I loved that the Gameboy was designed to survive a fall from the average shirt pocket. I love that the Wii controllers pushed gyroscopic technology so far that it allowed the explosion of quadcopters. I loved the idea of 3d through rapid aspect switching.

I loved when Nintendo pushed boundaries, not just through hardware but through gameplay. I enjoy and appreciate the Nintendo polish

I agree with your sentiment wholeheartedly - good gameplay is much more important than flashy graphics. But the polish was nice - pushing boundaries is what made the difference

Recently, a bunch of people on tik tok found this “bug” in their banking app where you can write a bad check, then withdraw the funds before it clears… Then started crying about it when their balances updated

Dude definitely thought he discovered a cool new life hack

I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you explain it in assembly?

Just to put this in context:

There’s only so many ways to turn a bunch of files into one - mainly, you stick them back to back. Easy.

Then, there’s an infinite ways to compress that file… You could come up with you own method, but what good is that? It’s better and smarter to use a format already supported by your users

So of course most bundles are the same archive type under the hood. Everything from backups to installers - you shouldn’t be inventing new formats without a damn good reason

We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

They actually use consultants like McKinley, who are the coordinating force behind a lot of the obviously self-destructive decisions companies are making in lockstep

Because they’re using hacktivist groups as a proxy. They just deny all involvement, and probably keep it all isolated from the fancy military grade tools and techniques

If there’s any chance they’ve heard about a concept, I’ll ask if they’ve heard of it and take them at their word (without comment either way).

And if they’re kinda nodding impatiently, I’ll wrap up the explanation and move on to the deeper level

At first, people will sometimes be defensive or lie about knowing a topic, but after you establish there’s no judgement either way with you I’ve found people become less hesitant about admitting ignorance and will even want to hear your explanation of something to check their knowledge

I also do the flip side - I pride myself on admitting when I don’t know something, so that might play in too

Nah, I’m thinking much bigger. I’ve got an AI that can transcribe video, I’m working on one to summarize and put facts into a knowledge graph, I’ve got one that can hold a conversation, and I’ve got a script that scrapes sites and does natural language processing. I just need an agent to tie the pieces together and some control scripts to manage the containerized pieces

The idea is, my assistant will go out, read up on programming topics and build knowledge graphs with references to the source, and I’ll fix my biggest issue - shittified searches crippling my work speed

Then, I’ll send it off to find content. It’ll transcribe/summarize videos and rank them, research topics and come back with reports, and trawl my socials to find new things I might find interesting

I plan to take all that, then let my assistant create video channels to watch and additional content to read if Lemmy is slow. And if my friends and family show interest, I’ll add in hosting and an internal social media and convince them to run additional nodes at home

I’ve been working on it for a while because I saw this coming, I’ve got most of the key pieces already.

And that’s the bubble of Internet I’m building - AI curation of my Internet life, it’ll happily work away the hours deshittifying a bubble of Internet

Seriously… The closer to three edge we get, the faster enshitification goes. No one is writing algorithms with users in mind… Not for a paycheck anyways

We’re getting to the point where we all need to carve out bubbles of curated Internet for our friends and family

I’d personally love an ev bike, but it’d be wasted on me right now. I really want an electric car because you could run the AC all night and power a computer - I want a little hotel on wheels

I mean, I’ve got one of those “so simple it’s stupid” solutions. It’s not a pure LLM, but those are probably impossible… Can’t have an AI service without a server after all, let alone drivers

Do a string comparison on the prompt, then tell the AI to stop.

And then, do a partial string match with at least x matching characters on the prompt, buffer it x characters, then stop the AI.

Then, put in more than an hour and match a certain amount of prompt chunks across multiple messages, and it’s now very difficult to get the intact prompt if you temp ban IPs. Even if they managed to get it, they wouldn’t get a convincing screenshot without stitching it together… You could just deny it and avoid embarrassment, because it’s annoyingly difficult to repeat

Finally, when you stop the AI, you start printing out passages from the yellow book before quickly refreshing the screen to a blank conversation

Or just flag key words and triggered stops, and have an LLM review the conversation to judge if they were trying to get the prompt, then temp ban them/change the prompt while a human reviews it

It’s almost like John Oliver’s NSA street campaign. No one cared until he started talking about how the NSA was cause inappropriately “handling” dick pics

They’re half the way there. One does not simply turn off the porn. People will go through great lengths to see nudes

Now we just have to make them understand that their porn history is being collected along with their legal identity. Hackers will get it before long, and if the government doesn’t have it already, it’s just a matter of time

The violation we’ve felt having all of our movements and habits tracked is apparently only felt by the masses when their junk is analyzed. Which I find weird, but hey, whatever makes people realize privacy isn’t something to shrug off

People just don’t get it… LLMs are unreliable, casual, and easily distracted/incepted.

They’re also fucking magic.

That’s the starting point - those are the traits of the technology. So what is it useful for?

You said drafting basically - and yeah, absolutely. Solid use case.

