It’s all about tone. The original comment was incredibly combative and hyperbolic (“I utterly loathe Mass Effect. I consider it one of the worst pieces of science-fiction ever created.”) so much so that it would easily be mistaken for flamebait given the thread was likely to attract fans of the series.

It certainly didn’t strike me as the start of an open-minded conversation.

But in hindsight I should’ve just downvoted and moved on rather than commenting as I did, so that’s on me.

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Ahh yes, the old “sticks and stones” defense that completely ignores human nature and basic decency. I use the same logic when I tell other people their babies are ugly. “Look, if you ask me your kid is an eyesore but it’s just my opinion so I don’t know why you’re so mad right now…”

Funny, I feel the same way about Fallout and The Witcher. Just… don’t get the appeal. As always, to each their own. Hence why I generally try to avoid yucking other people’s yums.

I don’t. Played with it a bit but as a capable writer and coder I don’t find it fills a need and just shifts the effort from composition (which I enjoy) to editing and review (which I don’t).

Oh please. The anti-TikTok hysteria has been going on much longer than the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the narrative has largely been about national security concerns, particularly as they relate to election misinformation.

Agree or not with the anti-China rhetoric about TikTok, but at least argue about the facts and not inane conspiracy theories.

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That’s roughly right, but that doesn’t make him in any meaningful way “good”. Of course I also don’t think anyone who decided to drop the bombs on Japan was a “good guy”. But maybe that’s why I’m not a pure utilitarian.

Absolutely not, unless you adhere to pure utilitarianism. Veidt kills untold numbers of innocent people on a self-imposed quest to do what he believes will save humanity. He was a straight up megalomaniac and the only upside is that his murderous actions eventually lead to peace.

So laziness. Got it.

(They could easily move to an ipc mechanism that doesn’t require binding a port on a network interface but that’d require time and effort and why bother when the goal is to ship something fast and cheap while the AI hype is strong)

Sounds like a fun way to directly mess with their model though.

Wait… why the heck does it need to open a network port?

I do both, because people can do more than one thing. This is called a false dichotomy, and in this case with an unsubtle whiff of moralizing.

A Short Hike, definitely. I just wish it was longer.

There are more beginners then there are experts, so in the absence of research a beginner UI is a safer bet.

If you’re in the business of creating high quality UX, and you’re building a UI without even the most basic research–understanding your target user–you’ve already failed.

And yes, if you definite “beginner” to be someone with expert training and experience, then yes an expert UI would be better for that “beginner”. What a strange way to define “beginner” though.

If I’m building a product that’s targeting software developers, a “beginner” has a very different definition than if I’m targeting grade school children, and the UX considerations will be vastly different.

This is, like, first principles of product development stuff, here.

Unless you’ve actually done the user research, you have no idea if a “beginner friendly UX is a safer bet” . It’s just a guess. Sometimes it’s a good guess. Sometimes it’s not. The correct answer is always “it depends”.

Hell, whether or not a form full of fields is or isn’t “beginner” friendly is even debatable given the world “beginner” is context-specific. Without knowing who that user is, their background, their training, and the work context, you have no way of knowing for sure. You just have a bunch of assumptions you’re making.

As for the rest, human data entry that cannot be automated is incredibly common, regardless of your personal feelings about it. If you’ve walked into a government office, healthcare setting, legal setting, etc, and had someone ask you a bunch of questions, you might be surprised to hear that the odds are very good that human was punching your answers into a computer.

Without knowing what the user is actually doing, that’s impossible to know. If the user has to input all those fields on a regular basis, then that one screen is the superior UX.

That third screenshot, assuming good keyboard navigation, would likely be a godsend for anyone actually using it every day for regular data entry (well, okay, not without fixes–e.g. the SSN and telephone number split apart as separate text boxes is terrible).

This same mindset is what led Tesla to replace all their driver friendly indicators and controls with a giant shiny touchscreen that is an unmitigated disaster for actual usability.

Hah I… think we’re on the same side?

The original comment was justifying unregulated and unmitigated research into AI on the premise that it’s so dangerous that we can’t allow adversaries to have the tech unless we have it too.

My claim is AI is not so existentially risky that holding back its development in our part of the world will somehow put us at risk if an adversarial nation charges ahead.

So no, it’s not harmless, but it’s also not “shit this is basically like nukes” harmful either. It’s just the usual, shitty SV kind of harmful: it will eliminate jobs, increase wealth inequality, destroy the livelihoods of artists, and make the internet a generally worse place to be. And it’s more important for us to mitigate those harms, now, than to worry about some future nation state threat that I don’t believe actually exists.

(It’ll also have lots of positive impact as well, but that’s not what we’re talking about here)

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Training new models is already the domain of large actors only, simply due to the GPU requirements, which serve as a massive moat. That ship has sailed. There isn’t a single open source model, today, that wasn’t trained by a corporate entity first, and then only fined tuned by the community later.