“We’re a startup”

“What’s your plan?”

“Giant mirrors in space to control the sunlight that hits the earth’s surface.”

“Wow, sounds incredibly expensive and of dubious technical merit. What are you asking to make this happen?”

“We need whatever money you have in your wallet right now.”

“And the return on investment?”

“Infinity zillion dollars.”

“I guess I’d be a fool not to hand you all my money.”

“Absolutely. Now… that’s a really nice watch. And shoes. We could get you an amazing return if you gave us those, too.”

What are they supposed to do?

My grandparents spent a lot of time playing tennis and bridge, knitting, and fishing.

Mad Max: Fury Road

One of the better action movies of the modern era

Really raises the question of how profitable these scam ads have become.

Also speaks to the addictive quality of social media (or perhaps the grim state of offline society). People keep coming back to these obviously booby-trapped websites to claw at a thin veneer of simulated friendship because they’ve got nothing better to do with their lives.

They’re just gonna lay them off.

And hire other people with the excess budget. Hell, depending on how badly these systems are implemented, you can end up with more staff supporting the testing system than you had doing the testing.

Ugh. QA. Quality Assurance. Reflexively jamming that & because I am a bad AI.

Regardless, digital simulated users are going to be able to test faster, more exhaustively, and with more detailed diagnostics, than manual end users.

I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the “AI” label.

Past that, advanced pathing algorithms are what Q&A systems need to validate all possible actions within a space. That’s the bread-and-butter of AI. Its also generally how you’d describe simulated end-users on a test system.

You don’t let AI check your work

From a game dev perspective, user Q&A QA is often annoying and repetitive labor. Endlessly criss-crossing terran hitting different buttons to make sure you don’t snag a corner or click objects in a sequence that triggers a state freeze. Hooking a PS controller to Roomba logic and having a digital tool rapidly rerun routes and explore button combos over and over, looking for failed states, is significantly better for you than hoping an overworked team of dummy players can recreate the failed state by tripping into it manually.

I wouldn’t be shy about getting into Remake or Rebirth now. They both stand up as their own games (concise start/ending, somewhat distinct mechanics, each one is easily 40+ hours of gameplay). And with Part 3 targeted for 2027 release, I suspect this kind of overhaul would be outside their dev cycle to implement.

Part 2 is already using the engine from Part 1 with minor adjustments. I suspect most of Part 3 development is cinematics and world building.

I would initially tap the breaks on this, if for no other reason than “AI doing Q&A” reads more like corporate buzzwords than material policy. Big software developers should already have much of their Q&A automated, at least at the base layer. Further automating Q&A is generally a better business practice, as it helps catch more bugs in the Dev/Test cycle sooner.

Then consider that Q&A work by end users is historically a miserable and soul-sucking job. Converting those roles to debuggers and active devs does a lot for both the business and the workforce. When compared to “AI is doing the art” this is night-and-day, the very definition of the “Getting rid of the jobs people hate so they can do the work they love” that AI was supposed to deliver.

Finally, I’m forced to drag out the old “95% of AI implementations fail” statistic. Far more worried that they’re going to implement a model that costs a fortune and delivers mediocre results than that they’ll implement an AI driven round of end-user testing.

Turning Q&A over to the Roomba AI to find corners of the setting that snag the user would be Gud Aktuly.

With this series, we aim to present not just the most complete picture yet of the GFW, but a roadmap for pushing back against the machinery of state censorship.

It’s definitely a deep technical dive into the underlying infrastructure of Chinese internet services. But I’m not seeing any of this in the guts of the article.

Definitely stems the tide, but it’s a long way from “never seen an ad in 25 years”

I’ve had some trouble setting up a pie-hole. It’s an imperfect system and something of a constant struggle between advertisers and ad-blockers.

If you’ve escaped every digital ad over the last 25 years, congrats. I’m reasonably tech savy, use adblockers where I can, and haven’t been remotely this fortunate.

People who rely on their phones/computers to tell time

Okay, but we’re not cave people, ffs. I couldn’t help notice the sun was up a lot sooner than normal.

Nah, his complaint was lack of torque.

Maybe just had torque confused with horsepower? That’s been the historical trade-off between gas and electric. Sure, its very easy to get an electric motor to jump into action. But it is comparatively difficult to generate the same amount of power with equivalent fuel density.

A gallon of refined gasoline packs insane energy.

Much of which is lost to heat when combusted, which is the historical hang-up.

Not that batteries don’t have their own heating problems. But the benefit of batteries is that they’re an engineering problem we can solve with miniaturization, which we’ve become incredibly good at. We’re at a soft ceiling in terms of engine chemistry. Petroleum is about as refined as we’re going to get it. Combustion’s math is what it is. Improvements to the efficiency of modern engines have stalled out as an automotive tool, even to the point that a gas engine powering an electric capacitor in a hybrid yields performance improvements over the gas engine just spinning the wheels directly.

What could he have possibly been trying to say?

I mean, the general appeal of ICE engines is the fuel, not the engine. Gasoline is generally more energy dense than lithium.

Generally speaking, I don’t check the age/gross karma on an account unless I’m suspicious. And by then… plenty of older accounts with lots of karma are HailCorporate to the gills. Nevermind the mods.

I just can’t take anything on that site seriously

“At least” is doing some heavy lifting

if a computer was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved (in) your face by every product. People would just use it.”

People did just use it. But because they were so comically expensive and complicated, most people couldn’t afford one until the mid-90s.

Computers were rapidly adopted for business, initially. But they quickly became a popular tool for entertainment as well.

AI serves little in the way of either purpose