flippant tone aside, this is a thing that actually happened!
not just after they release, but they would definitely show "abridged" versions of movies on daytime TV, with a little bit trimmed off to open up some space for commercials etc
Before the streaming boom I would've gone through the ripping and having a library to maintain, but after streaming I feel stuffed and don't care anymore. Nothing that is being made now or for the last couple of years I care about. You destroyed and watered down every IP and you're back to your dirty tricks again. It's too bad, but for a while there was peace.
Me personally, I've moved on with my life.
Every time IBM's name gets mentioned the FAANG-bangers bring up the Holocaust and with good reason. But the more that comes out, the more we see just how dirty and evil modern big tech as a whole is. It's just the tip of the iceberg.
How naive is everyone thinking that businesses are benevolent and really care about some cause? Maybe a private firm can make more conscious decisions, but the reality is the market puts pressure on everyone's behavior.
Business's sole purpose is to make money. Everything else is window dressing.
I hate the fact that Xbox One killed Xbox's momentum so much that people are dismissing or not recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud gaming. This is a transitional generation, but Xbox is positioned a lot better than most people seem to understand if they only travel in the areas where console wars is the religion of the day again.
I've been replaying Halo 1 & 2 again and just remembering the infancy of console online gaming and how fun it was as compared today were its either absolute silence or mute worthy trash.
> recognizing some of the things that Xbox has going for it right now with Xbox GamePass and cloud gaming
Or they don't recognize them as inherently good things. Game pass has potentially cannibalized "real" game sales on the platform and primed its userbase to "just wait for it to come to gamepass"; with the gamepass honeymoon developer deals drying up, this has had dire implications for third party support going forward. Xcloud has been a mixed bag - you can find countless reports of it lagging behind PS cloud streaming and various PC cloud gaming vendors in performance (latency) and image quality (though I personally haven't seen much difference between most of them).
For a lot of us, the current generation Xbox platform has been doing everything just as bad or even worse than it was with the Xbox One - they've stopped iterating on backwards compatibility, they've pushed Gamepass above all, and they've spent unbelievable amounts of money on M&A instead of building up their own existing studios and releasing more new original exclusive games. The quality of some of their major trumpeted releases has also been incredibly suspect, despite repeated claims of high quality from their internal tastemakers before release.
The dumb social media console war stuff has unfortunately gotten in the way of some important self-review and introspection that the Xbox team should be doing. As a longtime Xbox fan, it has been tremendously disappointing to see.
The Xbox team have just had terrible leadership choices.
The One was a miss from the beginning , trying to be more than a gaming console and falling short on all fronts. The name didn’t help either.
Then they picked an even worse name for the Series X and and Series S. while implementing a necessity for parity. confusing the market and holding back devs.
The 360 was effectively a flash in the pan IMHO, helped by a significant misstep on Sony’s part with the PS3 design, and Nintendo moving to create their own market with the Wii that effectively made it a companion console rather than a competing one.
With the One they also made the mistake of trying to permanently tie discs to consoles in an attempt to destroy the used game market for the console, which got leaked pretty early on and led to Microsoft and the Xbox brand taking a massive reputation hit, even though they quickly backtracked. For that generation, a lot of people who would’ve otherwise bought Xboxes instead bought PS4s out of principle.
That E3 was crazy. Anyone remember the video that Sony posted on "how to share games with friends" while the Xbox debacle on locked discs and always online was in full force? (it was literally a guy giving a game disc to another guy)
This is why I am still against the MS acquisitions. Imagine that whole debacle happening but you're still forced to buy an anti consumer console, because God forbid you like to play CoD, Fallout, Starfield...
Cue defenders “but it's only once and then it works offline!!” like that will make a difference in the far future once the activation system is dead and gone.
How does that make it okay? You're basically buying an external Blu-ray disc drive for the PS5. Why does it require Sony's permission to hook up and use if you've bought it? This is just another way modern companies are encroaching on our rights, it's literally online DRM for a peripheral. Imagine if you needed online activation to be able to use a new controller you buy. It'd be just as absurd as this.
a controller isn’t part of the security verification chain, and again, it’s disingenuous to compare the two because they happen at a significantly different frequency level.
The more salient comparison for “why” is look at PC games. Even if you buy a physical copy, most require you to authenticate them online.
Sony chose instead to do a one time drive authentication so you don’t need to authenticate every game online instead.
