dannersy

Indirectly as we offload our brains to the machine and we end up worshipping it because those who cared to understand it or be responsible were buried by capitalism of ages passed.

I find it bizarre that this blogger can make sweeping claims of someone being wrong, quoting specific values that are admittedly speculative, and then just using them as gotchas for being wrong. The then ignore the conclusion that those "wrong" yet close values mean in the grand scheme of Zitron's point, even when the margin of error was inconsequential.

For example, one of his first big criticisms of Ed is Ed's claim that Meta has a dying product and its a dying company. Do I really need to look at the numbers here? Or should we look at the companies actions and history WITH the numbers included?:

- Metaverse was a complete and total disaster and forced upon the company by a CEO who is clearly completely out of touch but infallible within the company.

- Facebook is a bot riddled, AI slop haven, used only for special cases and is basically unanimously hated by the next couple generation of users. Users who are critical for revenue if the serving ads to bots scam ever implodes.

- Meta's successes seem to be solely on knowing who to buy and have failed for a decade to innovate anything.

"Dying" is not the same as "dead". As someone else has said, but I have forgotten who it was, Meta is a "mature" company trying to be young and sexy again when they should focus on their existing products.

How does anyone come away from all this with a business, where we hear all of the horrible things about their internal culture, that an AI pivot to be anything but a trend following desperation move? Then the author addresses but shrugs off entirely the fact that they now hide their Monthly Active Users. I think all of this context is pretty fucking important to think about with the numbers, especially since Meta is trending down when we get the totals for the year. Zitron's point, again, still tracks because you can list a portion of "profit" but it is too early for 2026 since they intentionally use misleading numbers. I would be very interested to see what the first half of 2024 and 2025 profit numbers were before the total year calculation. Either way, Meta's dump into AI is a huge gamble from the company that must pay off.

I don't know. I think this guy does not like Ed Zitron, which is fair. I see a man pointing fingers at someone while doing the same things he is criticising: Taking the speculative and sensational as literal and using it as some sort of gotcha to be speculative and sensational themselves.

This is another case of missing the forest for the trees. In the scope of what Zitron is talking about, the difference of >$2 billion of revenue doesn't make a difference of his overall point of it not being close to enough to cover their spending.

I follow Zitron but the way he talks has been grating and it is even more obvious how biased he is when he has guests on. As if he's trying to lead them into agreeing with his more extreme claims.

That being said, why does this blogger get a pass at this criticism of just being blanket "wrong" when the point of the quote is still very much valid in context? It seems to be the same in the next article, quoted from Ed's blog with the same point. Is this more evidence of being "wrong" or did he correct a previously wrong value and came to the same conclusion (which seems reasonable to me in context)?

It seems like this blogger is guilty of the same criticisms he has against Zitron. They seem eager to find where Zitron is wrong, exaggerating the value of when he misses the mark and without looking at big picture. Then they make sensationalist claims based on those findings.

So they've been sold snake oil. This, along with colonizing Mars and mining asteroids, is complete and total science fiction.

Good luck convincing HN of this point. Half the replies in this thread reek of insanity.

It is almost as if the technology is not as good as everyone claims. If they were, the game would already be over.

> The alternative is no releases on PC.

If you think there aren't hackers on console, you're deluded.

> Your server side logic can't detect wall hacks, ESPs etc.

Correct, neither do the invasive tools. You can get these things without modifying memory or the game, which is the majority of what the kernel level stuff keeps on eye on.

> especially as ML networks are getting better and better at reproducing normal player behaviour.

True, there is no answer here. Again, if the provider is this sophisticated, then EAC isn't helping here. Then it is just the usual cat and mouse, and the kernel level is moot.

> But applications should be able to attest the environment is not modified, which is what desktop Linux lacks. Windows, macOS and Android do have methods to do this.

Also true, but they are frequently circumvented anyway, so ultimately you're at the same level of Linux from a functional standpoint.

I know you're probably thinking that we should just hit all vectors, and I agree to an extent. The problem is that those who charge for cheats easily circumvent (yes, easily, they are literally within 24hrs sometimes of adjusting to modifications by anti-cheat software) the methods you're claiming help. While the data you get from users on the server end doesn't paint a whole picture, it is the source of truth of what the game decided happened, so it becomes the only thing you can rely on. I know folks who specialize in this area who basically believe that online competitive shooters are basically lost and it isn't worth the investment to fight it.

