To the shocking number of people here who are justifying this or explaining how it only affect swipe input as if that makes it better: soft coercion is still coercion. If I made a physical keyboard that stops keys from working when you're about to finish typing something I don't want you to type, but you can still circumvent it, I still made a censorship keyboard. It's a sign of the times with how used tech companies are to 'softly' moderating societal trends by unilaterally tweaking the software that everyone uses.

Is there actually any evidence we're short on inference compute, let alone by a factor of 2.5? To me it always seemed the data centers were about accommodating some extreme predictions on future demand, scaling up training and trying to outdo one another in capturing the limited hardware.

That's right, but consider what people would be saying about oil companies on Driller News. Thousands of users here have financial or ideological vested interests in the success of the current crop of tech companies. They can recognize the individual faults of the industry where it doesn't affect their primary interest - such as disliking social media, addictive design and so on - but when you start talking about THE tech golden goose, the criticism dies down.

The HN crashout over people suddenly disliking hyperscalers for some reason is something you could only witness here.

I don't think the degree should be optimized toward hireability, but to me its value has still greatly diminished. My assumption was that the CS degree wouldn't follow every whim of the industry, but will still give me enough skills and knowledge to be able to pick up anything CS-related without too much extra training. There's no promise of a job, but there was an expectation that you were learning something useful and versatile that you could then turn into a tech job with some added work. Now, the value of all that has mostly vanished.

Instead of just one tech niche being automated away, leaving the others relatively intact, AI has plugged every opening that people like me could get into at the start of their careers, and this effect is the same across almost the entire industry. And for the people who got in, their employers are already valuing those fundamentals less and less as workers are encouraged to paper over any gaps in knowledge with AI. The relevance of all those learned skills has fallen. I think the only people this doesn't negatively impact are ones who are dead set on going into academia and becoming a researcher in a CS field. And maybe not even then, as AI seems to be taking the spotlight from most other research and is getting shoehorned into every new idea. Thinking the degree is a job training exercise and expecting your core skills to be relevant after graduation at all outside academia are different positions.

Can I ask about the uniform width formatting? Is this some convention from the old days, like formatting text to perfectly fit on a terminal screen?

Let me know when you're ready to move onto advanced economic theory, including what happens to efficiency and value when a tiny number of entities concentrate an in-demand commodity in their hands and refuse to share.

I think the only way out is extreme scrutiny of all updates and paranoid minimization of all attack vectors, but the industry is only going to settle into that local minimum after we go through some devastating breaches.

Do you not see any difference between creating garbage in these ways?

People have created low-quality things since the dawn of humanity, using all sorts of tools, professional and not. However, before AI, making most types of garbage still required some human work, it wasn't infinitely scalable. And what was automatable ended up being so horrible that most people could easily dismiss it on the spot, or for them to even be filtered out algorithmically. On the internet, it wasn't perfect, but the signal-to-noise ratio was still at a level where you reliably discern the signal part.

AI changed this. Even a beginner can set one up to run almost fully unattended - and while what comes out won't be good, it also won't be immediately apparent as such, especially to the general public. More and more I find myself being fooled by a website link, a YouTube video thumbnail or a paragraph in an article. AI lets people create garbage that can impersonate real effort decently well, and they've used that to great extents. As we speak, thousands of agents are working day and night to pump every online platform with their 'content', without a single person in the world to care about what they put out. They're taking over and removing any good signal we had, everything becomes diluted with trash on a scale we have never seen. People notice that. Many are clueless about AI, and social influence plays a role, but they're not being misled and have their opinions manipulated. They wouldn't enjoy most of this content regardless.

In addition to the dilution of good information, they care about appearances and how AI lets you create an appearance of caring about something. The cheap food stand seemed honest when they put up an unassuming print of a simple Word document, and now seems dishonest when they put up an AI-generated mess that looks nothing like the real product and desperately tries to seem more refined than they are. Their manager was at least honest when he replied with a lazy 'k', and now he's lying about caring by dumping out a bullet point list of AI-generated text for a response that we know he himself hasn't read. It's the dream product for scammers, grifters and people who simply don't care.

Can you use AI to help create something good? Sure, but anyone doing that still needs to take their time and put care into it. Even if AI makes them faster, by the time they finish, 10TB of more slop has already been produced to drown them out, because that can be fully automated. Effectively 99.9% of AI content ends up being garbage, so of course people are going to reject it. Most probably don't want the few nuggets of gold for the ocean of waste.

Ludditism is not 'a disease', how dehumanizing. It's an expected response. If we did anything towards sharing the profits, it would not exist. If we answered the hard question of "how will a person survive if we permanently cut the number of all jobs in half?", it would not exist. Ludditism for the people being made irrelevant is stepping out of the oncoming train instead of proudly letting yourself be run over to take one for the team so maybe in a few decades' time some of the added value of new automation cancels out the job loss (how it was in the past - and that was when automated jobs still required loads of brand new workers).

Same one as almost every other modern tech company. AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI

This is evil in ways most people probably don't understand. To explain, here is the real message behind this, stripped of neutral journalism language. I'm not going to be shocked if this is the actual hidden thought process.

"Hello. You have now worked at our company for 7 years, contributing thousands of hours of work towards making our products better. We regret to inform you that you are worthless. Your so-called 'contributions' don't deserve to be printed on toilet paper our CEO wipes with. Frankly, you are a waste of space sucking up the air inside our offices, and we are itching to get rid of degenerates like you at the first opportunity. Your only chance to temporarily offset our perception of your uselessness is our upcoming 20-minute degradation ritual where you'll dance to our whims and plead by showing how much you love using whatever our CEO says you'll use. Building good solutions, knowing our tech stack, working with other people, being creative? All worthless, just like you. What really matters is if you can make me feel good. Fuck you and get ready to crawl on your knees."

But beside that, I don't think that LLM non-determinism is really the same thing as what you see in engineering. Engineering has things like tolerances and redundancy, and while they accommodate random events, they're known, estimated and expected. They also deal with external factors, not the potential of shoddy engineering in the same system they're working on. The best way I can compare it is building a bridge that can withstand twice the normal expected full load and with enough structural redundancy to not collapse even after a prolonged lack of maintenance. These things account for many types of natural degradation and edge cases that are expected. And then there's building a bridge that you know will collapse in the next 10 years at a completely random moment, and instead of engineering a more robust solution, tacking on more gadgets to make the collapse less bad - automatic gates that close the entrances to the bridge, lake drainage system that will suck out the debris, a drone system that drops a brand new randomized bridge on the same spot, and so on. It doesn't feel very much like engineering.

If that doesn't sound convincing to you, consider one other thing. If you gave an engineer a non-deterministic solution and a deterministic solution to the exact same problem, which do you think they would prefer? Would they willingly remove determinism from a system? Maybe it's not the chaos of the real world that scares software developers so much - lots of them have to work on systems that directly interact with the real world. What if it's the fact that there is now a fight to take away their nice, understandable, satisfying deterministic solutions and inject probabilistic chaos into things that never had to have it in the first place - into absolutely everything?

The game in the post is basically identical to Gerrymandle, they're far more similar to one another than either game is to what you've posted.

Or are you perhaps using a game that was merely inspired by another concept but expanded on it in brand new ways to defend a game that is literally identical to what it's copying?