I mean, even if you can’t recall the ASCII characters for a hex value (like me), you should be able to realize that that 0x51 is one less than 0x52, so that the “R” and the “3” should be right next to each other. Whether the “R” should be a “4”, or the “3” should be a “Q”, you can see that this is just plain wrong at first glance. LLM’s can’t. I get it, of course. CoPilot interpreted the 0x51 in the second position as decimal instead of hex (as opposed to all the others), which does accurately translate to a “3”.
That’s the thing I find about CoPilot and ChatGPT so far: They have quick answers and suggestions for every line as I’m typing, and half of everything that looks right at first glance turns out to be wrong. I actually started to argue with CoPilot after fruitlessly trying to use it to track down a bug for a half hour. What I am doing with my life?
But sure, tell me how we’re all going to lose our jobs this year because of this technology.
ZeniMax Online Studios’ Studio Director Matt Firor talks about another big year for The Elder Scrolls Online and some of the even bigger changes coming to the game in 2025 and beyond.
…
We need to seriously address Cyrodiil performance. Our (ambitious) goal is to return it to the concurrency levels we supported in 2014. So, we will be experimenting with a Cyrodiil campaign where all classes will have PvP-specific (and more performant) skills that replace the standard player skills with the expectation that we can support more players per campaign
Hmm… Well would you just look at that? Who could have identified that core problem? Oh! Me!
The biggest problem with the game seems to be the PVP part. PVE and PVP are completely different games, but they both use the same skills and gear, and both “halves” of the game suffer for it, despite the innumerable tweaks and hacks they try to use to help the situation. I don’t think there’s a future for this game without making a cleaner break between the two modes than currently exists.
Combat in ESO is a mix of HUNDREDS of variables on your character, a lot of which are being intermixed with everyone you’re fighting WITH, and everything you’re fighting AGAINST. Calculated and resolved EVERY SECOND. Every set, every skill, and every mythic in the game is another thing to add into an equation that’s got to be THOUSANDS of conditions long, with scores of tiny little if-then corner-case scenarios.
Every new addition to the game has added another 3 zone sets, a couple more craftable sets, dungeon sets, trial sets, mythics, and now scribed skills with — as they brag — 8,000 different combinations of effects. It’s become a runaway problem as they try to squeeze more “monetization” out of the expansions. It’s no wonder PVP performance keeps getting worse.
It’s already bad enough in trials. You can see the game choke on everything that’s happening for 12 people at times. In Cyrodill, you might be talking about 50 people in a large battle, and it’s worse. They’ve got to make a significant separation between the two modes.
To be sure, it will make the current PVP lovers — who have mastered the dozens of things you need to stack and all the play style tricks you need to employ to make bombing or ball grouping work — insane with fury. The question is whether or not it will bring more casuals into the mix than sweats who quit.
When the US invaded Iraq, I read about the history of how the US installed Saddam Hussein to control what was going on in that country, and ostensibly to be a foil to Iran. Then we went in and deposed him, took his gold, and — I’m sure — installed a bunch of sycophantic leaders to make sure we continued to get their oil for a good price. We also armed the brave Mujahideen — popularized in Rambo 3! — to fight against the Russian colonizers in Afghanistan… who went on to hold out against not only the Russians for 20 years, but also the US for another 20.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if our military industrial complex just… stopped faffing about in the rest of the world. At least for a time, right? Since WW I, we’ve never stopped. I say we try it on for size, and see how it looks in the mirror.
Certain topics have revealed themselves to be IQ tests on social media. It’s become clear that, as a society, we are being held back by people who can’t understand basic concepts like averages and standard deviations or compound interest. When I’m reading an online conversation these days, I’m starting to see the IQ test behind the point more often and more quickly; the logical pitfall which, if you don’t avoid, will cause you to conclude the wrong things, and land on the opposite side of the solution.
