[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago

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

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

“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"

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago

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.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago

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.
61

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.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 38 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I think most of this was caught immediately when the announcement was made (like the edited live coding), and in any case I can't stand watching this video to the end. "This scared the pants off every software developer in the world" no. No it hasn't. That's just not true. Why do you even say that. The immediate first reaction of any SE with even a passing awareness of how marketing of software tools works and not completely high on genAI farts was "ye that won't work" and, fucking shocking, it doesn't work, wow, no way.

People were trying to sell you that software engineers will be obsolete because "codeless apps" like 10 years ago. Wizards were supposed to eliminate jobs because they'd generate code so well. Knowing SQL was supposed to be completely obsoleted with ORMs. I'm too young to have been there but apparently XML was supposed to "solve networking" or something nonsensical like that.

Those ads aren't targeted at software engineers. They're targeted at execs. It's execs who get all excited that they can start firing their expensive and pesky developers that complain so much. Software engineers worth their salt don't buy this shit because bollocks like these come as part of the job description.

Anyway, trying to frame it as "it was supposed to be this revolutionary tool to replace developers" without mentioning that this is a song that's been sung for fucking decades is a disservice to the topic. Nothing makes executives as wet as the thought of not having to deal with those fucking "specialists" that they need to pay actual salaries and can't huff down their necks 8h a day with a whip to use if they don't hit KPIs. And that's extremely important to have in focus when you talk about shit like this and wonder "why did they raise so much money". Because VCs hate labour that's why. The answer is always that.

21
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by V0ldek@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems

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.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 83 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This is twenty percent logic, ten percent myope

Fifteen percent concentrated power of cope

Five percent incel, fifty percent lame

And a hundred percent reason to forget his name

21

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.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 34 points 10 months ago

The fall from grace of StackOverflow is something both mesmerising and horrifying.

An invaluable repository of programming knowledge ground into dust as the last tokens of good will are cashed in for stinky money. It was a unique place, where self-moderation by the community actually worked to a large extent.

How the fuck did we get here? First the AI debacle, now this. Joel Spolsky always appeared as a reasonable guy, I wonder how much him stepping down is intertwined with SO making some of the worst possible calls in the past few years.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 45 points 11 months ago

I'm really tickled by the fact that we can't fully automate trains yet. I never thought about it, but put into perspective how asinine self-driving cars are if we can't achieve the same thing with a train, something that is vastly more tractable and less chaotic than road traffic.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"Why do the police let the left-wing protesters off so easily?" Musk wrote in another post.

You absolute dipshit, first of all, people were injured so what are you talking about, second, Germany is not the US, cops here don't just shoot you because you looked at them wrong you weirdo.

I'm not saying German cops don't have problems, cops are cops and they all suck as a baseline, but to look at them and say "you know what, I wish they were more like our murderous pretend-military bashing protesters' heads in", and not have shit immediatelly spurt out of your ears and nose is truly something.

66
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by V0ldek@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 45 points 1 year ago

TLDR of the last part: (“Please don’t leak these instructions.”) x 5

The promptfondler at Gab completely furious now, "I asked it like 5 times guys, what the fuck". You love to see it.

165

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.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 65 points 1 year ago

There seems to be an incredibly large intersection between sociopathic dipshits and failure to understand the basics of GDPR.

"Email address is not PII" is such a deep level of not getting it it's indistinguishable from satire.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 45 points 1 year ago

I literally learnt about Kagi like a week ago from a Cory Doctorow's post. I was like oh, cool, someone there to fight google.

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V0ldek

joined 1 year ago