For instance, there is a lot of evidence (and intuition, frankly) to the argument that while LLM increase superficial, short-term productivity, they also cause an extreme accumulation in technical debt that may more than wipe out any initial, fast progress down the line.
So how will progress be made in our field, in your scenario of the future?
It's both an obvious consequence of how they operate, and an easily observable reality, that even the best models utterly fail at any task that is even slightly outside of the space spanned by their training set. In this future, software in 2022 was as good and as capable as it was ever going to get. In which case -- fuck, I had higher hopes for what computers and software would be able to achieve when I started in this business 20 years ago, than this sorry state of affairs. We were finally getting some traction on the idea that we urgently need to work on security, reliability, stability, etc., and suddenly we're all supposed to be excited about heading full speed the other way.
Forget about checking Safe Browsing. Try reporting phishing sites to Google if you really want a reason to hate them.
I report all (manually verified) phishing sites I get spam for to Safe Browsing, then automatically check the listing status daily, and re-report every week if it's still not blacklisted. Usually, takedown by hosters is faster. Phishing sites that stay up long enough often go for 3-4 months before Google finally deems it apt to block them. I think the entire Safe Browsing team consists of one overworked, underpaid intern.
Compare this to Microsoft Defender. The time it takes for a site I report there to get blocked is usually measured in hours, not weeks. This is one thing MS actually seems to be running decently.
People get arrested for tweets like calling for the homes of asylum seekers to be set on fire. Something like this, clear and direct calls for violence and criminal acts, usually turn up when you research any of those cases brought as examples for censorship in the EU or UK.
There is a difference between the EU and the UK: the UK is no longer a signatory to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. On the other hand, it is still a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, but of course there has been a sustained, concerted effort to exit it, disparage it as "a villain's chapter" etc, at least since I've been in the country (2005).
The environment in the EU and the UK is also very different in terms of freedom of speech. In the UK for example I've kept tabs on people being put in jail for completely ludicrous reasons, like a kid who was accused of planning a Sandy Hook - like attack because he had a backpack with batteries, stones and ziplocks in it, and a young woman who was put in jail for writing poetry, with themes interpreted as terrorist sympathy. Unfortunately my bookmarks are on my other computer and I can't access them now and a search online only brings up more current cases that I don't know much about because I haven't looked into them yet, so I'll have to ask you to just have to believe me about that.
On the other hand you can find plenty of information about Drill music used as evidence in criminal trials, which is also a form of criminalisation of expression that should be banned under both the EU and CoE laws:
Then again there is the appalling treatment of climate activists and anti-war protesters in the UK, like for example the recent proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation and the arrest of hundreds of its supporters that followed. But I believe that protesting e.g. the carnage in Palestine is not treated much better in Germany or France.
The important thing to keep in mind however is that all of that is the result of authorities overstepping bounds and claiming for themselves powers that they don't have, which happens in such freedom of speech-loving countries like the US even more often. The fact of the matter is that the law of the land protects freedom of expression and we do not live in some dystopian dictatorship where you're bundled up if you so much as dare to make a squeak about the government, or the authorities.
Using a banned ad to claim otherwise is simply disingenuous.
Awesome, Clonk fans on HN! To this day, I don't think there's any game series I spent more total hours in than Clonk. Also starting in 1998 with Clonk 4, especially with one particular friend from school, we played these sometimes every day for hours, all through Planet, GWE, Endeavour, and Rage (did I miss one?). As far as splitscreen multiplayer is concerned, it's still one of the best and most versatile computer games ever written, in my opinion. Bastard of a learning curve, though, which is why I never managed to get anyone beyond that one friend hooked, and I stopped playing it when our life paths started diverging... :(
I also remember Matthes Bender as more of a distant, benevolent ruler keeping the project running but staying very much in the background. IIRC by the time Clonk 4 came out he already had his consultancy going, so he was probably glad to offload the community stuff to other people.
By the way, Clonk is still going: there's OpenClonk, as well as an open-source continuation of the original Rage branch. Even the CCAN is still online!
Nice, a dedicated Clonk player. My obsession didn't last as long. Many years later, King Arthur's Gold scratched a very similar itch: https://kag2d.com/en/
The community is very small now. Peak was 10 years ago, but still an excellent multiplayer game.
These problems had been solved for a long time before publishers decided to needlessly kill self-hosted multiplayer. Don't let them gaslight you into believing that the online requirements are about anything else but their greed.
Also, I'm pretty sure players still know each other's IP addresses these days. I don't have any insider knowledge about this, but I'd be very surprised if today's multiplayer games took the latency hit of funneling actual game state through their servers, rather than just using them for matchmaking.
There's also the problem of cheating which creates a reputational issue for the game and frustrates players. Many multiplayer games suffer from cheating.
I found it incredibly rewarding to share my hobbies with people from around the world, with the most diverse backgrounds, in the inherently more walled garden of the early web. That was what the web promised over "meatspace" and I think it would be a shame to lose it.
Profile age and history are not a reliable indicator, either. Many of these bots use hacked accounts. The accounts of real people who stopped using the site and therefore won't notice the abuse of their account and stop it. You sometimes see this happen with your own friends since FB will suggest posts to you that your "friend" interacted with.
How did you compile? Were you sitting at a desk getting piles of printed code?
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