LukeZaz
@LukeZaz@beehaw.org
- Comment on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 loses a GOTY award over use of gen AI 2 days ago:
So, from the way you talk about it, it seems you’re describing your feelings about the game moreso than an attempt at an objective take. Which is good, because there is no such thing as an objective take, and I definitely understand the perspective of not liking something that you feel is inexplicably ultra-popular.
That said, I do wonder how much you’ve seen of the game? Because I haven’t played it either, but everything I’ve seen strongly suggests that it is a genuine work of art that people put effort and passion into. Which – since you brought it up – is not a description I’d apply to Battlefield 6. So I’m kinda left wondering what specifically about it might put you off enough to want to slag it off like this.
If you’re upset at it for winning a billion awards, that’s fair. Most awards shows are always very silly and this one game getting practically showered honestly highlights that a lot — even a really good game like this probably didn’t deserve quite this many accolades. Still though, it might be worth giving the game itself a second look? Even if unlikely, pleasant surprises are nice!
- Comment on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 loses a GOTY award over use of gen AI 2 days ago:
This is most of it, but it is worth remembering that using GenAI/LLMs for placeholders is still bad. It’s strictly unnecessary, has dubious efficiency gains at best, and you’re still using tech that is provably hurting people and the environment en masse.
I’m not going to hate Sandfall forever for this – it’s not original sin – but it’s still a very real error they should not repeat.
- Comment on Don't call it a Substack 1 week ago:
It is a blogging site, but it’s also notable for being in favor of free-speech absolutism, to the point of allowing Nazis on the platform. From Wikipedia:
In January 2022, the Center for Countering Digital Hate accused Substack of allowing content that could be dangerous to public health. The Center estimated that the company earned $2.5 million per year from the top five anti-vaccine authors alone. The three founders responded via blog post affirming their commitment to minimal censorship.
Substack faced further criticism in November 2023 for allowing its platform to be used by white nationalists, Nazis, and antisemites. In an open letter, more than 100 Substack creators threatened to leave the platform and implored Substack’s leadership to stop giving bigotry a platform. In response, Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie said the company would continue to allow the publication of extremist views because attempting to censor them would make the problem worse. Creators like Casey Newton, Molly White, and Ryan Broderick left the platform as a result.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@beehaw.org | 7 comments
- Comment on 'Architects of AI' named Time Magazine's Person of the Year 1 week ago:
Doesn’t really matter if they say it’s praise or not. The reality is that it’s free press, and hardly could be said to be negative. It benefits them.
- Comment on Grok Says It Would Kill Every Jewish Person on the Planet to Save Elon Musk 2 weeks ago:
If I’m being honest, I don’t think Grok posts deserve attention here. This isn’t news; we already know Grok is shit because LLMs are shit and Elon is extremely shit. We don’t need reminders.
All this does is draw people’s attention to more slop and hate, same as they’ve been seeing all year. That’s not just unimportant, it’s unhealthy.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
FUD
What is this, a crypto forum? You make it sound like they’re trying to single-handedly tear down GrapheneOS or something.
- Comment on Thank Mozilla for Killing Localization on Support Mozilla (And Replacing Human Contributions With AI Bots) 3 weeks ago:
As time goes ever onward, I find myself increasingly in the position of using Firefox solely because it isn’t Chromium, rather than because of any inherent good quality.
Which is not to say that Firefox isn’t still at least fine as a browser. But this is what Mozilla is now, and if there’s anything the leaders of that organization are doing, it is that they are committing corporate suicide because none of those idiots know what the hell they are doing. Firefox can’t stay decent with people like them at the helm.
I swear, getting a business major should be considered self-harm.
- Comment on Hundreds of Google AI Workers Were Fired Amid Fight Over Working Conditions 2 months ago:
Well that’s a non-sequitur if I’ve ever seen one.
- Comment on Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 2 months ago:
The fundamental issue is and has always been that automation is being used to replace people, when it should be used to free up their time. Productivity increases could’ve meant shorter work weeks. But that didn’t generate as much money for the shareholders, so it didn’t get pursued. And now we’ve got LLMs and generative AI, which could’ve been a (admittedly rather shitty and niche) tool, but for the same reasons as before, companies would rather throw people under the bus instead.
