Did you not take the hyperfixation perk? Rookie move. There’s supposed to be one thing you’re permanently weird about.

ADHD is a bitch.

It took them until 2025 to figure out digital ownership isn’t about the serial number on your console.

This fucking company.

I will never get over C’s string references being in fucking octal.

Fuck software patents.

We have ruined everything in the name of sportsball.

Is the embedded video part of the Lemmy update? That’s a mixed bag.

Maybe because it’s not limited. If your comfort games were in RPG Maker, then 24-bit pixels are right, but good art is wrong. If they were on consoles, they should be aggressively paletted and tiled.

Try homebrew. An NES or SNES game will always look about right, because breaking those limits is a thousand times harder than embracing them.

But for peaceful purposes only!

This absolutism is jarring against your suggestion of applying the same technology to medicine.

Siri predates this architecture by a decade. And you still want to write off the whole thing as literally useless if it’s ever ever ever wrong… because god forbid you have to glance at whatever e-mail it points to. Like skimming one e-mail to confirm it’s from your mom, about a flight, and mentions the time… is harder than combing through your inbox by hand.

Confirming an answer is a lot easier than finding it from scratch. And if you’re late to the airport anyway, oh no, how terrible. Everything is ruined forever. Burn your computers and live in the woods, apparently, because one important e-mail was skipped. Your mother had to call you and then wait comfortably for an entire hour.

Perfect reliability does not exist. No technology provides it. Even with your prior example, phone alarms - I’ve told Android to re-use the last timer, when I said I wanted twenty minutes, and it didn’t go off until 6:35 PM, because yesterday I said that at 6:15. I’ve had physical analog alarm clocks fail to go off in the morning. I did not abandon the concept of time, following that betrayal.

The world did not end because a machine fucked up.

Finally, we have built the Torment Nexus, from the beloved book Do Not Build The Torment Nexus.

Your example of catastrophic failure is… e-mail? Spam filters are wrong all the time, and they’re still fantastic. Glancing in the folder for rare exceptions is cognitively easier than categorizing every single thing one-by-one.

If there’s one false negative, you don’t go “Holy shit, it’s the actual prince of Nigeria!”

But sure, let’s apply flawed models somewhere safe, like analyzing medical data. What?

And it doesn’t matter if it gets it wrong one time in a hundred, that one time is enough to completely negate all potential positives of the feature.

Obviously fucking not.

Even in car safety, a literal life-and-death context, a camera that beeps when you’re about to screw up can catch plenty of times where you might guess wrong. Yeah - if you straight-up do not look, and blindly trust the beepy camera, bad things will happen. That’s why you have the camera and look.

If a single fuckup renders the whole thing worthless, I have terrible news about human programmers.

But first we must ask, what is computer?

If you want something more complex than an alarm clock, this does kinda work for anything. Emphasis on “kinda.”

Neural networks are universal approximators. People get hung-up on the approximation part, like that cancels out the potential in… universal. You can make a model that does any damn thing. Only recently has that seriously meant you and can - backpropagation works, and it works on video-game hardware.

what is currently branded as AI

“AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet” has been the punchline for decades. For any advancement in the field, people only notice once you tell them it’s related to AI, and then they just call it “AI,” and later complain that it’s not like on Star Trek.

And yet it moves. Each advancement makes new things possible, and old things better. Being right most of the time is good, actually. 100% would be better than 99%, but the 100% version does not exist, so 99% is better than never.

Telling the grifters where to shove it should not condemn the cool shit they’re lying about.

I’ve done no such thing.

I called it half-decent, spooky, and admirable.

That turns out to be good enough, for a bunch of applications. Even the parts that are just a chatbot fooling people are useful. And massively better than the era you’re comparing this to.

We have to deal with this honestly. Neural networks have officially caught on, and anything with examples can be approximated. Anything. The hard part is reminding people what “approximated” means. Being wrong sometimes is normal. Humans are wrong about all kinds of stuff. But for some reason, people think computers bring unflinching perfection - and approach life-or-death scenarios with this sloppy magic.

