kescusay

kescusay , 4 months ago

Hey guys, can we keep the slapfights to a minimum, please? Just had to delete a whole thread where everyone was just insulting the fuck out of each other.

Cut it out.

kescusay , 4 months ago

They’re temporarily banned.

kescusay , 4 months ago

For the record, I disagree with you somewhat. I think the plastics industry in particular has had a great deal of success by doing things like convincing consumers that recycling is up to them, instead of rethinking the nature of their products. Did you know that a lot of the anti-littering campaigns from the 1970’s onward were bankrolled by the plastics industry? It was an effort to offload the responsibility to care about the environment onto consumers.

That said, this can be discussed civilly. The person who was arguing with you wouldn’t do that, though.

kescusay , 4 months ago

Damn it, what am I supposed to do with this pitchfork now?

But seriously, shitty misleading headline.

kescusay , 4 months ago

The “pitchfork” joke dates back to Fark, my friend.

kescusay , 4 months ago

Got myself a fully electric car, and yeah… Never looking back. I keep it charged for maybe five bucks a month most of the time, with the only exceptions being when I’m taking it on a longer trip. It gets 250 miles per charge on average, which is plenty as far as I’m concerned. Charging on the go is more expensive of course, but still a lot cheaper than filling a gas tank.

kescusay , 4 months ago

They were still doing some decent journalism here and there, but yeah, it’s been getting worse and worse very steadily.

kescusay , 4 months ago

How is the Index? I don’t know anything about it beyond Steam games in VR.

kescusay , 4 months ago

Thanks, man. Looks like I’ll be waiting a bit. I’ve got big hands, too.

kescusay OP , 4 months ago

Agreed, it’s a terrible headline, but the story is accurate. California’s getting a lot more snow in a lot more places than usual right now.

kescusay OP , 4 months ago

Highest from Palisades is now 191. There’s also been “thundersnow.” Shit’s wild.

kescusay , 4 months ago

Getting people like Cassif more exposure - and more of a voice in Israeli politics - seems like the right thing to do. Netanyahu’s government needs to be ousted.

kescusay , 4 months ago

At this point, I’m intensely curious how strong support for this atrocity is among regular Israelis. The horror of Hamas’ terrorist attack was astonishing, but at this point Netanyahu’s response makes it pale in comparison.

I know Biden said there was hope for a truce coming Monday, and I really, really want to believe it’s true, but right now Netanyahu’s government seems hell-bent on outright genocide.

kescusay OP , 4 months ago

And it’s probably going to be worse next year.

And the year after that.

And the year after that.

There is no “new normal” or return to the old normal without making a real effort to finally combat climate change. Things can - and will - just keep getting worse.

kescusay , 4 months ago

Alternate headline: “Ghana passes scientifically inaccurate and likely outright murderous anti-homosexuality bill, with the help of sick American evangelicals.”

kescusay , 4 months ago

They said a provision in Judge Arthur Engoron’s Feb. 16 ruling that bans Trump, his company, and co-defendants from obtaining loans from New York banks for three years would make it impossible for him to obtain a bond covering the full judgment.

So you’re not a fucking billionaire, you demented shitweasel. Got it.

Can you believe the nerve? “Judge, I know part of the reason I’m in hot water is because I lied through my fucking teeth to banks to get them to give me loans, but now that I can’t get loans anymore, I’m outta money, and that’s totes unfair, so can I pretty please get loans again?”

How about no, and fuck all the way off?

kescusay , 4 months ago

Biden isn’t funding Israel. Congress is. Biden is trying to walk a tightrope of maintaining relations with an increasingly extremist ally (to prevent them from going even more extremist) and using diplomacy to defuse the situation in Gaza. He’s doing the best he possibly could in a horrible situation with no “good guys.”

Should he lose in November to Trump, Trump will immediately abandon Ukraine and try to help Israel completely level Gaza. So your choices are a guy trying hard in an impossible situation, and a guy who will definitely make that impossible situation much, much worse for everyone in every conceivable way.

kescusay , 4 months ago

More accurately: 100K+ Michigan voters, comprising 13.3% of Democratic Primary voters, chose ‘uncommitted.’ Biden won handily with 81.1%.

kescusay , 4 months ago

fervent Zionist

There it is.

kescusay , 4 months ago

Those 100K protest votes aren’t going to be switching to Trump in the general election. Trump would be far, far worse for Gaza than Biden.

kescusay , 4 months ago

The predictable use of “Zionist” as an epithet for “someone who supports Israeli expansionism and aggression,” when all it really means is “someone who supports Israel’s right to exist.”

If you support Israel’s right to exist as a country, then you are also a Zionist - even if you disagree with the current Israeli government (as I do).

As for the money from Biden to Israel, that includes more than three decades, during which Israel’s government has changed drastically. It is also a non sequitur in a discussion of military aid, which I thought we were having. And I stand by my assertion there: The military aid (not private donations) is determined by Congress. They hold the purse strings.

kescusay , 4 months ago

Holy shit… Citing TRT World?

