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fzeroracer

4,208 karma · joined April 27, 2016

software developer and indie game developer, opinions represent myself only
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fzeroracer··on 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
To put it succinctly: It really comes down to jealously. The people generating creative works, whether it's art or writing or games or whatever do so because they are utter voids of creativity. They do so because they believe this machine can even the odds for them, finally show artists how it's done because they have far better ideas than any snobby creative.

And as sardonic as I am I'm also not joking. This is the #1 thing I see consistently show up when you push back on the drivel they're generating. They're upset that there's a perceived wall in front of them that's gatekeeping them from art and they want it destroyed.

fzeroracer··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
It's a weird trajectory to see because with the music industry people have started catching on and either support sites that offer more durable forms of ownership or have straight up reverted to physical ownership.
fzeroracer··on Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions
Then those 'competitors' can fork Godot and make their own AI version of it. Will they? No, no they wont. But they sure will complain about the rules while doing nothing about it.
fzeroracer··on Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions
The drama is in a nutshell someone made a really stupid post claiming only the woke use game engines. Godot community manager said guess that makes us woke (paraphrased), conservatives went batshit, got blocked on Twitter or elsewhere for going insane and a few innocent tweets got caught in the crossfire. Someone went off and made a fork of Godot as a 'non-political version' which went in the only obvious direction it could go.

Basically some incredibly stupid highschool level drama fed by the worst YouTubers you can think of. People vaguepost about it because it's so dumb.

fzeroracer··on Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions
In order to reject low quality PRs, you first have to determine that they are low quality. Guess what LLM-generated code is really good at hiding.
fzeroracer··on 30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech
The way back to sanity would've required the opposition party to be worth anything. Right now they're busy writing up their own project 2029 plan which involves cracking down on the internet and whining about the old guard getting voted out of office for being feckless.
fzeroracer··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
This isn't 'a person', this is one of 'THE' people. Elon Musk is technically just 'a person' at Tesla, but their actions have clear and profound effects. The same is true here.

When you're a founder or one of the c-suite your actions represent the full company. That's part of your job.

fzeroracer··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
> However, as others have argued, what would happen if Mullvad started weighing in on politics unrelated to its mission?

A bit too late for that now, isn't it? Extreme anti-immigration stances have always been associated with anti-privacy because eventually those stances evolve into state apparatuses designed to identify dissidents and targets for deportation. What will you do when the party your co-founder supports eventually demands stripping away privacy for the sake of finding 'terrorists'? Trying to hold this thin veneer of apoliticalism outside of your privacy stance is a remarkably foolish one and one that most people can identify. Especially those who saw that progression occur in real time.

fzeroracer··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
This is quite literally what they said: "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."

They want to deport anyone that isn't Swedish enough, even if they're native-born Swedes.

fzeroracer··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
Generally speaking, if the mission of a company is privacy and then the actions of the c-suite or founders indicates that they are more than willing to compromise on that, then yes. Why shouldnt you scrutinize people whose product is not aligned with their goals?

And yes I do actively switch products. I left the Windows ecosystem for Linux and I will leave Mullvad for whatever else pops up. So it goes.

fzeroracer··on Wikipedia Workers to Seek Union Recognition
They recently laid off an internal team that was popular among workers and also fired one of the oldest employees for dubious reasons. Notably all of the people laid off or fired were union advocates, so this can be seen as a supercharged reaction to an effort to union bust (whether it was or not, it was certainly perceived that way).
fzeroracer··on Call it what it is–the US has lost its hold on measles elimination
> Why does this fear exist? I’m at a loss. Is it because people aren’t less educated now than they were 30 years ago? Is it because deadly diseases have fallen out of public consciousness? Was there a coordinated external effort to psyop the American people into believing such things (now I’m starting to feel like a conspiracy theorist)?

There was essentially a coordinated effort and it's not particularly a conspiracy. Shock Jocks, YouTube personalities, folks like Alex Jones etc all would gleefully share anti-vaccine sentiment because it got eyeballs and eyeballs is more money. Then it travels up the chain, creating an entire industry around anti-vaccine sentiment by selling snake oil. Eventually you get stupid enough politicians to genuinely believe it and enact policy on it.

And unfortunately most people are incredibly stupid with zero foresight. Someone's kid will die of measles and they'll just shrug and say it was God's plan. They'll gleefully send their kid with fifty preventable diseases out to die and kill others along the way.

fzeroracer··on Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed
Saying never talk to the police is an 'online belief' is frankly baffling.

There are multiple examples of prominent law professors bringing in ex-police professionals who all say the exact same thing: never talk to the police. If you spend five minutes around a lawyer they will say the same thing. If you ever end up finding yourself in legal turmoil it is the very first thing a lawyer will directly advise you to do.

People being stupid I don't think suddenly makes this advice terminally online. I was hearing it, in person, when I was in college over a decade ago.

fzeroracer··on The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends
I'm thinking back to a recent interview I had. It was one of those online coding tests; after spending about an hour and a half on it I sent it back to the recruiter and they came back to me saying I didn't pass because I 'only' got an 80% despite passing all criteria in the worst working environment possible. This was a no-AI test too so I unfortunately respected the criteria.

