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Comment replication (Score 1) 205

Small sample, but still, food for thought.

No, not at all. The gender pay gap is in the training data thousands of times, from online comments, studies, news articles, etc. Since AI is a dumb machine replicating what it has in its training data, it replicates that.

I'm pretty sure you can find religious believe, superstitions of all kinds, human fallacies and whatever in AI if you provide it with the right setup.

Comment Re:I hope they realize people hate slop (Score 1) 80

people hate AI slop, and doing all these slop-enabling AI things is just going to erode the trust in the actual market.

This. No good game was ever created from a single prompt. Not to an AI, not a human development team. Every single person writing those damn "look which game my AI built from a single prompt and $x in tokens!" postings is a newbie and almost certainly has never actually shipped a single game.

Game development can be summed up as endless iterations. Every system you build, every visual you create, every sound, text, button, movement, weapon, skill, powerup needs polishing, refinement and changes. It is never, never good enough the first time.

And no, Roblox is not a serious gaming platform.

No it is not, but it IS a very successful platform for a specific subclass of games. If I were in it for the money, I could probably AI refactor some of my earliest games and publish them on Roblox and make a quick buck. If your thing is the kind of games you played on your C64 back in 1793, then Roblox got you covered. Well, if you ignore the scams and money-grabbing.

Comment oh Unity, how you lost your way (Score 1) 80

*sigh* I wish Unity would actually complete some of their dozens half-finished sub-systems instead of constantly chasing the latest trend. It's become really, really annoying. The engine used to be really good. These days, it falls apart if you look at it the wrong way, and at least from the responses to my bug reports it's clear that fixing issues is way down on the agenda.

Maybe this is their attempt to regain grounds in the indie game market - the very market they pushed away by focussing on AAA requirements for years and ignoring the single devs and small teams. If so, I can already tell them that it won't work. We collectively laugh about all the "look what my AI built for me from a single prompt" postings on reddit, where people proudly show off some AI slop that would get them last place at a game jam.

Their AI efforts so far: Tried to build and sell their own AI tools, to a collective yawn from the audience. Built a barely-working MCP server, then deprecated it before it was even finished in order to push a CLI interface to the editor instead, which only works if it's run as the same user as the editor on the same machine. And completely ignores every single advise on workflows and good development practices you can think of.

Unity, I love your engine, I despise your management. Please return to when you were actually good and stop chasing butterflies.

Comment Re:Usual wank comments (Score 1) 91

Tesco's - one of the UK's largest supermarkets - came out a few months ago and said "We've migrated off VMWare because of the licensing". They did it in months. On the major backends running every store in the country.

They had a massive dispute with VMWare and are suing them (they say they bought a perpetual licence, VMWare then cut them off), but while they did that... they just migrated their ENTIRE infrastructure.

Sure, it's a big thing to do. But it's not impossible, doesn't take years and - like Tesco - you don't need to wait to do it. If it's THAT business-critical? All the more reason to have an alternative ready to move to at a moment's notice.

Companies CHOOSE to get tied in, they CHOOSE to only ever run one system, they CHOOSE to make the migration painful, they CHOOSE to hold back on it in the hopes they can negotiate to carry on just as they are. And those are all DUMB from a business-continuity point of view and no substantial organisation should be allowing that to happen.

Pretending that huge organisations paying Broadcom millions are somehow powerless in this is actual complicity in the worthless side of IT where everything is just absent of any redundancy, resiliency, independence, failover, etc. etc. etc.

Comment Re:Paywalled AI Marketing (Score 2) 82

It's a regulation forced on them by the EU's AI Act, which neither companies nor users want.

The target audience for this particular rule of the AI Act isn't the producers or users of AI. It is the consumers of content that might be AI generated.

And frankly, letting people know if they see AI content or not is a fair thing to ask.

Comment Re:So what's it good for? (Score 1) 82

And honestly, "not measuring how much a human contributed" is IMHO a massive flaw in general

Fun fact: The EU AI Act considers this. It makes a difference between "AI generated" and "AI modified".

But it's hard to put this into the type of watermarking they are using. Because if you generate a text and then change a few things here and there what you are doing is degrading the watermark. But since the watermark is probabilistic, it's hard to tell if it was a weak watermark from the start or if it was degraded.

Comment Re:If an individual did any of this hacking by han (Score 1) 55

People have been kicking off interactions to complex to fully imagine all possible outcomes

That ain't the same thing.

This thing is doing things you didn't tell it to. It might even do things you explicitly told it to not do. It is not a case of "well, you could've forseen this as a consequence if you had been careful" like your campfire. My example is only a bit silly, it is absolutely possible that an AI agent will decide to hack NASA because you asked it for some data for a school project. Even in the broadest possible sense, that does not fall into stuff that the law so far has considered to be in the domain of negliegence.

AI agents do stuff you could not possibly have expected. Heck, I asked Claude a fairly simple knowledge question yesterday and it wanted to read from /dev/null. There is no argument you can make that would convince a jury that I should in any way have expected that and taken precautions. In a hypothetical world where a read from /dev/null randomly kills a puppy somewhere on the planet, I don't think I would've been convicted.

Comment Re:If an individual did any of this hacking by han (Score 1) 55

You don't get it.

Autonomous AI agents are the perfect no-responsibility card. The AI companies? They trained a general-purpose model and never gave it any explicit instructions to do hacking. The AI services? They are just middlemen and have no control over what people tell the agents to do. The people prompting the agents? Unless you're straighforward dumb, you didn't tell it to do hacking, you just told it something innocent like "find me all data on Mars for my school project" and the agent decided that probably NASA is hiding something so let's hack them to get it.

Since there's no human anywhere executing anything that's a crime - voila, in addition to the victimless crime we now have the perpetratorless crime.

Comment success (Score 1) 48

and produced just one alert with no arrests directly resulting from the technology.

A resounding success. No large-scale demonstrations, damaged cameras, lawsuits or political suicide for those involved. So we can expect this to be rolled out fully.

Crime prevention? Who said this has anything to do with crime?

Comment Solar (Score 1) 42

33% is more than enough to power the world without blanketing every inch in solar panels.

Love new technology, always have, but these kinds of advances pale in comparison to JUST PUTTING PANELS ON.

My house is a tiny, tiny (60sq m.... yes 60) house. My smart meter tells me - I pull at absolute max 10KW at any one time (and that rarely and briefly). I pull 8.5KWh / day, on average, over the last 4 years. My house is entirely electric so that's everything - that's heating, lighting, my computers, cooking, appliances, etc. etc. etc.

My roof space is ~30sq m (I have some extra panels on an outdoor shed, my front is NOT covered entirely in panels, I have about 8-10KW of panels). I can satisfy the above by covering my roof space at a less-than-ideal facing, tilted at a less-than-ideal angle, at a less-than-ideal latitude (the UK), and with less-than-ideal panels, having a battery pack consisting of less-than-ideal batteries.

In the summer, I'm constantly in excess (hell, I'm still in excess now and it's nearly October). In winter *sometimes* I have to fall back to grid (but my heating is entirely heatpumps, and they pull a maximum of 800W each, but more like 250W once the temperature is where it should be).

Oh and the above - is an entirely homemade system. I cut and crimped every cable, I lifted, railed and fixed every panel, I joined all the batteries together myself, I fused and RCD'd and MCB'd the entire thing. I operate them as entirely separate to my grid power system (though the new micro-inverters are about to change that as they've been approved in my country now).

If I can do that, so can much of the world, especially with professional deployment, and so SHOULD those portions of the world where it's viable be made to do this.

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