slinging slop: you make it marginally easier for you, and then far worse for everyone around you.

fzeroracer··on Ogre Battle 64 Recompiled Project at 99.05%
The N64 SDK (Libultra) was leaked a while ago and is all proprietary, owned by Nintendo. Portal 64 was issued a DMCA by Valve partly on account of them not wanting to get on the bad side of Nintendo because it used Libultra.

It's not only possible but I would argue highly likely that any LLM has absorbed that proprietary code into its training data making effectively any decomp not a clean room effort if they incorporate assistance from LLMs or coding agents into their tooling. If Nintendo wanted to be particularly onerous they could easily claim that their codebase makes use of proprietary tooling/knowledge and there would be zero recourse for the devs.

fzeroracer··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Damn, how did businesses survive decades without being able to pay some intern or someone in the office to quickly put up a poster? Like come on, claiming 'budget' is the issue here when I can see indie bands operating with twigs and some chewing gum figure out how to put together a poster for their band is embarassing.
fzeroracer··on Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
The number of times I've looked into something that was highly upvoted and purported to solve a problem only for it to be unreadable crap that barely functions has definitely skyrocketed over the past few years. In a way it's similar to how 80% of people only read the headline, except it's psychosis around the equivalent of a dressed up pile of trash.
fzeroracer··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
> Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data

We do have regulation against these issues. Companies spent years railing against piracy and IP theft enshrining it into law but now that it's being done by them en masse it's considered acceptable. The reality is that no regulation would help because we don't have regulators willing to enforce it nor do we have a legal system designed to help individuals against mass theft by corporations.

fzeroracer··on More than 100k people in Japan are now aged 100 or older
'Let nature take its course' is such a naive take.

The reality is that Japan (and countries following a similar path) are strangling the younger generation by saddling them with generational debt. They become responsible for taking care of an older population, with no guarantee of their own future as their own ability to retire vanishes and income goes to zero. It should be no surprise that the older block also votes to protect itself, as politicians skew far older than the rest of the citizenry. The result of 'nature taking its course' is a complete collapse of the government. In the long term this is certainly a solution but not a particularly good one.

An argument could be made that a slow gradual decline would help ease these issues but you would need to convince people twice your age to willingly give up their benefits and things they worked for and were promised. What are the odds that you think that will work out?

fzeroracer··on More than 100k people in Japan are now aged 100 or older
To be completely fair, we've also seen what happens to countries with nukes as well. It seems like almost every major military power on the planet has been hollowed out by institutional rot and grifters and I would fully believe the same of China's military if they got into a stupid conflict like the US. Traditional military power doesn't matter in a world where a country can buy a hundred thousand drones for dirt cheap and make any sort of invasion suicidal.
fzeroracer··on LG says we're fake news [video]
I'm not sure how anyone didn't see this coming.

Literally every business is working towards a solution where consumers own nothing and they own everything. Games, music, movies. They want to sell you subscriptions to use shit like your car or your fridge. They want to double dip on that by making you not only pay for the ability to use the stuff you bought, but also so that they can sell everything you do on it to advertisers. This is even especially true with all the shit people feed LLMs daily for work or personal purposes.

This is the end state of an unregulated capitalist market without consumer protections.

fzeroracer··on Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA
I'm curious: Why do you arguments against unions not equally apply to employers? Why do you blame the unions and not the companies responsible for it in the first place? Especially when you proudly admit you're partially responsible?
fzeroracer··on USPS Built an Untested, Undocumented Ballot-Blocking System Despite Injunction
Because it is trivial to identify the people who vote by mail. This complaint comes up over and over and over and over and over again by people that have spent zero seconds actually looking into how verification is done.

You compare the signature with what's on the voter record. You check records to see if they passed away recently. Then you can compare addresses and any other personal details. This is more than enough information to strongly verify that the person who voted was who they say.

