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EnderMB

@EnderMB@lemmy.world

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EnderMB ,

Another programmer here. The bottleneck in most jobs isn't in getting boilerplate out, which is where AI excels, it's in that first and/or last 10-20%, alongside dictating what patterns are suitable for your problem, what proprietary tooling you'll need to use, what API's you're hitting and what has changed in recent weeks/months.

What AI is achieving is impressive, but as someone that works in AI, I think that we're seeing a two-fold problem: we're seeing a limit of what these models can accomplish with their training data, and we're seeing employers hedge their bets on weaker output with AI over specialist workers.

The former is a great problem, because this tooling could be adjusted to make workers lives far easier/faster, in the same way that many tools have done so already. The latter is a huge problem, as in many skilled worker industries we've seen waves of layoffs, and years of enshitification resulting in poorer products.

The latter is also where I think we'll see a huge change in culture. IMO, we'll see existing companies bet it all and die from supporting AI over people, and a new wave of companies focus on putting output of a certain standard to take on larger companies.

Sony misses PS5 sales target as console enters ‘latter stage of its life cycle’ (www.theverge.com)

Sony misses PS5 sales target as console enters ‘latter stage of its life cycle’::Sony has cut its sales forecast by 4 million units for the fiscal year, down from 25 million to 21 million. It comes as the company missed its sales projections by a million.

EnderMB ,

Aside from the Switch, which just quietly prints money, this generation of consoles feels like a huge failure.

The Xbox launch was so bad I couldn't tell you what the latest Xbox is called, and the PS5 had its hype during a global pandemic, and seemingly couldn't bother to release games during that period.

While the "latter stage" could basically mean 4-5 years, I don't really see what the big rush is. Let 2020-2022 be a write-off, and focus on getting some fucking games out! I have a PS5, but purely because I got it as a gift. All of my games, aside from one, are PS4 games.

Obviously, there will be some big names that'll likely come out during this time. We'll likely see a new COD game, GTA6, ideally a new GOW came, and FF7's latest part. With that being said, 2024 is extremely underwhelming for games.

EnderMB ,

This has been a huge problem for Google for several years now. Under Sundar, Google implemented several regressive "un-Google" policies like Unregretted Attrition (URA) to reduce worker numbers, shifting responsibility to managers and senior leadership to determine technical vision, and promoting people who are solely focused on "empire building" over delivering the best products. The result is a management-heavy structure where policies like "put AI in everything" and "display more ads" are likely to be a business driver over making the best products.

EnderMB ,

That's a great analogy, and points towards parts of the downfall of Community, as those diverse roles shifted with Chevy Chase leaving, Britta's character changes, bringing together Troy, Abed, and Annie, etc. It's a show I dearly love, but it's also a great demonstration of how a show can struggle to keep the magic going from a working formula.

EnderMB ,

I really tried to watch Velma, and the only way I felt I could watch it was to totally disassociate it from Scooby Doo.

The problem in doing so, which is obvious in hindsight, is that on its own merits, there isn't really a show there that can stand on its own two feet and be compelling. That realisation alone should have been enough for the networks to pass, but with star power assigned to the writing and a known IP, I guess this was enough to get the green light.

I'm all for creative retelling of stories, but the fundamentals don't change. The absolute WORST thing you can do, once the reviews come in, is to criticise the critical response. Sure, many probably didn't get the artistic vision, but ultimately you are in the entertainment industry, and the creator and producers arguably gave themselves a heavy job in creating a show that caters across several cultural subjects, while also limiting themselves to the Scooby Doo/Mystery Inc gang. It's why I don't consider it "lazy" - if anything, they shot for the stars and hit the ceiling.

IMO, it's a bad show, but could have been good if they had written original characters. It would have highlighted that some characters were either unlikeable/lazy, or that the premise needed more work.

EnderMB ,

How has no one worked on a new search engine over the last decade or so where Google has been on a clear decline in its flagship product!

I know of the likes of DDG, and Bing has worked hard to catch up, but I'm genuinely surprised that a startup hasn't risen to find a novel way of attacking reliable web search. Some will say it's a "solved problem", but I'd argue that it was, but no longer.

A web search engine that crawls and searches historic versions of a web page could be an incredibly useful resource. If someone can also find a novel way to rank and crawl web applications or to find ways to "open" the closed web, it could pair with web search to be a genuine Google killer.

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    EnderMB ,

    Do you have a source?

    EnderMB ,

    In many combat sports like MT, BJJ, and MMA opinions are quite strong, and possibly rightly so when there is a risk of bodily harm. Some BJJ comps have put together rules where a trans person can enter their chosen division, as long as competitors agree to compete with them. That seems to be a common middle-ground, but still results in some people refusing and blocking that person from competing with their own gender. Some have just redefined the men's categories to "open" and lumped trans people into that category.

    Frankly, what I would love to see is a fully funded study, and a commitment from sporting bodies to both follow that guidance AND to commit to future funding to repeat experiments.

