Look, in the 1990s I was horrified of PC gaming because I was always dealing with kids who thought they were having fun with their PC whereas they were really fighting with an ugly plastic oversized joystick that fell apart two times during a level and had to be recalibrated three times. Or that it was a sweaty battle with the keyboard and mouse that reprises the sweaty battle with the keyboard and mouse I have at work and with my productive hobbies.

I got into console gaming in the late 00's and had a few portables and an Xbox 360 and a PS 3 just after they became obsolete and played through the libraries. My favorite games were games for the PS Vita from Japanese publishers like Altus, Idea Factory and Acquire. When Sony and the publishers quit investing in the Vita those games went right to Steam. And my experience with Steam is, "click on the Steam icon", pair the Xbox controller, use the controller to pick a game, and sit back. Like yeah, there still are sweaty keyboard-and-mouse games and I might even play one once in a while, but I'd say my experience on the big machine is "console like" with the condition that the kind of games I play are "console like" games.

I haven't had a driver issue other than 'you didn't upgrade your drivers lately' on a gaming PC in years and years. The problem now with pc gaming is the cost to enter the market with the GPU, RAM and storage prices.

In what sense is the steam deck more console than pc? I agree that there's convenience in it being a single target for people to work on, but it lets you run anything you want even on the stock operating system, and you can trivially replace that at will

The line between console and blurred significantly lately. Consoles became X86 machines running PC OSs but locked down. PCs gained options for console hardware with the same OSs.

These days the only difference between PC and Console is having a locked down OS. Which makes consoles seem purely a worse product, but the difference used to be a lot more.

The deck is a standard configuration they can test for, the “works with Steam Deck” badge sells product, game publishers covet it. Problems with Proton get worked out.

I boot into a video games only interface. To update I click a single button. This is exactly a console interface and user experience

SteamOS is basically just a Linux distro with Steam preinstalled and set to autorun in Big Picture mode at boot. Everything you are describing is available in the plain Steam client because SteamOS runs the same client. You can just set your PC to boot into Steam and get 99% the same experience.

> Provenance is hard to track - you would hope OpenAI has very good tools for this, but a full data trail of all inputs is difficult to trace through.

What would OpenAIs incentive for this be? They've gotten away with scraping everything and getting it ruled fair use. It seems like willful ignorance is an affirmative defense today. Why would they want to have some sort of audit trail that could prove otherwise?

Did you look at the original? I assumed it was censoring "killer" which also meshes with my perception that "trigger words" get censored in certain social media circles now.

Most of this is self-censorship by people who believe they are being oppressed by all-powerful dark forces, whose malevolent schemes can nevertheless be foiled by simple character substitutions.

My favorite example of this is people self-censoring “shooter” as “sh**ter”, which I can’t help myself from always parsing as “shitter”.

“The shitter in Virginia has been apprehended”, etc.

I assume it's just people mimicking/cargo culting content creators, who are indeed being oppressed by the dark forces of the algorithm and the de-mometizer.

To be fair, YouTube (and probably other platforms) used to literally block stuff like that, and the substitutions did get by it.

Facebook does this heavily. People discussing the strategy to beat a Fallout boss get sent to Facebook jail for writing "gun", "shot","kill", etc., so the self-censoring is now in the rules of most Fallout gaming groups.

IMO this boils down to big platforms being pressured to moderate, because some horrible things are shared there, and the cheapest moderation is blindly flagging words. People discussing things like games get warned/banned/shadowbanned by machines for using banned words, and everyone is getting used to self-censor because the appeal is as useful as a second navel.

TL;DR: self-censorship is so prevalent because it saves online platforms money.

How did "kosher" become one of those words?

ok, so i misread the censored word. Maybe i'm old; the concept of "trigger words" doesn't seem to be solved by making it harder to communicate in my opinion.

It not /all/ about triggers it's partially driven by the algorithms on some social sites like TikTok or Youtube where there's some evidence and a lot of speculation that mentioning or including certain words can cause the recommendation algorithm to suppress your videos etc. That leads to a lot of homophones etc popping up like "sewer slide" or odder non mentions like unalive popping up. Because the really big channels care about maximizing reach for monetization reasons it shows up strongly in peoples feeds which drives wide adoption.

Beenaminute did an experiment about this and found it didn’t really matter. Algospeek would be caught by the same filters people try to avoid anyways.

There'd be a lag between a new algospeak abomination popping up and it getting added to the filters at least but yeah I think it's probably largely ineffective now. Probably even less so if they're using LLMs to screen for potential new substitutions but the practice already gained popularity so even if it's ineffective now it'll persist until it's supplanted or becomes outdated. It's like the persistence of some SEO optimization techniques even after Google et al adjusted the algorithm to account for them.

Definitely agree. I don't understand how "thinking harder" about what the word MIGHT be solves any problem. I might just be part of this older generation who is hard trained on reading and not skimming, I don't know. I've never found anyone who appreciates this sort of censorship to ask them to help me understand.

Nobody appreciates it. It's in the Nash Gap -- the difference between the true optimum and the reality that emerges from each involved party optimizing for their incentives.

