You know what, this is on us. Chat GPT is just a prediction engine that tries to say what words it thinks follow a preceding prompt, and it’s looked at millions of examples (written by us) and it’s seen hapless clients and users complain about bugs and be told: “user error, works fine” so often chatGPT just thinks it’s just the culturally accepted polite response to a bug report, in the same way as responding to “thank you” with “you’re welcome”. This is a dark mirror on our profession.
Combine this with Chrome enforcing manifest v3 starting at June 2024, YouTube ads will be virtually unblockable on Chrome, even with an ads blocking extension installed because Google will be controlling the ad blocking mechanism used by the ad blocker. They can arbitrarily reduce the max number of the blocking rulesets, how often the extension can update the rulesets, or even elect to skip running any rulesets that target YouTube or Google domains.
They could instead severely cripple or outright block Firefox users. Since we are the minority, it won’t affect them. They will just blame it on Firefox and wash their hands off.
Facebook for all its nastiness was very much incompetent in influencing the direction of the web. Look at their failed attempts like free basics.
Google on the other hand has the web tightly in its dirty grip. At this point, they aren’t even pretending to be nice. Even those plans that cause them reputational damage are brought back in some other name.
The only way to stop Google is for the regulatory agencies to put their foot down hard. They should be divided into at least a couple dozen companies that are not allowed to do business with each other.
Models are geared towards seeking the best human response for answers, not necessarily the answers themselves. Its first answer is based on probability of autocompleting from a huge sample of data, and in versions that have a memory adjusts later responses to how well the human is accepting the answers. There is no actual processing of the answers, although that may be in the latest variations being worked on where there are components that cycle through hundreds of attempts of generations of a problem to try to verify and pick the best answers. Basically rather than spit out the first autocomplete answers, it has subprocessing to actually weed out the junk and narrow into a hopefully good result. Still not AGI, but it's more useful than the first LLMs.
That's not been my experience. It'll tend to be agreeable when I suggest architecture changes, or if I insist on some particular suboptimal design element, but if I tell it "this bit here isn't working" when it clearly isn't the real problem I've had it disagree with me and tell me what it thinks the bug is really caused by.
The stalebot is most times useless. The only scenario where I can see use of it is a maintainer waiting for the reporter to add information. But closing issues because no maintainer checked on them? That’s garbage and discourages bug reports.
This is superficially funny, of course. But I've seen it before and after thinking about it for a while I find myself coming to the defense of the Torment Nexus and the tech company that brought it into reality.
Science fiction authors are not necessarily the best authorities when it comes to evaluating the ethical or real-world implications of the technologies they dream up. Indeed, I think they are often particularly bad at that sort of thing. Their primary goal is to craft captivating narratives that engage readers by introducing conflicts and dilemmas that make for compelling stories. When they imagine a new technology they aren't going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome. The dark side of these technologies is deliberately emphasized by the authors to create tension and drama in their stories.
Tech companies, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of considerations. Their goal isn't just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems. They wouldn't build the Torment Nexus unless they figured that they could sell it to someone, and that they wouldn't get shut down for doing something society would reject. There are regulatory frameworks around this kind of thing.
If you look back through older science fiction you can find all sorts of "cautionary tales" against technologies that have turned out to be just fine. "Fahrenheit 451" warned against the proliferation of television entertainment, but there's been plenty of rich culture developed for that medium. "Brave New World" warned against genetic engineering, but that's turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields. The submarine in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was seen as unstoppable and disruptive, but nowadays submersibles have plenty of nonmilitary applications.
I'd want to know more about what exactly the Torment Nexus is before I automatically assume it's a bad idea just because some sci-fi writer claimed it was.
“Brave New World” warned against genetic engineering, but that’s turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields.
I was still a teen when I read the book, but that wasn’t really my take from it when I read it. We are still far away from genetically designing human babies. And you also overlooked the part about oppression/control via distractions such as drugs and entertainment.
I haven't read it in a while, but I kind of took the genetic engineering as a metaphor for being forced into the role/ class the ruling body wants you to be in
My takeaway from BNW was a warning against blindly embracing a society built only on good feelings and numbing anything that forces us to confront pain. The oppression was more or less a side effect of it.
Everyone in the upper classes were okay that lower classes were being oppressed because they all were just as happy thanks to Soma. The pain of the outsiders didn’t mean anything because they “chose” to live like that.
Genetic engineering was just a plot device to explain how the classes were chosen.
