Funny, that was around the point in the article where I was beginning to get irritated reading it because it felt like reading LLM output. LLMs love melodramatic headers ("THE CHILDHOOD TRAUMA"), outlandish and not particularly coherent metaphors ("hostage negotiator"), the overly terse arrow constructions that I've never seen a human write in my life ("something that feels less like “open app → consume lesson” and more like “tap creature → it looks at you → you do a small thing together”"), the segue into a redundant list of bullet points, the pointless not x but y ("The blob wasn’t a mascot here, it was the interface") which poorly establishes a contrast where it doesn't make sense to.
The funniest part to me is that I suspect the LLM generated the line about the 4th of July, and the suspected prompter being British, felt the need to insert an explanation for why "they" would reference it, in a voice/cadence that doesn't really match the rest of the article:
> "Confetti, fireworks, the whole 4th of July experience (I've seen it only in movies though, not sure why but it's not celebrated in the UK)"
I can't definitively say this is LLM-generated, but it resembled it enough so that I still came away annoyed for having read it.
For this analogy to be comparable, you would first have to consider that Best Buy, together with Walmart, owns 99.9999% of all store real estate in the world. You would also have to consider that the "shelf space" in this case is free and comes at zero cost to Best Buy; in fact, giving you virtual shelf space increases the amount of traffic that comes into their stores, resulting in a benefit to themselves.
Your analogy as presented was so lacking in merit you might as well have been talking about cats and leprechauns for how completely nonsensical it was to bring it up in the context of Apple.
Simon and GGP combined do own an overwhelming percentage of all retail square footage in the US, but lets at least consider the rest of the argument here.
Apple's "shelf space" is not free. There are constant R&D expenses involved in introducing new sensors and screens that make the underlying apps better. They take on the support load of on-boarding users, managing the relationship, and dealing with any problems. Advertising, carrier validation, third party hardware ecosystem, etc.
Epic wants to sidestep all of the costs of building a platform, and offload support costs onto Apple.
> Simon and GGP combined do own an overwhelming percentage of all retail square footage in the US
This is factually incorrect, and not only incorrect, but so wildly far from being correct that one wonders if this statement was made in bad faith. They only have around 300 million sqft out of an estimated 12 billion sqft, around 2.5%. That is not an overwhelming percentage, nor is it "99.9999% of all retail square footage in the world", which was not a hyperbolic statement. Competitors in retail can obtain their own shelf space. You cannot obtain your own shelf space for mobile software. The network effects of hardware+OS centralization are too strong, so there are and never will be any viable competitors to iOS and Android.
> Apple's "shelf space" is not free. There are constant R&D expenses involved in introducing new sensors and screens that make the underlying apps better.
The R&D expenses do not change regardless of whether there are 1 million or 10 million apps available for iOS. Allowing people to distribute their own software comes at no cost to Apple.
> They take on the support load of on-boarding users, managing the relationship, and dealing with any problems.
Apple absolutely does not do any of this as it pertains to individual apps.
> Epic wants to sidestep all of the costs of building a platform, and offload support costs onto Apple
Nobody is asking for Apple's support; really, what the world needs is less of Apple's involvement in the hardware the people own, not more. Epic is clearly willing to spend money on building platforms, since it has a documented $600 million in losses in its effort to build a competitor to Steam. This, however, is not a case where it is possible to build a platform.
In other words, this isn't even a cost-saving measure. They are now paying money to deny claims. Instead of paying money to provide healthcare, they instead pay money to third-party administrators who promise they won't actually do administrative work but instead outsource life-ruining decisions to an automated script. It is hard to come away from this without thinking that humanity is fundamentally evil, and that everyone involved in this should be treated like French royalty.
This is a terrible overview. The actual primary benefit of toasts is that they provide feedback on low-importance events without requiring the user to interact with them and without permanently taking up UI space. The web application I use most frequently would be infuriating if I had to deal with a modal window every time a toast would have been used, and UI space is at a premium for useful functionality, so occupying a permanent spot to relay those messages isn't a good solution either.
I wish software developers could drop this dogmatism. Same as the old Goto considered harmful trope outliving its usefulness and all that. It's always black and white - "people can misuse this tool, so this tool is inherently bad and should be eliminated from usage completely" - rather than acknowledging that many tools have great use cases even if they can also be abused.
Yes, but in that story, parent only has the word of that Journalist. I personally don't even have that, I only have a post about it.
