gamacodre

With those examples though, how would we know ahead of time that they "shouldn't be explored?" They sure looked interesting and maybe even potentially beneficial a couple decades ago.

Now, of course, we know those algorithms warp regular users (and by extension societies). Or... maybe they don't? Some research has suggested that just putting this many people in direct communication with each other is the root cause of the problems we see. There could be other ways to fix those without shutting down the internet. How would we know without more exploration?

Yeah, I saw that link and had a few thoughts immediately collide in my head:

    - Wait, WTF? Really??
    - But but but it's a *chatbot*, not an authority 
    - We're doomed

A recent study[1] seems to indicate that polarization is a hard problem, along with some of the other negative effects of social media. Many of the commonly suggested solutions have minimal impact, or no effect at all. That flywheel effect is surprisingly robust.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

As an anecdatum, one of my gen Y embedded engineers is using a little stick phone that can barely text, and avoids all social media except Discord (assuming that counts). One of the other younger folk in a different department has something similar. And we've only got around 100 people in this building.

> they convey the meaning and humor much better than the americanized voiceover

I'm glad this isn't just me. I occasionally watch anime and the English dubs are seemingly universally terrible compared to the originals. Subtitles are annoying but nothing like listening to someone mumble their way though a script.

I could be wrong, but my impression is that GDP is usually thought of (by non-economists) as a trailing index that has some sustainability baked in, by inertia if nothing else. Military spending would normally track reasonably well with that. What Russia is doing... doesn't sound sustainable.

> Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization

Doesn't this immediately turn into the kind of problem TFA is bemoaning? Once a news organization gets traction (opt-ins in this case) on a platform, they'll inevitably start selling space in their feed to one or more crappy aggregators. To the C-suite this looks like free money, since somehow they always manage to convince themselves that the brand damage from it will be minimal or at least manageable.

It sucks.

I expect we'll experiment with that as soon as we get a man and a woman imperfectly supervised in a low-gravity environment for 9+ months.

Vertical integration in this space sounds like a really bad thing to me ("bad" in the sense of "likely to lead to the creation of products that erode human dignity in new and interesting ways").

We can surely build more efficient and capable hardware than our current evolved wetware, since all of the details of how to build it are generally externalized. If the chips had to fab themselves, it would be a different story.

The software is a different story. Sure, the brain does all sorts of things that aren't necessary for $TASK, but we aren't necessarily going to be able to correctly identify which are which. Is your inner experience of your arm motion needed to fully parse the meaning in "raise a glass to toast the bride and groom", or respond meaningfully to someone who says that? Or perhaps it doesn't really matter - language is already a decent tool for bridging disjoint creature realities, maybe it'll stretch to synthetic consciousness too.

I think the problem here would be figuring out how much of the brain's power draw to attribute to the multiplication. A brain is more akin to a motherboard than a single CPU, with all kinds of I/O, internal regulation, and other ancillary stuff going on all the time.

I think this is still just a difference in how the output is used. You're presenting text generation as factual and image generation as artistic. It could be reversed - no one will care if a fantasy story gets some in-milieu "facts" wrong, but a blueprint or architectural reference coming out of Stable Diffusion could ruin someone's year.

Geez, these companies just keep getting passed around and around. I was working for Time Warner Interactive (aka Tengen, the consumer arm of Atari Games) when Midway bought them in '96.

Those are more difficult, but we're in the process of killing them off too.

As usual, without much regard to consequences.

Couple of thoughts:

You are assuming that a pure function has access to some source of randomness. I think that's a bit less than pure unless a source of randomness is one of the inputs. Doesn't change your point at all, but it distracted me from what you were saying.

Speaking as someone who has occasionally invented new things, I think you underestimate the variety of outputs that can arise from a lifetime of accumulated experiential cruft and a situational fitting function (e.g. "we need a working teleporter to stay competitive"), without bringing in randomness at all.

Yeah, and Tandy graphics were different from EGA or VGA, just enough that you needed to write different display code for them. And you had to get the user to tell you which ports/IRQ numbers half of their hardware was configured at.

We have way better hardware abstractions in the OS today, which I would agree makes modern development easier overall.

I've worked with some of those folks too. It seems to me like they haven't really learned programming the way I understand it; instead, they've learned various incantations that can be strung together, and are just at a loss when they don't work as expected/documented.

Mine happened a long time ago and the industry was very different, but there are echoes of it in some of the other comments here. I'd say, build a project and ship it to customers. The feelings of accomplishment and agency from doing that were a tremendous boost to me. Even though I knew my code was iffy at best.

It's fine if you're collaborating with someone else or a team, as long as there are some good-sized chunks in there that you can point to and say "I did that part." Your customer might only be a different team in your company. The point is that you created something that had an impact on other people.

PS I'd also suggest: Take some time and build something small in assembly language. Getting even a bit of a feeling for how the CPU actually interacts with memory and registers and math and branching will give you a completely different perspective on higher-level languages.

Looking a the other comments, it seems like there's some meta-commentary on the social and commercial positioning of art going on here. Along the lines of "taking no position is really bold," which is supposed to make this an interesting performative exercise... maybe?