Personally I’m excited for position tracking with accelerometers. Naively integrating into velocity and location immediately sends you to outer space. Clever filtering almost sorta kinda works. But it’s a complex noisy problem, with a minimal output, where approximate answers get partial credit. So long as it’s tuned for walking around versus riding a missile, it should Just Work.

Similarly restrained use-cases will do minor witchcraft on a pittance of electricity. It’s not like matrix math is hard, for computers. LLMs just try to do as much of it as possible.

The complaints then were the same as complaints now

Despite results improving at an insane rate, very recently. And you think this is proof of a problem with… the results? Not the complaints?

People went “I made this!” with fucking Terragen. A program that renders wild alien landscapes which became generic after about the fifth one you saw. The problem there is not expertise. It’s immense quantity for zero effort. None of that proves CGI in general is worthless non-art. It’s just shifting what the computer will do for free.

At some point, we will take it for granted that text-to-speech can do an admirable job reading out whatever. It’ll be a button you push when you’re busy sometimes. The dipshits mass-uploading that for popular articles, over stock footage, will be as relevant as people posting seven thousand alien sunsets.

We don’t need leaps and bounds, from here. We’re already in science fiction territory. Incremental improvement has silenced a wide variety of naysaying.

And this is with LLMs - which are stupid. We didn’t design them with logic units or factoid databases. Anything they get right is an emergent property from guessing plausible words, and they get a shocking amount of things right. Smaller models and faster training will encourage experimentation for better fundamental goals. Like a model that can only say yes, no, or mu. A decade ago that would have been an impossible sell - but now we know data alone can produce a network that’ll fake its way through explaining why the answer is yes or no. If we’re only interested in the accuracy of that answer, then we’re wasting effort on the quality of the faking.

Even with this level of intelligence, where people still bicker about whether it is any level of intelligence, dumb tricks keep working. Like telling the model to think out loud. Or having it check its work. These are solutions an author would propose as comedy. And yet: it helps. It narrows the gap between “but right now it sucks at [blank]” and having to find a new [blank]. If that never lets it do math properly, well, buy a calculator.

Dipshits going “I made this!” is not indicative of what this makes possible.

Blame ClearChannel. Nickelback emerged near the peak of one company fucking up commercial radio throughout the US. This new band played inoffensive pop-alternative-country melange, seeming broadly acceptable to everyone without exciting much of anyone. Their image was squeaky-clean while their conventionally attractive frontman looked vaguely rugged. All very saleable, but aggressively generic.

So: take an audience at peak rude irony. (This is the era of Celebrity Deathmatch, “Mike Tyson ate my balls,” and Game.com ads calling their customers morons.) Subject them to the same middling singles over and over. Ask how they feel about this merely okay experience taking up air time that could easily be Destiny’s Child, Third Eye Blind, or Shania Twain. Try not to act surprised when they smirk and say they hope the entire band dies.

People hate Nickelback because it’s fun to hate Nickelback. It is easy and rewarding to hate Nickelback. Everyone knew about them, but nobody was a diehard fan. You could perform ingroup bonding with nearly anyone by saying “Fuck Nickelback, right?” You could privately grumble about hearing “How You Remind Me” for the dozenth time this week, without any baggage like Creed’s religion-bait popularity or various artists’ public feuds. Hating Nickelback is uncomplicated. To this day, I have no goddamn idea what Chad Kroeger is like, or what he’s into, or what he’s done. But I still knew his name without checking.

And nobody’s replaced them. Rampant piracy deepened people’s musical tastes by letting them choose what to listen to, instead of the constant deluge of lowest-common-denominator payola. Streaming later made it polite and acceptable to pay artists nothing. Meanwhile, internet forums and thousand-channel cable packages allowed culture to splinter. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Taylor Swift song. I don’t care, and I don’t have to. Having any reputation become memetic like this is obscenely unlikely now. To have that reputation be… mediocre? Unthinkable.

After the inauguration? No, fuck that guy.