megopie @ megopie @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I suspect a lot of these layoffs are actually just cost cutting in response to these companies doing really poorly, the idea that the jobs are now being done by generative models is largely a smoke screen to save face and avoid admitting that companies are scaling back operations due to a lack of demand.

Those few cases where they actually are just replacing people are going to vanish the moment that the people hosting the models run out of money to burn and have to charge full price. Like the scale of operating losses is orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen in the past.

This is the thing that really kills me, like, what an LLM can do is not a revolutionary leap, it’s an evolutionary step beyond basic grammar, tone, and spell checking. It’s more capable than traditional auto complete, but it’s not a fundamentally different capability.

Most actors don’t make much money playing roles in theater, movies or TV shows (obvious exceptions for big name stars), rather they do those when they can get them, but make most of their money doing ads. If that ad work disappeared, way fewer people could afford to be actors and the overall talent pool would shrink.

Same goes for people doing drawn art or photography, the commodified work provides a stable income that allows them to pursue the career and creates space for them to produce genuine art.

There is absolutely a lot of issues regarding things going on in certain discord servers, or in certain subreddits, less so on twitch or steam.

But a lot of those issues are due to different use cases being pushed into proximity by being pushed off other platforms, ether by moderation decisions, or by their structure and user engagement maximizing algorithms making certain communities unviable.

So you end up with communities that need forum or chat room style organization being pushed in to close proximity to communities that run afoul of corporate moderation. This was less of an issue when these things might have just headed off to dedicated websites, but with everything ending up on platforms now, you have this milieu of mundane game or hobbyist communities, communities for mental health discussions, communities about drug usage, explicit adult content, and fringe politics, all right next to each other. Thus cross pollination between all of them becomes inevitable at a far higher rate than if they were on separate platforms, or on a mega platform with a bunch of other things that would dilute the cross pollination.

I’m not even saying that any of those are explicitly bad things that shouldn’t exist, just that having them all confined in such close proximity is a time bomb. This is not a result of careless management by these companies, but rather the result of pressures pushing these things off of other major platforms, and thus forcing them on to ones that are inherently more permissive.

Recently I’ve been going to the library a lot more. Like, I kind of want to tear my head off looking for books about certain topics online, like nothing but irrelevant but popular stuff, or stuff I’ve already read. I go to the library, go to a relevant section of shelf, boom, lots of relevant books. And if I need something more, the librarians are always happy to help look for something more specific in the system.

Compare that to corporate websites that seem like they are optimizing to waste my time at this point.

I think it’s better to go straight to Wikipedia if you’re looking something up at this point.

They get things wrong at a far higher rate than most of the websites that tend to end up at the top of a web result, and they get things wrong in weird ways that won’t stand out to users in the same way a shitty website will. These probabilistic text generators are much better at seeming like they have the correct answer than actually providing it.

It’s crazy how much money they are losing, and that’s with most of their compute being provided by Microsoft at cost, if not for free in exchange for the use of their models in Microsoft products.

Both they and Anthropic talk about their business as if they’re a software as a service company, but most SAS doesn’t get more expensive to run the more users there are, not to mention their conversion rate of free users to payed users is abysmal. Like, it’s an unsalvageable train wreck of a business model, I don’t see ether surviving more than a year unless they radically change their business models.

As other’s mentioned, probably more a way to fire a bunch of people without having to do so explicitly.

Microsoft seems to be on a warpath this year regarding layoffs. I wonder if maybe they’re trying to compensate for some giant black hole in their budget. Like, keep the costs looking stable even as some specific department balloons out of control without providing commensurate revenue. Wonder what that could possibly be?

I would advise against conspiratorializing, particularly when this such a relatively small and obscure platform, not the kind of thing that an institutional actor would target with an influence or astroturfing campaign.

As to why people don’t tend to advocate so much about electoral form? (Personally I would love to see multi member districts with single transferable votes). Simply because the same establishment centrists politicians who are currently rallying against mamdani, would torpedo it and claim it was impossible or that it would require constitutional amendment, despite that being categorically untrue.

Most people would love to see some kind of electoral reform and already tacitly support it, but realize that the real obstacle to it is not a lack of public interest, but the current party leadership. Which will stay in power so long as the tactic of “you have to vote for us because the other side is worse”x

Getting corporate backed moderate centrists out of party leadership is a prerequisite for electoral reform. And the only way to get the middlemen of the party to oust them is to make it clear that they will lose elections if they keep towing the moderate centrist line, thus a narrative must exist that people are willing to not vote for them if their only real platform is “we’re not as bad”.

It was a never a particularly common slogan in everyday discussions, but it was something that was fairly common during the 2020 primaries, notably Pete Buttigieg saying it during his concession speech in the New Hampshire primary, saying he heard it from organizers and canvassers.

Even if the exact wording isn’t exactly common by this point, outside of people mocking it, the sentiment behind it has been a consistent backdrop. That whoever the Democratic candidate, there is an obligation for supporters of left wing and progressive candidates to support, in turn, a centrists candidate who wins the primary.

So the question here is, if the left wing and progressives are obligated to support a centrist candidate when they win the primary, how come it’s okay for a centrist to loose the primary and not only not throw their support behind the winner, but to go out and run as an independent?