Failing these tests wouldn’t be harmful, except that the people failing them have full access to society through voting and being present when adults are talking, and they fight against rules, regulations, and policies which would help everyone in the long run due to their limitations. Our progress as a country is being thwarted because our politicians cater to their fears and misunderstanding in order to get their votes, and this absolutely happens on both sides. Society can be mapped onto a 2D graph with left/right political leanings on the horizontal axis, and IQ on the vertical, with 100 on the crossing.
The Graph we Need to Understand the World
This is our world. There’s about 25% of the population in each quadrant, and we’re all just trying to “figure it out.” Societally, the people below the line haven’t really had a lot of impact until the invention of the internet. In the early days, the internet felt egalitarian and promising because it took a certain amount of intelligence and resources (working as a proxy for intelligence) to get on and say something, and the results were quick, amazing, and impactful. Now “the internet” has been reduced to a dozen web sites, and everyone is on it. Now they have full access to whatever “news” they want to consume, and they have full access to the town square in various forms of social media. (And, no, for the purposes of this discussion, I’m not going anywhere near the debate about the First Amendment, or political or racial biases.)
So now the people above the line are trying to “figure it out” while the people below — who will never “figure it out” — make it more and more difficult for the rest, as they flail about in their own doomed efforts, confident in their Dunning-Krugerring that their input and understanding is equal to every else’s, and, after all, why shouldn’t they sit on city councils and school boards and be middle managers at large companies, and implement all the dumbest stuff imaginable?
A lot of the IQ tests are failed due to modern liberalism, by which I mean the tendency to ignore facts — or, especially, ignore certain facts in favor of others — while focusing on intents and feelings. You can’t save the Titanic by caring about the feelings of the iceberg, but that’s exactly what a large portion of our society would be concerned with these days. So there’s a concentration of society-sabatoging effort going on in the left half of the quadrant that mixes with the problems in the lower half. Hence the red line. (I really wanted to draw it going up asymptotically on the left side, showing that after a certain amount of liberalism, no amount of IQ can save you, but working Photoshop is not one of my skills, and, ironically, I’m apparently not smart enough to figure it out after 30 years.) It’s the people to the top and right who could help society the best over the longest terms, and they’re being clawed at by the people to the left and below, like crabs in bucket pulling down the ones smart enough climb up and over to escape.
I was “actioned” on the Elder Scrolls Online forums.
Again.
What was snipped?
The simple truth of the matter is that this is a 10-year-old game, and the architecture just won’t allow them to do things like crossplay or class changes. You have to at least “protect” for those things up front. These things will NEVER happen now. It’s not that they’re impossible. It’s that they’re not cost effective. This is a game in maintenance mode. It has a tiny community that reacts negatively to any and all changes. All we’re going to get going forward is more cookie cutter content, and set/skill tweaks that people will flock to the interwebs to complain about.
Take it or leave it, I guess.
This — this right here — has been my whole experience on the ESO forums:
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve suggested something, and the immediate response is that everything is perfect the way it is, and nothing should change:
Everything is great, nothing is wrong, and yet the player counts are at 7-year lows. To support my highlighted comment in what was snipped above, I present the graph of average online player count from Steam. And while many people have argued with me on the forums about the validity of these numbers, I understand statistics just fine, and this is representative of the state of the game, regardless of Windows version (Steam vs. Epic) or platform (PC vs Xbox vs PS). The number of active players is half what it was just back in the spring.
Dismal Player Counts
And, oh!, would you look at that? ZOS had planned two big 10th-anniversary in-person events, one in Amsterdam (which happened), and one in the US, which is now canceled. Nefas (one of the top ESO streamers) thinks ZOS is broke. Given the trends in activity, how could not conclude this?
No More In-Person Celebration Event for You!
The forums are awash with people complaining about literally everything now. PVP is in utter shambles (and I’m just all broken up about that). Queue times are disastrous, and there’s only room for about 2% of the online population to play. Years-long problems are not getting fixed. The “stuck in combat” bug, the annoyance of the “flappy bird,” the fact that they won’t revert the hybridization changes — even though everyone agrees that it changed the game fundamentally for the worse — hiding mythic leads behind crappy parts of the game, terrible drop rates for literally everything… The list goes on and on. The forums have been revealed as a giant honeypot to allay complaints, let people vent, and keep them playing. And if you say something they don’t like, they can and will find a rule to accuse you of breaking, and censor you for it.
