While I’m not against an anonymous stand for what’s “right”, that really was the tipping point for a lot of changes on 4chan.

It really fuelled the idea that anonymous should have some sort of goal of justice rather than just doing things “for the lulz”. It normalized the concept of shamelessly bringing your internet culture of choice out into the real world regardless of appropriateness (most of the protests were really just 4chan irl meetups, not really protests).

The biggest change was the sheer amount of public attention it drew to the site. That brought in a huge influx of new users who didn’t care to conform to the existing board culture (for better or worse). Things changed considerably following all that mess.

Wow.

They clearly care more about propety damage than people. Here’s an aside on why property damage in America is often damage to people (local business owners). But they totally only care about property.

My guy, there are significant, demonstrable, and studied long term negative effects on communities (problems that directly effect the people living there) due to property damage from protests. You’re right that it stems from a lack of support structures, but that cause doesn’t change the bad it does to communities and the people in them. It disproportianately effects the poor as well, as those with the means tend to flee areas where propery destruction/rioting/looting occured, which takes money out of the local area, which snowballs until a once thriving community is now a food desert with no businesses or services available for the residents.

Yeah, fuck the big businesses. Fuck the 1%. But don’t cut off vital services from a community by driving all of them out. Go make an actual statement and go after the owners. Go after the HQs. Go to the executives’ and politicians’ homes and where they actually work and spend time.

See how quick the police respond to people destroying inner city businesses vs a peaceful crowd in the street in front of Maxine Water’s house, and then tell me which is more important to the rich (and therefore far less damaging to the poor).

If you’re going to risk getting riot equipment used on you, pick more valuable fucking targets.

Does homeboy not know about crabcakes? All the taste, none of the pain in the ass and paying for the privilege of preparing your own food. Just get them somewhere that doesn’t use filler.

Solarwinds Orion

We don’t curse in this household.

Anyway, guessing it’s the classic “sales sold the demo of a perfectly configured setup maintained by a dedicated team, management expects you to make that happen alone on top of everything else you already do” situation? Multiple years into cleaning up the mess of that shit at my place.

That’s a combination of too simple/short in your sentences, mixed with too specific jargon with no clarification. It’s dumb as hell that people don’t know stuff like what a server is, but if they don’t you have to abstract it more.

My go to is some form of: I’m in IT, I do systems administration. I help keep all the things behind the scenes working so that everyone’s stuff works at my workplace. Less of making your email work, more of making everyone’s email work.

Obviously I work with a hell of a lot more than just email. I’m mostly scripting out custom automation jobs to bridge gaps in the integrations between different systems. But like you said, keep it simple.

So for those not familar with machine learning, which was the practical business use case for “AI” before LLMs took the world by storm, that is what they are describing as reinforcement learning. Both are valid terms for it.

It’s how you can make an AI that plays Mario Kart. You establish goals that grant points, stuff to avoid that loses points, and what actions it can take each “step”. Then you give it the first frame of a Mario Kart race, have it try literally every input it can put in that frame, then evaluate the change in points that results. You branch out from that collection of “frame 2s” and do the same thing again and again, checking more and more possible future states.

At some point you use certain rules to eliminate certain branches on this tree of potential future states, like discarding branches where it’s driving backwards. That way you can start opptimizing towards the options at any given time that get the most points im the end. Keep the amount of options being evaluated to an amount you can push through your hardware.

Eventually you try enough things enough times that you can pretty consistently use the data you gathered to make the best choice on any given frame.

The jank comes from how the points are configured. Like AI for a delivery robot could prioritize jumping off balconies if it prioritizes speed over self preservation.

Some of these pitfalls are easy to create rules around for training. Others are far more subtle and difficult to work around.

Some people in the video game TAS community (custom building a frame by frame list of the inputs needed to beat a game as fast as possible, human limits be damned) are already using this in limited capacities to automate testing approaches to particularly challenging sections of gameplay.

So it ends up coming down to complexity. Making an AI to play Pacman is relatively simple. There are only 4 options every step, the direction the joystick is held. So you have 4ⁿ states to keep track of, where n is the number of steps forward you want to look.

Trying to do that with language, and arguing that you can get reliable results with any kind of consistency, is blowing smoke. They can’t even clearly state what outcomes they are optimizing for with their “reward” function. God only knows what edge cases they’ve overlooked.

My complete out of my ass guess is that they did some analysis on response to previous gpt output, tried to distinguish between positive and negative responses (or at least distinguish against responses indicating that it was incorrect). They then used that as some sort of positive/negative points heuristic.

People have been speculating for a while that you could do that, crank up the “randomness”, have it generate multiple responses behind the scenes and then pit those “pre-responses” against each other and use that criteria to choose the best option of the “pre-responses”. They could even A/B test the responses over multiple users, and use the user responses as further “positive/negative points” reinforcement to feed back into it in a giant loop.

Again, completely pulled from my ass. Take with a boulder of salt.

Most people don’t want their kids eating slop all the time.

Beyond that Minecraft is a considerably old game now, especially if you got into it in the very early days. It shouldn’t be surprising that there are older people paying attention to this.

I was in notch’s old threads on /v/ in the very beginning back as a young teen (yes 4chan, I was totally 18 years old, pinky swear). I’m in my 30s and have a kid now who is too young to play, but I will probably introduce her at an appropriate age if she likes computer games.

