I write bugs and sometimes features! I’m also @CoderKat@kbin.social.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Find local groups. Two notable ones for me are that I found a discord for my city for people looking for friends (which means stuff like regular board game events and the likes) and the kink community (ie, fetlife) regularly does similar (you don’t treat that one as a dating site, but rather a way to find real life events where you meet people).

    There’s probably various other ways to find real life meetups that aren’t for the explicit purpose of meeting people to date, but will find em anyway. Casual sports leagues, hobby oriented groups, co-workers, etc.



  • Heck, I’d say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I’ll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I’d pirate no regrets even with my current income.

    After all, there won’t be AAA games if people don’t pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that’s something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it’ll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that’s unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).




  • But are they? Generally in tech, it’s really hard to gauge people’s performance and most companies are conservative with firing people for performance reasons. So you could coast by on mediocre performance. You team won’t be happy with you, but you probably will keep your job simply because you’re given the benefit of doubt. Tech is one of those areas where someone can actually be 10x as effective as another person, because so much of the job can be spent on stuff like debugging and dealing with weird issues, where one person might spend all day on an issue that another person can resolve in minutes.

    There’s also something to be said about the fact that companies are usually paying for your time, not output. Contractors are the ones who are paid for output, not employees. It’s also straight up expected in tech that you’re looking for ways to automate some tasks so they don’t have to be done anymore. It’s not like some mindless office job where you’re expected to do X reports per day. There’s a never ending list of bugs to fix and features requested. You’re generally paid to find ways to increase productivity, not merely do the same thing over and over.

    At any rate, tech is usually also paid well enough for it. There’s still massive income disparity between regular workers and C-suite, but at least the pay is always well, well above living wages, stock options are commonly given to regular workers, and high performers often are rewarded for doing better than average. IMO, tech jobs aren’t really an area to focus on the kinda mindset you have, since it does so much better than most (not perfect, but still far better). Most jobs don’t get anything close to what tech jobs offer to regular employees.


  • As a dev, I honestly can’t understand that. I probably use regex a dozen times a day. Basic regex is so easy and useful, but describing exactly what you want is so iffy for an AI. The basics of regex are also so easy. It’s not like most people are trying to, say, parse an email address with regex. Most usage is basic, like “extract this consistent pattern from this text” or “remove this (simple) parameter from this function”. It takes me seconds to come up with a working regex in most cases.


  • Especially where image generation is concerned, the infancy part can’t be understated. It’s growing so, so fast. A year ago, people would be dismissing AI art as “you can always tell”, it largely couldn’t do hands, and text was right out. But current cutting edge models can semi-reliably generate imperceptible works, needing only some fairly trivial manual curation to pick the best output. There’s also some models that are now able to do basic text. Just comparing a couple of years worth of progress side by side makes it very clear that it’s advancing rapidly and there’s no signs yet that it’s plateaued.

    The big barrier to image generation, though, is profit. The images that it creates are useful, but current understanding is that they can’t be copyrighted and there’s ongoing legal challenges that make it very murky. I don’t think these companies can stay in business from regular people who’ll pay for some tokens to generate art. They need to be usable by commercial companies, and the legal issues will scare many of those away, at least for now.


  • I do think there’s some use for AI in its current form (especially AI art as a tool for developing other works, like movies and video games), but I find it bizarre just how much investors value the current form of AI.

    As cool as I find AI art, I’m not yet sure about it’s commercial viability, given the serious legal issues it’s facing. So why do investors, who are supposed to care about commercial viability, value it so much?

    And for generative text, I have an even more negative stance. My understanding is that the cost to train and run those AIs is ludicrous. Sure, some companies will use it to make blog spam articles or replace their basic support staff with it, but is that really gonna make it profitable?

    And I emphasized “current form” because the current AI is basically just predictive text. It’s severely limited and this is extremely evident if you try to ask even basic math problems. It’s not capable of actual intelligence, which is what has me very skeptical of it on the long term. Maybe these companies will come up with a new, better form of AI. Or maybe they won’t. But it doesn’t seem like “just increase the size of the model” is sustainable nor will frankly get closer to strong(ish?) AI.






  • Yeah, the average consumer doesn’t buy Windows. They buy a computer and it happens to come with Windows most of the time. Those consumers aren’t going to want to pay for a subscription. Especially when you look at the prices of the kinds of computers that most people are buying. They’re budget machines. No way a subscription would go over well. And why would OEMs want to deal with the fallout of people not buying their computers because of subscriptions?


  • Agree and I sympathize with all the points.

    On the financial point, we, as a society, badly need to stop depending on jobs for survival before it’s too late. But I know that we’re unlikely to change until a lot of people get hurt.

    And on the self-worth point, it feels awful to be replaced, even if the money isn’t an issue. People take pride in their work and want their work to be celebrated. Yet, we’re quickly approaching a point where it’s going to be very difficult for people to create art by hand that can hold a candle to AI art. Sure, there’s still many master artists, but they got where they are through hard work. How many new potential artists will be willing to put in that hard work when any random Joe Blow can generate something better in seconds? Human made art (from scratch) won’t go away, but it is harder to feel good about what you create when it feels like your art has no place anymore.



  • Hands are only a give away for bad AI art. There’s no shortage of examples with great hands (especially when using features like Stable Diffusion’s ControlNet, which allows you to give hints to the AI for the shape that something should match). Just so many people posting AI art generate once or twice and post that. If you’re more selective and selectively regenerate, you’ll be able to get much more believable results.

    This is also a rapidly changing area, with the most cutting edge AI being way better than something from even a year ago. Used to be that no AI could do even remotely believable text, but in recent weeks, I’ve been seeing many examples of AI art that got small amounts of text perfect.