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Comment Complete the circle (Score 5, Interesting) 35

I use AI all the time, but I somehow find it deeply offensive when someone expects me to read AI slop.

Consider this example:

Applicant to AI: "Write a two-page job application e-mail to company Foo. I know some JS and React."
Applicant sends two pages of AI slop to Foo. HR person receives it.
HR person to AI: "Summarize this job application in one sentence"
AI: "Applicant knows some JS and React and is excited to work at Foo."
HR person updates their prompt so the AI ignores the "excited to work" part in the future.

In short, why would I spend more time reading something than someone else spent writing it?

Now you could say "if the content is just as good, why does it matter?". Well...

- We're not there yet
- Usually no human even checks if the content is any good / actually correct
- I'm not paying monthly for an AI wrapper instead of a general AI subscription because then I'm just paying for someone's idea of how to write prompts

Another thing - if you can replace $10M/year worth of employees with a $10k/year AI service, your company didn't "save" almost $10M. That's not $10M that you get to keep every year from now on. It means that you're playing a different game now, where the cost to entry is significantly lower.

Comment CompuServe VR (Score 3, Insightful) 34

Even to me as a VR enthusiast, the Metaverse is completely unappealing. And VR/AR itself has very little to do with it.

The internet would not be where it is today if it was managed by a single company that dictates everything that happens in it. It took millions of independent people and entities decades of work to develop personal computers and the way they connect to each other into a form where the value of an expensive box of computer chips becomes undeniable and even your grandparents can't live without one.

In many ways, the Metaverse is trying to repeat that process, only a shady company is in charge of everything and tries to convince people that this is like the internet but better, and let's just skip to the part where this is wildly successful.

In the 80s you could take a computer and a modem and host a BBS. At the end of the 90s you didn't need much more than that either to host a website. You didn't have to ask CompuServe or AOL for permission. Even back then you could technically "buy" your way into some "piece of the internet", but it wasn't exactly the way to success either.

To me the top-down approach of all this is one half of the problem that is basically unfixable if you're a for-profit, publicly-traded company led by someone who had a lot of success one time and now has enough money to pretend he can make anything happen with enough billions.

The other half of the problem is the "designed by sales" mindset.

You put a bunch of people in a room, who always seem extra motivated right after they come out of the bathroom. And then you pay them to come up with ideas that make a lot of money. They will go "What's the best thing in the world?" "Sex!" "Correct, what is the second best thing in the world?" "Pizza!" "Also correct. Now what if we combine those two, and make a service where you can make love to a pizza?" "GENIUS!"

And then you get a product that people are very excited to sell, focusing 100% on all of the money they are going to make with it, but nobody including them would even think about actually using it. I feel like that is extremely bad in gaming right now, but it's really happening wherever someone has to make a lot of money with minimal risk, minimal creativity and minimal understanding of why anyone actually pays for things that happen to be vaguely similar to this.

Comment It won't improve matches (Score 1) 27

Match Group has ruined dating, and this will only make it worse.
Consider its business relationship with a user (paying or not, but especially paying), going from best to worst scenario (for them):

1. The user gets matches regularly, maybe goes on a date once in a while, doesn't click with anyone, but is just motivated enough to stay subscribed.
2. The user hardly gets any matches, gets frustrated, ends their subscription, then comes back when they get too lonely.
3. The user enters a relationship which only lasts a short time, then comes back to try again.
4. The user finds a long-term partner and does not need to use online dating anymore.

1 is ideal, 2/3 are fine, 4 has to be avoided at all costs. Any for-profit business, especially publicly traded, has a financial incentive to develop algorithms that make sure nobody finds a long-term partner, even at the cost of lowering the amount of matches, and with absolutely no regard for the quality of matches. If you just show them people they'll hate, you can pretend that's all there is out there!

Comment Glad I canceled (Score 1) 84

As a poor student, I torrented a lot because I couldn't afford to buy DVD set after DVD set.
Then mostly for convenience.
Then streaming came along, and suddenly it was both cheap and convenient to just pay for the content.
Then I found myself being subscribed to 5 different services and not really watching any of them, because all the new shows were either copy-pasted garbage (wow, imagine people had super powers!), or would be canceled after a season.