Artists aren’t telling you that people washing dishes don’t matter. They’re telling you they might be getting fired just like those dishwashers were. If you care about either, I suggest standing up for the artists here. And once that’s done, they can stand up for everyone else right back. I think you’ll find they’d be happy to return the favor.
- Comment on An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism 3 months ago:
You were the only one here suggesting this required an explanation.
Alright, I think you’re being deliberately antagonistic now. Bye!
- Comment on An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism 3 months ago:
I was suggesting that no one else needs it explained to them either.
You’d hope so! But alas, some idiots exist. And when a title like this appears, it becomes difficult to tell if such an idiot wrote it at first glance, and more to point, a title like that tends to create more idiots (and it’s also just kinda offensive). That’s why it’s important not to write headlines like this.
Sidenote: If you want people to not take things personally, avoid personal pronouns. “Is that something that you need explained?” → “Is that something that people need explained?” It makes a world of difference and I’m confident I’ve avoided several arguments that could’ve spawned from my own posts thanks to making that kind of change. Not foolproof, sure – we are on the internet – but it helps.
- Comment on An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism 3 months ago:
You didn’t stop reading? Then it’s a bit weird that you’d think I don’t know autistic people have empathy, unless you decided to arbitrarily take the most bad faith reading you could’ve done. If that’s the case, I recommend taking breathers before posting so that you don’t do that.
- Comment on An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism 3 months ago:
Did you stop reading the rest of the post when you saw that? Because it really looks like you did.
- Comment on An AI Social Coach Is Teaching Empathy to People with Autism 3 months ago:
You can read that from the article text, but a) the text doesn’t appear to actually suggest autistic people do have empathy, which is a problem since b) the title absolutely implies they don’t.
At best, this is a terrible headline. But if I’m being honest, I don’t have much respect for an article that seems to be all too eager to tout the erstwhile benefits of an LLM, let alone one that is in all likelihood teaching people how to act more like an LLM. So I’m not inclined to take a charitable interpretation.
- Comment on FFmpeg 8 can subtitle your videos on the fly with Whisper 3 months ago:
The changelog lists 30 significant changes, of which the top new feature is integrating Whisper. This means whisper.cpp, which is Georgi Gerganov’s entirely local and offline version of OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition model. The bottom line is that FFmpeg can now automatically subtitle videos for you.
Yeah hey, can anyone chime in if this is at all based off LLMs? Because my problems with the incorrect plagiarism machine don’t end just because it’s now the offline incorrect plagiarism machine. Making OpenAI’s garbage hockey open source doesn’t make it okay. Or should I just start calling this shit FOSSwashing?
- Submitted 3 months ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fears 3 months ago:
I do avoid LLMs on principle. I find the technology and the manner in which it is used repugnant for a variety of reasons, most but not all of which I’ve already elaborated on here. At this point, I hate it even in the very niche scenario where it is useful, precisely because I think it does too much harm to be deserving of acceptance in any field at all. The most I can say for it is that I might be willing to slowly change that stance once this horrid bubble pops and the world stops getting set aflame for the sake of stock options.
Given your befuddlement at my stance though, I feel I should highlight and restate the following:
Almost nobody actually wanted Proton to make this. They just went and did it to chase a trend, ignoring the many people who hate it all the while. The last thing I need is for the the company that my email depends on to start getting dragged around by tech bros. If they’re willing to make a decision as rash and irresponsible as that, it is a clear indicator that worse is to come.
The presence of an LLM on a site is indicative to me of the character of those running it. It speaks to trend-following, a lack of understanding, and disdain for the intricacies of human work. If they weren’t trend-followers, they’d understand that LLMs have utterly failed to prove themselves as actually useful and would hold off to see if they ever do before using them. If they understood what was going on, they’d know that what LLMs actually do is typically irrelevant to most businesses. If they had any respect for the depths of creativity or effort, they’d know that what modern-day “AI” creates is a hollow imitation; a series of black-boxes that vaguely approximate a thing without having the capacity to understand anything that makes it up. And they’d know that in so doing such software creates something broken that serves only to devalue the efforts of real artists and writers, both in how it convinces studios to ignorantly fire them to improve a number at the expense of quality, and in how its rampant use as a cheating tool engenders environments of serious distrust.