So many interviews still demand absolute perfection so they just optimize for people that are dishonest and get away with it.

fzeroracer··on When I reject AI code even if it works
How can you own the design if you don't know what your design actually does?
fzeroracer··on When I reject AI code even if it works
If I'm on call solving a problem another engineer caused and I reach out to them for clarification and they say 'I don't know, the AI wrote it' I am going to advocate for them being fired tomorrow.
fzeroracer··on When I reject AI code even if it works
> I have never seen an agent output an implementation called FooImpl that's tens of thousands of LOC in a single file, but I have seen plenty of human code like this.

And how long does it take a coding agent to output a thousand lines of code versus a human? The worst human at any company was rate limited by themselves. Those 'average enterprise' programmers aren't going away, they're the ones now spending tens of thousands on coding agents and filling your codebase with even more garbage without bothering to review an iota of it.

fzeroracer··on Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?
>The whole reason the British government pushed Brexit was so Britain could control its immigration. That's how Brexit was presented to the population, that's why people voted for it.

>Meanwhile the government did not fix the housing issue, the cost of living disaster in London, the unemployment problem, ... and so on.

These two things might be connected. It's almost like Brexit caused a series of large social problems.

fzeroracer··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
I see there is no point trying to get through to you. These are not hypotheticals, as an example just recently ChatGPT advised a user to mix bleach and vinegar. I have seen Googles AI hallucinate many details that I had to double check and would've been disastrous had I assumed it was truthy. There's a reason why models have the legal clauses like 'this is for entertainment purposes only' because they are trying to shield themselves from legal obligations when it makes catastrophic mistakes.

The people least willing to understand how the system works are also the most willing to blindly believe it.

fzeroracer··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
> But it's not going to do that. It's literally designed to give the best and most accurate answer that it can.

No, no, no and no. This is the biggest mistake I see people consistently make with LLMs. It is not designed to give you the most accurate answer, it is designed to give you the most likely series of words following your prompt.

If an LLM is trained on 10 jackasses thinking bleach is a medicinal drink and 1 doctor who disagrees, it will by virtue of probability tell you to drink bleach. Companies add additional safeguards or system prompts to try and keep it 'on rails' but it's all probability based on what you prompt it. It is by the literal functionality of how it works to do so. A function depending on what said company ingests during training, many of which include the entire corpus of the internet.

If you do not understand how LLMs work under the hood then yes, you shouldn't trust your own personal learned experience because you've already demonstrated that you're wrong.

fzeroracer··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
And if you ask an LLM about an effective cure for cancer and it spits out to drink bleach, are you going to follow it?

When you ask 'who knows' that's the point of research which was my original comment here. The same goes true for some random asshole telling you to drink bleach as it does an LLM, except people seemingly have hyped themselves into believing the LLM is more right somehow instead of being trained on every random asshole ever.

fzeroracer··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
And I see people say this, that they've built a house but what they've built is something that structurally collapses immediately and fails due to problems that even an average person would've avoided had they learned how to build a house.

So did you build a house, or did you build a house?

fzeroracer··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you.

If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.

fzeroracer··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
> An LLM absolutely shortens the research part of learning

No, it doesn't. Because in any scenario where you are using AI in a potentially appropriate manner, you are verifying every single source it spits out and cross referencing everything it says. If you do not do this you are failing the process entirely.

fzeroracer··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
Isn't this effectively the same argument an addict would put forward?
fzeroracer··on Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
>Easy to say, harder to stand behind when you’re savings are depleted, you have a mortgage and a family to care for, and maybe you’re on a work visa about to be kicked out of the only country your kids have ever known only to return to a country they don’t even speak the language of.

Would these material conditions change if the person involved was responsible for making bombs used in a genocide? Or if they were working for the Torture Nexus company? Or responsible for money laundering and other illegal activities?

Life certainly has many shades and while I can be sympathetic to certain conditions here we're talking about a highly educated group of individuals who have multiple options to choose from. They've made their choice (or a series of choices) to end up where they are and that does not render them immune to criticism.

fzeroracer··on Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
There are plenty of options. I for example am one of those unemployed engineers that has been looking for a job for about a year now. Meta recruiters have came to me trying to poach me, and I've said no every time.

The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at Meta or Palantir and while it's true there are very few ethical or noble companies, working for Meta is more akin to completely throwing out your ethical compass.

fzeroracer··on Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games
I certainly can't think of any. I've gone through about 18,000 games on Steam (since I dig for hidden gems and interesting games) and the only time a vibe-coded game stood out to me was when it was so awful I did a double take.

There's so many vibe-coded roguelite deckbuilders out there and all of them look exactly the same. A bunch of shitty art with zero cohesion, mechanics that don't actually work and a UI that's actively offensive to engage with.

fzeroracer··on The rich aren't your role models
This would be fair...except said wary individuals have had zero problem giving the state the ability to confiscate private property as long as it appeals directly to their emotions. We've seen cheers from those same types as the government sends jack-booted thugs to kick in doors and destroy property.
fzeroracer··on The rich aren't your role models
This technical site for years had a large contingent of users fellating every action Musk did (just look at the cyber truck thread here all those years ago). Now criticism of Musk and his immense amounts of often ill-gotten wealth is tantamount to partisanship.
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