Oh, fuck off.

It blows my mind that people still don’t understand why women “cooperate” with their abusers. I feel like it has to be willful ignorance at this point.

Which picture? They all look pretty innocuous to me… Maybe I’m out of the loop on something?

Kiriakou has serious “that happened” energy.

I’m not really qualified to guess how much of what he says is bullshit, and I’m sure you inevitably gain some stories being a CIA station chief or whatever, but the guy has a story about literally everything ever. He’s been everywhere, he’s met everyone, he knows everything about everything… and it really strains disbelief.

The guy obviously loves telling stories (and I’d even go so far as to say he’s great at it), but I’ve gotta imagine that the vast majority of it is seriously embellished if not outright bullshit — especially when so much of what he says seems designed to paint him favorably.

A

Damn… and I thought nailing his feces to the door was bad…

Who could have guessed that a technology powered by data collection on historic scales would be in favor of more data collection?

What “usefulness” do you get out of them?

Some studios have already tried this. See Where Winds Meet for one of the most high-profile recent examples. I haven’t played the game myself, but my understanding is that the results are… weird. Not surprisingly, users pretty much immediately figured out how to coax unintended, game-breaking behaviors out of the AI NPCs.

But silly bugs aside, I think the main issue here is cost. So far we’re only seeing features like this in games with aggressive monetization, and that makes sense. LLMs are expensive to run. Getting good voice actors isn’t cheap either, but that is usually a fixed cost; you pay them once and that’s it. With AI, you’re paying for every single line of dialog uttered for as long as your game exists.

There are also no-zero setup and maintenance costs where you have to design specific guardrails to keep the AI from acting out of bounds. “Don’t give the player free loot, don’t use profanity or slurs, don’t discuss politics or sensitive topics with the player” et cetera. Of course players will always find ways around that, so now you’re playing a constant game of whack-a-mole trying to get this thing to behave the way you want. You’ve created a situation where you’re constantly paying for costly AI compute and you have to keep an “AI whisperer” on payroll. Suddenly paying a VA doesn’t seem so bad.

To mirror what others have already said, LLMs are actually really fucking bad at this.

For starters, all of the most common optimization problems are already silently fixed for you by the compiler. Modern compilers are crazy smart, and can optimize suboptimal code without the developer even having to think about it. That means that the remaining optimizations are already the ones that machines are bad at handling, and LLMs just don’t know how to close that gap.

I confess, I’m the kind of dev who lives for a good optimization challenge, and since I’m required to use an LLM at work, I’ve set them loose on a few of these problems myself. The results are not good. More often than not, optimization tends to be a big-picture endeavor where you’re thinking about how things fit together and if the project can be restructured to avoid bottlenecks. AI seems to be the weakest at big-picture stuff, so it tends to hone in on small details that aren’t going to give you much improvement. What they will do, however, is add lots of verbose code in pursuit of chasing a few extra milliseconds here and there, which is sub-optimal in its own way.

Readability and maintainability are both their own separate dimensions of optimization because they speed up the process of debugging and future development. AI does not optimize for these AT ALL. It often tries to compensate for this by filling the code with comments, but this actually makes the problem worse when your codebase becomes cluttered with hundreds of useless annotations like this:

//Initialize the app

InitializeApp();

thankless annoying task

I’m probably just a masochist, but I’ve always been the kind of dev who loves working on optimization problems. In that sense, I suppose the AI bubble has been a real boon for me, since now there’s far more messy, inefficient code out there than even before…

Weird they can’t even spare a colon when there are so many assholes to go around…

You almost have to admire the balls on any healthcare exec still willing to be so brazen with their enshitification…

We’ve all seen slop before. Posting more slop and saying “look how silly this slop is” isn’t speaking out against AI, it’s just proliferating slop.

It’s like sitting in a traffic jam and ranting about how much you hate traffic. You are the traffic.

lol what a cuck

Just the thought of it makes me wanna ride the sewer slide…

I’ve always felt the opposite. I love tofu, and have a zillion recipes for it. But seitan still disgusts me. No matter how I try to prepare it, I’ve always been disappointed.

I say this as a proud vegan, but seitan is fucking disgusting.

Okay, sure… But a dozen IT salaries doesn’t even come close to justifying multi-hundred-million dollar state subsidies. Local governments will be lucky to see a five-figure return on that investment in the form of employee W2s.

And meanwhile the local cost of power and water is going to skyrocket in the area… all so 12 guys in a community of 1000s can make 70k a year? Unreal.

What’s wild is that these data centers generate basically zero economic stimulus for the local communities they’re in, and no taxable revenue. So why all of the state-level incentives to build things that will pay back zero dividends to the states?

Corporate welfare is why. Eat the fucking rich.

You’re right, Cory. So drop out of your fucking primary and endorse a real leader.