The biggest problem with the game seems to be the PVP part. PVE and PVP are completely different games, but they both use the same skills and gear, and both “halves” of the game suffer for it, despite the innumerable tweaks and hacks they try to use to help the situation. I don’t think there’s a future for this game without making a cleaner break between the two modes than currently exists.
The forums are exhausting, so I’ve decided that those jerks can enjoy their circle without me any more. I’m trying to kill my account, but of course, none of their support systems makes any sense. I created a ticket, and the link to look at it is 404. I’ve questioned the guy who actioned me twice, and sent email about the ticket twice, and got no responses. Finally, I created a new forum thread — knowing it was against TOS to talk about being actioned in any way — and someone else finally at least verified that my ticket exists and is in the right place. That’s something I guess.
ZOS is working on a new game based on a new IP now, and it really seems like they’re putting minimal effort into ESO now. All we’re getting is cookie-cutter content with new zones, new sets, new companions, new Tales of Tribute decks, new skill styles, etc. You can’t float a game like this on subscriptions alone, and the offerings in the Crown store seem more and more flashy, more and more desperate. The game seems to be on its last legs.
The big question to me is whether Microsoft would spin this IP out to someone who would want to try to breathe new life into it. There are two big problems with this. One is that every change is unpopular with a vocal portion the player base, making significant changes difficult without risking financial impact. They can’t afford to lose a big chunk of people at this point. The other is that The Elder Scrolls is a massive franchise, involving many games and platforms, which would seem to make negotiations about this particular piece of the portfolio tricky. Where would this kind of move put the long-delayed-yet-ultimately-inevitable TES VI?
“We’re cancelling our NA anniversary event. Here, have a nice coloring contest instead.”
CoPilot started to answer this question in the Visual Studio Code “chat window” on my work laptop. It was spitting out an answer which I was digesting — and finally being enlightened about Ruby/Rails namespaces, the autoloader, the :: operator, and directory structure — and then it abruptly deleted its response, and printed this.
When you’re focused on a programming idea, you sometimes get blind to the other things in your code for the moment, but I finally figured out that I had a corporate URL in my code, which CoPilot was parroting back at me for context, despite being irrelevant to the question, and this was why it freaked out. So, ok, my company configured CoPilot requests on its computers to freak out about that.
Searching on this canned response shows a lot of people encounter this, and are similarly bewildered, and I’m suspecting that there are probably many other reasons for this to happen. Quite naturally, people are confused because there’s no indication as to why the “answer” provoked this response. I asked the exact same question on my personal computer and it worked just fine, so this is definitely a corporate filter that’s running… somewhere.
This is why Microsoft rules the corporate world: they give middle managers the power to do things like this. Anything they can dream up as a policy, Microsoft is only too happy to give them the tools to enforce it. However, it seems to me that any company that has the wherewithal to do this would also have the wherewithal to tell Microsoft not to use its code for their AI purposes. If CoPilot can be trained to barf on internal URL’s, it can be trained to not store or train on the response when it hits the configured input conditions, and not interrupt the programming loop with a useless and confusing error message.
This is precisely this kind of BS that I feared when Microsoft bought GitHub, even if I couldn’t put it into words at the time. But who had 2024 as the year of AI coding on their bingo cards when this happened 6 years ago? So no one could have put this into words back then.
God, please let them create an option button to stop this
Either Microsoft changed something automatically with the way I log into the Azure portal, or #CorporateIT tried to fix something I complained about without telling me, but either way, I’m trapped in a loop of confirming I’ve done the thing I’m supposed to do. So I go to clear cookies, and I’m treated to not one, but two different messages informing me — as if I didn’t already know — that I don’t own this computer.