To me it's kind of interesting that this person's stream of consciousness results in such visually coherent stuff, but that's about it. One might need to be more plugged in to modern art culture to get anything "moving" out of the meta.

I think that this kind of novel problem modeling was always in (comparatively) short supply in programming. It's just so _easy_ to tell the machine to do what you want it to do, that it's a tough sell to figure out how to tell it to do something completely different that your modeling says will magically make your solution easier.

It feels like progress here is really jerky, with periods of aimless milling about interspersed with breakthroughs that spread rapidly. Some examples that come readily to mind are A* graph traversal, BNF parser generators, BSP trees for game world rendering.

It seems rare that a working developer gets to sit back and think, "huh, this problem actually feels a bit like that physics/math/statistics thing I was reading about the other day/year/decade" and spend any time usefully thinking about it. So any language or library we have to hand gets bent into solving the problem the way we're thinking about it right now.

Heh. That would've been nice. Back in the day, after we walked in the snow uphill to work both ways, we wrote our code, ran it through the cross-assembler, burned EPROMs (after waiting an extra 15 minutes to erase the last ones we used because someone lost the dang tube), plugged 'em into a socketed NES cartridge and really hoped it worked.

The way I've seen this choice done that makes it easy (for me as a director of software dev) to buy into is a hybrid. You can pay $x/mo or $10x/yr. If you pay for the year, you don't have to do it as a subscription, but if you don't renew then you're stuck on the last version released during that year.

FontAwesome, TablePlus, and some others I've paid for multiple seats on do this and it's great. Some we just paid for the one year, and others we were able to see enough ongoing value to keep paying on the subscriptions.

> ...does not mean the government should coerce everyone...

Here you're presuming that the government's role in a pandemic is to wring their hands and issue PSA's. That might be what some folks want them to do these days, but when the legal foundations of public health policy were laid the government was expected to do quite a bit more.

> People have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies.

This might be your opinion, but the majority of your fellow citizens disagree with you. Try asking them about drug use, abortion, suicide, and other "purely personal" matters.

> People have the right to make the wrong choice.

Many wrong choices come with severe state-imposed consequences. We in the US long ago delegated to our elected representatives the authority to force some choices onto individuals, including in a health emergency. We are of course vigorously debating whether they used that authority wisely this time, but it was theirs to use.

This has bugged me since the beginning of this mess. It ought to be possible to say "Hey this looks kind of funny, could the vaccines be having weird effects in this .0000001% of the population?" without daggers coming out all around.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that "The SARS-Cov-2 vaccines occasionally cause health problems" and "Almost everyone should get vaccinated/boosted" are both entirely true statements.

Epic could also, in that case, offer subscriptions that can only be canceled at a storefront in Peoria between 1am and 4am on alternate Tuesdays.

And yet, with no functioning Facebook or Twitter account, I seem to have no problem finding businesses that sell the things I'm interested in. Most local issues of actual importance are still mentioned in the newspaper.

Facebook could get their databases and backups wiped tomorrow and I'm pretty sure nothing would substantively change in my life or my work (and I work in tech). Same goes for Twitter. I might be exposed to less second-hand stupidity on an average day.

I see lots of hand-wringing about them being somehow equivalent to power plants or water districts, but to me it seems like a tortuous justification for "make them act how I want them to act".

What? Those login pages are publicly accessible in their entirety.

But then who would they blame when the train derails?

> People who use 2fa are not related to the same group who updates their dependencies

This does raise the question though - should they be related? If so, why? If not, why not?

From TFA, it seems github believes that a positive correlation there is worth pursuing and they offer reasons, though I have no idea how their corporate-blog-speak relates to their actual motives here.

If your threat model is "someone cloned the database and can now perform unlimited attacks against the stored passwords", then yeah, word + digit protects just about nothing. Assuming a lexicon of 5,000 words, word+digit gives you about 50,000 variations to try. Say that L337 substitutions give you another 10x factor, so now you have 500,000 candidates for what the password might be. Now lets assume that instead of the stupid crap they did in this video, the folks storing your password did everything right and used bcrypt with a work factor of 12. A cracking rig from a couple years ago can run something like 10,000 hashes per second under these conditions, so it might take a whole minute to discover your password. (Remember this is if they did it right, most other password storage schemes would yield your password in a fraction of a second.)

Or, we could look at the two-words-separated-by-punctuation case. Same 5,000 word lexicon, maybe 10 different symbols likely to show up between the words. Call that ~250,000,000 possibilities for your password. That'll take up to a day to crack. A day is a long time to spend on one password, but maybe they don't have anything better to do. Maybe they hate you personally. Add another word, suddenly the hackers need years per password, which is obviously uneconomical.

These guidelines don't come out of nowhere, and there isn't really a tower of experts somewhere giggling at the unwashed idiots around them (well, there might be, but I wasn't invited). This is just one of many problems in computing that live around the intersection of math and psychology, where the "natural" thing to do is (unintuitively) quite dangerous.