The brilliant thing in Brave New World was that it didn't at any point make it obvious that people were miserable slaves - they could leave any time they wanted, and lived a life of bliss. Still, as a reader, you end up feeling like you'd rather take the place of the savage than any of the characters living in the hypercommercial utopia. At least that's how I felt.
On the other other hand, maybe we only understand the dangers of the Torment Nexus and use it responsibly because science fiction authors warned techy people who are into that subject about how it could go wrong, and the people who grew up reading those books went out of their way to avoid those flaws. We do seem to have a lot more of the technologies that sci-fi didn’t predict causing severe problems in our society.
But this is exactly contrary to my point, a science fiction author isn't qualified or motivated to give a realistic "understanding" of the Torment Nexus. His skillset is focused on writing stories and the stories he writes need to contain danger and conflict, so he's not necessarily going to interpret the idea of the Torment Nexus in a realistic way.
I think you don’t understand what motivates a lot of science fiction authors. Sure, there are a lot of science fiction novels that are really just science themed fantasy, but there are also a lot of authors that love real science and are trying to make stories about realistic interpretations of its potential effects. To say that science fiction authors don’t care about interpreting the Torment Nexus in a realistic way misses the entire point of a lot of really good science fiction.
[Sarcasm] Unlike companies, which are apparently altruistic organizations that exist for the betterment of humanity! It's all those fools who keep yelling "companies exist to make money" who are wrong. Yeah, that must be it. Tech companies charge because they're good, whilst various writers give away some, much, most, or all of their work because they're evil! Sharing is DEATH, kids!
Sorry, I went off a bit there because I'm frustrated at how committed you are to your bad ideas. Also textbooks also have to be sold, at least here in the US where many are (were?) tailored to the anti-education pro-horsecrap preferences of Texas.
Side thing: I'm becoming increasingly convinced that FaceDeer as an account/persona/whatever exists specifically to be mildly irritating. Is that true? Would you admit it if it were?
Nope. Isaac Asimov was a biochemist, why would he be particularly qualified to determine whether robots are safe? Arthur C. Clarke had a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics, which technology was he an expert in? Heinlein got a bachelor of arts in engineering equivalent degree from the US Naval Academy, that's the closest yet to having an "understanding of technology." Which ones did he write about?
Those were a list of authors who were pretty good at getting the science in their sci fi right. They talked to scientists working on the fields they wrote about. They wrote “hard” sci fi
You cannot judge their competence by their formal education
Well, I also am "pretty good" at getting the science right when I write sci fi. Makes me just as qualified as them, I guess.
The problem remains that the overriding goal of a sci fi author remains selling sci fi books, which requires telling a gripping story. It's much easier to tell a gripping story when something has gone wrong and the heroes are faced with the fallout, rather than a story in which everything's going fine and the revolutionary new tech doesn't have any hidden downsides to cause them difficulties. Even when you're writing "hard" science fiction you need to do that.
And frankly, much of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein's output was very far from being "hard" science fiction.
Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.
It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn't stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.
Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That's why it's useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.
Well, Fox News, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter were a fresh twist. I guess all good scifi mirrors history in one way or another, just taken to the extreme with help of technology. :)
If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
You kidding, right? Those stories have been dime a dozen since the late 90s at least.
24 warned us about having an evil, terrorist US president. As have done a few movies in the past. Streaming platforms were pretty much masturbating themselves over “Confederate US AU” script offerings as early as 2014. Not to mention the nowadays trite trodden trope of “Nazi US AU”.
Heck, you don’t even need fiction. Chile’s cup in 1973 was paid for by the CIA as a social experiment to produce the rising and establishment of a dictatorship.
I was referring more to the plot of brain-dead cable and social media algorithms fuelling the death of democracy. But you're right, it's probably been written many times - I'm not very knowledgeable of sci-fi, and there's a lot of brilliant work out there. :)
Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush.
No it isn’t. Global connectivity is just putting a spotlight on the the fact that most people are and always have been fucking stupid and/or dangerously undereducated.
Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
Maybe more practically, it's just hard to argue America wouldn't be in a better place right now if it wasn't for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.
Maybe more practically, it’s just hard to argue America wouldn’t be in a better place right now if it wasn’t for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.
We absolutely would be, but not because they make people stupid. All they do is exploit vulnerabilities in our shitty brains that have always been there.
I guess it makes people stupid all in the same way, while they used to be stupid all in their own unique ways. The morons have organized, synchronized, and become weaponised.
Somehow I feel like they're also dumber though - if everyone's an idiot in their own way at least they're original.
