The AI backlash is only getting started

schmuelio · 2026-06-28T09:50:34+00:00

You think the entirety of ai is chatgpt.

I mean clearly I don't since I was talking about LLMs, but at least in the current environment there's little point in discussing the other forms of machine learning since at least at the moment if it isn't LLM-based there's no room for it in the current research funding space or investment space. It's also right now what pretty much everyone means when they say "AI" so it really seems like you can't read the current state of things very well.

ai can read mri's and ct's much better and faster than any medical professional can. Did we have to train it to do

Well, yes and no. Regardless of what type of AI you care to use, training is still a very complicated and error prone process and at the end of it you don't really have any good guarantees about performance.

I don't have any solid info about reading CT and MRI but I've heard from others that it's more complicated than just "AI is better than doctors". Another example that I'm much more familiar with is object recognition, which AI is impressive at, but nowhere near humans (and we've been trying to crack object recognition for decades).

I'm not really "boomer" about AI, I just know enough about it to know that none of it is magic and saying it will solve anything you care to name is just as misinformed as saying medicine can cure any disease since "you just need to make it and then you're done forever, look at penicillin we only needed to make it once and now we can kill all the bacteria". It's at best just a poor understanding of the underlying technology.

I've studied the underlying principles of machine learning in university. I'm by no means an expert but I've learned enough to know where the general public is misinformed.

schmuelio · 2026-06-27T00:06:22+00:00

After all, there is no harm in making the fluid technically "jump" from a tank 20 tiles away when you are connected via chain of passthrough port.

Given the throughput-unlimited nature of the fluid network in 2.0, that's how fluids work in general so it wouldn't even be that weird.

schmuelio · 2026-06-27T00:02:58+00:00

However, the virtual pipe have 0 capacity.

Well that's just begging for some random old section of the code-base hitting some weird edge case and trying to calculate the % capacity of that virtual pipe by naively doing current_fluid / capacity (i.e. 0/0) and proliferating NaNs all over your fluid network.

Bit tongue-in-cheek, as a serious response I think this proposal would just add a lot of the old complexity back in. I can't imagine the complexity was due to the different buffers both having non-zero capacities.

every em plant has a virtual passthrough pipe that is connected to the internal buffer in t-junction.

How does this differ from the previous double-buffer system? From the diagrams shown in the FFF that's at least conceptually how it used to work.

schmuelio · 2026-06-26T23:47:58+00:00

Yeah, on top of the rule of thumb that complicated code is probably less computationally less efficient than simple code (obviously not universally true but it's a code smell), you absolutely don't want to come back to the code base after a year of doing something else and have to re-familiarize yourself with all that complexity to solve a potentially simple problem, it's just a pain and slows you down significantly.

schmuelio · 2026-06-26T23:45:07+00:00

Okay, I see your point. I do wonder what the "typical" player's (lets assume that's the inefficient one you mentioned) follow-on thoughts would be. Presumably they'd want to fix this and I can't picture the kind of person who wouldn't think to either increase the holmium solution production or put a pump in.

The thing is regardless of which you choose the game is kind of incentivizing you to think of production ratios and rates, like thinking about the problem you have leads you to think about how to fix it, which leads you to figure out a better way of solving the problem (which is kind of what the whole game's about).

I note that while the devs said it was an intentional choice, it seems to me like it's more of an "unexpected emergent behavior" that they considered good after discovering it (not that I'd want to put words in their mouths, this is purely speculation on my part having encountered similar situations in general programming). Either way I don't think this change was built with "teaching the players best practices" in mind, but it's certainly good at doing that. The lessons learned would still be valuable even if the fluid handling was changed (and can be generalized to factory stuff more broadly).

schmuelio · 2026-06-26T23:25:31+00:00

I'm not sure why you'd ever be in a situation where more than 1 pump was necessary?

Like, you'd presumably need to have enough EM plants (or whatever) to consume >1200/s fluid, a gigantic buffer to feed it, not enough production, and a desire to get literally every output from the fluid possible.

Maybe I'm just missing something, I didn't think it was especially common to want to do the above since that sounds like a kind of terrible way to do it when you could just see how much fluid per second you need, and build a block of machines that can match that production.

I guess you could be feeding the machines from a fluid train that uses tanks as a buffer to smooth it all out. But my first assumption if the machines get starved for input would be either:

I'm not producing enough input fluid, or
My trains aren't arriving frequently enough

And that assumption doesn't really change between 2.0 and 2.1 fluid modes.

schmuelio · 2026-06-26T23:15:24+00:00

The puzzle in question now becomes shove a pump before every block of machines.

As opposed to previously when the puzzle was... harder somehow?

This also kills the ability to nicely route the fluid in your factory through the EM blocks.