I am of the opinion we should just go back to dedicated servers and have self moderation. Sure, you get false positives if the owner or their mods suck at the game, but at least the players can do something about it. CS2 is a fucking nightmare at the moment.

Kernel level anti-cheat seems to be ultimately ineffective. I've seen this with my own eyes with backend data when I worked for a company with a moderately successful shooter. Kernel level anti-cheat is serving a similar function to something like EAC these days, which basically just keeps the lazy people out. With any decently sufficient backend data analysis, you catch these folks just as easy.

I am of the belief that if you cannot completely control the environment, like a user's physical hardware, you're fighting a losing battle. Forcing them to install spyware is, in my opinion, just marketing for your competitive shooter and too invasive for the perceived gain.

I mean, yeah, if I'm going off the cuff it seems like a scam either way. What you describe is just regular product stuff, AI doesn't change that much here. Though, what I do see that is different from the usually is companies attempting to cut corners but not reducing prices. They're keeping prices high that may have reflected a cost to production and that has suddenly taken a nose dive.

You may be correct, but from a user experience and product standpoint, you'll never get around the fact that if something doesn't feel real then it will also feel less quality and thus less valuable. Whether you like this about the human experience or not is irrelevant, since they are selling something they expect humans to use and buy, and one would hope they'd want their customers to come away from it feeling like they got their money's worth.

Honestly, this is close to my experience within my org. It is not 0%, but it is very close. It seems like you're just uncomfortable with the author's experience conflicting with yours.

Perhaps it is the wording. For my org, I think people are getting value out of AI use supplementally, but what I would see as "AI projects" are definitely dead in the water.

If you read the article, the go over a case where they introduce AI into their pitch and were met with results they were not comfortable with.

I get what you are saying, and while I'll say it is definitely not 0%, I have seen very little in the way of useful software that is primarily generated. The vast majority just does not go the distance for whatever reason. I could explain many reasons, but I am getting really tired of explaining myself. If the tools were as great as everyone says, we'd be going through a software Renaissance, but we're not. I would argue a software dark ages since it feels like things are getting worse and I find bugs in what was historically very long running and stable applications. But, whatever. I think the author is clearly talking about modern AI, I don't think they need to be explicit about models.

Nvidia has been historically tricky, but in the last two years or so (maybe longer), I have not needed to do any manual work for drivers. Sometimes, you may see some diminished performance on hardware that is brand new until drivers catch up, but that is usually just about waiting for an update on driver you already have.

I've been of the belief that 2026 has been year of the Linux desktop. As a user of MacOS for work and Linux at home, and being a former user of Windows for decades for video games, Linux has come so far that I think it has surpassed the mainstream OSes in terms of experience. The barrier to entry isn't really troubleshooting anymore, it is that we don't have any dominant desktop environment. Which is "bad" for adoption, but has been great for iteration by teams who are not bogged down by the need to support legacy users who don't want things to change.

I think folks ITT are trivializing the issue here. Many keep drawing parallels to LLMs being akin to the loom or calculator. That seems intellectually dishonest to me. Those tools were not anthropomorphized interfaces, nor were they instant gratification. To do significant things with a calculator, you still had to know maths, order of operations, formulas, etc. We didn't lose mathematicians as a result of the calculator, nor did the calculator play with our emotions.

I have linked this elsewhere in this thread, but the studies on this matter suggest a worse outcome than just losing hand crafted or "artisanal" software: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721

> These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning.

> We posit that persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own.

This issue is not that we are losing the ability to write good software by hand. It is possible we are losing our internal tools to learn new things by circumventing a necessary part of the process required by our biology.

Your suspicion is already being studied with increased effort, and the starting point has solid bones:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721

For what it is worth, my colleagues who use these tools more liberally see a much higher regression rate and are left refactoring more as well. While they definitely put out more PRs, I can confidently say that mine are more valuable and better stand the test of time. Whether that matters or not is up to debate as I guess you could argue there may be some point where the productivity overcomes their regression rate.