It's why fraud is rare and why the cases of attempted mass voting fraud are immediately identified (see: Leslie McCrae Dowless)

fzeroracer··on The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great
While I disagree with The Dark Forest hypothesis, the way AI and LLMs interact with the internet validate the theory in this specific instance. Individuals hosting their own slice of the internet have to deal with crawlers DDoSing them into oblivion and other islands retreat into privacy to avoid them entirely.
fzeroracer··on How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
Posting revenue numbers as an example of a company not dying seems rather foolish. Microsoft's gaming side is floundering and dying and Linux has been growing at an unprecedented rate as a result of Microsoft's decisions. Not to mention the geopolitical aspects at play here as countries make a serious consideration to drop Windows.

These companies are all heavily buoyed by their investments in AI which is essentially an oroboros of money.

fzeroracer··on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
It's not exactly an old thing. Wizards of the Coast hired the Pinkertons to seize cards and harass people extra-legally as recent at 2023. As I said, even if you remove the legal barriers preventing control over IP companies can and do operate on the fringe of or outside of the law to enforce it anyways.
fzeroracer··on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways.

This doesn't mean our current system of patents and copyrights doesn't favor them either especially as they shred it to train their AI models but it's not a system you can fix by simply tearing it all down.

fzeroracer··on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away.

With agents you can just throw them at every JIRA ticket and get them (badly) implemented. There's no rhyme or reason if it's needed or even wanted, and spending time to think about it is 'wasted'. So the numbers on the burn down chart go up, but actual productivity is stagnant or becomes negative as unnecessary bloat sneaks into your app or game.

fzeroracer··on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
Profitability can only matter as long as the ecosystem is sustainable; otherwise once the floor collapses there's no more money to be made. A game can be profitable, but when the entire team that made it is laid off or furloughed before launch there isn't a team anymore to follow up. Eventually those people leave the industry and there isn't enough capital made by your average worker to fund their own gaming studio, relying on investors or the rich to parasitize their work in order to create more games.

This is part of the reason why we see endless games as a service despite 90% of them failing. Teams have to do the bidding of the rich, but the rich don't know what's 'fun'.

fzeroracer··on I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked
That's the exact sort of thing the military would want us to think, because 'we were hacked by another nation' sounds a lot better than 'we fired the people responsible for food logistics'. You're not going to be able to divine the real reason this way.
fzeroracer··on I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked
There's a far simpler explanation than some outside actor (either state sponsored or otherwise) deciding that the best thing they can do is to muck around with freezers.

We know there's been a severe rot of operational capabilities in the military thanks for Hegseths purges and general stupidity. It's entirely possible and quite likely that over the course of his various drunken binges he decided to get rid of people who were in charge of operational control for stuff like freezers across military bases.

fzeroracer··on The world may have less time than it thinks on climate change
Politicians can only be held accountable as long as their base is willing to hold them to account. And unfortunately the old and wealthy have practiced the maximal mantra of FYGM. The degree with which not only do they hoard wealth but do everything in their power to ensure the old ways they made their wealth stay empowered tilts politics heavily.
fzeroracer··on The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality
How do you know your average AI PR is better than a human developer? Most of the teams that I see touting the benefits almost never review the code that's output, or they offload that process to another agent.

Like I see people say this, and yet the teams that are AI maxing produce worse code than ever. Software has rapidly gotten more unstable and unsustainable over the past three or so years than I've experienced in the past 20.

fzeroracer··on Nvidia Insists It Can Keep Printing Money to Fund the AI Boom
Capitalism has long since embedded itself as a cult of money, which is why it makes debates around it so difficult because people believe they are the Golden Child simply disenfranchised by people refusing to let Capitalism grace them. It's evolved from the 'temporarily embarrassed billionaire' part to just outright worship of billionaires though.

Unfortunately I think by the time people recognize the emperor having no clothes it'll be too late and we'll all suffer for it.

fzeroracer··on Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days
The backlash has only been growing as the result of a significant number of incredibly sloppy decomps, either creating unreadable codebases or outright being so buggy/inaccurate as to be useless. Every day I see another decomp pop up that exists solely for the cred of being the first to do so, which is then promptly abandoned by the developer because it doesn't fucking work.
fzeroracer··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
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.
fzeroracer··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
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.

fzeroracer··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
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.

fzeroracer··on AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
> 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?

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