On a more personal note and trying to keep exact circumstances vague and not name any names, but the IT corp I work at just had another wave of layoffs and our team got reduced from 5 to 4 people (and same for a neighbouring team that we are pretty close socially with, and more). Idk how they expect us to get anything done (I mean, I know, they want us to use more AI), especially with how much the mood has tanked. By any metric productivity this week is going to be close to 0% because everyone from affected teams has just mentally checked out.

So uhhhh anyone has any recommendations for what fields I could try to retrain to from IT? Preferably without going through uni again. I’m thinking locksmithing.

Just found this on sneerclub, this seems like a reasonable intro to the subject. Thanks!

Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic?

I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me “wait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgies” I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.

Edit: thanks everyone for responses, I’ll get my friend started with Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse and then point him at rational wiki for any further questions.

Yeah it’s really bad, I’ve been into crocheting and knitting (more of a knitter now) for about 2 years and if it’s not fake AI patterns or yarn companies dropping the ball, it’s pattern designers using AI to generate background pictures and stuff. I’ve been really disappointed with some people who really should have known better. You are in a creative, artistic hobby space! Why are you using a slop machine and devaluing work of other artists! Ugh.

At least being on ravelry and checking out other people’s project attempts/pattern comments has so far saved me from falling for AI bs.

…I’m so sorry, and it’s good (???) to know my company still has a few steps on the AI delusion ladder to climb. I guess with the way it’s been going I need to mentally prepare for the same thing you’re going through to come in a few months.

Spec-driven development is when you take these AI generated design docs and make it all you as a dev interact with. It’s waterfall but make it stupid and AI.

You give AI some guidelines and a feature description, then you twiddle your thumbs while it generates giant specs and occasionally asks you for some inputs, then you attempt to read the thing, give up, and give it to some other agent. Rinse and repeat until you burn a GDP of a small country in tokens and the agents agree that it’s going to work, and then you finally pull the lever and hopefully a feature matching all your specs appears. Or it doesn’t! And if it didn’t, it’s surely your fault because you didn’t give AI enough context.

I’m tired, boss.

I feel the need to scream into the void so here goes: my corpo job has certain execs that are very deep into the AI bs, and they’ve done a full tour of all the stages and iterations of AI hype, following all the new trendy tools because otherwise we’d surely be left behind 🫠

And the current somewhat new hotness is spec-driven development. I’ve tried it over the last few days since it looks like it’ll be mandatory for larger work.

And boy. Boy oh boy.

There are no words in the English language to describe how much I hated it. There may be some ancient curses in R’lyiehian that would do it.

The Copilot mandates were bad enough, but honestly if this is an attempt to make me see the light and admit that in itself Copilot isn’t that bad, then it’s kinda working.

It’s just… idk, I got into software dev because I like logic puzzles (and wanted the money, let’s be real). I enjoy making a small thing and then slowly adding stuff to it. I do not enjoy sitting idly while the slopmachine writes a giant spec that I think I’m supposed to read and correct but can’t because it’s unreadable. It’s like a textual white noise. It’s pretending to describe a piece of software I want to make while actually describing all the steps of a ritual to summon an Elder God of anxious boredom and machine madness.

I think I’ll be defining all of my work as small from now on.

I guess the silver lining here is that “his team” might accidentally discover some actual way to help sufferers of this disease? Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

Wait, three? What’s the previous 2? I think I’ve only heard about this case (…and a lot about Mythos so that proves your point nicely).

Ah yes, I love the smell of burning bridges in the evening. Fuck. And I was getting excited about Divinity! Well, guess that means more money to spend on other things.

I dunno about that, recent knitting drama took a while to clear up, and I’m not sure if AI sceptics are as determined a crowd as pissed off knitters.

(Tl;dr on the drama: there was video on SciShow about knitting that many (myself included) felt was not well researched, misrepresented the craft, and had a misogynistic vibe. It took a lot of pressure from the knitting community to get, in order, a bad “apology”, a better apology, and the video taken down.)

Fair warning: lots of roguelikes on this list. Just seems like the devs of these games really like 2d non-demanding visuals. And I don’t know how low do you need to go, so check these individually.

Don’t even need a sale for Moonring, which is a retro turn-based RPG, completely free. Runs on a potato.

Original Monster Train should work decently well, it’s 90% off.

Shogun Showdown is really cool, 50% off. Necesse is a very fun Terraria-like, coming out of EA in like a week and on sale now.

Look into Reus 2, very fun, but it’s got some more visual effects so may be a bit too much. Same with Astral Ascent, one of my fave action roguelikes but, well, it’s action. Needs a decent framerate. Same with Dead Cells, Cult of the Lamb and Chronicon - great games, 2d, but may require a basic dedicated video card or a beefy integrated one.

Spellcaster University is not a forever game but it’ll be fun for a while.

Cook Serve Delicious series is really good. You can start with 1, they are each a bit different.

Cross Code if you want an RPG. Citizen Sleeper or Road Warden if you want an RPG that’s borderline a visual novel. Slay the Princess if you straight up want a visual novel.

Library of Ruina and Lobotomy Corporation if you’re a masochist who likes a good story.

Then there’s eternal classics like Stardew Valley, Balatro, Terraria,FTL, Into the Breach, Slay the Spire or Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.

And on the incredibly niche side of things, I recommend Intergalactic Fishing and Rings of Saturn.

Hopefully something from this list catches your fancy!

Well that’s going immediately onto the “things that looked promising but what the fuck, so actually don’t read ever” list.

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Re: minecraft - kids/people who aren’t very good at technology can’t or are unwilling to learn how to host their own servers, so that’s your potentially paying audience. Or people who want to play with a ton of other people, not just their family/friends. And you can do some interesting things with custom scripts and so on on a server, I remember briefly playing on a server which had its own custom in-game currency (earned by selling certain materials) and you could buy potions, equipment and various random perks for it (and of course there are ways to connect that to real money, although you might get banned for it).

https://lemmy.ml/post/31490862 pretty interesting article linked in this post, tl;dr researchers tried to get AI agents to run a simulated vending machine (which, let’s be clear, is a solved problem and can be done with a normal algorithm better and cheaper) and it didn’t go that great. Even if some of the test runs actually managed to earn money, they mostly devolved into the AI becoming convinced that the system doesn’t work and desperately trying to email someone about it (even FBI, one memorable time). I think it illustrates quite well just how badly things would go if we left anything to AI agents. What are the odds anyone involved with pushing autoplag into everything actually reads this though…

Yeah, that video was rough. I wasn’t actually expecting him to be super lefty or anything, but the “both sides bad and should talk more instead of screaming” take was still a blow.

Good news: I’m sounding less and less like a conspiracy theorist nowadays. Bad news: see above.

Ah damn, I have it and enjoyed it a lot - it’s fun! The card assets have always been obviously generic, store-bought assets… but at least they were still made by humans. I remember the first AI controversy in that game, I think it was centered around the main menu’s background image, where the castle turrets and towers kinda didn’t line up.

I don’t know how I feel about this, on one hand this is such an incredibly niche product that I can understand wanting to save every scrap of money, but it sets a bad precedent going forward.

Name and shame? Which game?