So now we're at a point where all the content is boring, the creators and actors aren't getting paid fairly, and the studios are committing to making everything even more bland and repetitive by investing in AI-generated scripts and artificial actors.

Piracy looks like the more ethical option, but it doesn't matter because there's nothing but crap. I'm not expecting the streaming services to hurt too much because formulaic shallow mass-produced garbage is actually very popular, but for my own well-being I'll look for entertainment elsewhere.

Comment Finally, a new way for the rich to bully people (Score 1) 104

Voting to kick toxic players out isn't new. It also doesn't work very well when there's enough timid, passive players who secretly admire the toxic ones while also trying to stay on their good side.

In mostly toxic playerbases, who is most likely to be kicked out?

According to Sony, it's bullies and people who just refuse to become "high-skilled". Or who somehow aren't skilled at the game when they start?

Who is actually going to be kicked? Women, minorities, players who dare to win against high-profile streamers, players who play the game "wrong" according to the veterans, anyone speaking up against toxic behavior, and now in this patented system: anyone playing better than some rich idiot.

I have to admit though, monetizing toxicity is quite a genius, cynical, capitalist move. I would suggest also introducing game mechanics that maximise your anger against your fellow players, so that people will spend their food budget for the next week on getting back at someone who wronged them.

Comment Tone-deaf or malicious? (Score 5, Insightful) 111

Linus and some others described it as tone-deaf, how nivida paints tech reviewers as cheapskates who are just in it for the free hardware.

I have a hard time believing that that's what nvidia actually thinks. If you have a good product that works well, you want to give as many reviewers access to it as you can, and the cost of the unit is well worth the publicity. And anyone who even qualifies for getting free hardware and pre-release drivers, even if they didn't have any integrity at all, is long past the point where getting free hardware would be a serious part of their business model.

The letter looks very carefully crafted. A part of it was pure marketing-speak, clearly not aimed at a lone reviewer whose literal job it is see through marketing-speak. It was directed at the larger audience of people he inevitably would publish this letter to. It's aimed at driving a wedge between reviewers and their audience.

Nvidia would love nothing more than have their press releases be the only representation of reality out there. They don't want anyone to figure out how the 30XX line only looks good because the 20XX line was actually a step back in price/performance, or that this is still not the generation that makes raytracing a good alternative to pure rasterization. So they've decided to copy the most destructive ideas from all those anti-democratic movements around the world, and attack journalism directly by trying to pit its audience against it. "Look, these cheapskates get hardware for free that you desire but can't even afford, and then they probably just spend the rest of the day playing games!"

What nvidia actually wants is essentially like an Amazon-review-scam: For some free hardware, give us a glowing 5 star review, make sure to hit these points.

Of course they are "apologizing" now. That entire e-Mail was written in a way that screams "if you're angry, share it with everyone you know so they can read our ad copy too!". It's really chilling.

Comment Re:100% effective in FIVE monkeys (Score 1) 129

You are right, they still need to test it on humans - and the death rates really make the "cure" thing seem unimportant.

But five monkeys aren't that few if you consider it was 30000 times the lethal dosage. Sounds to me like testing bomb-squad armor by dropping an atomic bomb on it - five times.

I doubt that we'll see this being treated as the breakthrough that it is without calling it something that it isn't yet.

Comment Re:You know what this means (Score 1) 318

At least those Google employees who are responsible for getting stuff displayed in browsers need to use all major browsers. QA people probably even use all the browsers plus most versions of those browsers. Sure, those setups will probably be automated and sandboxed, but at least up until now I don't think it seemed necessary for each developer to be that paranoid about using the latest IE for quick tests.

I'm sure that for normal browsing (not for testing purposes) most of these people use chrome.

Comment Re:Oh for the love of god ... Throttlegate? (Score 1) 314

Every time some name becomes a noun (or a noun becomes a verb), a meme becomes mainstream, or anything slightly changes its meaning to settle in a niche, there will always be a lot of ranting from people who find this annoying or lame, making it something of a scandal.

I'll just call that "GATEGATEGATE".

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