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Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it
  • If you’re fine playing them on your PC, a remaster of the first two games is coming to Steam on June 10th.

    Oh my god this is the best news I've heard this year

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st June 2025
  • “I try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way

    You could show me this without any context whatsoever and my first thought would've been "did a React dev say that"

  • Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it
  • My entire experience with Sony is that I loved Patapon on the PSP (I would sell my fucking soul to get it to play on a smartphone god) and I watch The Last of Us and that's it. None of their games exist as far as I'm concerned because I can't play them on PC. What, I'm going to play TLoU 2 without playing 1 or GoW 4 without playing 1-3? Go fuck yourselves.

  • Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it
  • Valhalla and Shadows are two of the best-selling Assassin's games even though they've been exactly equally as shit and tedious since Origin, so I'd put a [citation needed] on your "increasing irrelevancy".

    Also which big game studios don't suck? The list you give below has, the top 10 largest in order,

    • Sony (I guess defensible, idk),
    • Tencent (lol), Microsoft (lmao)
    • Nintendo (legal almost as predatory as Oracle)
    • NetEase (???)
    • EA, Epic, Take-Two (sincerely wishing prostate cancer to all three of those CEOs)
    • MiHoYo (literally one gacha game), and
    • ROBLOX CORPORATION.
  • Firing people for AI: not going so well
  • Since basically all graphics processing algorithms are linear algebra and all of ML is linear algebra but with a twist, I think fuzzy background removal is definitely AI.

    This term is so meaningless you could call A* an "AI algorithm" at this fucking point

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025
  • Aren't you supposed to only use whatever "self-driving" nonsense they have on highways only? I thought Tesla explicitly says you can't do it on a normal road cause, well, it doesn't fucking work.

    It doesn't even seem the driver is actually holding the wheel like they don't try to avoid that at all

    Just a second before the crash a car goes by, this thing could've just as easily swerved right onto that other car and injured someone, someone should at least lose their license for this

  • UK AI unicorn Builder.ai is dead — the downfall of “AGI”: A Guy Instead
  • If I were a half-a-billion-dollar scam I would simply not have audits taps forehead

  • eating our own dogshit
  • For LLMs specifically? Code is not text, aside from the most clinical, dictionary definition of "text".

    But even then, it also fails at writing coherent short or longform, so even if code was "just text" it'd fail equally badly.

  • GitHub wants to spam open source projects with AI slop
  • So... I think it's high time to start planning an exodus.

    Is there a good alternative to GitHub?

    I have two types of repos, a few public open-source projects for which I require:

    • Basic git stuff ofc, PRs, forks, etc.
    • Issues
    • Automatic scanning for security vulnerabilities like GH does
    • CI on PRs and nightly CRON based, free and allowing both cloud-hosted runners and adding self-hosted runners
    • Ability to host a static documentation site

    Plus private ones where I don't need any bells and whistles, just a git hoster for myself and no one else.

    Is there something free that provides these things and doesn't suck? If I go to GitLab's page then it says:

    so that's fucked too now, huh

  • Does AI make researchers more productive? What? Why would it? Apparently you can just say that and almost get published!
  • Well that fully answers the questions I had I guess

    Why is everyone a milkshake duck

  • Does AI make researchers more productive? What? Why would it? Apparently you can just say that and almost get published!
  • God what's the odds that he also used a wisdom woodchipper to produce the text of that pdf lol

  • How to make a splash in AI economics: fake your data
  • Also referenced here with a debunk by a material scientist.

    Economics not beating the allegations of not being a serious science once again

  • Does AI make researchers more productive? What? Why would it? Apparently you can just say that and almost get published!
    thebsdetector.substack.com AI, Materials, and Fraud, Oh My!

    The red flags we should have seen earlier for a too-good-to-be-true paper on AI tool adoption at a materials research firm

    AI, Materials, and Fraud, Oh My!

    This is a nice post, but it has such an annoying sentence right in the intro:

    > At the time I saw the press coverage, I didn’t bother to click on the actual preprint and read the work. The results seemed unsurprising: when researchers were given access to AI tools, they became more productive. That sounds reasonable and expected.

    What? What about it sounds reasonable? What about it sounds expected given all we know about AI??

    I see this all the time. Why do otherwise skeptical voices always have the need to put in a weakening statement like this. "For sure, there are some legitimate uses of AI" or "Of course, I'm not claiming AI is useless" like why are you not claiming that. You probably should be claiming that. All of this garbage is useless until proven otherwise! "AI does not increase productivity" is the null hypothesis! It's the only correct skeptical position! Why do you seem to need to extend benefit of the doubt here, like seriously, I cannot explain this in any way.

    15
    If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?
  • What does this have to do with literally anything I said about comparing AI with interns

  • If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?
  • But what's the point of having that if it doesn't result in improvement on the other side? Like you're doing hard work to correct code and respond with feedback but you're putting that into the void to no one's benefit.

    Hiring an intern makes sense. It's an investment. Hiring an AI at the same skill level makes negative sense.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th May 2025
  • I don't think I ever had a vibe-check as successful as this, literally never heard about the guy, said he needs to be shoved into a locker based on vibes, an hour later he searches for his own name to respond and gets hammered in replies for supporting The Big Orb. Just a quintessential internet moment.

  • If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?
  • Sorry for being late, busy wanking off to the sexy robot in the article. So ye, anyway, why'd you do that?

  • If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?
  • Don't worry, if you apply yourself really hard one day you might become an actual engineer. Keep trying.

  • If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?
  • I treat AI as a new intern that doesn’t know how to code well

    This statement makes absolutely zero sense to me. The purpose of having a new intern and reviewing their code is for them to learn and become a valuable member of the team, right? Like we don't give them coding tasks just for shits and giggles to correct later. You can't turn an AI into a senior dev by mentoring it, however the fuck you'd imagine that process?

  • Give me your best software engineer blogs

    I'm looking for recommendations of good blogs for programmers. I've been asked about what I would recommend by younger folks a few times these past few months and I realised I don't really have a good list that I could just share with them.

    What I'm interested in are blogs that don't focus specifically on any particular tech but more things like Coding Horror that are just for devs in general. They don't have to be for beginners. It'd also be interesting to see which of those are most popular in our little circle, so please upvote comments that contain recommendations you agree with.

    I'm implicitly assuming stuff shared by folks here is going to be sensible, well-written blogs, and not some AI shill nonsense or other tech grift.

    Note that I'm specifically interested in the text medium, podcasts or YT not so much.

    6
    None of those words are in the Bible 2.0 (Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs — Ludicity)

    An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

    First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

    A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

    Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

    Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

    15
    Devin, the obviously fake "AI Developer", turns out to be fake

    Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a small shell script large language model.

    !

    The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

    First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

    Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

    It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

    The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

    It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

    3
    Zuckerberg ordered Snapchat to literally man-in-the-middle attack customers
    arstechnica.com Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

    Zuckerberg told execs to “figure out” how to spy on encrypted Snapchat traffic.

    Facebook secretly spied on Snapchat usage to confuse advertisers, court docs say

    I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

    In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

    > "Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan. > > "Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

    Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

    I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

    4
    V0ldek V0ldek @awful.systems
    Posts 9
    Comments 854