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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I’m pretty sad that people have to be perverts and glasses with cameras got such a bad rep.

    It is deserved and not surprising, and I’m not trying to defend them, but I was so looking forward to AR glasses with cameras, so I could finally get a working ad-block IRL, which should be easily possible with the tech.

    But, that requires a camera. It’s a shame, and I’ll definitely rather continue dealing with ads than support enabling perverts (or Meta, anyway), but it sounded like such a cool use-case.

    I hate how there are always groups who have to ruin everything for others :(


  • Exactly this, especially the last sentence.

    I only have pretty basic machine learning knowledge, based on a few Master’s classes at college while I was doing gamedev, and even with that I can tell that the way they are expecting to get AGI by just feeding more data into a language model is simply not happening.

    I remember a comparison from one of the AI-pilled tech-bros when AI was starting to get attention, and his metaphor about AGI was something along the lines of “Imagine a difference between a medieval commoner and Albert Einstein, that’s the difference in inteligence AI will soon have to the smartest people we know now”.

    But that doesn’t make sense with the current approach. Imagine Einstein writing his cutting-edge theories, and the commoner is watching him behind his shoulder and vetting anything he does. Scratching his ideas, forcing him to redo it, if he doesn’t like it, pointing to a reddit thread about why. There’s no way he would ever finish anything new.

    Unless they figure out a completely new way how to do AI reasoning, there is no way we’re getting anywhere near AGI. And that is also becoming more unlikely the longer we go with this approach, because every AI-pilled company is heavily outsourcing all of development to the current models, reducing their employee (and the whole worlds) innovation potential and skill. This is probably the last generation that can do serious academia, unless there are drastic measures done to limit access to AI in education. It’s fucked.





  • My partner works in HR, and from what I’ve heard about her stories from her job, this is nowhere near true. Anecdotal evidence, though.

    There is a lot of paperwork that needs to be done. If everyone could follow simple, written and documented directions that have actual pictures about how to fill the form you have to fill, you could have a lot less HR people.

    But majority of employees are not able to. They have to remind them dozens of times and chase people who didn’t do it unless personally threatened. They have to constantly answer questions that are very well documented. They have to parse out information that finances should be able to access, but they need it directly copied from the systems.

    It sounds like hell of a job, that would’ve been so much easier if people were able to follow simple instructions. And the kind of people that can’t follow a step-by-step guide that had 5 notifications about needing to be done in a Slack channel won’t do it if some AI is telling them to.

    From what I’ve heard, she is just managing disasters that could be a legal problem, always chasing people who don’t care about their annoying beraucracy that could cause a lot of trouble.

    I have a lot more respect for HR after seeing it from the other side.




  • Tbh from my experiences, AI is also turning current senior devs into juniors. The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude (since we’ve gotten access at my job).

    The skills I’ve spent a great part of my life acquiring are really not worth whatever advantages AI use may have, even if I just did my job to earn a paycheck and didn’t care about the quality of my output, as long as it’s acceptable. It may feel easier now, but eventually you will have to pass another interview, and good luck when the last time you actually coded without AI was a year ago.


  • The algorithm is probably made to maximize the time you spend on the platform, and is really good at it. (I mean, just look how good are ML algorithms on text -> picture, and add to it that the algorithm that does your info -> engagement has decades of data and training on billions of people).

    My theory is that it has misaligned, because it turned out that radicalizing people into right-wing bullshit will glue them to the social network very effectively, so it just started to do that. It makes sense - once you start spewing right-wing bullshit, it will probably isolate you from your IRL friends, you will have an echo chamber on the social network, and it is made to sound like some kind of deep truth no one else knows.

    You getting left-wing content might be simply because it would not be efficient to try to convert you, so the algorithm is trying something else that’s more effective on the (minority?) of people like you.


  • I’ve had a similar experience at my job, where we’ve gotten an unlimited access to a few models.

    There’s one huge problem I’ve very quickly ran into - skill attrition. You very quickly get lazy, and stop being able to critically think about problems. Hell, I’ve only had access to it for two weeks, and I’m starting to see the effects. “Can you add this button?” is a very simple change that I could probably make immediately, but AI can make it a little bit faster, and without me putting in the effort. Or it can at least show me the correct script to put it in, without me having to go scouring the code looking for it. It’s addicting, and quite scary. YMMV, you might have stronger willpower and be able to switch between lazy and locked in mode, but I very quickly found out I can’t.

    But is it useful? That very much depends on what do you want out of your job, and both cases have major (and mostly similar) problems.

