Readit News logoReadit News
blackbrokkoli commented on Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use   thegamer.com/clair-obscur... · Posted by u/anigbrowl
NitpickLawyer · 3 days ago
> rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers

The double standard here is too much. Notice how one is stealing while the other is learning from? How are diffusion models not "learning from all the previous art"? It's literally the same concept. The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.

blackbrokkoli · 3 days ago
It's a double standard because it's apples and oranges.

Code is an abstract way of soldering cables in the correct way so the machine does a thing.

Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.

blackbrokkoli commented on Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use   thegamer.com/clair-obscur... · Posted by u/anigbrowl
blackbrokkoli · 3 days ago
Is anyone else detecting a phase shift in LLM criticism?

Of course you could always find opinion pieces, blogs and nerdy forum comments that disliked AI; but it appears to me that hate for AI gen content is now hitting mainstream contexts, normie contexts. Feels like my grandma may soon have an opinion on this.

No idea what the implications are or even if this is actually something that's happening, but I think it's fascinating

blackbrokkoli commented on AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power   chrbutler.com/what-ai-is-... · Posted by u/delaugust
Muromec · a month ago
Whenever I hear about productivity gains, I mentally substitute it for "more time to play video games left in the day" to keep the conversation grounded. I would say I rather not.
blackbrokkoli · a month ago
If you have two modes of spending your time, one being work that you only do because you are paid for it, and the other being feeding into an addiction, the conversations you should be having are not about where to use AI.
blackbrokkoli commented on AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power   chrbutler.com/what-ai-is-... · Posted by u/delaugust
highfrequency · a month ago
The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times.

What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underlying technology is improving rapidly, but because it hasn’t cusped the viability threshold you don’t feel it at all. From this vantage point, it is easy to dismiss the whole thing and forget about the slope, because the whole line is under the surface of usefulness in your context. The author has identified two cases where current AI is below the cusp of viability: design and large scale changes to a codebase (though Codex is cracking the second one quickly).

The hard and useful thing is not to find contexts where the general purpose technology gets a 0, but to surf the cusp of viability by finding incrementally harder problems that are newly solvable as the underlying technology improves. A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices by starting with expensive sports cars, then luxury sedans, then normal cars. You can be sure that throughout the first two phases, everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars. By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead.

blackbrokkoli · a month ago
I heard a very similar sentiment expressed as "everything is not good enough to be useful until it suddenly is".

I find it a powerful mental model precisely because it is not a statement of success rate or survival rate: Yes, a lot of ideas never break any kind of viability threshold, sure, but every idea that did also started out as laughable, toy-like, and generally shit (not just li-ion batteries, also the wheel, guns, the internet and mobile computers).

It is essentially saying 'current lack of viability is a bad indicator of future death' (at least not any more than the high mortality of new tech in general), I guess.

blackbrokkoli commented on How the restoration of ancient Babylon is drawing tourists back to Iraq   theartnewspaper.com/2025/... · Posted by u/leoh
blackbrokkoli · 3 months ago
I was there earlier last year, and it was none too impressive.

Pretty shoddy brick walls (just straight blocks), crumbling at many places, constructed possibly along ancient foundations or maybe not, that you sort of walk through. Interesting things here and there. Couple of other tourists.

Walking through Saddam's palace next to it was much more fascinating; extreme grandeur morphed into a typical lost place with graffiti and empty bottles. The nearby town Al7illa certainly offered more to actually experience, like a mini theme park with the main attraction being (artificial) rain.

Anyways I genuinely wish the committed people all the best in the restoration, but I feel like the article is a tad over-enthusiastic and easily convinced.

blackbrokkoli commented on Show HN: LangFlick – TikTok but for Language Learning   apps.apple.com/us/app/lan... · Posted by u/ahmetomer
blackbrokkoli · 7 months ago
Interesting idea. Does it include any adaptive learning/spaced repetition mechanism? (I don't have an ios device, so I can't test)
blackbrokkoli commented on Show HN: GetZen.news – A news app that only shows what affects you   getzen.news/... · Posted by u/alexcloudstar
blackbrokkoli · 7 months ago
I think there really, really has to be a demo (at least screenshot mocks).

How will you collect the data (about me)? How much? How much more individual will this be compared to just subscribing to my city's newspaper (or a trade magazine, if we're talking job-related news)?

This may be just me, but I also think collecting emails here is a really weird first step — most news services provide at least a blurb of each article w/o any kind of signup, so this broke my expectation in a "what do you need my email for" kind of way.

Hope that helps.

blackbrokkoli commented on The best programmers I know   endler.dev/2025/best-prog... · Posted by u/kiyanwang
vinhcognito · 8 months ago
To me, cars are a means to an end. And I can imagine a world without cars more easily than a world without software.

Do you imagine that we just somehow evolve capabilities beyond it? or do we eventually produce universally perfect software solutions and leave it at that?

blackbrokkoli · 8 months ago
It's not really about that.

If I hire you to make software for me, I don't really want software; I want a problem to go away, a money stream built, a client to be happy. Of course, that probably requires you to build software, unless you invent a magic wand. But if you had the magic wand, I'd choose it every single time over software.

Not so with food, furniture or a fancy hotels, where I actually want the thing.

u/blackbrokkoli

KarmaCake day3202May 2, 2018
About
I mostly build learning apps.

You can find most of them at: https://koljapluemer.com/

View Original