[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 36 points 2 months ago

Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.

So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen.... which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon's "chat support" AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours "in case my package shows up". I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it's not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I'm willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final "solution" and I have to restart the convo over and over.

Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 33 points 3 months ago

Yeah, my first thought as well was that "pulling up" would be pulling the steering wheel back, which wouldn't do anything. Certainly wouldn't swerve the car all the way off the road, you wouldn't want to jerk a plane left or right in that scenario either.

So... definitely made up. But still an amusing greentext.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 28 points 5 months ago

Fiction is fiction. This is the same kind of logic that adults used when I was a kid because Harry Potter promoted witchcraft, or when the country had a moral panic because Call of Duty had their children killing people. Nothing in the game literally advocates for or glorifies IRL slavery, that would be absurd.

If you can't parse fiction from reality, then you aren't fit for just about anything. Movies, music, video games, books, etc. Every medium frequently depicts things you shouldn't emulate. Even the literal Bible has depictions of slavery, rape, incest, and murder.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 16 points 5 months ago

I don't necessarily disagree that we may figure out AGI, and even that LLM research may help us get there, but frankly, I don't think an LLM will actually be any part of an AGI system.

Because fundamentally it doesn't understand the words it's writing. The more I play with and learn about it, the more it feels like a glorified autocomplete/autocorrect. I suspect issues like hallucination and "Waluigis" or "jailbreaks" are fundamental issues for a language model trying to complete a story, compared to an actual intelligence with a purpose.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 30 points 8 months ago

Pretty happy about it honestly. He's been counting down to this for ages in his newsletter, so it's far from a blindside on my end.

I've preferred much of his "second channel" content for a while now anyways, and I suspect we'll see lots of interesting content outside of the boundaries of "things you may not know".

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 36 points 8 months ago

Eh, that is kinda the appeal of Reddit, and its alternatives. Finding smaller communities of likeminded individuals that you can group into a tailored feed.

I always say the magic of this model is that it's not just a firehose of every possible interest, it's more like a shower of dozens of tiny handpicked jets. It just happens that on Lemmy, the "All" feed is still reasonably tailored to the main demographic here. That being tech nerds who dislike Reddit's recent decisions enough to make a change.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 21 points 10 months ago

Surprisingly, a lot of the creepy media is fairly accurate, though extreme. Demons aren't prominent, we know they are angels who rebelled with Lucifer, and were cast out, so that would be their appearance, but in reference to possession, we basically have those that Jesus encountered and a few his apostles drove out in his name later on.

And what we see are people behaving almost like animals, screaming, shouting, with an inhuman strength to break chains or whatever locals have tried to contain them with, and inflicting a lot of self harm. There's a woman who would throw herself into fires, a man who had 100 demons in him (where "I am legion" comes from") who would throw himself onto rocks and off cliffs and cut himself, etc.

The more manufactured elements are the head twisting, anything to do with pentagrams, and honestly a lot of the hostility to others. People usually steered clear, but demon possessed individuals generally did more self harm than harming others, with cases where Jesus would meet them within cities, and they weren't surrounded by dead people or a panicking mob or anything. They also don't "haunt" or hunt people like they do in movies, but are usually extremely obvious.

Anyway, that's my experience purely from biblical account, off the top of my head, I'm sure others can add more detail or examples.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 27 points 11 months ago

Man, one time I ended up volunteering at a weekend youth event, and this other leader they put me in a room with was friends with my wife on Facebook, from college or something, but I'd never met him. Weirdest conversation of my life:

"So, how was your honeymoon in city?" "Oh, really nice. What was your name again?"

I imagine that's what this horror house would feel like. Was a nice guy, honestly. I've since forgotten his name again.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Seems like a sensible overhaul, hitting the major issues with the fee, but still going ahead with a version of it. Big points for me:

  • Not retroactive. Only affecting the next version of Unity, and you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.
  • Data is now reported by the customers. Still not sure how that plan to enforce this, but it's a hell of a lot better than some arbitrary data collection scheme being baked into the game.
  • Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

Still not sure I love charging per install as a concept, and they've already overplayed their hand and burnt many bridges, but at least this implementation isn't insanely hostile. Guess we'll see how this plays out from here.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, that's what burns the business relationship. Because now it's not just "oh, Unity might screw me, and I'm investing in learning what could become a dead platform", it's "even if Unity doesn't screw me now, they could randomly decide to screw me 10 years from now and retroactively charge me a king's ransom". That's the stuff that has a permanent chilling effect on the whole platform.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 20 points 1 year ago

Frankly, this whole situation boils down to exactly what I expected. LTT has always produced content at an insane velocity, and issues like these are the inevitable results. Miscommunications, errors that need to be tidied up, and compromises such as that water block video not being redone with the proper setup. LTT doesn't have the ability to reverse course on an emergency like that, they're already at breakneck pace so that they can't make a change of that scope without missing deadlines. If it wasn't this, it would've been something else.

Is that evil? I don't know. It's the business strategy they've gone with, and much of why they're in the position they are. An LTT that put out half the videos they do may have never made it to this position. This is a good wake up call as to the costs of that kind of operation, and it's up to you how you choose to react to this.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 24 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I've realized I mostly want "social media" as a place to create discussions. For that, honestly, the smaller community size is perfect.

I find massive communities have a way of devolving into hive minds. Once you reach a critical mass of people who think one thing, any comment to the contrary is just... obliterated, whether by an exhausting amount of argument, or downvotes. And then it just becomes known that that's the opinion of the community, and people stop even bringing it up. At least that's my theory on how it happens.

Over here, with a smaller community size, I'm finding a lot more genuine conversation, no matter the topic. It's awesome. And I'm still finding Lemmy large enough to bring me interesting links and memes to talk about.

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Hazzard

joined 1 year ago