ragequittah

>Live long and prosper.

Relevant. Star Trek is a post-scarcity society where people invent and create solely for the betterment of humanity. You know what else isn't "free" to create? Game mods. Yet I can go out there right now and download several hundred mods for any game that can be modded for free and most times without even a way to possibly pay the creator. I've also spent 100s of hours of my own time creating mods / helping communities on discord or reddit despite there never being a possible financial gain. I genuinely wonder what the software world / internet would be like if everyone were in it only if their time were compensated with money. Horrible place. We wouldn't be having this conversation right here right now that's for sure.

Funnily enough I've found for the most part the counter to all this spying also tends to be free products. Signal, pi-hole, ublock origin, graphene OS, Opnsense, Linux, etc. I have yet to find paid-for apps that are superior to the free ones in this regard. If I want an image editor I'm using Gimp, not Photoshop. Libreoffice is better than Microsoft Office if you don't want to be spied on. Most of the cost is learning about the alternatives and how to use them.

Agreed. Something like Dark Souls where an enemy is an enemy and it'll smash you if you're underleveled is so much more satisfying than something like Oblivion where enemy health inexplicably goes up based on your level. It also gives you the satisfaction of going back to earlier areas that were scary and laughing off the puny enemies.

>None of these things are free my friend.

I have not paid a single cent for any of them. Many of them I'm even free to change it however I like and even release my version as a fork.

>Even then, bitching about functionality and features would be entitled.

If you think Linux or ANY of the software I listed would be nearly as good without users "bitching" I have several bridges to sell you. The alternative is to pay a whole bunch of people to test every aspect of the software to find bugs, missing features, minor UI quirks that could be tightened, etc. FOSS only works because of us "entitled" people writing git issues or contributing code when we know how to fix the issue.

Most of the stuff I use is free and excellent. Linux, Firefox, libreoffice, xcp-ng, bottles, steam, playnite, opnsense, docker, dockhand, immich, freshrss, obsidian, tailscale, calibre, caddy, docker, pi-hole, signal, audiobookshelf I could probably keep going for a long while. I'm very glad most good software creators I've come across do not have your mindset.

I was wondering where this goal post would shift to next. So now instead of AI being incapable of doing something not in its training data it needs too much external help doing what no human could do, and what it came up with isn't even important anyways.

The companies can suck and their product can do amazing things at the same time.

This always seemed obvious to me until I listened to an episode of the Risky Business podcast and they seemed to be wholly against using VPNs in such a situation because modern wifi security is typically enough / there's no reason to fear public wifi anymore. Going so far as to call VPNs a scam in this context. I still never trusted public wifi for much of anything, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking those guys know more than me. I'm glad I still used my VPN with a kill switch despite their advice. Now I'm seriously considering a travel router.

Yep. That said I hesitate to paste AI verbatim. Instead I tell the AI to give me a good source for the information, make sure it's trustworthy, skim it myself then paste that. Like how everyone used Wikipedia when schools didn't allow it as a source.

It's a show until you're rounded up by ICE or you can't get an abortion in your state (or others because of mass surveillance).

The same way you stand out now. There are giant budget movies out there that are total trash compared to, say, The Odyssey. One that comes to mind that even had Matt Damon is The Great Wall. Such a huge budget and stacked cast (Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe) but a garbage movie. The tools being available to you isn't what make a you super.

Seems to be about $800 billion cares. Personalized advertising takes on a whole new meaning if people get to make ads on the fly. I hate everything about it but it's no doubt coming.

That is a good example actually. The reason women are typically not as harshly criticized for hitting men is that they are almost certainly physically weaker. It's also the reason why men typically feel safe with a woman walking behind them in a dark alley while the other way around it's terrifying. That's not to say we shouldn't criticize the woman for hitting the man, just that men have the onus to show more restraint in such a situation.

Now for all we know the woman was physically stronger than the man in the instance you're speaking of (doubtful) and hitting her back wasn't that big a deal or even deserved. But as a societal norm we should be dissuading men from hitting women even if they're hit first otherwise you might often get a major injury in exchange for a minor sting. And it's a FAFO situation when you break these norms.