There are some very old politicians doing great jobs, there are some younger ones who are just as much part of the problem as Chuck Schumer or Mitch Mconnell.

If there is an issue with gerontocracy, it goes far beyond politics, to the fact that the entirety of society is built on seniority, particularly ownership of assets, and thus control of the economy and politics at large. To fix the problem of gerontocracy in politics would require a decoupling of politics from private interests, or a massive systemic shift of ownership in the economy.

Like, is the fact that some law makers are suffering from late stage dementia bad? Yah, sure, but 98% of the problems with the lawmakers would remain even if they weren’t older than ARPANET. Age limits or mental capacity exams wouldn’t even make a dent.

Most would still be bought and payed for, most would still participate in revolving door lobbyist system. Most would still be only representing half of the constituents in their districts. Most would still be sitting in safe seats where they were confident of never getting primaried and the opposition party not standing a chance in the general.

Like, all this talk about it recently seems like missing the forest for the trees, or a cynical attempt to redirect criticism to a highly visible issue that can be addressed with a simple fix without actually challenging any entrenched power structures. It’s the same issue I have with term limits on politicians. It’s just addressing a cosmetic facet of a larger issue.

Yah, I agree.

At the very least much better optimized, with what length there is focused on meaningful content rather than low effort padding.

Again, it requires market pressure, something that a boom in portable games on less performant devices could cause.

Would be interesting to see a study looking at the overlap between political support and developmental lead poisoning.

Like, it’s well documented that, at least in the US, there was a catastrophic amount of developmental lead poisoning among the population cohorts that were born between the introduction of leaded gasoline and the phasing out of it.

Something like the steam deck or the original switch were probably on the upper end of meaningfully “portable” in that sense, and even they can’t really compete with smartphones on that front. But with the currently available chips/batteries/screens, you cannot really get much smaller without starting to limit the games that can be played on them.

There is a whole other conversation to be had about game optimization and the push in large parts of the games industry towards more power intensive games. If the PC/console games space had an incentive to better optimize for lightweight devices, that could change. Especially if something shifted on the smartphone storefront market that created more demand for better less exploitative games there.

But, they do for mobiles, because mobile app storefronts force micro transactions to go the through them and they take a significant cut on each one. The 30% apple tax for example.

So they have a huge incentive to put F2P slop front and center which other storefronts on other devices don’t. In the context of steam, they do make money on the micro transitions of games that valve owns, but they make more money selling everyone else’s games over all, so they still have a reasons to show those.

It’s not so much saying that other storefronts are angles who love their customer, but more that their incentive structures are aligned differently.

If there were significant shake up in the mobile storefront market, or in terms of how they can make money, there might be a shift in they type of content they push.

How much of it is that no one is willing to pay 20 or 30 dollars for a mobile game, and how much is it that anyone willing to pay is unable to find them, or has just given up on the segment entirely.

Of course the mobile store fronts have no incentive to increase the visibility, because a free to play game is liable to make them significantly more money in the long term due to their cut of each micro transaction.

PC game and console storefronts are full of free to play slop, but they’re not the first thing people are shown, even when they are popular. They make an active effort to highlight quality games, and thus users willing to pay for them can actually find them.

There is a lot to be said of the atrocious design of mobile application storefronts.

It’s a very interesting trend, it seems like companies are convinced that this form factor is the future, that consumers will choose something with a portable option over something stationary.

Like when the steam deck and switch came out, they both did well, I think the switch did well mainly on the grounds that it was the Nintendo device for that console generation generation. But they’ve hardly taken over the market.

I think the console industry kind of just wrote off the mobile market because they were late to the party, despite it being immensely profitable and a huge market segment. It seems now they’re becoming interested in it again, and I wonder if it’s due to there being an unmet demand, people who want to play games outside of their living room, but who are turned off by the state of games on mobile.

Like, the mobile games market is just a swamp, and people who want a more meaningful experience than a time waster puzzle game, or a cash grab gatcha game, are kind of left out in the cold. Maybe this is the legacy games companies seeing an opportunity, all it would take to smash that opportunity is for the mobile phone games market to start being… not awful.

The thing about primaries is that they’re largely internal affairs of parties. That’s why things like super delegates can exist. Like states do make laws regarding them, but there isn’t much actual legal framework about them.

Changes to them mostly are handled with in the respective party structure. Federal legislation regularizing them would raise some legitimately interesting legal questions.

For one court to come to this conclusion and then enforce a large scale national policy shift, even temporarily in the case of the ruling being over turned by a higher court, is a pretty jarring exercise of power by an unelected official over an elected one.

Of course, if it is confirmed illegal by higher courts, then it is with in the checks and balances to order civil servants to stop collecting the tariffs even if the White House orders them to keep doing it.

There are of course situations, particularly concerning the violation of people’s civil liberties, where such a halt order is entirely warranted even if it is jarring. But the White House abusing a vague power to collect additional taxes on imports, while harmful and disruptive, is not as directly harmful or destructive as people getting black bagged or having their citizenship revoked, where a an order to stop from a lower level judge until the policy is reviewed at a higher level, is entirely warranted.