My deeper point is that it's arguably very difficult to establish a global, socially acceptable lower threshold of trust. Parent's level is, apparently, the word of a famous Journalist in a radio broadcast. For some, the form of a message alone makes the message worthy of trust, and AI will mess with this so much.
Whether you trust the word of the journalist has little relation to the story. The "socially acceptable lower threshold of trust" is not static for all stories; it changes depending on the stakes of the story.
Non-consequential: A photo of a cat with a funny caption. I am likely to trust the caption by default, because the energy of doubting it is not worth the stakes. If the caption is a lie, it does nothing to change my worldview or any actions I will ever take. Nobody's life will be worse off for not having spent an hour debunking an amusing story fabricated over a cat photo.
Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything. The factor from the story that might influence your worldview is the knowledge that there are people in the world who are so easily swayed by false captions on photos, and that itself is a trivially verifiable fact, including other people consuming the exact photo and misinformation from the story.
More consequential: Somebody makes an accusation against a world leader. This has the potential to sway opinions of many people, feeding into political decisions and international relations. The stakes are higher. It is therefore prudent not to trust without evidence of the specific accusation at hand. Providence of evidence does also matter; not everything can be concretely proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We should not trust people blindly, but people who have a history of telling the truth are more credible than people who have a history of lying, which can influence what evidence is sufficient to reach a socially acceptable threshold of trust.
The point about the stakes is a good one. But there is an individiual factor to it. And maybe it's exactly because of the stakes you mention: if you perceive your personal stakes to be low, or might even gain something out of redistributing the message, no matter if fabricated or not, your threshold might be low as well.
> > Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything.
> The point about the stakes is a good one. But there is an individiual factor to it.
Indeed. The so called "trivially consequential" depends on whether you're the person being "mis-informationed" about or not. You could be a black man with a white grandchild, and someone could then take a video your wife posted of you playing with your grandchild, and redistribute it calling you a pedophile, causing impact to your life and employment. Those consequences don't seem trivial to the people impacted.
This is a complete and total misrepresentation of what I said. The key point here is that the "accused" in the trivial story is anonymous. They are fungible. Their identity is irrelevant to the story; it is merely an anecdote about the fact that a person like this exists, and people who exhibit the exact same behaviour as them verifiably do exist, so there is nothing to be misinformed about. A tangible accusation against a specific individual is completely different, and obviously is consequential.
Who cares about a single or two Yachts. Ukraine likely made 100 billion USD disappear and there were many people expecting just that. Just like some of the "donated equipment" started showing up on all sorts of black markets once it was shipped to Ukraine. It's just the obviously controlled media in Europe that stopped mentioning Ukraine's corruption issues right after February 2022.
Obviously I can only be a Putin-loving propaganda bot for saying such things.
Everybody is aware the Ukraine has major corruption issues. It is frequently covered in the media and is common knowledge.
I have no doubt however that Europe (and hopefully the wider world) is less worried about that corruption than they are about Russian military aggression. And there will be some level of media focus on that – rightly so, where the focus should be on grinding the Russian kleptostate into dust as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
You're not a propaganda bot; you're just making their lives easier.
If you're happy with your tax euros disappearing in Ukraine, good for you.
I know for a fact via family ties that major newsrooms in Germany received instructions to tune out the corruption angle once the war started. I'm sure it's all nothing though and that Putin will find himself in Poland next year. Of course!
If sending hundreds of billions of tax payer money to a known oligarch run cleptocracy is comparable to some German conservative party affiliate making a couple of millions using shady COVID mask deals is comparable to you, I rest my case.
It's all corruption in the end so who cares, right?
Two things can be true at the same time - we don't want Russia to absorb Ukraine and then further threaten the eastern border of the EU, and we don't want Ukraine to be corrupt.
And in the Ukraine we see that the corruption is uncovered punished, even if it is in the direct circles of the president.
There are problems in uncovering it, but the attempt to get rid of corruption is a big factor in the whole situation and one of the things Russia fears.
For Russia a corrupt system was a lot simpler to influence and Ukraine showing how a partially Russian speaking country, where people moved back and forth, fighting corruption was a threat to the system.
Ukraine was, and is still, one of the most corrupt developed countries in the world. Whether it is slightly more or slightly less corrupt than Russia I do not know. Both are Oligarchic in nature. In my opinion one of the reasons the various peace deals have not succeeded yet is because they fail to acknowledge the Oligarchic nature of both states and that they will both need to continue in that mode going forwards, probably as a frozen conflict or in a system where it is in neither interest to disrupt the balance (because it would end the corruption, pocket-lining, theft, etc). Of course for the ordinary unfortunate Ukrainian, well he/she matters little or not at all to rulers on either side.
