daemin

I don't think you understand the situation so I'll try explaining it one last time.

The developer stored floating point values in a text file written out by whatever means, in the developer's locale (say en-US). These files were shipped with the application and the values were read in using locale sensitive functions on a user's machine (the developer was unaware of the locale sensitive nature of these functions), and the user's locale was something different like de-DE for example. This resulted in a different value being read in compared to the value expected by the developer, therefore causing issues in the rest of the program.

For example the file stored "1.05" which in the developer's en-US locale is "one and five hundredths", but reading it on a different user's locale (de-DE) could result in the value being "105" (one hundred and five), or even "1" (one).

These files are generally not considered to be edited by users (unless they are modding the game, and then they do so without warranty etc).

Since you're just regurgitating LLM output I'll just leave you with a link showing that the world is a rich and varied place: https://randombits.dev/articles/number-localization/locale-l...

Europeans* - you mean the rest of the world that isn't default English (Traditional or Simplified) speaking.

The floating point values were valid, they were stored in the text files (unknowingly) in a locale dependent way, either by having a program use a locale sensitive functions to write the values, or because the values were written by hand using the developer's native way of number formatting. The values were then read using the locale dependent functions (like strtod) and if run on a machine with a locale that formatted numbers differently (i.e. using comma for decimal separator) they would return incorrect values.

This caused issues in the game as the values would be significantly different than originally designed, and it would be hard to test for since the people testing the game would usually be using a similar locale to the developer writing the game, and therefore they would only become apparent upon release or wider testing. Now the fix was to explicitly specify the locale before reading the data files, but it still took time to find and implement the fix.

I would say it more depends how the environment is designed and what transport options you have at your disposal.

In suburbia where the grocer is surrounded by a parking lot and there's busy roads to navigate nearby then of course people would drive rather than walk, and thus also end up getting a week's worth of groceries at a time.

In a dense mixed use environment where it is easy enough to navigate on foot then the urge to drive lessens and all grocery shopping can be done more frequently and on foot or by public transport.

I've experienced this personally in Australia, where living in suburbia I went grocery shopping once a week with a car and brought back many bags worth at a time, and also in a more dense neighbourhood where I could get groceries on the walk back from work more frequently and barely used my car even once a month. In Europe I only ever walk or get public transport for groceries as I live in a dense area and don't need to own a car.

There is some evidence of that, where the closer the crowd is to the field the more likely the referees are to call in the home team's favour. There was a study on this, probably close to a decade ago now.

>> Also changes based on locale,

> That's a feature: Where did the string come from if not the user?

Many games and applications store floating point values in text file formats. This has caused bugs in those programs many times over because they didn't realise it was locale dependent and the data parsing broke in another locale.

This topic brings up an interesting situation for wage taxation in Poland, where there's tax benefit that artists get for assigning copyright to the company. Now programming is included in this, but there's two points of interest that come up.

One is if your work is not creative any more as many people here suggest, does programming qualify as an artistic activity and would you say it qualifies for the tax break?

Two is if an LLM, AI, agent or other machine thing wrote the code for you, since it cannot produce copyrighted work, can you claim that tax break?

You're right. I was thinking of middle managers as the layer of management in between the executives and the workers.

So it looks like you're doing all the management work required by your reports, and if your reports were more capable you'd need to do more of the other things mentioned as well.

My original comment was to signal that if all you do now is write descriptions to feed to agents then you're not a programmer any more but you've become a manager as what you're doing is a management role and not an artistic or engineering one. You've changed jobs and you should be fine with that, just acknowledge it and move on, but stop fooling yourself that you're still a programmer or engineer. You're not, you're a manager now, even if you're not doing most of the things required of a people manager, as in your comment.

Aren't you managing AI/LLM Agents in this case, that write the actual code?

If all you do is write requests and then have the LLMs spit out the code then you're not a programmer, you're a middle manager. So maybe you never actually wanted to be a programmer but instead you liked having things built?

If 5 hours of thinking time to solve a problem is unthinkable to some people does that mean they have some form of Attention Deficit Disorder, be it a natural thing or introduced by an over-dependence on LLMs? Like stopping for an hour to think through a problem is unfathomable and instead they would rather hit small dopamine spikes every few minutes from talking to a chatbot?

You give a button pushing machine buttons to push and are surprised when it actually pushes them.

