DrewADesign

At least on mobile, the format is much more reminiscent of slashdot.

Man, what a tragic waste of a great .com era community. The whole community self-moderation thing worked ok before the more worthwhile people left. Now they can’t even be arsed to pop by once an hour to remove the multi-page swastika ascii art comments.

They clearly want to believe it was a valid response, but I didn’t bother responding because we, they, and everybody else, knows it was an obvious cop out.

You see, the only reason our society’s systems aren’t perfectly efficient, logical, and smooth, is because a software developer hadn’t briefly mulled over their challenges with a few casual thought experiments.

What do you propose as a more scientifically valid study of this cartoon?

> it deserves scrutiny and demands elaboration.

These challenges never go anywhere because it’s essentially a religious conviction. We’re likely in sort of uncharted territory on a macro scale and I reckon people a) either acknowledge that or refuse, and b), either trust or distrust the tech world’s stewardship of this technology. There’s a hundred bazillion data points, and I’m pretty pessimistic about the tech scene at large right now, but I think reasonable people can disagree on this without being factually or logically wrong. But true zealots in the midst of such uncertainty are driven by faith, which can certainly be deftly swayed over time, but definitely can’t be conquered in a debate.

There could be a whole set of Yakov Smirnoff “in Soviet Russia” style one-liners about the tech industry. “In Silicon Valley, software monetizes you!”

Not even close. It’s a homemade dune buggy vs a unimog. Nuke is a giant beast that doesn’t really do what comfy does, and comfy doesn’t do 99.9% of what Nuke does. It’s like 4k/seat for a reason.

> labs should take all of their fundamental research and turn into products entirely designed, limited and scoped only to empower artists instead of obsessed with trying to bypass them.

The software companies aren’t going to start doing this because the media companies aren’t interested in doing that. Tools like Nuke that already do this are expensive tools for people that the tech industry is trying to make obsolete. The media companies want to sell anything that will sell, and spend as little as possible in the process.

I’m pretty sure this will have to come from skilled and experienced artists doing amazing things with technology despite the tech industry sabotaging their careers, which in turn develops demand for actual art rather than bulk-created ‘content’. Sadly, I think we’re years away from that. I graduated in this field in 2024 and my career was dead before it started. Most people in this business with the hard-won skills to do this work that spent years developing their taste, storytelling sophistication, and craft are in the process of being systematically fucked over by the tech industry. Sad.

Your experience with office workers does not match mine. None of the ones I know are willing to pay a dime. In the administrative parts of my job, I document and tersely communicate data that I gather based on things in the physical world, which means AI features are less than useless to me — copilot is something I have to find and disable because it’s constantly trying to do things like fill in spreadsheets with complete nonsense.

Office work is many fields in many businesses of all shapes and sizes in many industries. It doesn’t make sense to generalize.

I’m willing to bet 98% of developers buy cars, practical tools, appliances, houses, electronics, etc. without personally verifying that the one they’re getting is suitable for its advertised uses. Developers have subject matter expertise in software, and to a lesser extent, computers. They don’t have to know how to inspect a transmission to have recourse if their new car has one not suitable for its advertised uses. My mechanic shouldn’t have to know how to evaluate a software product to determine that the underpinnings are suitable for its advertised use case. This industry overrun with hucksters and there’s zero accountability.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. If the customer set the agent in motion, the customer is no less responsible for the damage than someone that (as i think Cal Newport said) ties a weedwacker to a dog. It’s reckless.

If they were sold a product that claimed to be safe, they could in turn sue whoever sold it to them. Jeep’s insurance wouldn’t pay someone I crashed into because of defect in my jeep, but I could in turn sue Jeep for my legal trouble.

> Major U.S. banks detect unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts

Step 2 is instead of waiting to be caught, the instigators should issue a press release blaming cunning rogue agents as part of their research, call no felonies because they’re working for the greater good of eliminating a shitload of jobs, say the real problem is a lack of regulation. They could even return the money if it looks like they’re going to get sued, and collect some sweet, sweet reflexive investment money.

> so low density please

I’ll take either genuinely rural, or high-density urban over low-density urban/suburban any day of the week. (And have lived in each of the above for at least 5 years each.) I intellectually understand that it ticks a lot of people’s boxes for convenient, low-friction lifestyle, but viscerally, even nice suburbs with a little character just feel like a superficial, tepid, soulless simulacrum of an actual community to me. I’m clearly missing some connection or meaning in those places that other people are more attuned to.