Hah, Kim Dotcom is still around? In the 90s he was bragging that he's this super hacker that made millions, his website posted pics of parties, cars, girls, and yachts, and it turned out those were bought/rented using swindled investor money (ironic that he's accusing Zelensky of the same crime). Then he became a sort of hero when the US/NZ governments Team 6-ed his house for the crime of aiding copyright infringement.
Still around and at a huge cost to the New Zealand taxpayer - people used to have some sympathy but public opinion turned against him years ago. His extradition was declared ok, long overdue he was put on a plane and made somebody else's problem.
The people of New Zealand should be mad at the illegal tactics used by the FBI and GCSB. And why should he be extradicted to a country he never visited?
> Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes.
This is a categorically false statement. The Soviets turned the Russian empire from an agricultural backwater with a minority literate populace, into an advanced industrialised state, scientific leader and economic superpower that was on par with the US for decades, a transformation that took place within a span of merely 20~30 years. Planned economies have been demonstrated to have extremely strong potential. Of course, a planned economy is only as good as its planning, and humans are fallible; we have yet to work out a solution to that particular issue.
The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US. They managed to be relatively competitive in some endeavours by concentrated massive percentages of their national people and resources on certain endeavours (industrialization, space, the military), often with brutal violence. The US was militarily competitive, often with more advanced equipment, at a fraction the economic resources - and did it at the same time as having one of the highest living standards in the world (and often had the positive results of military tech bleeding into the civilian sector, like computers).
Magnitogorsk, a massive soviet city built around a steel mill, was essentially built with American expertise (this whole documentary is extremely fascinating on how central planning got to sophisticated and how the USSR ground to a halt): https://youtu.be/h3gwyHNo7MI?t=1023
This is not to say that any planning is bad, but having a central state trying to control everything from how many belt buckles to make down to how far cab drivers should drive each year, and you're going to become a bureaucratic nightmare. Central planning everything becomes a logarithmic planning nightmare, especially when trying to innovate at the same time. You can't plan around output of innovation because the planners are often far removed from everything. A planner would probably try and "plan" on how to breed a faster horse instead of a car, for example.
I'm reminded of an interview I once saw with Gorbachev. He was talking about how he was just promoted into the central committee, essentially the highest ring of the Soviet state. He had just made it to the top and one of his first meetings was having dealing with the issue of persistent shortages of women's panty hose. He was flabbergasted that he was at the top rung of a country that can blast people into space, but can't deal with basic consumer goods availability.
Also, many countries have industrialized just as fast without central planning, particularly several asian ones. True, then did centrally set goals and use various carrot and stick initiatives, but otherwise let the market dictate most of the rest.
> The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US
We can call it solidly #2 if you prefer, but going from a failed empire to #2 in the world is still a real achievement. To be clear, I was not making a statement on whether I think central planning is superior; I was merely contesting the claim that it can not work at scale, which I find to be clearly untrue. Whether it's inferior or not, we have an impressive example indicating that success is at least possible. I would also expect the modern era to offer a better opportunity for central planning than in the past if any nation wanted to give it another go because significantly more well-informed decisions could be made with the degree of data and instant communication we have available today. That said, I certainly wouldn't be keen to advocate for it in my own country, because I don't much like the idea of giving the state absolute control in an era with a level of surveillance the KGB could not have dreamed of.
You can't even measure it cleanly. It was so isolated and its currency wasn't even convertible, but by most measures Japan and West Germany had larger economies with far, far, far better living standards. Go to per-capita level equivalents and you'd be hard pressed to find it higher than any western developed country. Even economic basket-case countries in South America often had better living standards.
North Korea is sending things into space. You can't measure a country on its isolated accomplishments, even if they're impressive.
Many asian countries industrialised with what was essentially central planning. Not in the literal "one government decision maker" sense but via a handful of extraordinarily large mega-corporations operating as central planners themselves.
The big five chaebol in South Korea for example orchestrate more than half the economic activity in the country and that's down from what it was before the turn of the century.
Similarly Japan was heavily industrialised under the zaibatsu and they effectively ran the entire economy of Japan through the entire imperial era. It was only during the american occupation that the zaibatsu were broken up and afterwards the keiretsu would take their place as the dominant drivers and orchestrators of economic activity.
This isn't to say that central planning or extremely heavily integrated planning and operations are a good thing for an economy or remotely healthy in the long term, just that they were pretty prevalent in many major cases of rapid industrialization in asia regardless of whether they came in a socialist or capitalist flavor.
