I'm a little bit surprised to see someone taking such grand & absolute claims so seriously.
I guess I don't, generally.
Actually thinking about it, it's not that I treat them as unserious, it's more like I read it as something akin to hyperbole.
Anyway this isn't to say exploring this ("taking it serously") isn't worthwhile, just that I hadn't been prior.
As for the backlash itself, it seems safe to say it's motivated by a wide range of things.
Ultimately though, I do agree with the point in the title (i.e. it's about datacentres) but I think a lot of the other factors mentioned are significant, but I still wouldn't expect even a perfect (impossible) poll/study to find a neat, unifying reason for most of the backlash.
Of course it's about the datacentres: why would anybody want even a modest, ye olde time datacentre, let alone a neo cloud / AI one, in their neighbourhood?
You can call this nimbyism, which it is, but it's important to note the gulf of difference between a tech company's private profit facility and the sorts of projects where "nimby" typically is invoked.
Because this particular DC rollout is so massive and high profile, people have realised en masse that rejecting these things is something they can do. The anti-AI movement is absolutely a big part of this -- in terms of publicity, awareness, outreach -- but the various local peoples can (should, must) have their own reason for rejecting/protesting the projects.
Finally, given the dismal rate of promised capacity actually coming online -- which was apparent prior to and separately from "the backlash" -- I can't help but wonder if the widespread local resistance will end up as a scapegoat when questions start getting raised.
Sounds like the right move. I can only hope that the rest of us lap dogs see the (common) sense.
The USA is increasingly the source of economic and military destabliisation in the world and it's getting real hard to justify being the best little doggy for them.
I'm not suggesting any action more drastic than calling a shit deal shit, and frankly it's pathetic and embarrassing that this is such a rare occurence.
And yeah, maybe some miracle corrective action will begin with a new president but the thing is, that will necessarily include restoring our "special relationship". You're better off refusing a bad deal outright, rather than trying to reneg later.
Sorry to be a bore [that's a firearms joke], but -- while I encourage everyone and their family to experiment with building such devices, with safety in mind of course, it is a lot of fun -- please don't dispose of your old batteries in the natural environment!
Really not trying to call you out here, as a teenager I once had the idea to load up my marble cannon with dead AAs (they're free!) and got a "do you really think that's a good idea?" from an environmentally conscious adult when I went asking for dead batteries.
We moved on to oranges really fast after realizing that batteries coming out of the sky randomly was probably a bad idea, even if there were no apparent people around.
Don't get me wrong, oranges are dangerous too, coming out of the sky at terminal velocity, but at least when they hit the ground they disappeared into a fine, 3 meter wide mist.
You might need to qualify that a bit harder or someone could quite easily point out that all of these worthless shitdribblers cause actual damage to humans.
They all lie, they all continue to claim that they hold the future in their feeble sticky hands.
Just to take, take, take.
You seem fixated on lying being a problem but only one of these two liars causes you to feel that her case is different? Maybe the difference between the two is in the lie of the beholder.
The Alyx example is interesting, because I see that system as being designed to avoid breaking immersion. Specifically, to avoid entering an "unwinnable" state i.e. where the player restarts from a save/checkpoint. I do understand how noticing the underlying system can pull you out of the game though.
Intuitively, people want to save up ammo because they never know when there's gonna be a big fight, and they don't want to be caught low on ammo.
I had the same experience, I was trying to be very accurate with the guns and thought, wow, there's hardly any ammo to pick up in this game. Partway through I got tired of being stingy and started being less careful, having fun going rambo, and suddenly ammo was spawning everywhere.
I think it would be much better if the game just spawned enough to max out your pools fairly early, so you can focus less on inventory and more on combat. Then they can adjust the size of the ammo pools to tune how accurate they want you to be.
I think part of the issue is that Alyx doesn't really have any other options to fight besides guns that need ammo or however many grenades you're choosing to carry. They didn't have melee as a design decision, but it means they need to keep you topped up on ammo or you're defenseless.
"actual players" as opposed to other people who just, what? "use" the game?
Sorry, but it's hard to take this comment seriously when it reeks of "git gud".
So I'll just point out that a lot of people play games, and that there are well-documented instances of games with dynamic difficulty as early as the 80s.
As opposed to the game designer who came up with an idea that sounds convincing but barely ever tested it. My comment had nothing to do with "git gud", it's poorly worded perhaps.
Of course there's a ton of this, which is exactly why I complain. Level scaling is probably the easiest to justify because it solves legitimate issues (that are often caused by other poor decisions), but other types are usually much worse.
Allow me to elaborate on my earlier comment and reply to this one here:
A ton of it? No, I don't see that. It's probably the least commonly implemented approach to difficulty (curves).