My position is, if the technology will be so good and progressing so fast to the point that I don't have to write code anymore and I'm just dictating our needs and what I want architecturally, then I don't really feel the need to put in the time to learn the tools as they are now. That seems way easier to learn than anything computer science related that I had to learn to build robust systems.

> philosophically to me, art is inherently human.

When I was younger, still trying to figure out who I was and what I'd be doing for a career, I was very interested in science. Sadly, my home life as it was prevented me from pursuing it as a student and survival as an adult meant catching up was an uphill battle. I just didn't have the discipline. So instead I just read books, mostly cosmology related, but also computer science. That was my way of making up for lost time to become the software developer and eventually engineer that I am today. But something was sorely missing.

I believed science would solve everything, that we could use technology to lift humans out of regressive traditionalism, force out ignorant politicians, but more obviously, build things that would solve climate change, hunger, disease, whatever. Growing up and realizing this was not the case has left me cynical. Social media is a blight that poisons everything and truly has not been studied enough on how it has raped society from increased vanity, parasocial relationships, addiction, the ability to be targeted by bad actors, I could go on. This technology in particular is probably at fault for the rise of fascism and far right politics. American tax payer funded and researched space innovation has been plundered and now controlled by a fucking weirdo psychopath trillionaire with a taste for culture wars. It is just absurd. Now, AI, and that is a whole topic of its own.

Good science still happens, of course, but now it's being buried by noise from the newest tech hype, AI. What chaps my ass about AI is that it has amazing uses but because of capital at all costs, we advance it in the most blind and irresponsible ways possible at the expense of our humanity and planet. So much so, now it is blasting out "art" for the cost of fucking up people's lives wherever there is a datacenter.

My main point is, that with all these topics, I've found that people are generally "philosophically empty". It is easy to say people are dumb, but I don't think that is the case (or, well, it is but that is too simple). That younger self scoffed at philosophy, seeing it as a fun thought experiment and little more, science was king. Now? Oh man. I feel so foolish. I think we all should have been challenged to think more philosophically at a much younger age. We have a generation of young people who dream of being influencers. Have you ever seen a more talentless, uninspired, cynical group of people worse than influencers? I sure haven't. But it is my more philosophical side that sees so clearly how vapid it is, and how it cheapens what we are as human in the name of attention seeking capitalism, to sell yourself at all costs and one more medium to be a walking advertisment. It feels like we're at the end game. I'm sure most generations have felt this way, and some had good reason (looking at you generation of the atomic bomb). But somehow, this feels less tangible, more philosophically bad, and already endemic. We're all so ill equipped to address it or even acknowledge it societally.

Sorry for the rant, thanks for reading if you got this far.

It doesn't take kernel level anticheat to detect that kind of behavior. This is just laziness.

I think this is the answer. You get a lot more false positives, but at least the players can do something about it and aren't at the mercy of devs who can stop support at any time and also are fighting a losing battle.

Yes, but keep in mind there is a while world of EV production out there not available to the US for one reason or another that are plenty competitive with the low tier combustion engine cars.

If we ignore the cultural issues with Americans where some places buying an EV is considered "gay" (because that is inheritently negative to them) then we can easily point to the hostile lobbying tactics and government capitulation via bought congressmen. Go look at the historical hostilities Tesla faced when first trying to take off.

If I still lived in the US, I'd be hesitant to buy an EV because the infrastructure state to state to support charging wasn't great when I was last there. In Europe, you can road trip with your EV no problem.

Let's not entirely blame consumers for not being incentivised enough. Let's face it the US has been actively against EVs. You mention subsidies, haven't those even seen regressions in EV and solar panel subsidies? It's ridiculous.

I have seen plenty of greenfield projects go okay at first but never go the distance. These were mostly product software cases, where they were able to get something very professional looking very fast but AI ultimately always miss the mark because they are taking the median of what exists and not the specific needs of the customer they're developing for. So they get a ton of features and few that were necessary, then developing it further and correcting it to the needs of the customer just makes a mess and regressions are frequent. This is my experience as well when it comes to being a consumer of software products, everything feels shittier and less reliable, perhaps that's my emotion and bias coming out.

