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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Absolutely perfect example of what I mean. You want to talk about gamers like they are this specific sub-niche of humans who are all the same.

    Would you do this with movies? “People who watch movies are like XYZ and they only have a couple of skills.” What about music? “There’s a music listener in this thread and he said ABC.”

    This is why I led with “do you know how many people play video games?” The gaming industry earns more annually than movies and music combined.

    You have some stereotype of gamers in your brain, fine. That’s your deal. But “gamers” is just “people” these days. Including me. I’m a gamer. And I say: what bogus hysteria.


  • I think what you’re missing is the picture of a business that is doing pretty well and has extra cash but needs to grow even if it means losing some cash.

    In the old world of brand advertising, the idea was to plant an image in people’s minds that would last a long time, earning back the price of the ads by raising customer awareness and loyalty.

    In the new world of online ads, it’s more transactional. I can only sell t-shirts on my t-shirt site if I get visitors to it. How do I do that? Oh I can buy ads. And the ad network can target people interested in t-shirts. How does it know they’re interested? They clicked on other t-shirt ads. I spend $5.50 on hundreds of ads just to get one person to the site who buys. But I make $9 profit on each shirt.

    If you had a machine that could pump out $9 every time you put $5.50 in, your only question would be how many times you can turn that crank per hour. That’s where all the ads come from. And did you notice the ad company gets $5.50 while the t-shirt maker who actually makes and sells the product only gets $4.50? It’s still a profitable deal for them. But the ad companies make bank.

    All of this is going on all the time. Your post seems to be saying “but I hate ads.” I can’t disagree with you there. But unfortunately they actually work as long as you have some profit margin to spare on them.




  • What bogus hysteria. Do you have any idea how many people play video games? Would you expect them not to advertise a recruitment drive on television because we don’t want our air traffic controllers to just kick up their feet and watch the screens? Let’s not be idiots.

    It’s far more interesting to ask why they need to advertise a recruitment drive. The profession has been losing skilled people because its high skill, high stress, high stakes, and their paycheck gets jerked around every time there’s a government shutdown. Let’s focus on that instead of clutching our pearls over them hiring people who have played video games before.





  • It may sound odd but I’ve heard people bring up the above point a few times. “AI isn’t bad - if you run it on a sustainable off-grid system it’s perfectly fine.”

    But I have NOT encountered people actually doing this even once, let alone a few times. That’s why I was asking.

    Anything that wastes energy can be recast as harmless if you put it on an imaginary sustainable setup but that just seems like fantasizing.




  • It’s guaranteed that one quick attempt at something sophisticated will fail. It’s almost guaranteed that anything sophisticated will fail, no matter how much preparation and practice you have. However for something straightforward and toilsome, AI tooling can often save you 50% of the grunt work. I use it to pull and collate updates from JIRA, gitlab, slack, and zoom about what happened to this set of 12 projects being worked on by those 25 people. It tabulates and summarizes and I dig into specifics from there. It’s not doing anything critical, I’m not passing on slop to anyone, and I’m not relying on it to take things to the finish line. It saves me some busywork and occasionally finds things I didn’t know about. Really, the tools are great for specific purposes once you understand them and dial them in. This gets lost when everyone is either hailing it as the Second Coming of Jesus or hating on it as the Antichrist.

    Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere between.



  • It is actually legitimately unclear what to expect of them these days. They can do some dazzling things, and fail miserably at others. The spectrum from “easy” to “hard” is not the same for our brains. And our brains mostly know when something is hard or we just can’t do it. Or at least we’ve had millennia to adapt to the way our brains are. They’re pretty idiosyncratic as well, and both marvelously clever and painfully stupid.



  • I’m anti anything mob. The fucking groupthink on certain issues is real.

    I’m also anti people who make shit up and then try to sell it as a long strings of “inferences.”

    And after having AI shoved down my throat at work for two years while my teammates get laid off, I’m pretty anti AI too. At most I have direct experience with it that teaches me it has some uses, like summarization.

    You’re full of shit. You’ve been told. And you know it by now. But you’ll probably bleat on with more of the same because it’s all you know how to do. Proceed, I guess.