chefandy

Phone autocorrect usually is the culprit for those types of typos for me. I imagine this crowd would be more likely than many to have that common abbreviation for Active Domains trained into their input methods.

This is a tad reductive.

If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things?

Manipulative advertising practices suck. Privacy destroying data-driven marketing sucks.

Ads themselves often suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.

> Like cancer, I think it's possible to split ads into two categories: Benign and malignant.

I think you mean tumors because all cancer is malignant. There’s no benign cancer.

> you know that things have gone sideways. You can feel it.

What you’re feeling is your totally subjective value system bumping up against things that don’t jibe with it.

> these things are acceptable, and these things are not

You’re just taking those values and applying them to everything and everyone else. Febreeze gives me migraines, airlines are often totally shit companies, and toothpaste is a million of the same product full of a bunch of worthless gimmicks. Pharmaceutical ads depend on the pharmaceutical, and what you consider ‘vice’ ads are mostly for products used responsibly by many millions of people even if abused by many. Just because they make you uncomfortable doesn’t mean they should make everyone else uncomfortable.

Having been an avid net user since the early 90s, I can’t think of a time where that assertion wasn’t specious. In 2005— the year Gmail debuted and people stated using the term “web 2.0”— most of the content on the net was still from traditional media sources— PR garbage and all. Most blogs were still people just rattling off their opinions which was more likely based on the available content than their own high-quality research. And lack of oversight is a double-edged sword: sure you might have been less likely to get pure unfiltered marketing dreck but you were way more likely to get straight-up bullshit, which is a different, but serious problem. I think he was trying to champion the idealistic anti-establishment soul from the early net despite it essentially being an anachronism, even in 2005.

Every corporate pronouncement of virtue must be appended with “until we get paid enough, or the right people ask.”

This is a fun toy. I have no problem naming toys after the serious people and things that inspired it. For all I know, that is exactly what the author of this toy intended to do. Toy isn’t even a denigrating term — play is critically important to many things, especially in visual art.

What gets old is the hubris of the tech world thinking that an artist’s intention and methods boil down to a superficial ‘style’— devoid of granular stroke-by-stroke intention, context, or meaning which you can apply to any arbitrary subject or setting to effectively create new works by that artist.

> I’d completely disagree, because China was the beneficiary and it destroyed North American jobs.

a) The whole point of commercial NN services is to replace human labor, and jobs are paid labor. Literally the entire point of LLMs is to destroy jobs; this isn't hypothetical-- US companies have openly talked about having fired people and not filled roles because they either have increased or hope to increase efficiency with LLMs. And that's in tech where there's a chance more jobs will be created as a result-- the situation is far worse in creative fields. I personally know quite a few north American creative workers that have lost their jobs because the studios they work for have replaced almost the entire department with image generators that the remaining workers use to spray-and-pray concept art and game assets. Comparatively, the argument that they will create more jobs-- even as many jobs-- as they destroy is pure speculation.

b) Considering you're willing to have in-group protectionism in the form of nationalism, I'm guessing you're willing to extend that to industry, so creative workers don't count? Is it only American tech jobs that count or are you against American LLMs that replace any American workers, also?

> China needs to respect the American trademark system!

Trademarks? I assume you're talking about the patent system rather than logos... and legally they don't, actually. The US doesn't respect Chinese patents, either. How many times have you heard of a US company stopping doing something because a Chinese company patented it first? Do you really think we just invent everything first over here?

Houdini’s 3D Voronoi tools are fun.

A whole lot of people in the tech scene got really mad when Huawei was using obviously stolen Cisco designs and code for their switches. Didn’t humanity benefit from having cheaper access to switches because they didn’t have to pay for Cisco’s sunk costs? A whole lot of people got mad when Microsoft reportedly ganked open source code for things like DNS. Didn’t humanity benefit from one of the world’s most popular server OSs having more reliable name resolution?

Oh, but corporations were the primary beneficiaries, right?

Well, corporations are the primary beneficiaries of this too from a financial perspective. A vanishingly small percentage of people will run, let alone train these models themselves— it’s almost exclusively used to make commercial services that directly compete against the people that made the initial ” data“. But, the vanishingly small percentage of people that directly utilize this stuff for non-commercial use frequent echo chambers like this that make them think more regular people benefit directly. And the companies that are competing directly with creatives and intellectuals using their stolen work employ a whole lot of people here, directly or not.

The distinction between a reason and a justification gets pretty difficult to distinguish the closer you are to the group benefiting from injustice.

I wouldn’t even expect them to understand basic marketing themselves: there’s a lot more to it than many assume. I would hope they could understand the value of someone that does. There’s this kind of “well if I don’t understand it then it’s probably not worth understanding” cockiness in software that I was definitely guilty of in my twenties at the very least. Someone thinking they can dismiss expert knowledge or even entire fields out-of-hand based on a few a priori thought experiments says a lot more about that person than the fields they denigrate.

Maybe post-catch or something— like a cleaning chemical used in fish markets or something— but one branch of my family are lobstermen in nearby waters south of the border and I haven’t heard of any such thing happening in their communities.