    EnderMB ,

    Eh, this is somewhat true, and he's dug into this a few times. Some is put up for TV, but he's inclined to be annoyed at people that call themselves chefs, take people's money, and serve them sub-par products. In a few shows, like the one with Angela Hartnett where she took over The Connaught, it showed that he's still an angry dude, but that it was needed because he's taking over the restaurant at one of London's finest hotels. Michelin Star places seem to be the same boiling pot of bullying and anger to strive for the best possible quality.

    Some chefs, like J Kenji Lopez Alt have called it and him out several times on it, because it's a very damaging practice, and one that spreads throughout the industry from wannabe Ramsay's that thinks intimidation is needed to make food.

    I'm sure Ramsay is a lovely guy in person, but I would hate to work for him.

    EnderMB ,

    Has there been a company that has experienced such a fast fall from grace as Google?

    Mere years ago they were viewed as the bastion of intellectuals in tech. They worked on stuff that was deemed "not evil", people that worked there were deemed the best and brightest, and their culture was celebrated so highly that literal movies have been made about working there.

    Obviously, the reality is different from the vision, but in a short amount of time they've implemented URA, have had multiple mass layoffs where people were locked out overnight with no more than a sentence in an email after a decade of work, have doubled-down on enshitification of their services, and have alienated a significant chunk of their workers through RTO and cost cutting.

    EnderMB ,

    Unregretted Attrition. It's basically stack ranking, where the company plans to fire a percentage of its staff every year.

    EnderMB ,

    This is similar to what most tech companies have aligned on. I work 200 miles from my co-workers, my manager is 100 miles away, and while I'm supposed to be 100 miles away our tracking software doesn't care if I badge in 2 miles away at my local office.

    If you're a multinational company, you'll be on video calls regardless of what you do, so it's fucking stupid that they enforce these rules.

    EnderMB ,

    Obviously, she unplugged it so the rest of her body didn't get laminated.

    EnderMB ,

    If you become a "Salesforce developer" you can make lots of money in contracting. Some people build complex systems around their CRM, and I've known people pull the equivalent of $150k on what was essentially a part-time job.

    EnderMB ,

    The thing with the MBP is that it's often considered "the best", when in reality it's just a premium work laptop. It's built for heavy use, and it'll do any extensive job well, whether it's video editing, software engineering, whatever intensive specialist work you want to do for 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week.

    In terms of branding, there isn't a consistent competitor, but premium build laptops do exist. My daily driver is still my Surface Book, and outside of the track pad, I'd say it's better than my MBP that I use for work. I run Windows and Fedora with no problems, and while I don't bother with detaching the screen, it's lasted through several jobs and dozens of projects with barely a slowdown. Sadly, Microsoft kept with the gimmicks and didn't continue to pursue a MBP competitor long-term, otherwise I'd probably upgrade when needed.

    This is a long-winded way to say that there is choice, and whereas a MBP is a consistent choice, you'll probably get more bang for your buck by picking another highly-rated laptop from the premium market.

    EnderMB ,

    Some people have intolerances to onions, and I feel so, so sorry for them. I can't think of many meals where onions don't improve the flavour.

    'Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription' says HP CEO gunning for 2024's Worst Person of the Year award | Not satisfied with merely bricking printers, HP now wants to own them al... (www.pcgamer.com)

    'Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription' says HP CEO gunning for 2024's Worst Person of the Year award | Not satisfied with merely bricking printers, HP now wants to own them al...::It was only the other day we reported how HP has been slapped with a lawsuit in response to measures that disable its printers...

    EnderMB ,

    I'm really surprised that someone didn't jump into this space to basically make "the final printer you'll ever want to buy for home/office use".

    Sell the printer to make a small profit, support refillable ink, and you'll basically capture 90% of the market. It's not a billion dollar idea, but for a small company it could make millions, even as a Kickstarter type thing between some hardware and device software folks.

    EnderMB ,

    I see a lot of comments saying that people comment, but I'll occasionally post videos when I see them come out, get zero responses, and will see the same video on Reddit with thousands of responses. These aren't small communities either - the videos community on lemmy.world has thousands of subscribers, but few videos have any comments.

    I don't think it's necessarily an issue with people not posting enough. I think there just aren't enough people to sustain a social network with thousands of communities.

    EnderMB ,

    While I do work in the space, I'm more pessimistic. I think LLM's will allow the tech companies to breach plateaus that they've found with compositional models, but what we will see is other companies catch up to GPT4, perhaps surpassing it a little.

    I won't pretend to be an expert on AI, but my view is that we're purely seeing a future where multiple companies will own LLM's. We also won't see many improvements over what we have now, and this is the pessimist in me again, what I think we'll see is that many of the benefits we saw from GPT4 were likely from the fact that their datasets contained an unbelievable amount of PII and stolen data. Without that data, we've seen ChatGPT get worse, and it's one area where researchers and other tech firms have tried to explain the performance gap.

