sirtaj

This is one thing I find more on Hacker News than most other discussion sites. Any topic about annoying or bad behaviour by corporations eventually devolves to "they're allowed to do it".

"They're allowed to do it" is one of those things that doesn't really bear saying so much because that's already been implicitly established. Nobody is claiming what they're doing is illegal, so how does this add anything of value? Who is still unaware that corporations will use their size and market control to their benefit?

It _is_ hilarious, but not in the way you intended I think. The crash out is not about his receiving the credits. It's about his then working so hard to pretend he did it all himself, and that the government should stop giving people money to do things because it's always a tremendous waste. The irony and hypocrisy is indeed sublime.

It was definitely a mixed blessing, but I had a close relative (a local, not an American) who worked with them in some poor countries for some years. The verdict was, yes, it's pretty clearly a CIA front, but they also did some real and serious humanitarian work.

I've been playing around with this stuff for around a year too, mixing deterministic-ish simulation with AI comms, decision making and story guidance. There are flashes of cool, but the work to guide it to write good stories with what you have often takes just as much effort as writing the story. Fine, you've written a situation generator. Now you have to tell it what kind of situations are compelling, without them feeling like cookie-cutter templates. Then what you're doing is writing.

Thanks for the Emergent Garden rec, looks interesting.

Someone already did this, and it was a dancing bear of a thing. Cool that it worked, pretty boring in practice. The sims-like Inzoi was built around this idea as well and the blandness really put people off.

I'd love to see it happen, but until I see an AI write a compelling story worth reading, I'm glad people are still doing the heavy lifting.

Considering the 10ft-horizon-thinking around us, I feel like this is a feature not a bug.

Plus system prompt and context control. Also I'm beginning to see them kind of like linux namespaces or container, ie anyone can make one but it's going to have only as much authorisation as the starting process, or even less.

Not about profit in the sense that nobody sat down to say "let's add a feature that looks useful and burns more tokens so we make more money". For status update thing I can believe that.

I'm making an educated guess based on the overabundance of below-average digital stuff being shovelled at us at an alarming rate, and of course the article itself.

I'm not sure why you're concerned that people might complain about it though. If customer feedback isn't a useful signal to the market, a lot of people have been misled about that for a very long time.

Yeah, and now there are a larger number of those.

What it had to do with quality is that nobody actually cared enough to review the art. No taste, no attention to detail, not even a basic walkthrough to evaluate whether anything breaks the 4th wall.

Since this is primarily still a programming site, consider mediocre code that looks like it works but clearly nobody actually made an effort to make sure.

Sure, but what precisely is your concern? That people aren't pleased about being caught in the crossfire and are complaining about it, and you want them to stop doing that?

Whether it's "right" depends on the goal of course, but in this case I'm not understanding your point because nobody is prosecuting those companies for doing this.

In any case, these kinds of blanket statements are not very useful, because each case tends to be judged on its own merits. For example, yes, enough people believe that monopolistic tactics are not "right" and laws reflect that.

Yup, as I said. Same as rich people do everywhere, they don't have to worry, they won't run out of water or power, if things get too hot where they are they'll just move somewhere nicer. They have the money and zero incentive to solve the actual problem.

An extremely wealthy acquaintance in my local circle is happy to endlessly debate whether climate change is ACTUALLY real or just scientists carving out job security, while flying out for monthly ski holidays wherever there's nice snow in the world when it gets a bit muggy at home.

Unless they've somehow restored Norway's glaciers with a refrigerator of some sort, I think you might be mistaking a local maximum for a global one.

It will still be true another 30 years from now perhaps, but nobody who has the actual funds to spend seems to care. If the world was actually taking it seriously, it would be dealt with like the ozone hole was. Instead, we're still debating whether it's real, and if it's real whether it's important, and if it's important whether it is more important than - I don't know - pretty much anything else.

What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.

We've been hearing some variant of "engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don't need to worry now" since the late 90s.

This is about a video game.

I still get a tiny creepout when I recall how he said "grubby tap"

One of the funniest ideas I heard was that we in South Asia do corruption properly, because unlike the West, even the poorest person gets to be corrupt while in the West you have to have money and know people. Democracy!

Speaking of the IAS, my grandfather went smoothly from being an honest and principled ICS officer to being an IAS one. A contractor had his mother murdered because he wouldn't take a bribe for an illegal transport licence. That had nothing to do with socialism or capitalism, and neither ism will magically fix a society where that barely raises an eyebrow.

The expression "80% of life is just showing up" seemed like such a useless cliche to me, until I tried it.

We're going to go back to the original point you made that you don't understand why privatisation is going so slowly. And I will reiterate that there are good and bad reasons. The bad reasons are visible, like Adani winning every coal tender in every BJP state, or the contractors (privatised) who make shit roads so they can then get paid to repair them. The good reasons are the ones I stated and you've touched on - you don't just give away the family jewels, you make sure that the recipient is strongly incentivised to do a better job. Just "oh they need to make money so it will be better" is too nebulous to mean anything. What is the incentive for a railway caterer to do a better job if he won't get pulled up for substandard food?

Saw the same thing playing out in public transport in a few different countries, incidentally. London railways are a particularly hilarious example of what happens when you privatise without proper accountability.

Boogeyman? Is the outcome of the World Bank's insistence on "structural adjustments" somehow in debate now?

I was in Delhi when this started and they began laying out the tamper-proof cable back in the early 2000s. At that time, railway food had been privatised, perhaps you recall. It wasn't better. The problem was not the privatisation or lack thereof, it was the complete lack of accountability.

It's not surprising. For one, stated vs actual goals always differ and someone needs pockets to reach into. For the other, plenty of countries that listened to orgs like the World Bank saying "privatise everything immediately and reap the benefits!" just ended up handing the assets to cronies. Examples like Russia are of course well-known, but it's obviously happening under BJP in India as well.

The privatisation of Delhi power distribution was initiated by a Congress state government in 2000.

And both the reactivity and tone of modelers is so good now that even trained ears can have trouble distinguishing between them. In the vast majority of cases it's not a downgrade from a real amp.

Here in India we have a little explosion of youtube-trained bedroom guitarists with outstanding chops, playing live to small but dedicated audiences. Almost none of them would have been able to afford a "proper" gig amp and cab, let alone a place to practice with them.

Ocean Machine has some of my most emotionally affecting songs (the entire second half the album, basically), and it bugs me no end that he only started playing them live after I stopped being able to go his shows.

server -> personal -> server -> personal... I've seen this cycle a number of times in the last 40 years. Almost none of the people making any of the software we use are purely using the cloud, they are using powerful personal computers with cloud for GPU. The ubiquity of personal computing is required if we want this industry to keep producing enthusiastic hackers.

I guess efforts like Google's OKF, which teach the llm to manage the ontology directly, are the opposite of what you want.

The weathering need is real. An llm equivalent of dbms analysing usage pattern to tune indexes.