As a long time creative worker in addition to my technical work, I’ve tried in vain to explain to the FOSS crowd that names, UIs, user flows, etc a) really matter if they want anyone outside of the technical world to use their tools, and b) what other software developers think of them isn’t a good measure of those things. What Mastodon would need to have done to be a Twitter replacement for general audiences was my most recent losing battle. Lots of haughty, dismissive “federation is not that complicated” and “I think toots is a cute analog to tweet and the people who don’t like it just need to get over it.” Well, the nearly immediate mass exodus after the incredibly energetic mass adoption says everything we need to know about that.

“Well I don’t think it’s too complicated,” doesn’t really say much from someone whose profession is wrangling that complexity. “Well I don’t think it’s unappealing,” doesn’t say much from someone that has no experience wrangling the different nuanced ways different things can be appealing to different people in different contexts and how that affects the way people approach and interact with stuff.

Interface design, copywriting, branding— these are all communication mediums that deal with the emotional intangibles, instincts, and irrational tendencies we all have even when we don’t see them. It’s not about taste and aesthetic preference, they’re tools to solve communication problems. Developers on a whole have a hard enough time dealing with communication in technical documentation for software they wrote, let alone effective visual communication. I’m seeing some progress in developers realizing how much more impact software can have as a problem solving tool when designers are involved… but a whole lot still think designers just add frivolous fluff and that their quirky interfaces more informed by the API implementation than how users solve problems isn’t the problem — users failing to read their wall-o-text documentation is.

But there’s no hard ceiling above the people on the bottom. It’s not a stratification — it’s a spectrum. The lower-end developers replaced easily by LLMs aren’t going to just give up and become task rabbits: they’re going to update their skills trying to qualify for the (probably temporarily) less vulnerable jobs above them. They might never be good enough to solve the really hard problems, they’ll put pressure on those just above them… which will echo up the entire industry. When everyone— regardless of the applicability of LLMs to their workflow— is suddenly facing competition from the developers just below them because of this upward pressure, the market gets a whole lot shittier. Damn near everybody I’ve spoken to thinks they’re the special one that surely can’t be heavily affected by LLMs because their job is uniquely difficult/quality-focused/etc. Even for the smallish percentage of people for whom that’s true, the value of their skill set on a whole is still going to take a huge hit.

What seems far more likely to me is that computer scientists will be doing math research and wrangling LLMS, a vanishingly small number of dedicated software engineers work on most practical textual coding tasks with engineering methodologies, and low or no code tooling with the aid of LLMs gets good enough to make custom software something made by mostly less-technical people with domain knowledge, like spreadsheet scripting.

A lot of people in the LLM booster crowd think LLMs will replace specialists with generalists. I think that’s utterly ridiculous. LLMs easily have the shallow/broad knowledge generalists require, but struggle with the accuracy and trustworthiness for specialized work. They are much more likely to replace the generalists currently supporting people with domain-specific expertise too deep to trust to LLMs. The problem here is that most developers aren’t really specialists. They work across the spectrum of disciplines and domains but know how to use a very complex toolkit. The more accessible those tools are to other people, the more the skill dissolves into the expected professional skill set.

Just another way for the people on top to siphon money from everyone else. No individual contributor is going to be rewarded for any productivity increase beyond what is absolutely required to get them to fulfill the company’s goals, and the goal posts will be moving so fast that keeping up will be a full time job. As we see from the current job market, the supply of problems the commercial software market needs more coders to solve maybe isn’t quite as bountiful as we thought it was, and maybe we won’t need to perpetually ramp up the number of developers humanity has… maybe we even have too many already? If a company’s top developer can do the work of the 10 developers below them, their boss is going to happily fire the extra developers— not think of all the incredible other things they could use those developers for. A lot of developers assume that one uber-productive developer left standing will be more valuable to the company than they were before— but now that developer is competing with 10 people that also know the code base willing to work for a lot cheaper. We get paid based on what the market will bear, not the amount of value we deliver, so 100% of that newfound profit goes to the top and the rest of it goes to reducing the price of the product to stay competitive with every other company doing the exact same thing.

Maybe I’m being overly cynical, but assuming this isn’t a race to the bottom and people will get rich being super productive ai-enhanced code monsters, to me, looks like a conceited white collar version of the hustle porn guys that think if they simultaneously work the right combo of gig apps at the right time of day in the right spots then they can work their way up to being wealthy entrepreneurs. Good luck.

Many bosses are willing to stake their subordinates’ reputations on it, too.

It’s weird that caring about people impacted by the training of a hobby NN model feels anachronistic. Well those people were ALL the way at the other end of the internet tube, and it was only a game so their time doesn’t really matter, and think about how many people “weren’t” impacted!

It seems like tech has gotten so dang self-absorbed.