The last 20% of the software development cycle is always the hardest. Releasing, maintenance, usability, support. You know, having a real product. I don't see AI helping here at all, more the first 80%, which sadly is also the fun part.

When developing things that are novel, with designs specific to our use cases needing high throughput, the results are pretty dismal. AI can kind of get you there, but I've seen no advancement on this front with new models. At the end of each attempt we've always realized we should have done things by hand. Having people with intense knowledge of the system frequently comes from building it and troubleshooting it, I don't think serious engineering orgs have escaped this inevitability.

On cases where we have legacy software, AI has helped with understanding shit code and design, but woefully bad at contributing to legacy software. Here be dragons for sure. It is super strange to me that these tools can seemingly easily diagnose but completely blunder the fix.

I could easily see there being gains, as you say, in fields where data wrangling becomes tedious (though the inherent error rate in AI outputs scares me if you're trying to get deterministic outputs from experiments... I digress).

The part I think this forum tends to forget, and the tech industry at large fails to even care about, is that we're still humans. There are many studies basically pointing out that the way the AI outputs information is bad for us. Instant gratification from anthropomorphised machines with a habit for sycophancy doesn't sound like a recipe for a healthy relationship with what everyone wants to claim is just a tool. AI providers know this is effective, as well as knowing that there is a gambling effect here. They care about making money, not a good product and they happily prey on our human weaknesses. That is what social media is now. They aren't good products anymore, they just promote addiction via engagement.

Sorry for the long response and cynicism, but that is just my anecdotal experience and perspectives. I can give sources to some of the objective claims if you want.

Reading this thread makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The folks on this train in my team do not produce anything significant that we can rely on or use. A lot of hollow prototypes that join the prototype graveyard and code that needs extra scrutiny on critical areas ultimately leading to taking longer.

It's a shame, they were smart and productive engineers. Now? I guess everyone is just all-in on the slot machine.

Uhhh, at this order of magnitude? No way.

I can see how folks find Zitron shrill, but I wouldn't dare say he is ignorant. The man seems to be bending over backwards to do actual journalism when most outlets take CEOs at their word and promote a market that goes irrationally up despite evidence. Case and point, the situation in Iran is such a mess, yet every time Trump says there is a deal of some sort, the market rallies. It has been months now of this game.

As a listener, I have not heard him predict collapse once. Maybe I got to him late, but so far as I know, he claims that the industry as it exists is unsustainable. You may think that is him dodging the logical progression of "collapse" but I think so far he has been pretty correct on the unsustainable part, the signs are there. If anyone could predict such things they'd be a billionaire many times over. In the end I think he will be more or less correct, the timing and how long investors can prop it up is the much harder part to predict.

It's getting exponentially better, and everything is getting cheaper, and it's the end of SaaS!

But I am still waiting. If everything was as the hype folks said it was, we would all be fucked already.

"We" is a very telling way to say that, in the sense that he, a citizen, seems to think he is above such systems. He's not wrong, sadly.

I understand and agree with your point, but sadly we must concede that when you say the letters "AI", people now think of the chatbot interfaced, generative technology. It seems rather intentional to me that the definition has been muddied and is a part of the marketing of something that is clearly not artificial intelligence. I apologize for maybe contributing to that reality, but our words have to mean something to the majority of people, and when I say AI now, the general populous relates that to the new definition of snake oil salesmen.

A couple years back, I think I would have bent over backwards to defend the maintainers. It is a gruelling and thankless effort to maintain any open source project, let alone one as established as rsync. I guess I just don't see AI being a net positive anywhere, and I have to see this backlash to using gen AI as a good course correction from the general populous.

There are other posts talking about the instant gratification of LLM use and the more I have to interact with people using the tools, I think this may truly be the problem. Our biology can't handle it. I see otherwise very smart people do really really stupid things because the slot machine told them, but it has even trained them to be helpless when the slot machine fails them.

I'm being seen as a Luddite, blind to the advancement, and then I see colleagues writing benchmarks that make no sense but have beautiful graphs made with AI. Then I basically have to choose to smile at them and pretend it's good work or scold them for not seeing that the bench is testing an interval baked in as a constant so it's moot. Both options are treating them like they are 7 years old, not intelligent colleagues.