I, too, tend to make meta commentary when a comment compels me to say something but have absolutely no consequential thoughts to contribute.

It’s cool how you killed a crow because you didn’t feel like getting a shade and removing the toy that you gave them to play with. They were clearly at fault.

Even many people familiar with pocket computers use the iOS Mail client. I was an email user over a decade before Gmail existed, and I used mutt for most of those years. I happily use the iOS email client because of the OS integration, clean UI, well-designed interactions, and decent support for wherever my email happens to live that year. I think mostly it’s because I’ve dicked around with computers enough in my life, and I’ve no interest in doing so with my phone, too.

Not everybody did, and many of the ones that didn’t are still open because they were the ones focused on the long game. Even a small shop just needs one skilled person to retain that knowledge and it doesn’t take a business genius to see that you need to train that person. In the grand scheme of things, having the equivalent of a couple interns is a very minor expense. It was pure shortsightedness.

The American manufacturing industry is scrambling to transfer some of the industrial trade and process knowledge from the retiring remnants of pre-offshoring industrial America into the two generations of people that didn’t have apprenticeships, pensions, (often) union membership with good benefits, etc. Trade schools were very expensive for industrial trade skills that were seen as dead-end careers compared to white collar jobs or non-manufacturing trades, and almost none of the companies saw any reason to spend all that money training people into expensive skilled professionals when they had all the professionals they could possibly need for decades after the industry largely collapsed, here. Keeping the workforce viable was always someone else’s problem— the individuals, the governments, larger companies— until it was suddenly everyone’s problem. They spend decades myopically chasing quarterly results before they realized they were running towards a cliff.

I certainly wouldn’t complain about that setup if it worked.

My gut says the economics, e.g hardware/data center/resource constraints, are going make the economics of small specialized models more attractive. Without any evidence whatsoever, I also think that the big frontier companies will have to de-emphasize chatbots as huge models in favor of chatbots as huge products with a much much more granular mixture of experts approach, but with much smaller models. I’ve been saying for a while now that AI products have to hit the gas on prioritizing product design to reliably solve real people’s problems in predictable-enough ways, because the current approach is only really appealing to enthusiasts, developers, or optimistic managers, and with the kind of money they’re throwing around, that’s not going to work.

I’d guess it was a) an amalgam of a few good ideas that are pretty stupid together, or b) some hand-rolled techniques that got clobbered by a library imported for something else.

What, software bugs? The point of the sport is driving, not mitigating sloppy bullshit shoved into your car.

I have no idea if modern-day SV’s “tests pass… idfk, it’s a web app… LGTM I guess” coding ethos was the cause of this particular bug. However, it’s a great, relatively benign demonstration of why it has absolutely zero fucking place controlling extremely dangerous hardware shooting a human around a race track surrounded by people.

If your experience was actually worse than my astonishingly janky mobile experience, that would be pathetic. Pretty bad. It looked cool for a second, and then when I tried to zoom in to where I live, I was instantly too irritated to bother.

Well you certainly didn’t overshoot.

Sorry, you’re right. I meant pointless, glib, false-equivalence clapback.

Not really, but nice low-effort false equivalence dodge.

Everybody thinks that the people they disagree with are worse. And frankly, I’d eat my hat if this didn’t stem from a deliberately divisive social media campaign sprung by image generator services. The “Defending AI Art” subreddit was created 4 days before the “Artist Hate” subreddit when midjourney was still in public alpha. And as someone that graduated art school, as a career changer, into an industry whose entry-level workforce was immediately screwed by models that trained on my student portfolio without permission, credit, or compensation, I consider the people mangling intersectional privilege jargon to paint themselves as an oppressed minority because they can’t enter midjourney images into photography contests to be completely fucking ridiculous.

a) scale matters, b) we don’t think up justifications for actions that don’t violate our principles— we do it to absolve ourselves from doing it anyway.

I hadn’t considered the language similarities between some sects of AI boosters, particularly in the AI art realm, and incels. The persecution complex, pseudo social justice jargon, the extreme tribalism, and other greatest hits seemed very familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.