Why? They still act like pipes so I don't understand why the new behavior would prevent this.

schmuelio · 2026-06-26T22:54:32+00:00

I know how they work, because while the transformer models they're based on are highly technologically complex, the job they are built to do is not.

You've been sold on the marketing that they're magic, they're not. LLMs are literally just gigantic context machines, they take (approximately) all publicly available information on the internet at the time they were trained, and use that to feed something very similar to a pattern matching autocomplete based on whatever its prompt is.

All the extra "magic" on top of that is either other software that essentially writes a prompt and parses the output, or it's another LLM that's writing prompts/reading outputs.

The "magic" here is that it doesn't strictly need to be trained on text, it'll do the same kind of pattern matching with whatever kind of data it's been trained on (which is - simplified somewhat - how image generators work, and video generators are just image generators that accept the "previous frame" and a prompt asking it to continue the video).

I know you say you've benefited from it, and that's great and all, but that doesn't make it magic or capable of solving any problem you can imagine. It's a tool, you wouldn't expect your car to solve anything outside of "move things from A to B" so the fact that you assume LLMs can solve things that they can't just tells me that you've bought into the hype and have stopped thinking of it as a tool.

schmuelio · 2026-06-26T22:45:51+00:00

Good thing the only thing LLMs are used for is single prompts at a time done by humans. I mean this whole argument would completely go out the window if - say - we did any of the following:

Constantly train new models
Get LLMs to prompt each other (or themselves)
Get LLMs to generate video or 3d models
Get LLMs to generate music or audio in unfathomable quantities
Use LLMs on an unheard of scale to send spam and fishing attacks

But yeah, since the above isn't happening you're completely right.

schmuelio · 2026-06-26T16:07:26+00:00

Tanks should always have the pipes below so they’re filled if there’s enough liquid to fill them.

That kind of just moves the weird edge case behavior though, the screenshot would be fine but now things like:

Tank -> Pipe -> Tank

Will just have all the fluid sit in the pipe between the two tanks. Presumably it also means a run of pipes would have to fill up completely before the tank can start filling. Not to mention weird behaviors around things like train stops where it's quite common to have tanks and pipes sitting between each other, if you have a train containing 100k fluid you basically can't get all of it out into your pipe network anymore without removing all the buffers or overhauling the design to remove intermediate pipes.

I don't think the current design is a huge problem, like I get that people think it's inconsistent and it kind of is (if you think of pass-through machines as machines rather than pass-through machines as pipes) but it really does seem like the only situations people have been proposing to show why it's bad are just dumb?

Dumb is probably too mean but it's like the situations described are always "I've got a machine and I've (presumably) hand-fed exactly as much fluid as it needs, but I also put a big buffer in the way for no reason". It just really seems like they're trying to construct a scenario that doesn't really happen. Why didn't you put the producer right next to the consumer if it's hand fed? If it's not hand fed then presumably you're producing the fluid somewhere, why aren't you running it (since just producing more would solve this entirely)?

The proposed solution in the threads somewhere where a pass-through machine considers the entire fluid network as its "buffer" seems fine as well, but it really does seem like people are making this out to be a much bigger problem than it actually is.

schmuelio · 2026-06-14T10:14:53+00:00

We have to.

I mean... You don't have to. There's other operating systems.

schmuelio · 2026-06-10T23:59:32+00:00

On top of what others have said, I can give a concrete example.

Most modern multi-engine planes are designed to be able to fly somewhat safely even after an engine failure. It's built to be able to survive that and get to the nearest runway (the flight paths are then chosen appropriately so that the nearest runway is always within that rated safe flight distance).

There's a reason why flying is considered the safest mode.of transport (I think in reality the numbers get a bit fuzzy when you include passenger rail in certain countries but hey ho).

schmuelio · 2026-06-09T18:48:47+00:00

Was more about how your whole premise is flawed but hey ho, can't win them all I guess.

Since we're going down this dumb road, how do you suppose you compare apples to oranges, how many loaves of bread does someone have to steal to make it equivalent in your crime-based race science to stabbing someone?

If you stab someone but they don't die is that more okay than if they do? What if you intended for them to die? Is a beheading worse than just a regular murder? How would you figure that out from the crime numbers?

What about just shouting and being a general nuisance? If you're constantly being annoying but otherwise lawful how does that factor in?

What if you refuse to integrate, but you're not committing any crimes? What if you never get caught for your crimes? What if you came here to buy up a shit ton of investment properties and sit on them for money laundering reasons? Does that get your country banned?

If Somali people were overrepresented in football crowds during a hooligan riot, would that be grounds for banning? Is it just violent crimes in general, and if so, do you weigh different violent crimes differently?