And just because a sci-fi writer can make up a horrifying story of the Torment Nexus gone wrong doesn't make it a bad idea. Making up horrifying stories of things going wrong is their job. They've make up stories of how things go horrifyingly wrong while doing research into a cure for Alzheimer's disease, doesn't mean curing Alzheimer's disease is a bad thing.
When they imagine a new technology they aren’t going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome.
“Cyberpunks” weren’t warning us about the internet - they were warning us about the corporations who will control it, and through it, us. We are trying explicitly not to communicate on that medium by using Lemmy (that medium encompasses Reddit, X, the various properties of Meta and Alphabet)
Science fiction mentioning a technology, even centering around it, doesn’t mean it’s saying the technology is universally bad. The author highlights the dangers, but the tech itself is almost always portrayed as neutral. It’s the people who use it to nefarious ends that science fiction is warning us about.
Like the people who would seek to profit off of the Torment Nexus.
The concept of the “Torment Nexus” is a placeholder for any technology specifically described as dystopian or otherwise contributing to suffering in fiction, such as mass surveillance, mind control technology, and so on. The meme refers to modern-day corporations missing the point of the fiction, and creating said “Torment Nexus” as something they view as “cool” and “futuristic”. In some cases, the companies are self-aware enough to not pretend that their creation is anything other than dystopian, but in many cases they try to sell the new technology to the public as a good thing despite that very tech being described as dystopian already.
NO cyberpunk was afraid of the fucking internet. The problem has always been the economic mode of production underlying it, which is unironically dystopian. Also the tech world we live in is PRETTY fucking dystopian, get your head out of your ass.
Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought “Fahrenheit 451” was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.
“Brave New World” struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).
It’s been too long since I read “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.
I don’t see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as “neutral” demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.
I stopped reading when you said the goal of tech companies is to solve real world problems. The only goal of tech companies is to create products that will make them a profit. To believe anything else is delusional. That’s kind of why our society is crumbling and the planet is dying.
Yes, but by other companies. Those problems are not created intentionally in order to create and exploit a market, they’re just consequences of those other companies doing business. Pretty much the only example of companies creating problems so that they can sell solutions I can think of is free-to-play games (e.g. make game excessively grindy on purpose to sell boosters). Some of that scummy monetization is now creeping into real-world products, with things such as subscription-based heated seats that are installed in your car regardless but disabled unless you pay up, but the vast majority of products and services on the market address problems that were not created by their manufacturers/providers.
Tech companies … goal isn’t just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems.
This is so naively wrong it’s laughable. Ever heard of profit motive?
Speaking of Fahrenheit 451, weren’t there seashells mentioned in that book? Little devices you could stuff in your ears to play music? And those ended up being uncannily similar to the wireless earbuds we have today?
There are some good ideas in this comment, but I’d like to counter that the cautionary tales are an instigating factor in implementing safety for new tech. The wealthy few shouldn’t get to blindly and unilaterally decide the future of all through careless and unrestricted development of world-altering tech.
We have all of those things and the dystopic predictions of the authors who predicted them haven't come remotely true. All of these examples prove my point.
We have autonomous weaponized drones and they aren't running around massacring humanity like the Terminator depicted. Frankly, I'd trust them to obey the Geneva Conventions more thoroughly than human soldiers usually do.
We have had mass surveillance for decades, Snowden revealed that, and there's no totalitarian global state as depicted in 1984.
We've had nuclear weapons for almost 80 years now and they were only used in anger twice, at the very beginning of that. A good case can be made that nuclear weapons kept the world at large-scale peace for much of that period.
Various companies have made attempts at "Corporate controlled hypercommercialized microtransaction-filled metaverses" over the years and they have generally failed because nobody wanted them and freer alternatives exist. No need to ban anything.
Netflix's Squid Game is not a "real-life" Squid Game. Did you watch Squid Game? That was a private spectacle for the benefit of ultra-wealthy elites and people died in them. Deliberately and in large quantities. Netflix is just making a dumb TV show. Do you really think they'd benefit from massacring the contestants?
"MoviePass to track people’s eyes through their phone’s cameras to make sure they don’t look away from ads” - ok, let's see how long that lasts when there are competitors that don't do that.
"Soulless AI facsimile of dead relatives" - firstly, please show me a method for determining the presence or absence of a soul. Secondly, show me why these facsimiles are inherently "bad" somehow. People keep photographs of their dead loved ones, if that makes you uncomfortable then don't keep one.