But I find it hard to see the nuance in much of the political nonsense going on right now (which is what I thought you were speaking of). Mass surveillance that doesn't seem to offer any security in return? Obviously bad. Things like measles, the screwworm, and cyclospora coming back due to political posturing or just plain ignorance? Obviously bad. Again I don't see how you could possibly be on the fence about a lot of the politics going on right now unless it's benefiting you in some way.

Not all politics mind you, I'm sure you can find some nuggets of good in there somewhere too. But if you're having a tough time determining the bad things currently as prices for everything are rising and the world is in constant turmoil I want whatever drugs you're taking.

This reads somewhat like the older I get the less morals I have. If you have a hard time seeing the wild amount of bad in the world right now you're probably profiting from it in some way.

>I don't want to play even a free game if I think it was made by someone else prompting an AI

I have bad news for you if you think the video game industry isn't widely embracing generative AI. Companies try not to say it because of the current backlash involved but I truly believe Tim Sweeney isn't wrong[1]. I think in 5 years it will be a quaint idea to be AI-vegan and it'll be similar to how people resisted smartphones (I was one of them) until they became inevitable.

[1]https://www.techspot.com/news/110410-epic-tim-sweeney-ai-lab...

I guess I haven't looked into it much, but the chilling effect of having Disney lawyers scrutinize your project would be enough to deter most people. The slew of content coming out after these properties enter public domain from Disney is telling. But it's also just the irony that Disney used other people's stories to build their empire but then fought extremely hard so that nobody could use theirs for as long as society would possibly hold out (which in my opinion was way beyond the point of reason).

My challenge for anyone who still thinks like this is pay for Claude or Chatgpt and use the thinking version of the latest model for every web search you would do. See how long it takes for it to make a mistake. I can't remember the last time and I use chatgpt quite a bit every day.

The model reads the webpage before it gives it to you so the odds of a stale link are effectively nil these days. And the odds of it being exactly what you were looking for are quite high.

The models are so much better than they were even a year ago, and it seems many people have an outdated view of their capabilities.

Your idea about web devs picking a package before thinking about the problem is legitimate. What would be cool is if you could have something help you break down both the problem and the packages to choose from (or if it's worth rolling your own). AI is fantastic at this.

As said banging your head against arcane documentation or the infuriating Internet [1] isn't using your brain. And skipping the mundane parts let's you use your higher functioning brain so much it's exhausting. Thinking on the harder problems all day is exactly where I want to be.

[1]https://xkcd.com/979/

Possibly. Sort of like how Disney remixed basically everything from existing fairy tales for decades then made it so nobody else could.

So I read a lot of ideological takes like this about video games. My take: gamers take their hobby way too seriously. Maybe I'm just out of the loop but I never hear this kind of talk about music, movies, books, or really anything else. You listen to the music you think sound good, watch movies that look interesting. I'm of the same mindset with video games.

EA being bought by the Saudis and people taking a hard "moral stance" to not purchase any further EA games is another example. I've got a bridge to sell you if you think you're boycotting everything (even every video game) that's making the Saudis money. I dislike EA for other reasons and their products tend to be bland but if they make a good game I'm going to reward the developers of that game so they hopefully make further good games.

And in terms of the conspiracy theory the engine is an engine. Developers choose what to implement and can tone down all the crazy new tech as much as they want. They can also write custom stacks to do things no other Unreal Engine game would do. Unreal actually scales pretty well in that regard. Current minimum specs for Satisfactory is an i5-3570K and 1650 GTX. Recommended video card is a 2070 RTX. I have a 15 year old computer sitting in a closet that can play the game fairly well. There's so many great indie titles out there that if I only had that 15 year old computer I'd be spoiled for choice. But IMO we also need bleeding edge games to move the needle forward and keep the industry exciting. I want crazy tech in my video game that makes my jaw drop like the trailers for Witcher 4 do right now. That keeps 100s of millions of people watching things like The Video Game Awards.