It is a very rare occurrence when corporations and the people running them are punished for killing people. I mean the whole concept of a corporation was created to shield the owners of it from being liable for damages caused by / visited upon the enterprise.

I'd say the bigger issue is not the way it listens for the wake word, it's the recording and processing it does afterwards for a significantly long period of time, recording for much longer than people anticipated, and with a microphone that can pick up conversations from much further away or even behind walls.

This combines with two other dangers, one of unintended recordings when the wake word is triggered unintentionally, and one of intended recordings by third parties based on various other wake/watch words. They already have it in the T&C that they will share this data with law enforcement, so it's not that far fetched that these TVs and other appliances will spy on people in the home far more effectively than even the East German Stasi could have ever imagined.

I would also bet that they didn't actually have any alcohol in their drinking vessels at the time of filming.

Not only that but to read every single related T&C from the whole chain of partners, and to keep track of it when it changed, is basically impossible.

This sort of malicious compliance of using T&C to enable bad behaviour by corporations needs to be fixed with laws.

Reminds me of cookie banners, the dark pattern where they've decided to be deliberately verbose and annoying in order to get people to take the easy path and agree to let them continue doing their bad behaviour.

The problem is when a helpful friend or family member decides to connect the TV to the Internet for you, they have good intentions and think they are helping but have in fact screwed up your carefully considered plan. Same thing goes when someone agrees to all terms and conditions on a nag screen that pops up (as in the video only a subset of T&C were required to function but agree to all was the default behaviour), or when they go and apply that automatic update/upgrade that you didn't want on a device you own (i.e. from Windows 10 to Windows 11).

There's too many dark patterns and bad behaviour from big corporations these days trying to wear you down and trick you into relinquishing your rights and letting them "get away with murder".

Because it's there and available should they ever want to use it, and most people would not know that the HDMI cable is potentially another network cable.

But once you've innovated that first bit, you're in a mature industry, do you do the hard thing and innovate again or do you just stay there slowly becoming irrelevant, or do you optimise what you have and figure out more income sources from the same innovation for even more money?

Take a look at any mature software product, do they try to innovate more, or do they figure out how to put more advertisements into it?

Simplest thing to say is: find all the people responsible for this, from the bottom to the top, and charge them with the same crime as an individual would be. I would include everyone in the chain from the programmers that implemented it, to the VP that authorised it, and finally to the CEO because all responsibility ends with them (that's why they get paid the big bucks right?).

I'd like to say look at Volkswagen for an example but I don't know if all the necessary people were charged.

For a corporation there's always more money to be made, until it makes all the money in the world.

Doesn't HDMI have built in Ethernet these days? So any HDMI cable of a certain specification is also a network cable.

I remember these things being discussed a while ago on here, how TVs use their own hard coded DNS ("for safety") rather than any network provided DNS (to avoid filtered DNS ala PiHole), how there's Ethernet in a HDMI cable, how other wireless networks are tried, and how eventually they'll go the car route and just embed a wireless modem in the device.

I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs.

Using machine learning to make enemies smarter has been thought about and talked about for decades, but I don't see it being used either for similar reasons. Training a ML algorithm takes resources which are in short supply and time which could take longer than for the player to finish the game (if you want smarter enemies play against real human players). There's also the fact that the game has to run on the minimum specification computer, which means different players will have differently skilled enemies and their experience of the game will suffer.

There have been some games in the past which used some form of machine learning as a core gameplay feature, but they have been pet breeding simulators.

The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.

Writing your own game engine makes you realise that no game engine is written well (when it is written to ship a game).

What I see is that you'll get low end chips for embedded applications, because you tend to specifically build and compile programs for things as small as that. You'll also get the large sever and massive super-computer scale systems, because yet again you'll compile code specifically for those systems.

What you're less likely to get is the consumer level PC and Laptop systems, as you'll need one large company to set the standard and others to adhere to it. So you could feasibly compile a program for a certain level of RISCV chip and have it run on many vendors processors. As it is there's several companies trying to push ARM for some sort of high end consumer PCs/Laptops but they all require different OSes and the chips aren't equivalent, so you have to compile software separately for those different platforms.

Is it actually a backup though or only a cloud sync?

Given how the other major provider behaves I have to assume that it's a cloud sync, not a backup, and that your photos will no longer be yours but instead stored on someone else's computer.

Speaking of subsidies it is often the case that fossil fuel industries are very heavily subsidised, yet they are still losing out to solar panels.