Damn, that sucks.

The studio head of Modern Warfare (all ghillied up), Titanfall / Titanfall 2, and Apex Legends. The guy clearly had an eye for talent and knew how to make a memorable game. RIP.

Who spends their day “browsing around GitHub”?

It’s not entirely clear what he’s referring to, he just uses the term AI broadly in the context of people being worried about job losses, then talks about the reduction in secret police costs that enables, then discusses applying AI to physics.

Tl;dw: he has two points:

1. That between cameras and now AI monitoring, it has just drastically reduced the cost of running an authoritarian regime. He claims that running the Stahsi used to cost like 20% of the government budget, but can now be done for next to nothing and if will be harder for governments to resist that temptation.

2. That there hasn’t been much progress in the world of physics since the 70s, so what happens if you point AI and it’s compute power at the field of physics? It could see wondrous progress and a world of plenty.

Personally I think point 1 is genuinely interesting and valid, and that point 2 is kind of incredible nonsense. Yes, all other fields are just simplified forms of physics, and physics fundamentally underlies all of them. That doesn’t mean that no new knowledge has come from those fields, and that doesn’t mean that new knowledge in physics automatically improves them. Physics has in many ways, done its job. Obviously there’s still more to learn, but between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we can model most human scale processes in our universe, with incredible precision. The problem is that that the closer we get to understanding the true underlying math of the universe, the harder it is to compute that math for a practical system… at a certain point, it requires a computer on the scale of the universe to compute.

Most of our practical improvements in the past decade have and will come from chemistry, and biology, and engineering in general, because there is far more room to improve human scale processes by finding shortcuts, and patterns, and designing systems to behave the way we want. AI’s computer scale pattern matching ability will undoubtedly help with that, but I think it’s less likely that it can make any true physics breakthroughs, nor that those breakthroughs would impact daily life that much.

Again though, I think that point number 1 is incredibly valid. At the end of the day incentives, and specifically cost incentives, drive a massive amount of behaviour. It’s worth thinking about how how AI changes them.

Again, that’s not what Cory Doctorow coined it to mean. However, the pressures that enshittify two sided marketplaces can be abstracted to general capitalist pressures that push you to squeeze profitability at every opportunity, even to the detriment of your customers.

Two sided marketplaces often have the dynamics of creating a massive sticky force that prevents competition or movement, which enables their exploitative behaviour, but non marketplace companies also find ways of creating that stickiness through other anti-competitive means, and the use that stickiness to make their products as shitty as possible to squeeze every penny they can put of people.

I think that Doctorow’s points about two sided marketplaces are extremely useful because of their specificity, they can lead directly to specific legislation, but the term of enshittification is rapidly expanding to be used more generally.

If something is shitty they’ll call it shitty. Enshittification is inherently used to refer to a process of getting shittier. And 99% of the time people are referring to capitalism / corporate greed as that process.

and it’s not even the way it’s usually misused, so even more confusing

How do you think it’s most commonly misused?

It does exemplify why it’s such an awful word in general though, so that’s helpful in some small way, I guess.

Why is it awful? Because people have generalized its original specific meaning? Or because of the awfulness it represents?

I watched Fallout and Silo in close succession and they felt like an inversion in terms of which parts were good.

Fallout felt like it’s scene to scene dialog was well written, but it’s overarching plot felt kind of nonsensical. Silo felt like it’s scene to scene writing was a little cheesy, but it’s bigger plot beats were far more nuanced and interesting.

I honestly have more faith that, being based on a series of books, Silo will turn out to be the better show. Fallout could be good, but it felt way more like the writers were laying down the tracks in front of the train as it was already rolling… Though again, at this point in time, Fallout’s still nowhere close to the level of bad writing that was the star wars prequels, let alone the newer three.

I do know that Cory Doctorow used it specifically to refer to the dynamics of two sided marketplaces. I chose to use it the way it’s more commonly used, to refer to the general enshittifying pressures of late stage capitalism, to get my point across.

I’m not completely sold, but at this point in time I’d say it’d work better with the new Fallout Show for one.

This would be a better comic if they chose a franchise that hadn’t been enshittified to the nth degree.

I agree with everything you’re saying, but even speaking specialist to specialist, or say to a group of specialist colleagues who might not be working on exactly what you’re working on, you still often simplify away the technical parts that aren’t relevant to the specific conversation you’re having, and use specific language on the parts that are, because that inherently helps the listener to focus on the technical aspects you want them to focus on.

If you’re communicating with another scientist about the actual work you’re doing then sure there are times when you need to be specific.

If you’re publishing official documentation on something or writing contracts, then yes, you also need to be extremely speciific.

But if you’re just providing a description of your work to a non-specialist then no, there’s always a way of simplifying it for the appropriate context. Same thing goes for most of specialist to specialist communication. There are specific sentences and times you use the precision to distinguish between two different things, but if you insist on always speaking in maximum precision and accuracy then it is simply poor communication skills where you are over providing unnecessary detail that detracts from the actual point you’re trying to convey.

Their literal entire first paragraph is about scientists doing it.

No, I’m talking about engineers and scientists communicating with project managers, designers, lawyers, business people, and the many many other people who work in the same industry but do not have technical backgrounds.

It is for a white collar job where most people have degrees.

Eh I don’t really agree, depending on how simple you’re talking. Bags within bags, or dumbing things down to a grade school level, then sure, there are topics that can’t be described succinctly.

But if you’re talking about simplifying things down to the point that anyone who took a bit of undergrad math/science can understand, then pretty much everything can be described in simple and easy to understand ways.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen many people at the top who can’t, but in every case, it’s not because of the topics’ inherent complexity, but either because they don’t actually understand the topics as well as they may seem, or because they lack the social skills (or time / effort / setting) to properly analogize and adjust for the listener.

You’re literally just describing this meme.

When you don’t know shit you think it should be simpler, when you slightly understand it then you end up using technical terms because you know those terms apply and aren’t confident enough to replace them, and then once you know enough you get confident just describing everything as bags within bags.

Claiming that VSCode is not an IDE is just pedantic.

It is literally just a modular IDE that lets you pick and choose which piece you want rather then being like Visual Studio or XCode that is tailored for a single language / development flow.

Hell you still have to download core parts of XCode / VS after you download and install them, like the development frameworks for your targets, does that mean that they’re not actually IDEs?

Drawing strong conclusions like ‘VSCode is an abomination that runs like dogshit and is worse than an Oracle product’, from an admittedly flawed comparison that does not demonstrate that, is inviting some antagonism.