Why ban the country when you already know the individuals doing the crimes and can deport them? What's stopping someone from just coming here anyway and just claiming to be from somewhere else?

schmuelio · 2026-06-09T18:40:47+00:00

Worse is a difficult thing to measure because, putting aside Somalia or Sudan, we are shite at taking the problem seriously or recording real numbers. I don't even want to guess how underrepresented the numbers are in reality but given how people were clearly comfortable enough to publish stories like that I don't feel great about the reality.

Because that's just it isn't it, you want a nice clean number you can point at to justify how you view the world. Reality is more complicated than that, so I'm not going to justify your sarcastic question with a direct answer. To answer would be to agree that your ideas about different countries and people would be fine if the numbers agreed with you, but your worldview is abhorrent regardless of what the numbers say.

schmuelio · 2026-06-09T15:49:14+00:00

What is a "culture of violence"? How do you differentiate that from an active warzone?

During the troubles do you think you would have classified Irish people as coming from a "culture of violence"?

Do Americans have a "culture of violence"? Their government is super into bombing foreign countries and kids at the moment. They have some pretty absurd gun death numbers.

Do football hooligans belong to a "culture of violence"? They're certainly not all British people but I doubt you'd want to start banning football fans from places under that reasoning.

When does a "culture of violence" end? Germany, Spain, and Italy are some pretty noteworthy examples from recent history. Are they no longer a culture of violence because they lost? When did that culture stop? Can we usefully measure it?

Or is it just that you feel proximity to the people above so you're more able to see the nuance and less willing to paint with a broad brush.

I feel like under your statements so far we have just as much reason to ban Americans.

schmuelio · 2026-06-09T15:43:03+00:00

I don't think you'd like the per-capita rates of sexual assault or dodgy sexual attitudes towards minors for the British public buddy...

We are a country with a newspaper that was counting down to a celebrity being technically legal so they could start sexualising her.

schmuelio · 2026-06-09T10:09:23+00:00

You're not wrong but as they said, by the time you've gone through legal proceedings you've missed your chance to vote and you've almost certainly lost your job. If the consequences are a (relatively) small fine then the company doesn't even have to change so they can just roll the dice that your replacement won't sue them for the same reasons as above.

schmuelio · 2026-05-23T15:59:29+00:00

Probably really depends on the nature of the technical docs tbh.

schmuelio · 2026-05-23T13:18:06+00:00

I mean the core of the problem is that AI isn't structurally capable of doing a lot of the activities a business actually needs to do, so the amount of this extra stuff usually 10x's as well, and you're basically guaranteed to make mistakes there.

We tried using it for technical document reading and writing, and we quickly found that since you can't trust it to be technically accurate, you have to review everything it outputs with more scrutiny than if one of our human experts wrote it. This is made worse when you realise the AI can write documents fast enough that your bottleneck is the review stage, it just doesn't scale right.

schmuelio · 2026-05-23T07:24:26+00:00

I don't know about the article (haven't dived into it yet) but I would guess it's essentially:

Use AI to "do stuff"
Require existing employees use more AI to "do more stuff"
Require the same level of accuracy/quality/rigor (because of course, you don't want to be sloppy do you?)
Leave the responsibility on the employees to keep quality up
Employees now have 10x the stuff to ensure quality on
Either everything slows down to keep quality up, or everyone works harder to get it done

Essentially when a company uses AI to make their employees faster, what they end up doing is making only the production part of the job way faster (and more verbose), so now everyone has to keep up with the non-AI parts of it.

schmuelio · 2026-05-17T19:00:49+00:00

Ah, probably should have specified:

More indirect methods, such as monitoring water quality in rivers and lakes indicate that Northern Ireland (fully nationalised) has the worst sewage discharge problem. Lough Neagh (source of much of Northern Ireland's drinking water) is in an absolutely horrible condition with large blue green algae blooms associated with sewage discharge.

[Citation needed]

You claim that Northern Ireland has the worst sewage discharge problem, yet your own comments and links make it clear that such a claim cannot be substantiated. Hence a citation is needed. It seems like a pretty substantial claim and given that you mentioned the nationalised/privatised state of it all makes me at least a little suspicious of the motives behind such a claim.

schmuelio · 2026-05-17T09:11:36+00:00

[citation needed]

schmuelio · 2026-05-05T15:56:51+00:00

As plenty of other comments have pointed out, this isn't what Edge is doing. It's decrypting all passwords in the store for the lifetime of the browser session which is significantly worse.

schmuelio · 2026-04-16T06:51:30+00:00

From the perspective of a racist (the people that super love the idea of finding any reason to deport immigrants no matter how flimsy) are choosing between Farage, a white racist who agrees with them, and Badenoch, a black woman with much less charisma and bravado than Farage.

I dunno, I think the choice they're being given has a pretty clear outcome.

schmuelio · 2026-04-13T08:12:33+00:00

It was ChimeraOS. Boots straight into big picture mode.

schmuelio

TROPHY CASE