In terms of homogenization I see the exact opposite happening. You probably have a slew of games to play right now that all use different engines. I myself have a backlog I don't think I can get through in my lifetime that's going to grow immensely this September. There's so many games being released and they're made in so many different ways that saying there's homogenization seems strange. Right now I'm hopping between Death Stranding 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Terratech Legion, and Resident Evil Requiem. Where is the monoculture? The idea of not giving TerraTech Legion a chance simply because the devs used unreal seems wrong.

The music sounds good? I listen to the music. The book is well written? I buy the book. The game is fun? I buy the game. You could spend your whole life nit-picking reasons why X publisher is bad, X record label is the worst (and in both cases most ARE) but in the end these companies will still make ungodly amounts of money and you're just making life less enjoyable for yourself.

>I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine.

I don't really understand making hard and fast rules like this. Clair Obscur is one of the best and most beautiful games I've ever played. The Witcher 4 has the best graphics I've seen come from a video game. Satisfactory is nuts to look at when you see an eloquent end game build.

I also don't understand why people knee-jerk hate upscaling/fake frames so much. I can understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.

Metroid has always been a very (very) small series in the grand scheme of Nintendo. If they screw up the next Zelda or Mario they might be in trouble. But they also seem to have actual magicians work on those games.

We're warned of heatwaves and given instructions on how to not die all the time now. Not once did this occur when I was a child where I live. Record temperatures are more shown as an almanac style this is what's happened today whenever I see them. Personally I wish more scaremongering were happening right now.

I love the dedication but isn't using a good password manager the much cleaner and robust way of fixing the bank phishing problem? Or using the app on your phone.

As someone who grew up on Homer Simpson I'm pretty fond of this character trope myself.

I also don't think it requires secure boot. I don't have it on currently (Windows 11 Pro).

What programmer codes exactly the way of any other programmer? Human ability to write code is dependent on time allowed, how hungry they are, how much sleep they got and a million other non-determined factors.

If that hammer could allow people to go into people's homes / work en masse, steal all their information, blackmail them, steal their identities, break their systems (including those of hospitals and other critical infrastructure) and generally help fund bad actors through it all we'd think of having restrictions on hammers too. A hammer can't screw people over by the millions.

I don't like this argument specifically with AI. Facial recognition everywhere you go is just a tool. Your job creating a detailed profile on exactly how you work, who you talk to, and about what is just a tool. The tools have become so good and easy to use we have to have serious discussions about them before things get out of hand.

You can understand deeply what you're doing and still make a huge amount of mistakes. This is what we're ironically (in terms of this conversation) seeing AI point out over and over now that companies have mythos in their hands. If I had to bet on it at some point we'll see the shift where if AI hasn't fully reviewed and edited code it's considered unsafe to use. Similar to how we all understand how once self-driving cars are good enough human driving should probably be minimized because we're so bad at it.

They really are though. There seems to be some confusion about "determinism" as if everyone writes perfect code and every compiler interprets that code perfectly. There's bugs and nondeterminism in every step of the chain with human coders and, say, a .NET compiler too. The idea that we've got coding down to a pristine and exact science and AI is some random chaos element that muddies it makes no sense to me after seeing how most human created code works.

I see this as a type of psychological manipulation. Almost everyone is interested in other people's story and the basic human trait of listening gets you over that hump. The "and align your request with their self-interest and self-image" part is what gets me. As an off-the-cuff example that someone might use this advice to craft:

“You’re such a generous person. I know you love being there for friends. Could you help me move Saturday?”

It's an example that of course sounds ridiculous to anybody that reads it, but it's essentially what the book teaches. Gather information not even about the person but how the person feels about themselves and then use that as a tool to make them feel good when you're talking to them.

I suppose it's also not helped that many of the people I've met who use this and admire this book have psychopathic traits. They're very good at faking caring but actually can't. It's a cold calculation to them and admittedly it's very effective at getting them ahead.

>Search engine AI summaries flat out lie and deceive people all the time.

What was the alternative you were using that gave you 100% accurate information before? Search engines lied all the time as well. As did news sites and any other place you could go to for information. AI just makes it easier to get the information people were already consuming.