    EnderMB ,

    What infuriates me is that the only reason anyone gave a shit is because ITV made a (frankly, okayish) drama about the scandal. Now, politicians are ripping the law apart to save face, alongside trying to point fingers away from those responsible. Jail time is absolutely needed. People have had their entire careers ruined by this, and while they all deserve a huge payout, no amount of money will fix the damage caused.

    EnderMB ,

    Just fling me into a wood chipper, and point it at the ground in a field somewhere.

    Failing that, I've always loved the idea of being strapped to a rocket and launched into space.

    If all else fails, I'd like my family to perform a (mostly) shot-for-shot remake of the funeral scene from GoW: Ragnarok.

    EnderMB ,

    Of course, ideally it'd be Bear McCreary, but I'd settle for my wife learning to play it.

    Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman warns AI is a ‘fundamentally labor replacing’ tool over the long term (fortune.com)

    Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman warns AI is a ‘fundamentally labor replacing’ tool over the long term::Despite today’s AI hype, it’s still a “truly transformational” technology that will replace jobs unless policy steps in, Suleyman said.

    EnderMB ,

    IMO, the warning should be with companies, not individuals.

    So, if a company needs fewer employees, there will be more companies, and more competition in the market. You lay off thousands of very smart people, and they'll go to your competitors, or create new ones using the skills you gave them.

    The problem right now is that companies are expecting AI to replace people right now. If you do, you're in for a world of hurt as hallucinations and training issues will almost certainly give you some headaches - whether it's a HR agent committing an offence that makes the company legally or financially liable, recruitment AI that rejects candidates disproportionately, or software tools that decide to invent features or introduce nested, poor-performing bullshit. This doesn't even go into the liability issues of pumping your customer and employee data into third-party tools. AI in it's current state is a useful tool, nothing more.

    IBM scraps rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points | Big Blue staffers aren’t pleased to lose out on potential bonuses (www.theregister.com)

    IBM scraps rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points | Big Blue staffers aren’t pleased to lose out on potential bonuses::Big Blue staffers aren't pleased to lose out on potential bonuses

    EnderMB ,

    It's funny how the big tech companies are getting worse, to the point where engineers are favouring a return to "boomer tech" because they treat their employees well long-term - and now the older companies that focused on research and consultancy are starting to become shit at that.

    EnderMB ,

    Layoffs have turned Google, Apple, and Amazon into IBM. You cannot sustainability cut jobs forever, while also expecting your bottom line and moonshot ideas to provide growth. What sustains you is "old tech", and these companies jumped into old tech the second they decided to take management failures out on employees.

    EnderMB ,

    Used it today using Firefox on OSX, no issues whatsoever.

    EnderMB ,

    Sonic Adventure 3. The game's plot is written entirely by a LLM trained exclusively on Sonic fan-fiction, and the art style can best be described as "live action furry", starring all of your favourite original characters from DeviantART.

    EnderMB ,

    Booths is basically unheard of anywhere else in the UK. The only reason I've heard of them is because the bald guy on TikTok that reviews the worst towns in the UK did a video on them.

    EnderMB ,

    They're very popular here too, but a lot of older people really struggle with them, so they're widely hated by boomers that want things to be like the 80's again.

    The technology is a bit shit, and more often than not there's a lot of waiting around for someone to unblock you. Where it was probably a "failure" to many is in the initial promise of being able to get rid of employees and replace them with self-scan.

    EnderMB ,

    How about instead of anarchist cosplay where we all pretend that we're going to petrol bomb billionaire estates, we push for people with excessive incomes to be taxed at a much higher threshold?

    The fact that there are billionaires just shows that the system is hilariously flawed. Billionaires would rather you sit around and make memes about them than actually push for some fucking change...

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    EnderMB ,

    This isn't even remotely accurate. The average person isn't a PC gamer.

    The reason is because for the average person, Windows "works". It works with the applications they know, it looks and acts like they remember, they can get it repaired, and there is zero incentive to change.

    Furthermore, Linux isn't as user-friendly as Windows on the desktop. The average user doesn't give a fuck about the terminal, privacy, ads, or any of the shit other people care about.

    When someone creates a distro that has 99% support for all Windows applications, zero maintenance, no need to ever touch a terminal or change a config file, and comes preinstalled on the crappy machines they buy from the supermarket, then Linux has a chance.

    EnderMB ,

    I say this as someone that uses FOSS day to day for work, I don't really give a shit if my Lemmy app is FOSS.

    For me, Sync was Reddit. It's where 99% of my interaction with Reddit happened. I don't really give a shit about Lemmy or the fediverse either. I'm here because Sync is a seamless product that gave me the best interface.

    Despite saying that I don't care about Lemmy or other distributed servers, Sync is basically that sync (lol) for me. Once I map my old subreddits on Lemmy, the experience doesn't change.

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