Virtually any country that achieves political stability and effective institutions experiences rapid development in the modern world with open knowledge and trade networks.
There is nothing special about central planning in that manner that a laissez-faire economy would also achieve at that low development.
That's quite a misattribution of success. The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially. The Soviet revolution, of course, ushered in a famously politically unstable era with regular, massive purges. Meanwhile, there are many relatively politically stable countries that never managed to become especially industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico.
There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks, and it was superior to both. That is a ridiculous feat, and it happened in the middle of a massive invasion that forced the relocation of huge swathes of industry to boot. The USSR was also the first to most space achievements, and it was second to develop nuclear weapons. The USSR did not just catch up to "any industrialised nation", it surpassed them all completely other than the US.
> The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially.
The Russian empire was (finally) developing industrially at the outbreak of WW1. It's industrialization was retarded by it's hanging onto serfdom (including in practice after it was technically ended) far longer than the rest Europe (that prevented people moving into cities and work in factories).
> There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks
The US sent over 400,000 trucks and jeeps to Russia (on top of building many more for itself and other allies), built out a massive navy and merchant marine, built 300,000 planes of various types (almost as much as the rest of the other allies and axis combined), supplied massive amounts of food, energy, etc and researched and built the atomic bomb (and didn't steal it). They did this while fighting a war on two fronts and maintaining a relatively good living standard (it's a fair argument to make that they weren't dealing with a direct invasion threat, though). They also had one of the best military supply chains in the world, that still persists to this day.
The superiority of the T-34 is overplayed. It was a decent tank that was good enough to build at scale, but the Sherman was more survivable and just as reliable.
The Soviet Union went to massive amounts of trouble to gloss over lend-lease aid for propaganda reasons. Russian blood absolutely won the war in Europe, but the USSR had massive amounts of help.
>industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico.
Pretty sure Mexico's GDP per capita was higher for quite a while, and their stagnation lied precisely in improper government interference that closed off the economy with protectionist policg rather than embracing free trade. Nor did these have inclusive institutions or really stable political situations.
The thing about the USSR, just like with China and India and USA is that once the economic growth sets in, their large populations compared to existing European states would obviously lead to much larger economies of scale and thus GDP growth. But of course, even given that large absolute growth, living standards never did converge with Western Europe. That speaks more to how central planning stagnated things.
This is all false, I guess you've never been to Soviet Union nor russia (that country doesn't deserve capital R). Central planning is dysfunctional at its core, ignoring subtleties of smaller parts. Also, it was historically always done in eastern Europe hand in hand with corruption, nepotism and incompetence where apparatchiks held most power due to going deepest in ass kissing and other rectal speleology hobbies, not because they were competent.
I come from one such country. After WWII, there was Austria and there was eastern bloc to compare. Austria was severely damaged and had much lower GDP than us. It took mere 40 years of open market vs centrally planned economy to see absolutely massive differences when borders reopened and people weren't shot anymore for trying to escape - we didn't have proper food in the shops ffs. Exotic fruits came few times a year, rotten or unripe. Even stuff grown in our country was often lacking completely. Any product ie electric ones, or cars were vastly subpar to western ones while massively more costly (and often design was plain stolen from the western companies).
Society as a whole made it because almost everybody had a big garden to complement everything basic missing in shops. The little meat you could buy was of worst quality, ladden with amount of toxic chemistry that wouldn't be acceptable in Bangladesh.
> The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight (Phytophthora infestans)[14] throughout Europe during the 1840s.
Vs.
> While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture.
You could've read a bit more of the article. Proximate cause != ultimate cause.
> Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some assumed that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character,[20
I truly hate how this buzzword is misused with regards to the EU. Voluntarily delegating authority is not the same as losing sovereignty. If you can un-delegate the authority at your own prerogative, you have not lost sovereignty. If the UK, for example, had genuinely lost its sovereignty, it would not have been able to voluntarily withdraw from its participation in the EU.
I would rather say that the term “sovereignty” is multifaceted. We have the concept of popular sovereignty, which means that political power emanates from the people and all other sovereignty is delegated.
However, there is also a use of the term “sovereignty” in the sense of self-determination over one's own state structure and the ability to ward off external interference. When a state transfers certain sovereign rights to the EU, this is more than just delegation. In German constitutional law, for example, this means that the transfer of such rights to the EU has constitutional status.
If there is a lawsuit before the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) that challanges an EU law or regulation, the court first examines whether the EU law in question regulates something that actually falls within the EU's area of responsibility or whether it is something over which Germany has reserved its sovereignty.