That's not true. PS5 Slims which are bundled with a disc drive still require online activation to use the disc drive. It's not just for those who bought a digital model and want to buy the disc drive later.
This puts them in the same boat as the retail Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles, which require an internet connection during first time setup.
It all goes back to Microsoft not naming the 360 "Xbox 3" with some lame excuse for why it did so. Yes, everyone would have laughed, but no one would remember or care today that the "Xbox 5" isn't actually the fifth Xbox.
Though at the time we joked they just needed a triangle based word in the name for the follow up and they'll have all the main PS buttons covered in the title.
It's funny that you should note that they are doing positive things in a transitional era, only to finish off by noting that you are playing decades-old games on their hardware.
While I am a fan of GamePass, and I own two XBox One consoles, I have no desire to own a Series console or the forthcoming refresh. Everything I want to play I can play on the One or via Cloud; but more importantly: the difficulty of discovering compelling experiences in this era of XBox is too damn high.
There are too many straight-up _bad_ indie games swamping GamePass, and too many B and AAA quality games that are phoning it in.
Any game developer could have told them early on that Kinect was next-to-useless, despite the technology being interesting.
Even operating simple menus was problematic. You could point, but had no buttons to click. It was never going to work beyond a few niche cases (dance games and simple minigames).
It's not that people are not recognizing the good things about it. There's this underlying theory that we had one chance at a digital game library. The PS3 and Xbox 360 were way too early for people to get attached to their digital purchases; after all, few large titles released digitally day and date with their disc versions. So people bought a few indie titles digitally, but they still had a big disc library.
But the PS4 generation was the digital generation. The majority of sales were digital then (probably not dollars-wise, but certainly units-wise). So the theory goes that people have this large lock-in with PS4, which leads to them directly going to the PS5 without looking at the distinguished competition's offerings.
I went full streaming in 2007 and I always knew that it would become this. So I made a rule that when Netflix got ads I'd bail on streaming altogether. I've been digital only for video games for a few generations so just picked a video ecosystem and buy content when it's at its cheapest. I'm not playing this game where my collection requires extra time and maintenance. If a company takes a license away then the won't get anymore money from me. There are a few video game companies that will never get money from me ever again. They need my money more than I need to give it to them.
One non tech sales job I worked when the Regional Manager was someone that drove sports cars then the managers below all went out and bought sports cars. When the Regional Manager got promoted and was replaced by someone who drove an electric car they all went out and bought electric cars.
Getting promotions is rarely about the work, they can always find ten idiots like me to do the work.
The jokes on them. The generations are getting smaller and smaller. The lack of junior roles is making that pool even smaller. A giant bubble is forming. They spent the last 5 years talking about diversity and how great it is and how it makes better teams. Now every job is 5+ YOE. Do as I say, not as I do tech.
Even as an experienced engineer the sheer amount of knowledge you get access to from a single prompt without having to read any tutorial or book can change a Junior into Senior very quickly.
I just hope it wont face the same issue google had:
- starting with good answers and evolving into mud
For now, my feelings are that AI can be really helpful if you know the field. You need to be senior to know how to ask things and to understand the answers.
For anyone not understanding the domain, AI is just a glorified stack overflow but with hallucinations.
Hallucinations can be fought but you need to suggest that you got the wrong answer and why. And that requires a deep understanding of the domain.
Honestly I’m really frightened that we collectively accept that AI is an acceptable source of truth and that it’s ok to make decisions from its output or worse, use it as a learning material.
You don't get anywhere faster "learning" from something that lies to you 20% of the time.
It's a bit like working with a bad colleague who is very fast, but very arrogant. You can't trust what they say because they're wrong often enough to make costly mistakes common. But you can't fight them on every little thing, either. The only solution is to already be an expert, and ignore them when they're wrong.
I honestly believe AI -- if it has a dramatic impact at all -- will only reduce the value of junior employees.
My entire formal education and subsequent career stands in opposition to this statement. Unless you mean that learning requires being lied to more than 20% of the time.
That sounds like exaggeration to me, in service of a bias against "formal education". But OK. YMMV.
My statement applies only to the experience of working with the things, and relates not at all to "formal education". If I have to learn the subject to debug what they're putting out, then the rate-limiting step of using them is...learning the subject. Same as it ever was.
Having a stochastic parrot spit a stream of 20% nonsense at me doesn't make learning go faster -- it definitely does make work go faster if I'm already an expert, however.