Biden is saying no such thing, and neither am I. I’m saying that the current country, Israel, has a right to exist. Nothing more, nothing less. I’m also saying, in case you missed it, that their current government is horrible and has engaged in atrocities.

Biden’s job - and it’s a difficult one - is threading the needle on maintaining good ties with an ally while using diplomacy to try to end the violence in Gaza.

What is your goal, Linkerbaan? Four more years of President Trump wholeheartedly supporting the absolute destruction of Gaza and Palestine? Because that’s what you get if you are successful in going after Biden for not being anti-Israel. You get Trump and Netanyahu happily working together to wipe Palestine off the face of the Earth, as well as leaving Ukraine out to dry.

kescusay , 4 months ago

So they’ll in effect be handing the election to Trump, who won’t even try for a diplomatic resolution, but instead will fully support Netanyahu in razing Gaza to the ground.

kescusay , 4 months ago

Bullshit like that is why I can’t take you seriously. Biden is not razing Gaza, he’s trying to end the violence there while maintaining ties to a long-term ally that has (hopefully temporarily) gone astray with a right-wing government.

And pretending that the options are anything but Biden or Trump will get you Trump. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. There is a 100% chance Trump becomes president again if Biden loses, because we have first-past-the-post elections and exactly two viable candidates. Sucks, but that’s reality. The sooner you face that fact, the better.

kescusay , 5 months ago

It’s been so disheartening to watch. There’s apparently a large percentage of the world’s population that is scared of every change for the better. Just absolutely driven by mind-numbing, counter-productive fear. And I don’t get it.

I mean, come on, these are fucking cigarettes. There’s no mystery, here, they kill people. They’re a poison product, and the monsters who sell them are selling gruesome death. But somehow, stopping a business from profiting off of these horrible, unnecessary deaths is scarier than the cancer sticks themselves? Why? Fucking why? Is it because literally all change is scary, no matter what its nature?

I’m starting to think we’re an evolutionary dead end. I don’t know how we survive past this madness.

kescusay , 4 months ago

I think that accurately describes the power-brokers, the ones in charge. But I think the people who actually support them are driven by - and easily manipulated with - fear.

kescusay , 4 months ago

But in this case, it was telling cancer-stick merchants that they can’t kill people, and then their victims rushed to their defense.

kescusay , 5 months ago

That was First National Taphouse or something like that, right?

kescusay , 5 months ago

Well. That’s stupid.

Large language models are amazingly useful coding tools. They help developers write code more quickly.

They are nowhere near being able to actually replace developers. They can’t know when their code doesn’t make sense (which is frequently). They can’t know where to integrate new code into an existing application. They can’t debug themselves.

Try to replace developers with an MBA using a large language model AI, and once the MBA fails, you’ll be hiring developers again - if your business still exists.

Every few years, something comes along that makes bean counters who are desperate to cut costs, and scammers who are desperate for a few bucks, declare that programming is over. Code will self-write! No-code editors will replace developers! LLMs can do it all!

No. No, they can’t. They’re just another tool in the developer toolbox.

kescusay , 5 months ago

I really don’t see it.

Think about a modern application. Think about the file structure, how the individual sources interrelate, how non-code assets are stored, how applications are deployed, and all the other bits and pieces that go into an application. An AI can’t know any of that without being trained - by a human - on the specifics of that application’s needs.

I use Copilot for my job. It’s very nice, and makes my job easier. And if my boss fired me and the rest of the team and tried to do it himself, the application would be down in a day, then irrevocably destroyed in a week. Then he’d be fired, we’d be rehired, and we - unlike my now-former boss - would know things like how to revert the changes he made when he broke everything while trying to make Copilot create a whole new feature for the application.

AI code generation is pretty cool, but without the capacity to know what code actually should be generated, it’s useless.

kescusay , 5 months ago

I don’t think most people grok just how hard implementing that kind of joined-up thinking and metacognition is.

You’re right, developers aren’t special, except in those ways all humans are, but we’re a very long way indeed from being able to simulate them in AI - especially in large language models. Humans automatically engage in joined-up thinking, second-order logic, and so on, without having to consciously try. Those are all things a large language model literally can’t do.

It doesn’t know anything. It can’t conceptualize a “summary story,” or understand parts that it might get wrong in such a story. It’s glorified autocomplete.

And that can be extraordinarily useful, but only if we’re honest with ourselves about what it is and is not capable of.

Companies that decide to replace their developers with one guy using ChatGPT or Gemini or something will fail, and that’s going to be true for the foreseeable future.

kescusay , 5 months ago

Try for a second to think beyond what they’re able to do now and think about the future.

