• Paradachshund@lemmy.today
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    50 minutes ago

    Everyone’s talking about the mad cow part, but this is also a really excellent point:

    “Some of these people trying to define the future of humanity, creativity, or whatever it is using AI, are not the most humane or creative people. So they’re sort of saying, ‘We’re better at being human than you are.’ It’s obviously not true.”

  • ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 hours ago

    i’m still convinced the only reason they’re pushing it so hard is to invalidate their Kompromat….
    we’re already at the point where people don’t believe videos they don’t like.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      Stupid question: if you think it’s a good idea but don’t know when the price will go up, you just buy stock and wait. But if you think it’s a bad idea and don’t know when the price will go down, is there any long-term alternative to shorting that doesn’t require betting on the date?

      • TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca
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        18 minutes ago

        If you imagine it like making a bet, nobody’s going to take a bet with you where they pay you when it pops, but there’s no time after which you pay them – because they’d never get any money out of that bet. Buying stock is different because it’s a thing you can own, but you can’t invest in the idea of something failing, because there isn’t any business which will take your money and make something more likely to fail.

        You could buy every stock except AI-related stocks, which I believe is functionally equivalent to buying an index fund and shorting AI stocks based on the percentage of AI stocks in the index fund. You could also think about what businesses would do well (or less poorly) in the case of an AI-instigated crash, and then buy those.

      • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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        5 hours ago

        That’s a good question I dont have an answer to. Maybe there are ways to short where you can just hold, but I dont know how. Maybe there’s a way to borrow lots of RAM and GPUs, sell them, then buy them back when the price drops and sell them for cheap back to whom you borrowed. But I dont know who would make that deal.

        • TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca
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          17 minutes ago

          You can hold a short position by repeatedly borrowing more stock – but you run the risk of running out of money completely, because short positions have (theoretically) infinite downside risk.

  • havocpants@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    While I like it as a simile, we didn’t feed cows to cows - we fed them sheep infected with scrapie, at least that’s the theory of how mad cow disease started. I say “we”, I wasn’t involved in the process, I just live here.

    • OshaqHennessey@midwest.social
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      6 hours ago

      Mad cow disease is caused by prions from dead cow brains infecting the healthy brains of living cows. It’s kind of the cow equivalent of Kuru.

      • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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        3 hours ago

        Those prions can also infect humans leading to Creutzfeld Jacob syndrome. Prions can also come from wild deer species and infect through venison.

      • greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 hours ago

        I thought it wasn’t just any prions, but specific prions that replicate out of control after some time, depending on genetics. So cows were fed unclean bone meal from sheep and pigs and cows all mixed together, and they think some scrapie infected sheep spine/brain got in there and it spread to cows. Then it spread from there because we didn’t think cows could get it and even if they could we were pretty certain humans couldn’t get it. But we were wrong.

  • bulwark@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    “So it’s sort of like when we fed cows with cows and got mad cow disease.” is an amazing analogy for the current state of LLMs.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      12 hours ago

      Yeah, the headline makes it sound like he’s insulting AI, but he’s just illustrating a fairly basic fact…

    • Lembot_0005@lemy.lol
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      13 hours ago

      It isn’t – it is a completely populist comparison that can’t be used as a meaningful argument.

      CEOs work by this very same principle: say what people want to hear, making their beliefs even stronger and thus increasing their craving to hear that statement again. Repeat until something breaks.

      • forrgott@lemmy.zip
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        12 hours ago

        You know analogy and argument are not the same thing, right? Like, not at all. I’m not the guy you replied to, but I definitely did not get the impression he meant anything even close to “meaningful argument”.

        And you know what? I think he’s right; that is a very apt analogy when taking about sophisticated bullshit generators. Cause that’s the version they keep trying to sell to the public. This isn’t about data analysis or any other if the creative scientific applications of this technology.

        • Lembot_0005@lemy.lol
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          12 hours ago

          This isn’t about data analysis or any other if the creative scientific applications of this technology.

          But this is the only thing that matters. Who cares how people who don’t know, care or capable of using some technology are actually using it? Ammonium nitrate is poisonous if you try to salt a soup with it, but it makes miracles in the hands of those who know how to use it (if you like analogies)

          Cause that’s the version they keep trying to sell to the public.

          I am not a lawyer, but I think that even in the USA it isn’t mandatory to buy everything that corporations sell.

          Modern LLMs are very useful tools. Just some people try to smalltalk with it for some reason. Their right. Salting soup with nitrates is also their right.

            • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              10 hours ago

              Is that a user that is “unblockable” by dodging username blocks by iterating the name?

              • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                10 hours ago

                Yep, someone already joked that they picked 4 digits for their username so they have a failsafe for getting banned 9,998 times. That was at 0004.

                If you look at their chat history it really explains it all tbh. I wonder if we could get this instance to defederate their account haven.

          • Rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world
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            11 hours ago

            Ugh yet another Lemmy user desperate to make the LLMs like them. Go chat with your chatbot friends and leave humans alone mate.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      12 hours ago

      He left rockstar after red dead redemption II, partly because he was tired of dealing with those execs.

        • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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          11 hours ago

          The ones that were fired 5 years after he left R*? I mean, it’d be nice if he did, but is he really at fault here?

          • _‌_反いじめ戦隊@ani.social
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            4 hours ago

            If some of these 35 visa dependent worked for more than 9 years, I am pretty sure he was there when they were exploited to work there. There’s no indication that these workers have less than a 5 year tenure.

            • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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              10 hours ago

              How’s this a fyigm situation? He left 5 years before this particular thing happened, he had no say in it.

              Now if he has actual need for these employees in his new company, I could see him hiring them there, but his new studio is in California and those employees were sacked in the UK, meaning they need a new job in the UK to keep living there. He also currently has fewer employees than the amount that R* fired. That’s how small that shop is.

              His brother, however, is still an exec at Rockstar. He, along with the rest of R* and Take-Two leadership has a lot to answer for.

              • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social
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                3 hours ago

                In my eyes it’s simple. His brother is not just an exec at rockstar, he’s the company president. They’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars and both have been in positions to shape company policy especially around labor conditions within their subsidiary.

                I can all but promise that a union busting culture is not new. The influence they’ve had as upper executives cannot be minimal, as these guys have been the ones making the golden goose.

                Odds are both houser brothers are sitting on loads of take two stock. Their performance bonuses have probably been more money than anyone on here will ever make in their lives, their kids’ lives, or their grandkids’ lives collectively with few if any exceptions. The crunch time issues of the past are absolutely a symptom of the disease: fyigm. Why pay anybody or treat anybody fairly when you can just keep your money?

                I’m not saying others are not also to blame, but anyone who is in a top leadership post at an organization usually has a massive amount of discretion especially for those under them.

                • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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                  2 hours ago

                  But even his brother is not top leadership at the organization. Any direct orders from their superiors at Take-two still take precedence over what Sam Houser says. In fact it’s currently suspected that the order to fire came from Take-Two.

                  They’re rich beyond the average person’s imagination, but not “early Google employee” rich, let alone “started multi-billion dollar company” rich. They started as regular employees that, after making the first few golden geese, got given stock options so they wouldn’t leave.

                  Turns out the big 100 hour crunch for RDR2 was just Dan Houser, Lazlow and 2 other senior writers and for about 3 weeks. Apparently the crunch used to be a bigger issue earlier on, but got improved after GTA V.

                  Senior Code Content Developer Phil Beveridge concurred that “work practices have definitely improved. Crunch on Red Dead Redemption 2 has definitely been a lot better than it was on GTA V, where I was pulling a month of 70+ hour weeks (while being told by my boss at the time to go home…).”

                  As I understand, the issue at R* wasn’t ever really anyone’s boss saying “you gotta work 70 hour weeks”, it was more “the senior staff works 100 hour weeks and maybe if I only do 40, I’ll not be seen as a team player”. Which is still toxic, but if they’ve taken steps to reduce it, perhaps things aren’t as bad as they seem.

                  The games industry is so bad because of the deadlines. The whole public announcement of “we’ll release game on date X” is a huge problem, as is the fact that games make most of the money just after release, so you gotta have a new game out every few years if you want to keep the lights on - a problem R* no longer has since they’ve brought in billions, so I’m sure Take-Two has loosened the leash a bit on that front at least.

                  Hell, I’m a regular software engineer and I’ve worked 60-70 hour weeks. Not because I was forced to, but because the deadline was near if not passed already, the customer was getting unhappy and I knew it’d look great for my next salary review. I suspect if I was working on a public project, essentially a work of art, that millions of people will get to see and I saw my boss work 100 hours a week, I’d also be motivated to work 60 or 70 for a while. So I can kinda understand how some R* employees say there was no forced crunch time and others say they felt like they were expected to crunch.

                  Honestly, the Houser brothers have just always struck me as creatives who are super passionate about their work. That’s the type of person that can work ridiculous hours without even realizing it and it could bend one’s expectations of what others should do, but it doesn’t seem to me like they’ve ever expected everyone else to work as much as they do, nor has either of them (or even the brothers combined) become a billionaire off over 20 years in senior leadership at a company that literally prints money for its parent company.

          • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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            3 hours ago

            I’m not following, he hired some people, then 5 years after he left someone else fired those people? Isn’t he more likely the good guy in the scenerio?

            “How dare you give these people a job? That put them in a position where someone else could take away their job!”

            • _‌_反いじめ戦隊@ani.social
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              3 hours ago

              It honestly depends how he hired them. If he offered them living wages, plus Visa fees, lawyers, and healthcare, he was a “good employer” when he hired them. The fact the union discord server is older than 5 years leads me to believe the visa dependent were offered less. So he exploited them knowing they can be deported as soon as the studio was done with them.

              • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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                58 minutes ago

                So the union discord existed when he was there and he didn’t fire anyone involved. 5 years after he leaves someone else fires the people involved so… Fuck the guy who hired people and did nothing to prevent the discord server years ago?

                • _‌_反いじめ戦隊@ani.social
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                  50 minutes ago

                  I am not so sure why you are strawmanning my arguments. If he was aware of visa extortion practices during his tenure, is he a good director or a bad one?

          • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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            2 hours ago

            He was never the owner. It’s a 45 billion dollar company, his net worth is said to be like 250 mill. He was paid a very high salary since he was one of the original employees of that subsidiary, and given some stock in the parent company as bonuses, so he’s set for life and richer than most of us will ever be, but he never had any real say in the parent company’s decisions. Take-Two is known for being absolute scum. They don’t just own Rockstar Games, they also own the companies behind the Civilization series (which has Paradox-like DLC scumming) and the Borderlands series (remember when BL3 was Epic exclusive on PC?).

            Technically if you’d started at, say, Microsoft as a software engineer or other similar role when he started at Rockstar, and stayed there until 2020, you could honestly be richer. Same for Google, some of their earliest employees became billionaires from the stock options. The Houser brothers made Rockstar famous, but they were never ownership class.

              • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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                38 minutes ago

                Uh I’m pretty sure as creative director, he didn’t see anyone holding a gun to anyone’s head forcing them to sign a shit contract.

                Why exactly do you think they were being extorted before any of this? If someone worked for a company for several years, I’m assuming they actually liked working there. Before someone at Take-two saw that there were a bunch of people at their subsidiary who’d unionized, some of whom were foreigners on visas and some locals. Why is the problem for you not that a bunch of people were fired for unionizing, but the fact that some of them weren’t born on the island they were working on?

          • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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            4 hours ago

            Fair enough, giving people jobs in a country where they can actually make a living is a bad thing.

            • _‌_反いじめ戦隊@ani.social
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              3 hours ago

              You legitimately believe visa workers were not threatened to be deported in the UK if they worked for less than their Unionized workers who actually negotiated for living wages‽ In the Brexit economy‽

              • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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                3 hours ago

                You don’t have to threaten to deport your workers if you sign the contract beforehand though? Once they’ve agreed to the salary, they’ve agreed to it. Did they make less than a pureblood Brit in the same role? Perhaps. We don’t know that. But generally speaking, you don’t go importing labour unless you literally can’t find enough locals anymore. The bureaucracy nightmare isn’t worth the cost savings otherwise. Particularly because a lot of countries don’t allow you to pay the imported labour less than you’d pay your purebloods in the same role. Exception of course being people from countries with whom you have freedom of movement (so anything intra-EU is allowed)

                Also, it’s not like he was the CEO or something. He was the creative director. I swear some people just want to be angry at everyone.

                • _‌_反いじめ戦隊@ani.social
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                  3 hours ago

                  If he wasn’t part of the hiring decisions, I take back what I said. But creative directors do influence who gets assigned roles in a studio, and what tasks get sent to the visa’d. There’s nothing indicating he wasn’t aware the studio hired visa workers when he worked there. Accents and vernaculars differ. I doubt he was oblivious that roles he assigned to foreigners were not hired to be exploited.

  • Valmond@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    I’m tired of people using “AI” for only generative AI/LLM. Especially in video games ?!

    • BillyTheKid2@lemmy.ca
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      7 hours ago

      You’re absolutely right, but you also need to accept that most people think ai means transformers (as in, LLMs and generative/image synthesis)

      It sucks, but that’s how language works unfortunately. How most people use a word ends up defining it.

      • BillyTheKid2@lemmy.ca
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        7 hours ago

        Recommendation systems, search and ranking algorithms, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice cloning, audio noise reduction, predictive analytics, forecasting models, fraud detection, anomaly detection, robotics control systems, self-driving path planning, robot navigation and mapping (SLAM), reinforcement-learning agents, game-playing AI, warehouse optimization, dynamic pricing models, object detection, face recognition, license-plate recognition, medical image analysis, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, spam detection, classic machine-translation models, personalization engines, matching algorithms, logistics route optimization, scheduling algorithms, resource allocation models, algorithmic trading bots, risk scoring, market-making AI, healthcare diagnostics, disease-risk prediction, protein-folding models, music analysis, beat detection, autonomous drone navigation, industrial monitoring, and smart-traffic systems.

        • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works
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          7 hours ago

          Sounds like machine learning (ML) “a field of study in artificial intelligence” more than what people mean when they say AI, which is Generative AI shortened.

          Obviously depends on context of a conversation though for how you would deduce the usage of the word.