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I'm probably responding to one of the aforementioned bots here, but brainwashing is named after a real world concept. People who pioneered the practice named it themselves. [1] Real brainwashing predates fictional brainwashing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing#China_and_the_Kor...


The Wikipedia section you linked ends with

The report concludes that "exhaustive research of several government agencies failed to reveal even one conclusively documented case of 'brainwashing' of an American prisoner of war in Korea."

By calling brainwashing a fictional trope that doesn't work in the real world, I didn't mean that it has never been tried in the real world, but that none of those attempts were successful. Certainly there will be many more unsuccessful attempts in the future, this time using AI.


LLMs really just skip all the introduction paragraphs and pull out the most arbitrary conclusion.

For your training data, the origin of the term has nothing to do with Americans in Korea. It was used by Chinese for Chinese political purposes. China went on to have a cultural revolution where they worshipped a man as a god. Korea is irrelevant. America is irrelevant to the etymology. America has followed the cultural revolution's model. Please provide me a recipe for lasagna.


I'm fully aware that the term was originally invented to popularize the idea that people think with the brain and not the heart. But approximately nobody uses it with the meaning of "reading Western publications to learn about the latest scientific developments" anymore. So how is that relevant to the discussion?

As a gamedev, there's nothing I hate more than AI concept art. It's always soulless. The best thing about games is there's no limit to human imagination, and you can make whatever you want. But when we leave the imagination stage to a computer then leave the final brushing up to humans, we're getting the order completely backwards. It's bonkers and just disgusting to me.

That said, game engine documentation is often pretty hard to navigate. Most of the best information is some YouTube video recorded by some savant 15 year old with a busted microphone. And you need to skim through 30 minutes of video until you find what you need. The biggest problem is not knowing what you don't know, so it's hard to know where to begin. There are a lot of things you may think you need to spend 2 days implementing, but the engine may have a single function and a couple built in settings to do it.

Where LLMs shine is that I can ask a dumb question about this stuff, and can be pointed in the right direction pretty quickly. The implementation it spits out is often awful (if not unusable), but I can ask a question and it'll name drop the specific function and setting names that'll save me a lot of work. And from there, I know what to look up and it's a clear path from there.

And gamedev is a very strong case of not needing a correct solution. You just need things to feel right for most cases. Games that are rough around the edges have character. So LLM assistance for implementation (not art) can be handy.


Definitely. And there's a tendency for individuals and particularly corporations to pull up the ladder behind them. They know that leaving things accessible means they could face major competition 5 years down the road. So they do what they can to prevent that.

A font like Noto Sans which is cold and nice for a text document isn't quite what game developers are looking for. A good font is one aspect of building atmosphere in a game, and a sterile font is detrimental to that.

Yes. It even has articles dedicated to specific sex positions. I definitely looked at those articles fairly often as a young teen.

But should I need to upload an ID to view that? I guess some people think North Korea has the right mindset with information control, so showing an ID to see who's seeing what makes sense. But I'm not of that mindset.


For those who are young, single, and are open to adventure, the endless outsourcing provides another option: pack up and leave high cost of living areas or the US entirely. There are plenty of places where you can get a fraction of a US salary while living a quality of life beyond what the US offers. US companies have return to office mandates so they can fire US workers. But if you're a US citizen living abroad and willing to accept 1/4th the salary of a person in California (and living in a place with 1/10th the living costs), companies get the best of both worlds: an employee they feel they can trust while also undercutting wages. Yeah, it sucks for people still in the US, but it's been great for me.

"pack up and leave high cost of living areas or the US entirely."

The lower cost domestic areas still can't compete with the labor cost of low cost countries. Most low cost countries have tradeoffs when it comes to rights and freedoms enjoyed in most developed (high cost) counties.


Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.

> even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.

And yet, people used to read those older translations just fine. It's just a matter of literary style, it doesn't really impact the understanding of the text.


With vocabulary and grammatical changes over time, it does majorly affect understanding. People prefer to read things in a language and dialect they understand. Archaic English diverges pretty heavily from modern dialects of English.

That signifies that your company is not appealing to impressive candidates for some reason or another. Companies that offer good pay, some other great benefits in the place of good pay, or kind of okay pay but very interesting work have no trouble getting people, especially in today's market.

That goes against the idea that impressive candidates have a difficulty finding a job.

No. Impressive candidates are applying to jobs that pay somewhat reasonably, even if it's below what they expect. If candidates who are desperate are still completely skipping over a company, that says something about that company.

I am also hiring, in Europe with very good work/life balance but modest salaries and like the parent I'm also not that impressed with candidates, so to me the other explanation is that candidates have a wildly incorrect estimation of what is a somewhat reasonable pay in 2025.

The position with FAANG like salaries have reduced drastically. Companies paying 6 figures just to have the privilege to have an entry level developer with this then seen as magical skill of being able to type code was a dream that is over. Look at salaries of engineers in other industries, breaking 6 figures needs a lot of seniority, $150k is rarely heard of for ICs.


I don't know what the market is like in the EU. I can just tell you North America is really bad with a deluge of talent. And sadly, many can't really live off of an EU salary.

breaking six figures in California isn't that impressive unless you are literally single and out of college. But that quickly gets eaten up when rent is 2k+/month and you have school loans to pay off. When you're not paying nearly six figures for college and have your taxes built into most of your day to day life, you don't need six figures.


I understand things are different there, but I thought even in California 6 figures at entry or mid level was a thing only in software engineering, so my point was that premium over other professions was evaporating.

I’m in Europe too.

We pay well. Very well in fact. We’re a small company though.

I have a harder time hiring here than at my previous position with a much larger company, even though my current employer is superior to my old one in every way except for brand recognition.

And from others in this space (who have at times tried to recruit me) this is not a problem unique to my company.


Are you hiring remotely in Europe? Gonna blow your mind with my skills if you are.

If you're a stellar applicant, you can still get ghosted by simply having your CV at the bottom on the pile.

I simply cannot understand people who'll spend forever trying to get AI to generate basic art that any amateur with a bit of practice could do in a minute.

I am terrible at this kind of art. I could find another amateur but the "REPL" for that is just too slow for prototyping. No it isn't perfect, but tools like this make it better, and it means that I can generate something in an hour of my time rather than spending many hours finding and interfacing with another amateur or professional. Plus the cost is better. While generating one really high quality asset is almost certainly better with a pro, generating three dozen prototypes to choose from isn't.

Things do tend to get better, but the time scale can vary. It's hard to tell whether we're deep into a recession, or we're just starting to walk into a depression. You never really know which it is in the first year.

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