Dynamically adjusted difficulty has been around for a long time, but it's never been broadly adopted.
There's a lot of reasons for this I'm sure, but a couple of obvious ones are that executives don't tend to throw money at features they can't see [or game developers in general], and that it's a tricky thing to build anyway.
It's certainly not the default solution to the problem, but there's a long history of games implementing some form of dynamically adjusted difficulty. Some of them to great success with the difficulty system itself being celebrated (Xevious, Resident Evil 4, Left 4 Dead), the vast majority of them you have no idea even implemented such a feature, and there's also a number of famous examples that were widely derided for it (Oblivion, ...?). [I'm genuinely stumped to think of another famously bad example, not trying to make it look like there are fewer of one than the other. I'm sure there are just as many negatively viewed ones as I can come up with positive ones.]
While it's obviously possible that an individual designer/team didn't thoroughly test their particular feature, the concept itself has been very well tested in a wide variety of implementations/mechanics. And if you're playing a game designed by people who didn't test it, the difficulty scaling seems likely to be the least of your problems.
I'm not sure that that's even worth considering, seeing as Facebook just lets scammers pay to list ads that are disguised (by Facebook) as actual posts.
It's hardly a surprise to see a behemoth like Oracle doing this.
Accepting LLM contributions can only be a liability, particularly for such a mature, stable project. Even if you see that liability as small or insignificant, it's non-zero. Given the project and the company, choosing zero additional liability seems like the obvious choice.
One also assumes the people maintaining OpenJDK have had their workload increase to an unmanageable level, like a lot of other free software projects and one thing I'm sure everyone can agree on is that Oracle certainly won't want to pay anyone more or hire more people to deal with that.
A lot of people (including the Register[0]) are pointing out that Oracle leadership are gung-ho about using LLMs for everything, and this seems to go against that.
It makes sense to question this from a journalistic angle -- the executives are obviously full of shit and people would do well to remember that the next time one of them opens their mouth. But pointing at the apparent contradiction -- different rules for internal projects vs. open ones -- doesn't seem particularly meaningful on its own:
I don't think the CEO/CTO raving about LLMs should be taken as firm statements about how they actually operate internally. I'm surprised that this does not seem to be the default case.
Among other things, Oracle stands to profit from greater adoption of LLM tools.
It would be unrealistic/unreasonable to expect their employees/contractors working on internal projects to be held to the same standard/guidelines/rules as developers contributing to a free software project.
This applies either way, whichever side (internal/open) has the worse deal.
I don't know what the rules are for their internal teams. As far as I know, I'm not alone in that.
Oracle also don't need to post anything publicly to change those rules.
I just want to add that programmers have only relatively recently become so abundant (i.e. replaceable) that they have so little say in how software should be built.
Programmers are still the experts in the room, but they don't get what they ask for for free anymore.
> This post reads off as AI slop. You said it, I see it.
I completely disagree. I think this post has emdashes in the first paragraphs and that most of the people saying that it was generated didn't go any further than that.
Where is the repetition? The sense of deja vu? Where is the artificial sweetener, the overuse of adjectives? Where is the lack of meaning?
Suppose there was a group of highly motivated individuals that saw this article and felt called out by it -- prompt engineers, if you will.
Because saying that "taste is all that's left" and that you can't develop taste without doing the work?
That's saying that there's something still out of their reach.
Something that can't be copied and reproduced ad nauseum.
This article gets at the heart of the issue and calls out -- though not explicitly -- these practitioners.
It does this in a calm and reasoned way, in a way that they cannot defend themselves from.
I'm not making the claim that the article is an attack on anyone -- my claim is that a class of people will see it that way and react to that like Gamers seeing a 7/10 review for the game they're hyped for.
As for the backlash itself, it seems safe to say it's motivated by a wide range of things. Ultimately though, I do agree with the point in the title (i.e. it's about datacentres) but I think a lot of the other factors mentioned are significant, but I still wouldn't expect even a perfect (impossible) poll/study to find a neat, unifying reason for most of the backlash.
Of course it's about the datacentres: why would anybody want even a modest, ye olde time datacentre, let alone a neo cloud / AI one, in their neighbourhood? You can call this nimbyism, which it is, but it's important to note the gulf of difference between a tech company's private profit facility and the sorts of projects where "nimby" typically is invoked.
Because this particular DC rollout is so massive and high profile, people have realised en masse that rejecting these things is something they can do. The anti-AI movement is absolutely a big part of this -- in terms of publicity, awareness, outreach -- but the various local peoples can (should, must) have their own reason for rejecting/protesting the projects.
Finally, given the dismal rate of promised capacity actually coming online -- which was apparent prior to and separately from "the backlash" -- I can't help but wonder if the widespread local resistance will end up as a scapegoat when questions start getting raised.