Any recommendations? My only experience with defcon is through recordings of the talks from there, and they’ve always been phenomenal, and some videos from the events like various CTFs. Never really looked into it more. I think I also saw a documentary a few years ago that was pretty sick.

The algorithm is probably made to maximize the time you spend on the platform, and is really good at it. (I mean, just look how good are ML algorithms on text -> picture, and add to it that the algorithm that does your info -> engagement has decades of data and training on billions of people).

My theory is that it has misaligned, because it turned out that radicalizing people into right-wing bullshit will glue them to the social network very effectively, so it just started to do that. It makes sense - once you start spewing right-wing bullshit, it will probably isolate you from your IRL friends, you will have an echo chamber on the social network, and it is made to sound like some kind of deep truth no one else knows.

You getting left-wing content might be simply because it would not be efficient to try to convert you, so the algorithm is trying something else that’s more effective on the (minority?) of people like you.

If you’re going this route, I highly recommend looking into and using OKLAB instead.

The problem with HSL/HSV is that it’s not perceptually uniform - if you only move HUE to change color, you will get different perceived brightnesses. This is important especially when procedurally generating color palettes, but also makes it harder to pick a color.

OKLAB solves that issue, and is designed to be uniform. Here is a great article about it, which is funnily enough IIRC a blog post that invented the color spectrum, that got noticed and eventually turned into a new industry standard.

Here is a picture that sums up pretty obviously what is the difference. This is a gradient that moves just the hue.

I’ve been wondering - how do you make brown? Don’t really see it on the spectrum.

Defcon is my biggest regret about the whole “US going to shit” situation. I’m from Europe, and I was planning to eventually attend, but there’s no way I’m going there until USA gets their shit together, which I suspect won’t be during my lifetime at this point.

They should move it to Europe, especially for this kind of event, I’d suspect that for a lot of attendees and speakers, who tend to be pretty anti-systemic, going into US safely at this point is not an option.

I’ve had a similar experience at my job, where we’ve gotten an unlimited access to a few models.

There’s one huge problem I’ve very quickly ran into - skill attrition. You very quickly get lazy, and stop being able to critically think about problems. Hell, I’ve only had access to it for two weeks, and I’m starting to see the effects. “Can you add this button?” is a very simple change that I could probably make immediately, but AI can make it a little bit faster, and without me putting in the effort. Or it can at least show me the correct script to put it in, without me having to go scouring the code looking for it. It’s addicting, and quite scary. YMMV, you might have stronger willpower and be able to switch between lazy and locked in mode, but I very quickly found out I can’t.

But is it useful? That very much depends on what do you want out of your job, and both cases have major (and mostly similar) problems.

If you don’t really care about the quality of your job, and are there just to work your 8/5 and get money, hoping to just balance effort vs. quality so they won’t fire you, the it might help. Especially at this point, where management isn’t really used to it that much, you can get away with a lot. But, eventually, you will very probably need to look for a new job, and good luck getting through an interview when you haven’t really thought about code without the help of an AI for the past two years. The fact that you started coding before AI is the only advantage you now have against literally EVERYONE who can do the same job with AI. And every day you don’t write a piece of code from scratch, you are loosing that advantage.

I have I job I don’t particularly care about, but I still use it as a learning opportunity. It might be vastly different in other projects, but my job is mostly just support and bugfixing on a game that has been released for years at this point by a large developer, so nothing really involved, so I can usually afford to use my time to research things I wasn’t familiar with, look into things we could do better thanks to new tech or updates that have been released, and how to refactor or rewrite our code into it. Or making tools that would make our testing easier. I could just not do that, easily get my paycheck, and be glad I have a somewhat stable position, but that would not help me much. In this case, AI is actively harmful for what I’m trying to get out of my job, even if it works pretty well. It only erodes my skills I have, which are not very practiced even without AI, since bug fixing isn’t really much of development. Adding AI to the mix would just throw away my years of college and dozens of projects I’ve learned on. And I won’t learn anything new.

Obviously, if you care about your job output and want to do it perfectly, you don’t want to erode your skills, and you don’t want AI output in your code. AI by definition outputs mediocre and average work, riddled with hard-to-spot bugs, and you should not be ok with mediocre if you really care about the work you do and leave behind.

Especially the point about the pretty large probability of having to seek a new job eventually is IMO the most important thing that’s really worth considering, before you go all in on AI. It’s something that a lot of programmers spend years (and in less developed countries thousands of dollars) in learning, and throwing it away in favor of a service that will very soon need to massively ramp up their costs to get out of red and earn billions they have invested into it is not worth it.

Currently, AI is cheap. It also actively harms your ability to do the job without it. They have also invested billions of dollars that they need to eventually make up, and you will eventually need to pass a job interview. Keep that in mind when deciding to offload your thinking to AI.