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Comment replication (Score 1) 187

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 Long Road (Score 1) 61

JPEG-XL is a good format but I just realized yesterday that Google Docs on Android doesn't support inserting a webp image a decade after Google was pushing it. I had one from a website and needed to run it through imagemagick first.

Android supports it, all the apps using android image primitives supoort it, but one of Google's flagship apps still doesn't.

We used move much faster thirty years ago. If an app supported say GIF, PNM, and TGA when JPEG came out it was supported in the next release.

Hopefully this round will be better. It's probably a management problem ... maybe they will listen to their chatbot since they don't listen to their engineers.

Comment Re:I hope they realize people hate slop (Score 1) 79

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) 79

*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 Quick question (Score 1) 45

[Fundamental physics has never been more dead] As Sabine Hossenfelder accurately observed in her latest video

Quoting Sabine Hossenfelder as anything just outs you as anti-science.

Quick question: Is she wrong?

The previous post made a point, which you totally sidestepped.

I have no opinion on Sabing Hossenfelder either way, but I get the impression that physics has largely stalled over the last few decades.

So... I'm just wondering, Is she wrong?

Comment Re:Aux port - how could it even technically pause? (Score 1) 47

I don't know the protocol but old phone headsets had a 2.5 or 3.5mm jack with an extra ring that got you play/pause/hook/next/last.

Hypothetically that could have been implemented. I had a collection of Alexas that got binned as soon as they got caught spying for police so I never got that far. ESP32 is better for nerds anyway.

One thing Australia does right is a statute naming removal of features as a violation of contract requiring full refunds in these circumstances.

Comment Re: Aux port - how could it even technically pause (Score 1) 47

Exactly.

users can no longer ask Alexa to play or pause audio coming through the wired connection

That line is clearly considering the 3.5mm jack as an "input" rather than an output - "...audio coming through the wired connection"

There were various Amazon devices with 3.55mm jacks - some were output only, some were input only, others could have their port either be an input or an output.

Source: https://www.amazonforum.com/s/...

Comment Re:Paywalled AI Marketing (Score 2) 78

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) 78

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) 54

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 There's different types of video (Score 3, Interesting) 90

Teslas, BMW's, Rivian, and Mercedes have cameras all around the vehicle that are always on, and if a security incident is detected they will save the video from a few minutes before the incident to right after the incident.

A quick search shows that Tesla theft (by example) is 90% to 99% lower than the national average, and I assume the other types are similar.

People do not stop stealing cars because of cameras. But I guess Flock is desperate for some good press, so we get propaganda lies now.

People do not steal cars because of *flock* cameras, they are always on, and the data is available to law enforcement with no oversight.

Personal vehicles save video locally, and it's only used when an actual crime is committed.

I'm in favor of public surveillance that's kept local to whichever user, in the manner of a ring doorbell video (if that were kept local, which it is not). It prevents crime without violating rights - the burglar shouldn't have been on the property to begin with.

This leads to an interesting thought. Flock is a company that keeps videos across the country and tracks vehicles, and soon to include facial recognition. Flock cameras would be entirely acceptable if the video were "owned" by someone local to the actual camera, so that police would have to query the owner to get a video.

I'm not sure who the "owner" would be in this case, but hypothetically if the camera were on the telephone pole outside of a house, if we consider the video owned by the property owner then the possibility of a rights violation would go down precipitously.

Just a thought, and an under-developed one.

We need new ideas to help solve new problems, here is one to chew on.

Comment Re: And if we had a spine we'd have voted for (Score 1, Insightful) 53

Kamala Harris because she would sure have enforced antitrust laws to save us all from the evil billionaires.

Exactly who do you think donated to her (literal) billion-dollar plus campaign? Oh, right, it was the retired teachers and widowers that donated hundreds of times a day they Act Blue, purely grass-roots, bottom-up campaign financing, no billionaires... LOL

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