I actually think the time I spent in school was valuable and that formal education gets a bad rap around here. I believe that my teachers all had good intentions. But they weren't always right. In my experience nobody is right 80% of the time.
I'm skeptical of the AI hype but I do believe there is value. Similar to self driving cars an AI assistant or teacher doesn't have to be right all the time, it only has to be right more often. Proper use of this tool will require skillbuilding like anything else.
Oh, I'm not saying there's no value, just that I don't think the value is nearly the magnitude being hyped, and certainly not for the "speeding up the junior to senior transition" posited by the comment at the top of the thread. And sure, every teacher is wrong at some rate -- but the way we deal with that is by thinking for ourselves, asking lots of teachers, working out the differences, etc. This inherently takes time.
Pick some domain that you know nothing about, and ask a transformer model to solve a known problem in the space. It will give you a reply. Is the reply correct? Assuming that you even know how to ask the right question to get a sensible answer (which itself requires expertise), assessing the quality of the answer certainly requires expertise that you don't have. So either you figure it out for yourself (as slow as learning from any other source), or you take it on blind faith.
If I had to wager on the area where I think these models are going to lead to big changes, it's reading and summarization, not generation. "Describe how node deletion in b-trees works in 500 words" is a heck of a lot more useful than asking a transformer to write code to implement node deletion in a b-tree.
I can't really speak for previous posts, but I've personally seen a huge uptick in how fast I can move through material using LLMs - not because I'm asking them how things work or to explain things to me, but because they remove the slog of memorizing ancillary boilerplate and help me find the terms I need to search the docs for.
These are very specific things that you can't get as efficiently elsewhere. Essentially, it's not so much about the language model outputting information that I can understand, but more about the language model being able to parse MY queries and respond with something that's kinda good-enough.
Say you're looking at a chunk of code you didn't write, and you want to know what function foo_man_chu() is doing. You could go straight to the documentation for that function, but in many cases it's interacting with a bunch of other systems that are documented elsewhere, and not referenced in that material. If you ask GPT to explain it to you, it pops out a (reliable enough) list of things to RTFM on. This takes what could be a couple hours deep-reading through stack / google and distills it down to like ten minutes.
This effect is magnified the less you know about the domain, if you do it right.
Multiply that by the amount of times you have to do this in the course of teaching yourself something and it adds up quite a bit. This may be what the parent is talking about.
AI won't be as impactful in generating good results (though it may result in middle management firing devs/admins since they think they're easily replaceable).
As an example, I asked claude.ai to generate an ansible playbook for patching a Docker cluster. It created one, something I'd expect a junior admin to be able to whip up pretty easily. Then I noticed something funky. The playbook was OS agnostic, just using some where clauses to handle debian, RHEL, etc. Nice stuff, but wrong. One of the tasks was to clean the cache after apply updates. The AI got apt correct (autoclean), but assumed incorrectly that yum had the same parameter. Just a small detail that would have shown up when the playbook was run, but when it can't handle the small details, why bother?
It wrote a template that passed a playbook linter. Whether any of the tasks were actually correct is highly questionable. I caught the errors because I have lots of experience. Maybe we need an AI to double check the work of the first AI?
Not to derail the thread, but its really not that simple. People are subject to their own biases and knowledge gaps. Long form responses do not fix either of those issues though they might help with the latter. If it really upskilled everyone that cleanly its effect on roles would've happened by now.
I've noticed a lot of people frankly do not have the natural "context length" needed to really take advantage of AI and there are those that are really benefitting from it, but they're in the smallest minority.
Man, comment was greyed between reading and clicking reply - I get that the back-and-forth over AI is a thing but if you're gonna respond negatively to an arguable point based on a topic with this much nuance, at least respond with words as well as downvotes. ANYWAY...
...It's that very google issue that convinces me the most important thing we can do is build towards locally runnable LLMs. There's no reason we can't eventually get to gpt4-or-better on consumer hardware, it's just going to take some time and research and we're gonna have to dodge the incessant ladder-pulls that the big dogs keep lobbying for ("AI is dangerous! Only we can be trusted(tm)!").
You can't enshittify an application I own, that's running on my hardware. Not with the current state of things, at least.
The greenest car is keeping the car you have for as long as possible. Then replacing it with a used car. You could even get a bumper sticker that says "Rescue Driver" or "Who saved Who?" with a icon of a car if it would make you feel superior to the rest of the drivers on the road.