I get the concept
I see these messages in the browser, in every Office app, in OneDrive, and in the Windows settings. I get it. I got it. I’m good. Thank you for the continual reminder that literally every single keystroke, sound I make, image the camera can see, file I look at, email I send, web site I use, and everything else I’m tired of typing into this list is logged and reviewed by people who can somehow not go insane by looking at reports like this from 80,000 users. (If there were a use for AI to get its feet wet, this would surely be it.)
You may think I’m exaggerating, but many years ago, I got caught up in a kerfluffle with IT, and literally had someone look me dead in the eye and tell me that he reviewed every single file that got transferred to or from a USB drive connected to a computer. He said this as if I were supposed to be scared; like he was looking for a reaction that I should be worried. I just told him, “I know,” and moved on. This wasn’t something that was being advertised, but I easily inferred it by everything else going on in the way the company approaches IT. It seemed like he didn’t know how to process that.
This Right Here. This is the Problem.
Tangentially, I think this is why the Microsoft phone died. Microsoft lives and breathes by the average Fortune 500 IT manager — let that sink in — and of course people who bought a Windows phone wanted to connect it to their corporate email. When they tried, they got scary messages that the company could see everything they did with their phone, and remotely wipe it on a whim. I expect most (like me on my iPhone) backed out of the process, and then asked themselves what the advantage was of a Windows phone over others. For decades, it’s become routine for companies to make sudden, sweeping personnel changes, and who wants to wake up to a wiped phone because your company missed its projections for a second quarter in a row? I’m sure they’re only eliminating the people who had something to do with that, right? Right?
Our electronics our very, very personal. This is why people mostly choose Apple products when spending their own money. There is much more “telemetry” going on with Apple products than I would like, and they keep making moves to transform macOS into the same sort of walled garden that iOS is, but Apple is at least presenting an overall message that your stuff is your stuff, and they seem to making the right moves to ensure that. Time will tell, I guess.
Almost everyone has to use Windows at their job. Every company with a fleet of Windows computers is doing these sorts of things, because some upper manager hired some top-4 consulting company who told them they had to, and now everyone distrusts their company and Microsoft. That shows up on the bottom line.
Microsoft has a glorious opportunity to create a new version of Windows for personal use that flips the script. A version where there’s no telemetry and no artificial restrictions on hardware. Instead, they’re quintupling down on their user-last philosophy, and trying this. (Again.) The Windows terminal computer, with no local storage. It’s just a KVM to a Windows image running in their cloud. There will be — there cannot be — any hardware upgrades or gaming or piracy or anything else interesting. And for what? What’s the upside for the user? They still have a “computer” on their desk. What are they getting for the tradeoff? Who would want this?
Not this crap again
I’m betting that part of this introduction is a whole fleet of “AI-enhanced” tracking of literally everything going on with the “computer,” so that IT departments can “simplify” this critically-necessary piece of “infrastructure” in their “security” posture, and I’d bet key people in my IT department are touching themselves thinking about foisting it on everyone who doesn’t have to have some sort of engineering or development tool.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen inaccurate data and graphs circulating on social media channels regarding Stack Overflow’s traffic. We wanted to take the opportunity to provide additional context and information on the origin of that data, the traffic trends we are seeing, and the work we’re doing to ensure Stack Overflow remains a go-to destination for developers and technologists for years to come.
They are responding to this graph, which I saw this on some aggregate social media site.
First, ChatGPT couldn’t have started making a difference at this time. It, along with other LLM’s, hasn’t really become useful till this year.
Second, it couldn’t have made that much of a difference that fast. Nothing does.
Third, who would take this graph out of context and overlay this trend line and blame it on ChatGPT? What’s the thinking? Who benefits? Was it for the lulz? Was it to drive mindshare about what “AI” is supposedly doing “for us?” “To” programming? Why has it been pushed in front of so many people that StackOverflow feels the need to set the record straight?
I can’t confirm one way or another that this actually happened, and I’m not going to even try. It is instructive that there is no doubt it could be true, and I’ll leave it at that.
This is yet another reminder that Reddit is a corporate-fronted deep-state psyop propaganda machine designed to manipulate a very, very specific demographic.