The most prominent example of such a ruling is the PSPP (Public Sector Purchase Programme) case from 2020, where the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that another ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) regarding the European Central Bank (ECB) program of purchasing government bonds is not binding in Germany because the CJEU exceed its judicial mandate and violated the sovereignty of the German Bundestag. The case was "solved" when the European Central Bank provided the Bundestag with additional documentation regarding the program and the Bundestag concluded that everything is in order.
In this decision the term "sovereignty" is explicitly used to outline the case: "In particular, these [complaints] concerned the prohibition of monetary financing of Member State budgets, the monetary policy mandate of the ECB, and a potential encroachment upon the Members States’ competences and sovereignty in budget matters."
The decision later concludes:
"This standard of review [in the ruling of the CJEU] is by no means conducive to restricting the scope of the competences conferred upon the ECB, which are limited to monetary policy. Rather, it allows the ECB to gradually expand its competences on its own authority; at the very least, it largely or completely exempts such action on the part of the ECB from judicial review. Yet for safeguarding the principle of democracy und upholding the legal bases of the European Union, it is imperative that the division of competences be respected."
> The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.
Indeed, and FSFE writes:
> The platform never aligned with our values
> a space we were never comfortable joining, yet one that was once important for reaching members of society who were not active in our preferred spaces for interaction
And then says in no unclear terms what changed:
> Since Elon Musk acquired the social network [...] the FSFE has been closely monitoring the developments of this proprietary platform
> Over time, it has become increasingly hostile, with misinformation, harassment, and hate speech more visible than ever.
> an algorithm that prioritises hatred, polarisation, and sensationalism, alongside growing privacy and data protection concerns, has led us to the decision to part ways with this platform.
You cherry-picked two words "direction and climate" from the article and criticised them for taking an ambiguous political stance, but there is nothing ambiguous about the actual announcement and they clarify their exact motivation for leaving multiple times.
The problem is that 'what changed' is hardly related to why they joined Twitter in the first place. Becoming 'increasingly hostile' and prioritising 'hatred, polarisation, and sensationalism' (more than before) doesn't really contradict or prevent you from 'reaching members of society who were not active in [y]our preferred spaces for interaction'. Like I wrote, X is still popular, there are still people you can communicate with about your mission. The original logical (and given) reason for being on X is still just as valid.
And I didn't criticise them for taking an ambiguous stance. On the contrary, I remarked they seem to be taking a rather unambiguous political stance (one opposed to that of X's new leadership). What I criticised was their not being upfront about this and instead giving explanations which don't really add up for me (for reasons restated above).
I quoted only short parts to avoid making my comment appear twice as long, but please let me know if you found the way I did so to be misleading in some way.
> The problem is that 'what changed' is hardly related to why they joined Twitter in the first place.
Does it have to be? The original calculus was "unpleasantness of using unfree software vs. benefit of reaching more people". The calculus has changed to "unpleasantness of using unfree software + unpleasantness of encountering hate speech vs. benefit of reaching more people". In other words, what used to be "1 + -1 = 0" has become "1 + -2 = -1" for the FSFE. As humans, they are free to consider other reasons than their primary mission alone when determining whether the platform is still one they find to be worthwhile to use.
> What I criticised was their not being upfront about this
I really don't get how your impression is that they are not upfront about this, and yes, I found your comment to have been quite misleading, having skimmed the comments before reading the article. The very first sentence in the article starts with "Since Elon Musk...". What part of this would you have liked them to be more upfront about?
Sort of? For an individual, there's obviously a ton of personal factors that play a role in decision-making. For an organisation with a stated mission, though, I should expect them to make their decisions based on what best aligns with said mission, or another set of priorities they're bound to follow. This is important for knowing if one should support the organisation and if their values are aligned. How can one trust an organisation which only ever claims to fight for Y, but then in practice randomly throws Z, W, and U into the mix, as they feel like it?
As I wrote, the content they criticise X for is the kind of content I recall them being much more indifferent about in the past, so seeing this come up as their main reason for leaving this platform, with no indication of any internal re-evaluation of priorities having happened, is rather out of the blue.
> The very first sentence in the article starts with "Since Elon Musk..."
… and goes on to tell us they have been monitoring it; found it increasingly hostile; that they originally joined to interact with people, promote free software and alternative networks; that the platform feeds hatred, polarisation and sensationalism and grows privacy concerns; and finally that they're leaving.