People: complain to politicians when egregious content starts trending

Politicians: bug Platform to do something about the egregious content

Platform: quickest fix for egregious content is dumb pattern matching

Content Producers: avoid becoming a false positive by using dumb substitutions to dodge the dumb pattern matching

The most direct fix would be the platform getting smarter about censorship, but this would not be without its own tradeoffs.

The estimated travel times displayed in major cities along highways are calculated by license plate sampling from what I understand

I dont think thats everywhere. CA freeways have speed sensors every mile or two, and from that, along a given route you can estimate time

So you think that is the unauthorized use that the officers were fired for?

That seems overly complicated when simple speed sensors would do the job.

You are definitely not alone. I love Java and I will always defend it. Java's perception is tainted by baggage from decades ago.

Is the hard evidence of AI being a net improvement for society in the room with us now?

If I'm in the room, yes. For me, AI is one, is the best handicap accessibility tool I've ever had. At a minimum, speech recognition is a higher quality, and second, it lets me write code again. I'm working on the third benefit, which is it helps me organize, helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.

If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and engineering. These improvements get drowned out by the AI Cheerleaders, but they're there.

> helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.

I keep seeing this and I'm pretty envious! You must have a different form of ADHD than I do. For me, trying to use AI to build anything is terrible for my attention, it turns everything into a miserable slog because it's so hands off.

I miss getting into flow.

I hear you.

AI helps me get into flow state because I can have a rambling conversation with a chatbot and work through ideas and what abouts. eventually it helps me forget to a place where flow is easier to maintain.

I like this argument/reasoning more than any I've encountered so far. Thank you! Enabling the disabled is definitely a positive and this is a strong argument for the "pro AI" column.

I think another argument for AI is that it can help pull out patterns and information that are normally hidden from human cognition because we can't encompass that information and keep it in mind.

I think one place we should apply this is to the financial system. Use it to detect fraud, tax manipulation games and Other b**** pulled by the 1%ers.

With luck, it might even help us find methods of reducing their influence and power.

"With luck, it might even help us find methods of reducing their influence and power."

If it started to look like that might happen, the ones with influence and power would adjust the AI behavior. They own and control them.

Maybe.. off grid local llms from multiple sources could be a bullwark against that.

Two points on that: 1. This would require hardware to be affordable by mere mortals. That hardware is not financially beyond our reach yet, but AI is making the cost of buying good computer parts very expensive. The big corporations are working against the goal of local LLMs in a major way just by soaking up most of the hardware on the market. And I don't even think that's intentional - they're just too hungry to consider otherwise. They can pay high prices where normal people cannot.

2.Local LLMs would have to be designed to be very convenient to use. As it stands, the big players are making their online models very convenient instead, and that let's them charge a subscription. It's a proven business model that our society has gotten used to (even if we grumble a bit). Even if the hardware were cheap, local LLMs are mostly for businesses, with a few hobbyists running it in their basement because they can.

It's extremely hard for me to imagine local LLMs being a threat to the powerful in any way.

Depends, is the net improvement of the internet, electricity, agriculture, steam engine also in the room?

Asbestos is the miracle material it is advertised as. It really is great insulation, and really is absolutely fireproof. Thousands of industrial uses are readily apparent.

Despite this, because of its other effects, the cost to clean up and stop using asbestos is greater than the sum total of any benefit from all mined asbestos worldwide.

Even a miracle technology can still be a net disaster.

It's a good point I have to say

I don't understand that this argument. Why does the net improvement of the technologies listed imply that AI will also have a net improvement? Are you just arguing that there's no such thing as technology that is harmful on net?

Back in the late 90s the Michigan Tech CS labs had 2 preferred machines for students to remote into, Colossus and Guardian.

I always enjoyed the reference as well as this movie’s a kid!

Now watch Person of Interest and then name your computer Samaritan.

And your life might be very privileged to so flippantly disregard anyone’s reality that is just that difficult.

It's that difficult but they're also commenting on hn.

And? Is that a hurdle or something? You know homeless people are allowed to go on the internet? Smartphones? You'll find other homeless or desolate people here on HN - I won't name anyone out of respect but if you read enough comments here over time you would recognize them.

measured and flavorless. As expected of a company trying to IPO.

I know my country is a circus right now, but I haven't forgotten the steps a "civilized" corporation does to creep into your privacy. This is just the first step: "It won't affect most of you don't worry. We pinky promise your data won't leak too".

I'm tired of words. I want actions taken. The current actions is "we will wait until it's too late and disassociate with any 3rd party that gets hacked". Doesn't really help now that my data is out there.

I think Java has plenty of features that end up implicitly banned at least. e.g. you will really never see a `java.util.Vector` in any modern code base. No one `implements Serializable` anymore in practice. `Objects.equals()` and `Objects.hashCode()` get you through 99% of equals/hash code implementations. The list goes on.

I guess the difference is it's rarely "dangerous" or "hard to reason about" using the old features unlike what I see in the C++ list. Java replaces things with better things and momentum shifts behind them kind of naturally because the better things are objectively better.