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pachorizons

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"you are likely overestimating your own contributions at work"

Based on what? Your own zero-evidence speculation? How is this anything other than arrogant punting? For sure we know that the point was something other than how fast the author reads compared to an AI, so what are we left with here?

What's damning about this is that such an error was both not caught by the researchers and then not corrected after it was raised as an error. Is this the kind of conduct that should be acceptable amongst AI researchers who want to stake a claim on their work being authoritative?

Putting aside the astounding material and resource cost of this fantasy, the claim made here is an example of why people call AI proponents 'out of touch' or 'anti-human.'

Part of the reason why mass media entertainment - Squid Games, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Minecraft Movie, etc - is so popular is because it is a shared experience that is commodified and then widely distributed. People watch things because their friends and families watch them, and the shared experience is a sort of asynchronous social experience. The same is true of games - just look at the popularity of Lets Play content on Youtube and Twitch. The same is true of music - concerts are still the primary way musicians make money.

So long as this is true, the 'dream' of hyper customised, personalised Netflix-style entertainment is an utter fantasy that denies the human need to experience, share and discuss their entertainment. I would go so far as to call it a delusional claim, and also very dystopian - to realise this goal is to atomise the social lives of billions via a complete walling off of the shared lived experience.

(Maybe this is not true with porn, given it is a commonly viewed in a, uh, solitary context; although at the same time Porntube and pre-Verizon Tumblr both show that it turns out that many people share their porn taste with others.)

In the U.S. in 2024, 32% of adult Americans reported being the target of workplace bullying[1]. Nearly 3 in 10 women (29%) and 1 in 10 men (10%) reported being subjected to debilitating sexual, physical or psychological abuse by their partner[2]. This means that 1/3rd of workers do not feel safe in their workplace, and a significant number of people don't feel safe in their own homes. There is no way these people are going to put anything on their faces that obscures their vision - not a pair of glasses, and not a giant headset. Until these numbers come down, VR and AR will never, ever go mainstream.

[1] https://workplacebullying.org/2024-wbi-us-survey/

[2] https://www.thehotline.org/stakeholders/domestic-violence-st...

Usually I would be as optimistic as you are about this, because that would be the dream (although it would be nicer for them to contribute to the project.) However, given Proton's primary use case is gaming, such an effort will almost certainly be kneecapped by Apple's historic half-hearted commitment to anything other than microtransaction-powered mobile games.

Do you really think that a DEI mandate specifies refusing to produce white faces in historical contexts? That is an extraordinary position, especially in the face of the layoffs of the ethics teams that this sort of claim would consider as collaborators for such a conspiracy. Do you really truly think that this is anything beyond the obvious naked incompetence of Google under it's current leadership?

To put it another way, this is an unsophisticated position. It is an unsophisticated to describe Google or Microsoft as Nazi organization for releasing a racist AI, so to is it an unsophisticated position to for clearly absurd "DEI" behaviour from Gemini. What both examples demonstrate are companies utterly incapble of governing this kind of system.

It is truly indicative of the shortcomings of the supposedly enlightened Hacker News hivemind that Google - a company that has killed influential projects and sacrificed / cannibalised the integrity of it's core search product - should be condemned because it's latest AI malfunction is too 'DEI'.

Google's AI blunders are more systemic than the latest culture war. The cringe hate spewed by earlier models are just as incompetent as Gemini, these are nothing more than the flailing of a multinational who is incapable of fashioning a vision of a world they promise. These are bugs at the highest level, that are clearly poisioning every layer of Google. They are the same bugs that led to Google search shortcuts that pushed disinformation COVID.

This is a failure of rigour from the flailing of the world's self appointed organiser of knowledge. Your least favourite DEI minority has nothing to do with it. For fucks sake. Place your blame where it belongs.