Here’s the biggest one right now, IMO - education. An occasionally unreliable tutor is actually better than a perfect one - it makes you pay attention. Hook it into docs or a search through unstructured comments? It can rephrase for you, dumb it down or just present it casually. It can generate examples, and even tie concepts together thematically

Text generation - this is niche for “proper” usage, but very useful. I’m making a game, I want an arbitrarily large number of quest chains with dialogue. We’re talking every city in the US (for now), I don’t need high quality or perfect accuracy - I need to take a procedurally generated quest and fluff it up with some dialogue.

Assistants - if you take your news feed or morning brief (or most anything else), they can present the information in a more human way. It can curate, summarize, or even make a feed interactive with conversation. They can even do fantastic transcriptions and pretty good image recognition to handle all sorts of media

There’s plenty more, but here’s the thing - none of those are particularly economically valuable. Valuable at an individual/human level, but not something people are willing to pay for.

The tech is far from useless… Even in it’s current state, running on minimal hardware, it can do all sorts of formerly impossible things.

It’s just being sold as what they want it to be, not what it is

To put it more descriptively, when you do industrial scale WiFi, you’re supposed to design out the network during the blueprint stage, then go through with a signal analyzer to map out the radio properties when it’s time to install the telecom

You can put an access point in every room or every 30 feet, and tune them to work seamlessly without interference. You can do the same with cell signals too. They even make cables that are also the antenna - they’re cut with gaps in the shielding, so you can get perfect coverage inside an iron maze if you wanted to

It’s all just a matter of cost… It’s not cheap, but a few million dollars is just a line item at that scale

… What? Code quality is “does it work” followed by readability, only then do you get into performance and other things

Good code is better than shitty code by definition.

Well on the flip side, I somehow ended up doing legacy projects with a dude that has been coding for decades and is still actively developing in VB and asp.net. Weirdly, the guys not dumb - he asked me for an API and I blew his mind with generics and cut the code down by a third. I then introduced him to the concept of (primitive) components, he isn’t quite sold on the importance of code reuse, but every time I delete 1k lines of old code and replace it with a 20 line function my soul grows

When we do code reviews, it’s basically pair programming sharing screen… Usually we just push everything and wait for bug reports, because this crazy ass company has been using a reference book, a calculator, and hundreds of people were manually re-entering things by memory into QuickBooks until January 1st this year. They were thousands of dollars off in the second week… We thought it was a bug. It was all user errors

He’s been working on this system for 15 years, I ran into a table with 126 columns the other day. Somehow, this dude manages to swim through a database with hundreds of tables and just as many triggers with rawdog sql.

It’s fucking wild…I split my time between that and working on my virtual assistant that brainstorms it’s own development with me, and an app that I’m trying to make into a unified fediverse client.

I know what a tight ship looks like and I push for best practices when I think there’s something to gain worth the fight, but the sheer spectrum of software dev is incredible. My legacy guy told me about what’s been taking all his time lately today - he has to build a system to screen scrape from an emulated IBM mainframe… And I spent my morning working on a unified activity pub interface and my evening testing my weird observation that LLMs speaking UwU seem to perform significantly better

My point being, there’s a sweet spot between methodology/process, and it’s very rare to hit it. And also, software dev is playing in realms beyond human comprehension, and no matter how orderly if seems it should be, every senior dev who still writes code is superstitious, and often correct to be so

Notify the people you have to notify for your blockers, then embrace the absurdity

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk

Can we just take a second to say what utter bullshit it is that “facilitating piracy” is so allowed to be an argument?

How are we in this wacky world where rights holders get to say “what you built allows piracy, we demand total control over you”

Because Taylor Swift is a billionaire who is politically relevant. She often has been on the right side of things (but not always). Even if she was solely a source for good, that doesn’t justify the obscene wealth she has or her lifestyle

And the right doesn’t generally worship her the way other billionaires are worshipped because she’s woke or something? Whatever the reason, they’re more willing to criticize her

She’s also far more susceptible to public pressure than other billionaires as an artist

All together, she’s a good target to rally around.

Does she deserve to be wealthy? Sure. She actually worked to get where she is, and has done a lot of good.

But she’s a billionaire, and we need to discuss limiting all billionaires to reasonable amounts of extreme wealth.

It doesn’t matter where the conversation starts, we can’t really afford to be picky

All of those (except MSG as far as I know) are definitively bad, the only question is how bad.

The problem is in the US, we’ve basically decided if there’s no acute symptoms or a direct line to a very serious long term illness, we let companies do whatever they want.

It doesn’t flow from science to policy, it mostly flows from public sentiment to policy

That’s just an engineering problem… Not a particularly hard one either

Wtf would you keep re-encoding it? If you don’t, it’s just binary. You can run error checks on it, save it on raid config with high redundancy, and it’s more stable than any physical media

Load it into memory and you can copy it all you want, do error checking at the destination and you’re golden.

The exception is if you keep uploading it to and ripping it from hosting sites which keep re-encoding/compressing it… But replication itself is easy

Sure, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a Corp that frames fair use as a subset of fair use, making allowances only when it’s beneficial to them for marketing

For the most cut and dry example, they allow blog posts praising them… What about a blog post offering a nuanced criticism? What about a satiric post about them?