I’m not raging or anything, but I’m definitely paying attention enough to know if this movie is garbage to steer my kid away from in the future.

I would hope, but I’ve been burned enough to not assume big companies are doing things the sensible way.

This is a common thing in online discourse, and reviews. People aren’t usually going around posting “Yet another day of no issues with my computer”. There’s no emotional motivation there.

I’ll take a swing. I’ve had no issues with my Windows 10 desktop since I built it in 2020. None of the bloat, ads, forced updates, OneDrive pushing. None of the shit people regularly cite as problems inherent and unavoidable with Windows.

I did my research and used the proper official tools to configure it before and immediately after a fresh install. Used third party scripts and programs for messing with configuration shit as minimally as possible.

I’ve only had to adjust things maybe three times a year, and most of the time it’s been to re-enable shit that the average user would never disable like printing or hibernation, rather than having to fix or adjust anything from an update.

It doesn’t take many times being on the hiring side of the table or talking with someone who is, to hear the horror stories of why the stupid questions get asked.

Or, to frame it a different way:

Modern work enviornments being what they are, as a worker you will be required to have some bare minimum soft skills in order to interact with co-workers and your boss in a manner that isn’t completely deranged.

Shitty questions like these, with an obvious difference between the blunt honest answer and the “workplace acceptable” answer, serve as quite possibly the lowest bar possible to measure your ability to cater your communication properly to an audience.

These stupid questions are a litmus test for whether you are capable of reasonably functioning socially in a work environment. Very few jobs exist where you never interact with others.

I’d rather not spend my 8 hours a day listening to someone rant constantly about UBI and hating the job. That only makes the grind worse and drag on longer, even when the complaining is on the mark.

Most of all: for as dumb as a lot of this song and dance is, very few people ask these questions because they want to. Most people in recruiting have experienced times where they skipped the stupid question, and ended up missing the red flag to not hire the person.

I’ll give you that, but it seems to me that you must not have been around for the surge of iPhone bootlegs earlier in the smartphone era.

Lock screen, default background, fonts, literal stolen icons (not just stupidly similar ones), Chrome labelled as Safari, etc.

Settings panel design and especially the icon are super minor.

Hell, what about new Samsungs disabling the App drawer by default and tossing all apps on the home screen?

Where? Unless you’re saying people need to pull over on the shoulder because someone wants to speed in the right hand lane.

Sorry buddy, but that capitalistic framework is where we all have to exist for the forseeable future.

Giving corporations more power is not going to help us end that.

Shitposting?

I feel like that’s a stretch, and there’s some important things to consider here.

People are weird, and can fetishize all sorts of shit. There’s no reasonable way to control say, someone jerking off to pictures of hand models. Or to stop someone shlicking it to your shlubby beer gut at the beach photos you put up on social media if that’s their thing (and I know a woman who’s thing was “straight bears” for a long time).

But no one has any agency or ability to prevent that. No one has any agency to prevent any random person passing them on the street and then later using that memory plus imagination as cranking fuel.

For the sake of every individual’s personal sanity, I think it’s important that each and every one of us understand and accept that. Existing in the world is naturally giving up a certain amount of control. This is part of it, as disgusting as it is.

This is even more the case when you put content out there. Whether through acting in film or other media, creating artwork, posting pictures, etc. Creating content in the current age of the internet is inherently ceding ownership and control over it. The moment it hits the public space, you cannot control what is done with it, and the sooner people can learn to accept that, the better off I think we all will be.

I understand that feeling of violation to learn that someone has used you purely as an object for arousal.

That said, there is nuance. This content was not edited, it was merely taken out of the original context. Are we going to prevent news from doing this to prevent using content in ways unintended and unanticipated by the original creators?

“I’ll know misuse when I see it” is not a sustainable method for evaluating misuse at scale.

“If it’s clearly being used for erotic purposes” likewise doesn’t work, as defining that line isn’t straightforward. Do we ban reposts of bikini shots?

This isn’t something that was created for private use that was leaked. It was content made for public consption. Being disgusted with how the public chooses to consume it is your right, but there’s no way to control that.

Again, I entirely sympathize with the women experiencing this. Being used in this manner is dehumanizing.

But there’s no stopping it. Best to accept as best you can and ignore it.

Ehhhhh… that’s a pretty shit take. Any site that allows uploads of files “allows” uploads of CSAM? See how that breaks down immediately?

Regretting doing a nude scene is humanizing. Making your regret someone else’s problem is just shitty all around.

If you don’t do something stupid like reuse keys just with different capitalization, this never occurs.

PowerShell variable names and function names are not case sensitive.

I understand the conventions of using capitalization of those names having specific meanings in regards to things like constants, but the overwhelming majority of us all use IDEs now with autocomplete.

Personally, I prefer to use prefixes anyway to denote that info. Works better with segmenting stuff for autocomplete, and has less overhead of deriving non-explicit meaning from stuff like formatting or capitalization choices.

On top of that, you really shouldn’t be using variables with the same name but different capitalization in the same sections of code anyway. “Did I mean to use $AGE, $Age, or $age here?” God forbid someone come through to enforce standards or something and fuck that all up.