> The educational proposals and predictions of the Internet boosters described above point to a profoundly illiberal future. I fear that if we take their advice, in the place of a creative society with a reasonably deep well of liberally educated critical thinkers, we will have a society of drones, enculturated by hive minds, who are able to work together online but who are largely innocent of the texts and habits of study that encourage deep and independent thought. We will be bound by the prejudices of our "digital tribe," ripe for manipulation by whoever has the firmest grip on our dialogue. I see all too much evidence that we are moving headlong in that direction. Indeed, I fear this is already happening. I honestly hope that I prove to be an alarmist, but I am a realist reporting on my observations. I wish the news were better.
It's hard to not see parallels with the current insistence to automate all jobs with AI.
If the software makes money because it's expected to work reliably, every edge case matters. Web games aren't exempt from engineering challenges. In fact, the more trivial the problem seems on the surface, the more likely it is to have edge cases.
Bugs are always prioritized based on how big of a deal it is for the customer. They don't like to wait and they rarely give second chances.
AI doesn't fit into any dev workflow except greenfield or analysis. Everything else needs a lot of close human attention and human discussion. AI doesn't read minds.
I think you are misssing the economics of the situation, which the GP is implicitly referring to. You have 24 hours in a day. A person that is making a web game that he wants to release cannot spend all of his effort chasing one in a million bugs, as that would eat into the time he has to actually make a great and engaging game. He can’t worry about how the game renders on Internet Explorers running in PowerPC. If you are making a kernel, a single RCE in an edge case (worse, even in a adversarially induced edge case) can equate to an emergency patch and general loss of trust in your system. The kernel programmer is even incentivized to do the opposite of the web game guy, which is remove functionality that they do not think they can reasonably completely test. So yes, edge case importance matters differently in different applications.
> The kernel programmer is even incentivized to do the opposite of the web game guy, which is remove functionality that they do not think they can reasonably completely test.
Why wouldn't a game dev do the same? It's pretty common for initial game releases to lack features.
No that is not a correct read -it might be based on this past few months or so state of the art, while instead that state of the art is moving forward every month- and at the rate these ai coding systems are improving and our harnesses for managing them- bug handling and brownfield codebases are becoming increasingly accessible to AI coding
Ie you are making the mistake of assuming the tech is static when it most assuredly is not
You're absolutely correct, but the sense of entitlement from the typical HN commenter is boundless.
Many of the people who downvoted you may want nice things, but would never contribute back. They're exactly the people who would immediately ruin it. Sometimes the grass really is greener, and it's usually because there's a system at work to keep it that way.
Everyone who downvoted contributes back. They are the people who would not ruin it.
You on the other hand would definitely not want to contribute, and if any were built you'd go out of your way to ruin it, though indirectly (e.g. by working to reduce/remove funding for maintenance)
> most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time”
You have to admit that shutting people out is still a defense mechanism that can backfire.
You're not immune from a skilled sociopath for doing this. They know what you're doing. The moment you turn your back is when they know they can blindside you.
It's the moment they start talking behind your back, shutting you out of conversations, undermining your work, etc. You're a lot more vulnerable when you're out of the loop. You can't assume you're stronger or smarter for trying to take the "high road". There is no high road with these people. They'll ruin everything in any way possible. They have their bases covered.
Yeah. “Just cut bullshitters out of your life” is about as unhelpful as “Don’t get sick!” when it comes to medical advice.
Like, duh yeah that’s the goal. Do that as much as possible, but a lot of your life is going to involve dealing with these people.
On a slightly deeper level, essentially nobody is 0% or 100% bullshitter. Nearly all of humanity falls into the middle. Even the most literal, level 2+ ASD folks I’ve known were, at a minimum, cagey at times.
No it's good advice. Most people don't react at all when they discover they were being bullshitted. Dropping interactions to the minimum you're forced to deal with them is still a huge improvement.
There really is a cheapness to the designs I can't quite put my finger on. Even if you had told me a human made them, I'd still assume the designs are knockoffs of something better.
Many (most?) things are rendered without image files.
I think it's the overall flattened look, use of overly simplistic gradients, bland fonts, animations that feel dead, etc. The lack of details all adds up to feeling cheap. It's not any one of them in particular, nor something I'd be able to advise on. That needs a human designer. It doesn't take much sophistication to notice it, though.
It makes perfect sense when you accept that the LLM hype was mostly delusional. Nobody invested in that lie can admit it just yet because there's still some juice left. Never mind all the "I told you so"s ever since 2022 market dip.
> the synthesis was marked by a classification model as more duck than the real duck sample
The quality of a recording can throw off most classifiers.
Models we have today are so dependent on the quality of training data, that it's questionable how we will sustain long term what we are currently calling "AI".
i.e. What happens when the cameras and microphones everyone has in their pockets are significantly higher quality and the AI model hasn't had a total refresh in a long time? How does that cause classification to drift enough to fail?
The broader topic of marginal utility is worth looking into if this is interesting to you.
The reason why AI induces more demand is more interesting than simply observing a correlation. At the root of the paradox is the dissatisfaction with AI as it raises the bar for human work. In that sense, AI functions like training wheels more than actually doing anything useful on its own. More people can ride the bike well as a result.
This is the "law of diminishing marginal utility". In other words, LLMs are an NLP-powered google search 2.0. That sums up pretty well why AI hit a plateau a couple of years ago. There's only so much training data and humans become more efficient and creative once exposed to the exact information they were always looking for, but could never find in the past.
It's hard to not see parallels with the current insistence to automate all jobs with AI.
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