If someone’s got an LLM on their site, or if they’ve decided to offer an LLM of their own through their business, they communicate to me a serious deficit in their understanding of the world at large. That the only thing they’re interested in is a graph someone showed them at a marketing meeting. They want metrics for investors, not a good product—and if that’s the kind of goals they’ve got, what reason have I to believe they won’t step on me to accomplish them?
Proton is making an LLM, and from that I know that their leadership is failing and that their future is likely bleak. I can’t trust my email in those hands.
- Comment on Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fears 3 months ago:
Because companies that chase LLMs tend not to give me a choice, that’s why. They inject it into everything they touch because they think it’s the Future™, and therefore I must obviously want it around every second of my life, every day, consequences be damned. The earth can burn, my privacy can erode, misinformation can run rampant, and the copyright of small artists can die, all for the sake of an overused, scarcely-functional “tool” that a bunch of MBAs think I can’t so much as breathe without.
- Comment on Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fears 3 months ago:
its newly launched AI chatbot positioned as a privacy-friendly ChatGPT rival
Add another thing to the list of reasons I’m losing trust in Proton. Might start having to look at a new email provider soon, I guess.
- Comment on Can we talk about the Roblox situation? 4 months ago:
I made a post about it for a more general discussion but I think it’s worth saying here too: Chris Hansen is an irresponsible hack at best and he is very likely to misinform. There are far better people around if you want to learn about the many harms to children caused by Roblox.
- Comment on The train that never came; how maglev technology was derailed 4 months ago:
Imagine a world in which enough people generate enough content containing þe Old English þorn (voiceless dental fricative) and eþ (voiced dental fricative) characters þat þey start showing up in AI generated content.
- Comment on AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified 4 months ago:
If it ends the stupid AI bubble then I don’t think it qualifies as petty vengeance; that is some real change. There won’t be meaningful legislation to aid the day-to-day person against this garbage, no, but it’d still seriously reduce the degree to which this shit has invaded our lives.
- Comment on Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity 4 months ago:
You bring up people fighting a war as a comparison, you invite the idea that you expect others to do the same, bullets and all. If you didn’t want to make that implication, you shouldn’t have made that comparison. This is on you.
This goes double when the suggestions you’ve offered are so vague and unhelpful as “Organize. Disrupt. Disobey.” Do you have any concrete ideas for how that’ll work? Because right now, you’re just yelling at people in an entirely different country to you to do a bunch of Stuff™ all while you hypocritically whine online yourself about what we are doing.
Again, if you want to be frustrated, do it differently. As it stands, you’re just fighting your own allies because the work they’re doing isn’t what you specifically want to occur. You’re going to have deal with the fact that sometimes activism isn’t flashy, and sometimes it isn’t easy to spot. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful, and it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Besides, even if you were right, shame doesn’t tend to be a useful tool for growing action; it just makes you more enemies and encourages spite and doomerism. So save the crit for the Democrat politicians, aye?
- Comment on Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity 4 months ago:
I’m sorry, but the problems with modern-day LLMs and GenAI run far deeper than “who hosts it.”
- Comment on Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity 4 months ago:
Your grandparents stormed the beaches at Normandy
Oh, so what you actually want is for us to dash our bodies upon the stones and get shot to death by cops, is it? What a completely reasonable ask! One that I’m sure you won’t be doing yourself, of course. That’s our job.
I’m not your footsoldier. I’m not throwing myself into a fire just because you’re unsatisfied with the action being taken. I have a life to live, and I’m barely managing that as it is. Your criticism is less than worthless.
Your advice wouldn’t fix America. It’d just get us all killed.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 4 months ago:
I shudder to think how much electricity got wasted so you could get fooled by an LLM into believing nonsense. Let alone the equally-unnecessary followup questions.
- Comment on Itch.io are seeking out new payment processors who are more comfortable with adult material | RPS 4 months ago:
Dan Olson’s documentary is as true as ever. Stop recommending an environment-destroying investment scam to people. You aren’t helping.
- Comment on itch.io now seemingly affected by payment processor rules as Steam 4 months ago:
I am very glad we live in the universe where that didn’t happen!
- Comment on itch.io now seemingly affected by payment processor rules as Steam 4 months ago:
