Notices by Csepp 🌢 (csepp@merveilles.town)

New #FoldingIdeas video. 🤩

"The Future is a Dead Mall - #Decentraland and the #Metaverse "
https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q

Every tech writer should take a moment before writing a hype piece about the hot new tech of the week to think about all the trivial things that computers still suck at doing and why we aren't fixing those instead.
See the (in)famous "copying files between two laptops" use case that should have been solved about 20 years ago.

Also a good thought exercise for programmers, web designers, etc.

@suricrasia Re: Coding Machines: I'm kind of looking forward to having AI that can write jailbreaks for all the old devices lying around.

As for jobs, AI might be able to spit code out, but it will still need handholding for QA. But yeah, lots of menial programming jobs will likely be lost.

But on the bright(?) side, we might have a huge energy crisis that makes all these power hungry model trainings cost prohibitive.

@suricrasia The dark side of the Coding Machines scenario is that whichever nation state puts the most resources behind AI viruses will be able to fuck things up big time.
New viruses might not even have to bother with precise targeting or prolonged avoidance of detection when a new virus can be generated in a few days.

Buuut then again maybe this will lead to security holes being patched quicker??? Who knows.

@suricrasia ...now that I write it down, a Red Queen's Race co-evolution scenario seems most likely.

There was an interesting episode of uuh some podcast I'm too lazy to look up right now where the guest talked about how US defense would benefit from closing all security holes, because that would deny other states access to the cyber battleground and since the US has major advantages in industry and meatspace military, they would come out on top.

@suricrasia A somewhat more esoteric application that I'm really curious how it'll develop is automatic theorem proving. This is kind of a subset of the QA thing I guess, but with different tools.
There isn't nearly as much training data for developing Coq tactics and proof scripts as there is for writing JavaScript or Python, but unlike those languages, you'd be certain that the generated code (however unreadable) fits the spec. (barring the AI finding holes in the underlying logic)

@alcinnz @urusan Seems more useful than most other image generation stuff I've seen, but to be honest I think we're gonna have to scale our expectations back of what art should look like if we want to solve the climate crisis.

Which, when put into perspective, is not a huge sacrifice compared to other changes we should be making.

@alcinnz @urusan I already dread trying to look that up. How do people choose the least searchable names for their projects...

@urusan The one saving grace for 3D and AI art is that once rendered it's just an image/video, but you don't need either an AI or raytracing to create aesthetic art.

@urusan Bitcoin did at least promise (but so far failed) to decentralize finance. I haven't seen a decent use case for AI art that justified its energy costs.

And yeah, I'm holding PC gaming and other forms of digital art to the same standard. Games should have a tiny fraction of their system requirements. Same goes for 3D animation.

Tbh if you were against the #NFT and #blockchain crap because of its energy requirements, you should be against #ChatGPT and most other currently hyped #AI crap.
If you aren't, I'm really curious what you're doing that you think makes the energy expenditure worthwhile.

What if video game hardware requirements were rephrased in terms of "on average you have to earn this much to be able to afford the required hardware".

This toot prompted by People Make Games's excellent video about the video game industry's relation to class.
https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=Xz6NyOaP5xg&listen=false

cc #gamedev

@jbauer What's your goal with the programs you write?
My experience has been that debugging "clever" code in languages like C often detracts from the joy of solving the original problem, and writing horrible/clever code is a separate kind of fun.
FWIW, reliable C code feels to me much more rigid than reliable Rust code, maybe because all the rigidity has to live in your head instead of in the type checker.

@alcinnz A beef industry representative would like to challenge you on that statement. Clearly some meats are more meat than others, and some (like lamb) are just New Zealand propaganda.

The Beef and Dairy Podcast is like if the meat entity from The Magnus Archives took over daily life and people just kept on living.

Did the person who named Electron realize the irony of naming something after the lightest subatomic particle that became a symbol for heavy web apps?

@alcinnz I'm not sure just any teacher would be good at UX, but for designing a language that is easy to learn it's certainly useful if you have practical experience with how people learn.

@alcinnz In theory I like the approach used by some of the folks at Xerox Parc where (if I remember correctly) they got teachers to design the system so it would be easy to learn.
I definitely think software teams need more people whose skillset overlaps with a teacher's.

Also this one.

Cleaning out my screenshot folder. This one aged like wine.