I can go out today and pay $50 for a thick cut ribeye at Ruth's Chris that has been visually inspected for marbling then hard seared in a special high temp over to temp by someone who knows wtf they're doing. I can also go to Denny's and pay $20 for a t-bone cooked to within shouting distance of what I asked for on the same griddle they use for the pancakes that doesn't get the sear I'm looking for.
Point being, you're absolutely right that the goal for a company selling a product is to be barely satisfactory but they don't actually get to decide what's satisfactory.
We used to say computers can't make decisions because they can't meaningfully be held responsible for those decisions. Now the vibe seems to be that computers should make decisions because instead of anyone being held responsible we can just say "the computer made a mistake and it is very sorry" and effectively shield anyone from being responsible. But the thing is, machines don't do stuff. Not from a responsibility standpoint. My car doesn't drive, I do. It may provide the means, but I decide where we're going and how we're going there. Even with the active cruise on, the car didn't speed, I did. The car may have hit the wall, but I caused the accident. the car ran that person over, but I killed someone, not the car. The machine did what someone told it to do. If someone told it to do a bad thing, or someone did a bad job telling it not to a bad thing, that person is responsible.
When people started using Grok to make CSAM the platform's response was to paywall image generation. If we don't start making the driver responsible for what the car does, the coder responsible for what the code does, the CEO responsible for what the company does, they will continue to exploit people in increasingly horiffic ways.
I recently bought far cry 3 on steam and spent 20 minutes post-install trying to log into my ubisoft account between forgetting an old password, 2fa across multiple devices and a badly broken captcha system.
uConnect and the various 3rd party storefront/DRMs are a travesty on the Steamdeck - the Decky plugin Junkstore goes some way to remedying it, but Far Cry 3 is harder to get working than any number of tempermental Switch emulations with pre-cached shaders and other graphics hacks.
>I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly?
Because the various uammi sources also add other flavors. I like being able to choose between soy sauce, fish sauce, worcestershire sauce, soy bean paste, mushroom powder, anchovies, chicken powder, yeast extract, and, yes, msg (with 2% i&g) because each of them affects the recipe i'm working with differently. Is your diet nothing but chicken breast, raw flour and shortening because they're the simplest sources of protein, carbs and fat?
this is a great metaphor precisely because (outside those with paradoxical stimulant response) everyone thinks they're more productive on amphetamines and there's some naive evidence to that effect. the number of things you've actually done is significantly higher. the change in value created, as measured by the decrease in distance between where you are and the the goal you're shooting for, is unpredictable at best and slowly degrades as reliance increases.
AI is like having a junior dev with an adderall addiction and an encyclopedic knowledge of coding syntax at your beck and call.
tbf rephrasing the output in my own words has become the best and most important tool in ensuring quality from AI. Whether it's an answer to a question or an implementation of some ACs that I copypasta'd in, the best sanity check is understanding and the best demonstration of understanding is the ability to redo.
the article talks about AI books winning awards and AI books on bestseller charts, but can any one of us think of a book they genuinely enjoyed that was written by an AI? this feels less like proof that AI books are good and more like proof that awards, rankings and other accolades are rife with abuse. it's a known issue across almost all entertainment media: you start by trying to find the best media to consume but the process is so subjective and gameable that it ends up being a way to pick something arbitrarily and then declare it to be the best.
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