Each and every one of these technologies were depicted in fiction over-the-top unrealistic ways that emphasized their bad aspects. In reality none of them have matched those depictions to any significant degree. That's my whole point here.
So tell me, what part of their creation was “solving real-world problems” beyond playing to the desires of autocrats and control freaks? What part of their creation was a net positive to society? Or are you happy to live in a world of autonomous drone strikes on weddings and kindergartens, mass surveillance, a thermonuclear sword of damocles hanging over all of humanity, and so on?
Autonomous weaponized drones are useful for fighting wars more effectively, and with fewer lives placed at risk using manned platforms. You may not like that wars are fought, but they will be fought regardless. Drones solve problems that arise in war-fighting.
Likewise, mass surveillance solves problems faced by intelligence agencies. It's also useful for things like marketing studies, medical studies, all kinds of such things. And again, you may not like some of these problems being solved, but they're real-world problems that are being solved.
Nuclear weapons have kept the world's superpowers at bay from each other. They've stopped "world wars" from happening. They don't stop all wars from happening, but there haven't been any major direct clashes between nuclear-armed powers since their invention.
Those metaverses and reality TV shows are entertainment. They are aimed at entertaining people.
MoviePass' ad system is an effort to monetize entertainment, allowing for more to be made.
AI facsimiles of dead relatives are for psychological purposes - helping people work through grief, helping people relive fond memories, providing emotional support, and so forth.
There you go, real-world problems they're all there to solve. And none of them are dystopic nightmares as depicted by the science fiction scenarios you listed, which is the main point I'm making here.
Science fiction authors got their predictions wrong. They spun nightmare scenarios because that's what makes for compelling drama and increased sales of their books or shows. They're not good bases for real-world decision-making because they're biased in incorrect directions.
I kind of with the sentiment. Review pre merge though, but only block the merge if there are serious faults. Otherwise, merge the code and have the author address issues after the merge. Get the value to production
Yeah, I see your point. Maybe my employers are different, it’s never been an issue explaining why the ticket isn’t closed just because the PR is merged
This only works if the merge is being done to staging builds that are continuously tested by a QA team before they go to production, with carefully planned production milestone releases. I work for an emergency management SaaS company. If we just merged all lightly reviewed code into production without thorough QA testing, there’s the possibility that our software would fail in production. This could cause aircraft in major airports to crash into each other on the runway, or a university to respond poorly to a live shooter situation, or the deletion of customer data about COVID vaccine efforts, etc
Sorry about the confusion. It’s not sarcasm. I’m just sick and tired of people blocking my PR because of an argument about wether the function should be called X or Y or Z or D
Ah. Yeah those kind of nitpicks are annoying. We try to specify when comments are blocking or non blocking on reviews.
But I definitely block a lot of reviews over no tests, bad tests, no error handling, failed linting. And the occasional “this doesn’t do what the ticket asked for”
I’m with you. I’ve worked on a few teams, one of the first was a company where two teams were contributing code changes to the same product. The other team “owned” it and as a result it took ages, sometimes months, to get code changes merged. It meant more time was spent just rebasing (because merging wasn’t “clean”) than working on the actual feature.
My current role, we just do TDD, pair programming, and trunk-based development. We have a release process that involves manual testing before live deployment. Features that aren’t ready for live are turned off by feature flags. It’s quick and efficient.
Fundamentally I think the issue is the right tool for the job. Code doesn’t need to be managed the same way in a company as it does in an open-source project.
Code doesn’t need to be managed the same way in a company as it does in an open-source project.
Open-source projects are usually longer lived more maintainable, more stable, and more useful than any closed source code I’ve ever worked on for a company. Partially because they’re not under contract deadlines which create pressure to “deliver value” by a certain date, but still. Might be helpful for companies to consider adopting practices the open-source community has shown to work, rather than inventing their own.
Ugh, not this SAFe Agile ™ cultist bullshit. The “value” is working, bug free code, which you get when you put it through review and QA before it gets to production.
There’s often features and bug fixes worth more than the ones introduced in the PR. I’ve yet to see bug free code just because it’s went through review and QA.
Surely you’ve seen bugs caught because code went through review and QA though. Those are bugs that would go into production if following the “advice” in this post.
There is no value in spaghetti piled on top of rotten spaghetti. Tech iCal debt is real and if you’re just shippin it and plan to fix it later, y’all gonna have a bad time. Nothing more permanent than a temporary workaround.
I let my stand-in scrummy drive the TFS board this morning. In adding a PBI to the sprint he typed the iteration manually (a pretty long path name), rather than clicking the context menu and selecting “current iteration”
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