For some little indie setup, sure. But AAA studios are like any other software companies— the folks putting their network stack together aren’t the same people that are making the gameplay logic, many of whom probably went to art school and learned how to script and write some less-complex C++, and they’re different from the people working with the low-level graphics programming in the game engine, many of whom probably have PhDs in computer science or other related math disciplines. Having a connection low-latency enough and reliable enough to have fighting game tournaments on servers with many thousands of players isn’t a job for a general purpose game developer.

There's a big difference between can and will. We absolutely can hold people and corporations accountable, but we often don't. We cannot hold a computer responsible for anything. It's a computer. No matter how complex or abstracted, its output is entirely based on instructions and data given to it by humans, interpreting and executing it as humans designed it to. It can't be discouraged or punished: a computer doesn't care if it's on or off; if it's the most important computer to have ever existed or a DoA Gateway 486 from the early 90s that sat in a dumpster from the day after it was born until the day it was smashed to bits in a garbage compactor in a transfer station. It doesn't care because it can't care. Anything beyond that is anthropomorphization.

Hmmm... maybe I need to make an AI bot service that repeatedly has agents making 24/7 argumentative chat and voice complaints to customer service about services you use to reach the optimal low price. And THEN have another company selling a chatbot that expertly stonewalls bot complaints more effectively than current CS bots. And eventually, everything would be so clogged up with bots arguing with each other that the only way to actually reach customer service for any company would be through my platform.

Not so much a value-added strategy, but value-partially-un-removed strategy.

Looks like enshittif.ai is available!

I guess what I'm probably not seeing from my vantage point is that translating into a better experience with the tools available. I just cancelled a ChatGPT plus subscription because it just didn't seem useful enough to justify the price. I absolutely understand that there are people for whom it is, but nearly everyone I see that talks a lot about the value of AI either has use cases that I don't care about such as automated "content" generation or high-volume lowish-skill code generation, or they see achieving a progressively more difficult set of benchmarks as a useful end in itself. I like copilot autocomplete when I'm coding, but the quality of that hasn't dramatically changed. I don't give a damn about benchmarks-- I only care what I get from it practically. I have absolutely no interest in using ChatGPT as a therapist or companion because I value human connection and have access to it. So far I simply don't see significant changes in what comes out vs what gets typed in for practical usage. I wouldn't give ChatGPT logic problems to solve except maybe for generating code because I know code well enough to quickly evaluate its output. If the caveat is "hey FYI this thing might hide some frustratingly plausible looking bullshit in the answer so double-check its work," then what good is it really for hard problems if you just have to re-do them anyway?

The same thing is true with image generation. Sure, it's better in ways that are sort-of meaningful for low-value professional or hobby usage, but it's barely budged the barriers to becoming good enough for high-end media production.

I totally believe that this technology is improving and when you're looking at it in isolation, those improvements seem meaningful. But I just don't see that yet translating into things most of the general public can sink their teeth into. With things like the (still) shitty google search "enhancements", and users being forced into AI-driven chat workflows or having big loud not-really-useful UI elements dedicated to AI features, in some ways they've made people's experience using computers meaningfully worse.

Just like with Mastodon, I see a huge disconnect with the tech crowd's excitement with what's happening with the technology, and how that ends up working for users that need to actually solve their problems with that technology.

Could you give an example of something we recently solved that was considered an unsolvable problem six months beforehand? I don’t have any specific examples, but it seems like most of the huge breakthrough discoveries I’ve seen announced end up being overstated and for practical usage, our choice of LLM-driven tools is only marginally better than they were a couple of years ago. It seems like the preponderance of practical advancement in recent times has come from the tooling/interface improvements rather than generating miracles from the models themselves. But it could be that I just don’t have the right use cases.

I don’t mean the more effective voting system — I mean the more effective system overall. I don’t really think that’s controversial. As I said, I like the Slashdot voting system

Thanks— Could be my vpn.

I'd love to know more but there's a zero percent chance I'm paying for a Daily Beast subscription to access a 2014 entertainment column. Oh well.

> Swift can’t evolve or even exist without Apple and so unless you’re Apple, then Swift is too great of a risk.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. It's Apache licensed so you can just fork it. It's got pretty active development and a whole lot of software developers that use it-- if Apple decides to somehow lock down the repo and stop accepting PRs, what's stopping a group of developers from just making their own branch? It's got non-Apple cross-platform GUI frameworks, good support in editors... Sure it's 100% not as good off of Apple systems but I'm not sure what they'd be expected to do MORE than open it up with an Apache license?

And OmniSharp works just fine in VSCode from what I see. What am I missing?

Oh yeah true

Yeah I'm sick of this. Did you know you can't even use ext2/3/4 together on the same partition? What a mess.

And then all of their stans taking on a persecution complex because people that actually made all of the “data” don’t uncritically accept their work as equivalent adds insult to injury.

Not for me. I first ask Advanced Voice to read me some code and have Siri listen and email it to an API I wrote which uses Claude to estimate the best cloud provider to run that code based on its requirements and then a n8n script deploys it and send me the results via twilio.

Do you think your considering HN a clear exception to being “Reddit with a sense of grandeur” might have more to do with your vantage point than your ability to gauge the value of online communities?