Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Microsoft is trying to make Xbox into Windows: Where 3rd parties make the hardware and then license the platform from Microsoft. It’s a vastly more profitable model. Especially if they get all those end users signed up for a subscription service.

    The problem is that the world thinks of “Xbox” as a console (and a specific kind of controller). To pull this off Microsoft is going to have to re-brand Xbox entirely by making people think of it more like a game-specific app store that runs on Windows and special handheld hardware. It won’t be easy.

    There’s a bigger problem with this plan though: No real coordination with the Windows OS team. Windows on handhelds sucks. The past twenty fucking years of Windows development has been almost entirely focused on improving enterprise features with very little attention paid to end users or gaming.

    Growth in Windows gaming has come despite Microsoft’s investments. Not because of them. In fact, I’d argue that if it weren’t for Steam, Windows—as a gaming platform—would be a fraction of what it is today.

    Don’t get me wrong, though! I love this new Xbox roadmap! Windows gaming has been holding back Linux desktop adoption for far too long. The latest benchmarks that show games on SteamOS vastly outperforming the new Xbox-branded handhelds pretty clearly demonstrates all that bashing of Windows by Linux nerds was deeply accurate.

    It turns out that Linux on the desktop really is superior! 🤣




  • Riskable@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.worldTeachers Are Not OK
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    13 days ago

    Correction: Education is not OK.

    AI is just giving poor kids the same opportunities rich kids have had for decades. Opportunities for cheating the system that was made specifically not to give students the best education possible but instead to bring them up to speed on the bare minimum required to become factory workers.

    Except we don’t have very many factories any more. And we don’t have jobs for all these graduates that pay a living wage.

    The banks are going to have to get involved soon. They’re going to have to figure out a way to load up working-age people with long term debt without college being involved.



  • Mods on Xbox only exist for games where the game itself officially added mod support. I mean, sure it’s great when a game maker does that but usually it’s not as good as community-made mod support because community mods don’t require approval and can’t get censored/removed because the vendor doesn’t like it.

    Remember: Microsoft’s vision of mods is what you get with the Bedrock version of Minecraft. Yet the mods available in the Java version are so vastly superior the difference is like night and day.

    Console players—that are used to living without mods—don’t understand. Once mods become a regular thing that you expect in popular games going without them feels like going back into the dark ages.



  • To be fair, the world of JavaScript is such a clusterfuck… Can you really blame the LLM for needing constant reminders about the specifics of your project?

    When a programming language has five hundred bazillion absolutely terrible ways of accomplishing a given thing—and endless absolutely awful code examples on the Internet to “learn from”—you’re just asking for trouble. Not just from trying to get an LLM to produce what you want but also trying to get humans to do it.

    This is why LLMs are so fucking good at writing rust and Python: There’s only so many ways to do a thing and the larger community pretty much always uses the same solutions.

    JavaScript? How can it even keep up? You’re using yarn today but in a year you’ll probably like, “fuuuuck this code is garbage… I need to convert this all to [new thing].”




  • I’m not convinced that humans don’t reason in a similar fashion. When I’m asked to produce pointless bullshit at work my brain puts in a similar level of reasoning to an LLM.

    Think about “normal” programming: An experienced developer (that’s self-trained on dozens of enterprise code bases) doesn’t have to think much at all about 90% of what they’re coding. It’s all bog standard bullshit so they end up copying and pasting from previous work, Stack Overflow, etc because it’s nothing special.

    The remaining 10% is “the hard stuff”. They have to read documentation, search the Internet, and then—after all that effort to avoid having to think—they sigh and start actually start thinking in order to program the thing they need.

    LLMs go through similar motions behind the scenes! Probably because they were created by software developers but they still fail at that last 90%: The stuff that requires actual thinking.

    Eventually someone is going to figure out how to auto-generate LoRAs based on test cases combined with trial and error that then get used by the AI model to improve itself and that is when people are going to be like, “Oh shit! Maybe AGI really is imminent!” But again, they’ll be wrong.

    AGI won’t happen until AI models get good at retraining themselves with something better than basic reinforcement learning. In order for that to happen you need the working memory of the model to be nearly as big as the hardware that was used to train it. That, and loads and loads of spare matrix math processors ready to go for handing that retraining.