I am. In the future, they will need to be able to perform tasks using joined-up thinking, second-order logic, and metacognition if they’re going to replace people like me with AI. And that is a very hard goal to achieve. Maybe not P = NP hard, but by no means trivial.

Also, educate yourself on Autogen and CrewAI, you actually haven’t addressed anything I said because you’re too busy pontificating.

I have. My company looked at Autogen. We concluded it wasn’t worth it. The solution to AI agents not being able to actually understand what they’re doing isn’t to amplify the problem by creating teams of them.

Every few years, something new comes along driven by incredible hype, and people declare programming to be dead. They insist a robot will be able to do my job. I have yet to see a technology that will plausibly do that in ten years, let alone now. And all the hype is built on a foundation of ignorance over how complicated a modern, enterprise-ready application is, and how necessary being able to think about its many moving parts is.

You know who doesn’t suffer from that ignorance? Microsoft, the creators of Autogen. And they’re currently hiring developers, not laying them off and replacing them with Autogen.

kescusay , 5 months ago

When I first heard about it, I genuinely thought it had to be a fake story. And now I wish it was.

kescusay , 5 months ago

Man, I would be so happy to find out everything since then was just a gnarly fever dream.

kescusay , 5 months ago

The thing is, it’s not. You can watch the entire video, without edits. It’s as racist and banal as it sounds.

kescusay , 4 months ago

Here’s the video, straight from Fox itself: www.foxnews.com/video/6347175332112

(Ugh, I feel dirty sharing a Fox link, but I don’t want asshats coming out of the woodwork declaring it’s taken out of context or some bullshit.)

kescusay , 5 months ago

Yep. I watched their demo clips, and the “good” ones are full of errors, have lots of thematically incoherent content, and - this is the biggie - can’t be fixed.

Say you’re a 3D animator and build an animation with thousands of different assets and individual, alterable elements. Your editor comes to you and says, “This furry guy over here is looking in the wrong direction, he should be looking at the kangaroo king over there, but it looks like he’s just glaring at his own hand.”

So you just fix it. You go in, tweak the furry guy’s animation, and now he’s looking in the right direction.

Now say you made that animation with Sora. You have no manipulatable assets, just a set of generated frames that made the furry guy look in the wrong direction.

So you fire up Sora and try to fine-tune its instructions, and it generates a completely new animation that shares none of the elements of the previous one, and has all sorts of new, similarly unfixable errors.

If I use an AI assistant while coding, I can correct its coding errors. But you can’t just “correct” frames of video it has created. If you try, you’re looking at painstakingly hand-painting every frame where there’s an error. You’ll spend more time trying to fix an AI-generated animation that’s 90% good and 10% wrong than you will just doing the animation with 3D assets from scratch.

kescusay , 5 months ago

This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how generative AI works. To accomplish what you’re describing you’d need:

• An instance of generative AI running for each asset.
• An enclosing instance of generative AI running for each scene.
• A means for each AI instance to discard its own model and recreate exactly the same asset, tweaked in precisely the manner requested, but immediately being able to reincorporate the model for subsequent generation.
• A coordinating AI instance to keep it all working together, performing actions such as mediating asset collisions.

The whole system would need to be able to rewind to specific trouble spots, correct them, and still generate everything that comes after unchanged. We’re talking orders of magnitude more complexity and difficulty.

And in the meantime, artists creating 3D assets the regular way would suddenly look a lot less expensive and a lot less difficult.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Right now, generative AI is everyone’s really attractive hammer. But I don’t see it working here in 36 months. Or 48. Or even 60.

The first 90% is easy. The last 10% is really fucking hard.

kescusay , 5 months ago

Or the swamps of Dagobah.

kescusay , 5 months ago

Never having played Borderlands… is the game actually this unapologetically stupid? I chuckled at a few bits in the trailer, but I felt bad for doing it.

kescusay , 5 months ago

No worries, seems to be gaining traction and still makes me go WTF, so I’ll allow it.

kescusay , 5 months ago

I have a trans kid. I worry every single day about cases like this.

kescusay , 5 months ago

Or the original Shatner episode.

“There’s something… on the wing!”

kescusay , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Early on, the Russian asset released some genuine information in order to establish some bona fides. But since then, he’s used his platform to create nothing but instability and strife. Never forget, the “pizzagate” bullshit came directly from WikiLeaks.

kescusay , 5 months ago

WikiLeaks published them out of order, lacking context, and with clear intent to have them used as the basis for some kind of conspiracy theory. And they started publishing them literally 30 minutes after Trump’s Access Hollywood “grab 'em by the pussy” tape came out: politifact.com/…/its-true-wikileaks-dumped-podest…

WikiLeaks made “pizzagate” happen, and is clearly a Russian asset.

kescusay , 5 months ago

It’s more like you get some kind of weird construction multitool that promises to be a level, a drill, a hammer, and a dozen other things, and it turns out to be a really good, innovative, and helpful level… and a really bad everything else.