Those are both undeniably fair use, but by framing it as outside fair use, they’re being shit heels

The real LPT is always in the comments

Holy shit… The balls of that policy. “Hey, we took two common words of the English language for our project. They’re ours now.”

The psuedo-friendly tone where they define fair use as “all the places we want you to market for us, and none of the ones we don’t” (specifically “showing support of rust”… Not as in “our software supports rust”, but “I want to praise rust publicly”) and you use the word rust in a project… So I guess <my_sdk>-rust can probably be licensed if we ask.

I think I figured out the hack - you use the word rust, along with the logo for the still popular game rust (released 2 years before it). They’ll be paralyzed by the mental gymnastics it takes to twist their stance into a “friendly cease and desist” for months. And when it finally comes, you can insist you were talking about the game, Rust, using familiar programming concepts allegorically to comment on game mechanics and emergent design and through player interaction and feedback.

Then you say “I think I’ve heard of rust-lang in the last couple years, some people really seem to like it. But library availability is a concern, do you have a good package manager? Can I find a package for most things I might need?”

I never used atom, but I could use a new sidearm next to vs code (my plugin list is getting a bit ridiculous)

Is it (or rather proton) worth checking out?

That drove me nuts… You can fix it through, I did it immediately when they made the change

I’m not attracted to masculine characters. You want me to care what a dude looks like? You’re barking up the wrong tree. And if I wanted to look at myself, I’d look in a mirror

My avatar is not me… If I’m going to watch a character for a couple dozen hours, it’s going to be someone I find attractive. Hell, if I’m going to spend more than 5 minutes on a character creation screen, it’s going to be a woman, because it’s hard to get invested in a male character for me

Yeah, that was a joke… Which is why I followed it up with a couple ways to download media at the airport quickly

Sure it will. It fully supports streaming

Or, you know, if you accidentally typed a YouTube address into the wrong site, and somehow it ended up on your phone. Whoops. It could happen anywhere, even on a layover

Or if you’re uncomfortable with that, Dr horrible’s sing along blog is pubic domain, a bunch of big actors and writers made it during the first writers strike. I think the sequel is too. I think you can still download it off the official website… I’ve got a copy on my phone just in case I find myself desperate for offline content

The consensus is that access to porn lowers rape. Does this extend to pedophilia? Probably, but not proven, in large part because of obvious reasons… testing this theory is super duper internationally illegal

Well it depends on the method of sync… Doing it through updates would lag, but what if it was through something like quantum effects, or even by treating both bodies and brains like a contiguous organism until the cloning is complete? Like with a cell dividing, there’s no original

Huh. Now my confusion about the chicken and the egg debate makes a lot more sense, it seems odd to me that such an easily answered question ended with so much confusion

I’m now realizing it’s only a debate with non programmers, I thought it was a mutual ADHD communication thing, now I’m realizing maybe it’s just because they learned about inheritance

Unless your pause execution of the original or there’s an ongoing synchronization during the cloning process

There’s an easy way to reconcile them… The opinions are “articles should be backed up to prevent information manipulation, a threat to democracy” and “they should be able to hide their mistakes so they don’t get made fun of”

You reconcile them by not letting them stealth edit, and you stand up for them when they made an honest mistake and are being blasted for it

Where’s your sense of drama???

Rebuild? Checks notes not seeing that step, it just says “cash out”, “promise you’ve changed”, “wait to fall out of the news cycle”, and “repeat”

Nah, he was named Sequel in the hopes he’d both benefit from and be crushed by expectations

Discretion, not discrimination

You can also be denied a transplant for bad hygiene, missing appointments, being too old, or any other reason that makes them think you wouldn’t get the most out of the organ. Not following your doctor’s instructions is definitely going to kill your chances - if you refuse to be vaccines, what happens if you decide maybe you don’t need to take your immunosuppressants? Or you decide you could probably drink a bit just this once, no matter what your doctor said. You can destroy a transplanted organ with one bad decision

A new organ isn’t a right or a privilege, it’s triage. There aren’t enough to go around, so medical ethics dictate you first save people who are dying, but are most likely to be savable - refusing a vaccine is a serious risk factor

I get it.

Imagine you start working with your friend, and you start to get successful. He starts acting like an asshole more and more, the friend part shrinks and the boss part grows, and he’s oblivious to that.

But he also trusts you, would happily fund you building new things, and has an enormous audience. He’s only willing to share a small slice of the pie, but it’s a very big pie

Now either you leave and get a normal job, or you stay, get lots of autonomy, minor fame, and maybe a ton of money down the line, but you have to handle a narcissist.

Also by staying, you can steer the narcissist now and again - and that ripples out into the viewers

I love arguing with people, I’ll even argue points I don’t necessarily believe, but that’s not the same as trolling. The difference is doing it in good faith

Trolls aren’t trying to convince anyone or engage in debate, they’re in it to russle jimmies, own the libs, or whatever. There’s not really an intellectual aspect to it, it’s arguing on emotion