    If you don’t really care about the quality of your job, and are there just to work your 8/5 and get money, hoping to just balance effort vs. quality so they won’t fire you, the it might help. Especially at this point, where management isn’t really used to it that much, you can get away with a lot. But, eventually, you will very probably need to look for a new job, and good luck getting through an interview when you haven’t really thought about code without the help of an AI for the past two years. The fact that you started coding before AI is the only advantage you now have against literally EVERYONE who can do the same job with AI. And every day you don’t write a piece of code from scratch, you are loosing that advantage.

    I have I job I don’t particularly care about, but I still use it as a learning opportunity. It might be vastly different in other projects, but my job is mostly just support and bugfixing on a game that has been released for years at this point by a large developer, so nothing really involved, so I can usually afford to use my time to research things I wasn’t familiar with, look into things we could do better thanks to new tech or updates that have been released, and how to refactor or rewrite our code into it. Or making tools that would make our testing easier. I could just not do that, easily get my paycheck, and be glad I have a somewhat stable position, but that would not help me much. In this case, AI is actively harmful for what I’m trying to get out of my job, even if it works pretty well. It only erodes my skills I have, which are not very practiced even without AI, since bug fixing isn’t really much of development. Adding AI to the mix would just throw away my years of college and dozens of projects I’ve learned on. And I won’t learn anything new.

    Obviously, if you care about your job output and want to do it perfectly, you don’t want to erode your skills, and you don’t want AI output in your code. AI by definition outputs mediocre and average work, riddled with hard-to-spot bugs, and you should not be ok with mediocre if you really care about the work you do and leave behind.

    Especially the point about the pretty large probability of having to seek a new job eventually is IMO the most important thing that’s really worth considering, before you go all in on AI. It’s something that a lot of programmers spend years (and in less developed countries thousands of dollars) in learning, and throwing it away in favor of a service that will very soon need to massively ramp up their costs to get out of red and earn billions they have invested into it is not worth it.

    Currently, AI is cheap. It also actively harms your ability to do the job without it. They have also invested billions of dollars that they need to eventually make up, and you will eventually need to pass a job interview. Keep that in mind when deciding to offload your thinking to AI.






  • Is it a problem anymore with proton?

    Or rather – is testing the game on Linux via proton sufficient, or do you actually look for native Linux builds?

    I’m honestly interested as a dev who recently released my game I worked on free time, and I decide to go the route of single Windows build + proton, since it makes the build and release process a little bit easier, since I have a custom CI/CD pipeline and adding a Linux support into it would take some time.

    And as someone who has a Linux as a daily driver and game only on Linux, having the game run on it was important to me, but I honestly didn’t see a reason why go with a native build and the additional trouble it would cause with testing - because now I can just test one windows build on my Linux desktop through proton, and be fairly sure that it runs OK on both.




  • The issue isn’t whether you can get a good results or not. The issue is the skills you are outsourcing to a proprietary tool, skills that you will never learn or forget. Getting information out of documentation, designing an architecture, understanding and replicating an algorithm, etc.

    You will eventually start struggling with critical thinking, there are already studies about that.

    Of course, if you use it in moderation and don’t rely on LLMs too much, you should be ok.

    But how did that work for everyone with short-form content and social networks in the last ten years? How is your attention span doing? Surely we all have managed to take short-form content in moderation, since we knew the risks to our attention span, right?


  • I’ve switched to vim on a whim few months ago, and it still is a pretty fun and satisfying experience. I couldn’t get LazyVim to properly work on our Unity project, since the LSP can’t handle the hundreds of projects it generates, but IdeaVim in Rider works pretty much the same, as far as the movements are considered.

    However, the important thing is that I said fun and satisfying, not faster and efficient. I still make mistakes, I have to look into a keybind reference sheet every time I want to do something I’m sure has to have a special keybind but I’ve forgotten which one it is, but once you do that it feels good.

    Slowly but surely learning new stuff, getting the hang of some motions you use often, not having to reach for your mouse, all of that feels good. It’s still no way near the speed or efficiency of me just clicking the damn mouse, instead of fumbling around with VIM modes, undoing random actions because I missed one important key and now half of my text is gone, or just remembering that your clipboards get overridden by almost any action unless you do it differently.

    So, if you want to get efficient and quicker in your programming, I highly recommend checking the keybind section of your IDE, and learning the few important keybinds it has, such as jump to next function/next parameter, search symbols, and the like. That will make you more efficient.

    If, on the other hand, you want your editing to be a skill you can slowly continue mastering, eventually (after years of use) min-maxing, but always having some cool new things to learn that will feel good, them vim is pretty nice for that.

    Just don’t expect it will make you faster or more efficient.