The US was doing it in the Philippines. Russia was doing it in the US. It’s the circle of life.

Huh. TIL. I always wondered why libraries treat ebooks like physical books.

It’s not lying or hallucinating. It’s describing exactly what it found in search results. There’s an web page with that title from that date. Now the problem is that the web page is pinterest and the title is the result of aggressive SEO. These types of SEO practices are what made Google largely useless for the past several years and an AI that is based on these useless results will be just as useless.

How are crashlytics and firebase analytics profiting off of users? I cannot imagine not including those in an app you’re actually hoping to improve.

since they mostly use band 66 for large cells which has pretty crap penetration into buildings.

Huh, good to know there’s an explanation for why I was getting no signal inside my home when I was on T-Mobile. It’s the reason I switched.

They also count one vote as one vote instead of this electoral college BS

Not sharing any part of my name, but last thing I ate was durian pancake

What’s wrong with my transmexican?

Textures and audio were always the largest part of a game. And the installation process of a game was mostly decompressing those. What changed in recent years is not as much an increase of the overall size of these assets, but less incentive to compress them in the first place. Most buyers have enough bandwidth to be able to download uncompressed assets and start playing right away instead of having to wait for a long installation step after the download is finished.

there where DVDs and and CDs had a perfect balance between storage and read speed

90% of the games didn’t need that much storage. As someone growing up in a country with no copyright laws at the time, I was used to 100-200 games on a single CD. Then my dad got an official copy of MK Trilogy and I remember thinking how wasteful it was to use an entire CD for one game (you could physically see on the surface of the CD how much data was recorded on it, and it was mostly unused space).

Then there was the rare game that used not only the entire storage, but needed multiple CDs for the whole thing (e.g. Phantasmagoria).

We could go back to games coming on flash media, which switch does still do

Switch games get online updates too though. They’re not much different from other platform games in that regard.

The overall issue being discussed is not physical media vs downloading games. It’s the fact that the games you get are not a final playable version, but still need additional downloads to make them playable (zero-day patches are a norm these days).

Deep learning did not shift any paradigm. It’s just more advanced programming. But gen AI is not intelligence. It’s just really well trained ML. ChatGPT can generate text that looks true and relevant. And that’s its goal. It doesn’t have to be true or relevant, it just has to look convincing. And it does. But there’s no form of intelligence at play there. It’s just advanced ML models taking an input and guessing the most likely output.

Here’s another interesting article about this debate: https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines

What we have today does not exhibit even the faintest signs of actual intelligence. Gen AI models don’t actually understand the output they are providing, that’s why they so often produce self-contradictory results. And the algorithms will continue to be fine-tuned to produce fewer such mistakes, but that won’t change the core of what gen AI really is. You can’t teach ChatGPT how to play chess or a new language or music. The same model can be trained to do one of those tasks instead of chatting, but that’s not how intelligence works.

Any type of content generated by AI should be reviewed and polished by a professional. If you’re putting raw AI output out there directly then you don’t care enough about the quality of your product.

For example, there are tons of nonsensical articles on the internet that were obviously generated by AI and their sole purpose is to crowd search results and generate traffic. The content writers those replaced were paid $1/article or less (I work in the freelancing business and I know these types of jobs). Not people with any actual training in content writing.

But besides the tons of prompt crafting and other similar AI support jobs now flooding the market, there’s also huge investment in hiring highly skilled engineers to launch various AI related product while the hype is high.

So overall a ton of badly paid jobs were lost and a lot of better paid jobs were created.

The worst part will be when the hype dies and the new trend comes along. Entire AI teams will be laid off to make room for others.

See the sources above and many more. We don’t need one or two breakthroughs, we need a complete paradigm shift. We don’t even know where to start with for AGI. There’s a bunch of research, but nothing really came out of it yet. Weak AI has made impressive bounds in the past few years, but the only connection between weak and strong AI is the name. Weak AI will not become strong AI as it continues to evolve. The two are completely separate avenues of research. Weak AI is still advanced algorithms. You can’t get AGI with just code. We’ll need a completely new type of hardware for it.

https://www.lifewire.com/strong-ai-vs-weak-ai-7508012

Strong AI, also called artificial general intelligence (AGI), possesses the full range of human capabilities, including talking, reasoning, and emoting. So far, strong AI examples exist in sci-fi movies

Weak AI is easily identified by its limitations, but strong AI remains theoretical since it should have few (if any) limitations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

As of 2023, complete forms of AGI remain speculative.

Boucher, Philip (March 2019). How artificial intelligence works

Today’s AI is powerful and useful, but remains far from speculated AGI or ASI.

https://www.itu.int/en/journal/001/Documents/itu2018-9.pdf

AGI represents a level of power that remains firmly in the realm of speculative fiction as on date

All progress comes with old jobs becoming obsolete and new jobs being created. It’s just natural.

But AI is not going to replace any skilled professionals soon. It’s a great tool to add to professionals’ arsenal, but non-professionals who use it to completely replace hiring a professional will get what they pay for (and those people would have never actually paid for a skilled professional in the first place; they’d have hired the cheapest outsourced wannabe they could find; after first trying to convince a professional that exposure is worth more than money)

That would be a danger if real AI existed. We are very far away from that and what is being called “AI” today (which is advanced ML) is not the path to actual AI. So don’t worry, we’re not heading for the singularity.

My first email address was @k.ro (a free email provider many many years ago) and many websites thought a valid second-level domain name cannot be just one letter

Changing the setting from a grocery isle to an electronics department makes for a completely different story. Goes from “yeah, sure, that happened” to “perfectly credible encounter.”

I was thinking there must be younger siblings in the back, so he had to travel in front. But now I realize both parents were there, so that means one of the parents is in the back seat…

It does make sense to increase all menu prices in order to pay higher wages, but it’s a sleazy dishonest practice to hide that increase from the customers until it’s too late.