> What part of this would you have liked them to be more upfront about?
What they suddenly have a problem with and why. As I said, what they actually wrote doesn't add up to this for me. Hostile environment, misinformation, harassment? They didn't seem to care much or see it as hindering their mission before. Hatred, polarisation, sensationalism? Same thing, and it doesn't necessarily hinder their activity on the network. Data protection, privacy concerns? The network has always been non-free, for-profit and centralised. Interacting with people and promoting free software? You literally can still do that.
They say why they originally came, but those reasons are still valid today. They say what they dislike about their platform, but it's either irrelevant to their mission or they haven't disliked it so much before. So what they say does not explain their decision. It doesn't explain the logic behind it. Trying to use it as an explanation doesn't really make sense with their supposed mission.
I can only guess the actual logic is more like 'we have other values we care about more now, which the platform now goes against, and in our current political climate we want to more noticeably stand at the "right side" and gain favour with our primary audience over there'. This, for example, could be a sensible explanation. But they chose not to give one.
Apparently, controlling what people are allowed to say "in the name of good" aligns with the FSFE's values. I know enough history to know what that means.
As far as I can tell, there was no actual low-level optimization being done. In fact, it appears they did not even think to benchmark before committing to 130gb of bloat.
Further good news: the change in the file size will result in minimal changes to load times - seconds at most. “Wait a minute,” I hear you ask - “didn’t you just tell us all that you duplicate data because the loading times on HDDs could be 10 times worse?”. I am pleased to say that our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.
This reads to me as "we did a google search about HDD loading times and built our game's infrastructure around some random Reddit post without reasoning about or benchmarking our own codebase at any point, ever".
LLMs will never get good enough that no one can tell the difference, because the technology is fundamentally incapable of it, nor will it ever completely disappear, because the technology has real use cases that can be run at a massive profit.
Since LLMs are here to stay, what we actually need is for humans to get better at recognising LLM slop, and stop allowing our communication spaces to be rotted by slop articles and slop comments. It's weird that people find this concept objectional. It was historically a given that if a spambot posted a copy-pasted message, the comment would be flagged and removed. Now the spambot comments are randomly generated, and we're okay with it because it appears vaguely-but-not-actually-human-like. That conversations are devolving into this is actually the failure of HN moderation for allowing spambots to proliferate unscathed, rather than the users calling out the most blatantly obvious cases.
Do you think the original comment posted by quapster was "slop" equivalent to a copy-paste spam bot?
The only spam I see in this chain is the flagged post by electric_muse.
It's actually kind of ironic you bring up copy-paste spam bots. Because people fucking love to copy-paste "ai slop" on every comment and article that uses any punctuation rarer than a period.
> Do you think the original comment posted by quapster was "slop" equivalent to a copy-paste spam bot?
Yes: the original comment is unequivocally slop that genuinely gives me a headache to read.
It's not just "using any punctuation rarer than a period": it's the overuse and misuse of punctuation that serves as a tell.
Humans don't needlessly use a colon in every single sentence they write: abusing punctuation like this is actually really fucking irritating.
Of course, it goes beyond the punctuation: there is zero substance to the actual output, either.
> What's wild is that nothing here is exotic: subdomain enumeration, unauthenticated API, over-privileged token, minified JS leaking internals.
> Least privilege, token scoping, and proper isolation are friction in the sales process, so they get bolted on later, if at all.
This stupid pattern of LLMs listing off jargon like they're buzzwords does not add to the conversation. Perhaps the usage of jargon lulls people into a false sense of believing that what is being said is deeply meaningful and intelligent. It is not. It is rot for your brain.
"it's not just x, it's y" is an ai pattern and you just said:
>"It's not just "using any punctuation rarer than a period": it's the overuse and misuse of punctuation that serves as a tell."
So, I'm actually pretty sure you're just copy-pasting my comments into chatgpt to generate troll-slop replies, and I'd rather not converse with obvious ai slop.
Congratulations, you successfully picked up on a pattern when I was intentionally mimicking the tone of the original spambot content to point out how annoying it was. Why are you incapable of doing this with the original spambot comment?
The funniest part to me is that I suspect the LLM generated the line about the 4th of July, and the suspected prompter being British, felt the need to insert an explanation for why "they" would reference it, in a voice/cadence that doesn't really match the rest of the article:
> "Confetti, fireworks, the whole 4th of July experience (I've seen it only in movies though, not sure why but it's not celebrated in the UK)"
I can't definitively say this is LLM-generated, but it resembled it enough so that I still came away annoyed for having read it.
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