• 7 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • That’s really not fair or helpful to the poor kid. It may be nonsense but it’s very real and has a very real impact on his life. Those little monsters truly will go out of their way to make him miserable and sad as it may be keeping a low profile and reducing the number of things they can pick on can be a way not to be targeted. The idea that of telling him he “should be better than that” is just adding to the burden he’s already carrying of being forced to coexist with those little sociopaths. Is it somehow his fault?





  • I’m more unhappy with messaging apps that notify people if you’ve read a message. It did have a positive side effect in that with Facebook, once they introduced that feature sometime around 09 or something, it caused me to reduce my use of the messaging capabilities significantly but frankly I’m not sure that’s really what Facebook or I really wanted. It’s a common feature in messaging applications and I fucking hate it. I need to read the message to decide if I want people to know if I’ve seen it and I can’t do that without telling them I’ve seen it.





  • I didn’t hear anything before now about this issue and am not well informed at this moment. Some preliminary reading from a CNN article indicates that the Houthi leadership acknowledged the agreement praising it as a victory because it separates US support from Israel. I didn’t immediately find anything regarding further attacks since the announcement but also I see that the agreement was specifically about halting the bombing campaign in exchange for the cessation of attacks on specifically American assets in the region, which I think would be why the Houthi leadership were quick to call this a victory. Are the attacks you’re referring to on American assets?


  • I don’t know, if I’m the alien in this scenario and could plainly see they don’t have the ability to traverse interstellar distances I wouldn’t be concerned from a personal safety stand point about making first contact with the intelligent life on a distant planet even if they did show they still had problems with conflict. I’m obviously projecting my own assumptions based on living on Earth but, on Earth inter and intra species conflicts naturally occurr across the kingdoms of life (maybe even all of them?) so it’s doesn’t seem that unusual.

    Maybe if life, and intelligent life particularly, is common and perhaps intelligent civilizations commonly eventually figure out how to avoid conflict, I wouldn’t be presumptuous and judgemental because this particular one hadn’t got that far yet. It would seem that’s something they likely all have to go through and that’s just operating on the arbitrary assumption that civilizations somehow do tend to figure out a way to overcome conflict, it could just as well be that they typically don’t given how hard it seems to be, so the would be aliens here likely have or have had conflicts of their own.



  • I realise the dumbass here is the guy saying programmers are ‘cooked’, but there’s something kind of funny how the programmer talks about how people misunderstand the complexities of their job and how LLMs easily make mistakes because of an inability to understand the nuances of what he does everyday and understands deeply. They rightly point out how without their specialist oversight, AI agents would fail in ridiculous and spectacular ways, yet happily and vaguely adds as a throw away statement at the end “replacing other industries, sure.” with the exact same blitheness and lack of personal understanding with which ‘Ace’ proclaims all programmers cooked.


  • That’s got to be the key to all this, specificity, it’s great that it’s got natural language processing to simplify things but sometimes that’s what’s actually getting in the way. What they should really do is have a special version of chatGPT for programming where users can interact with it in a very special form of structured English. It’s still natural language, this is the future after all, none of that zeroes and ones crap like the stone age, but just highly specific words with carefully defined meanings particular to making repeatable and executable steps in a pattern that does the same thing every time in response to inputs to produce outputs. You could then “speak” to one of these LLM things using this carefully structured English to automate specific tasks. The real kicker would be that you could tell it to chain together a bunch of these tasks you’ve had it automate for you to build up in to something much more complex. This would really harness the power of AI because at each step it’s made it for you, with minimal input from yourself because you’re just ‘talking’ to it in a very specific way. Admittedly this approach would be a little bit less obvious for new users than a standard LLM, but if an average person kept doing this for like a year or two they’d get pretty adept at this manner of speech, it’d be kind of like learning another language and people have been doing that for as long as there’s been people, I speak in a language everyday, I’m doing it right now. We could make it easier too, we could have courses and schools to help people get better at it faster.



  • Yeh, arguably and to a limited extent, the problems he’s having now aren’t the result of the decision to use AI to make his product so much as the decision to tell people about that and people deliberately attempting to sabotage it. I’m careful to qualify that though because the self evident flaw in his plan even if it only surfaced in a rather extreme scenario, is that he lacks the domain specific knowledge to actually make his product work as soon as anything becomes more complicated than just collecting the money. Evidently there was more to this venture than just the building of the software, that was necessary to for it to be a viable service. Much like if you consider yourself the ideas man and paid a programmer to engineer the product for you and then fired them straight after without hiring anyone to maintain it or keep the infrastructure going or provide support for your clients and then claimed you ‘built’ the product, you’d be in a similar scenario not long after your first paying customer finds out the hard way that you don’t actually know anything about your own service that you willingly took money for. He’s discovering he can’t actually provide the service part of the Software as a Service he’s selling.



  • I don’t live in the states but there’s similar systems in some department stores here in Australia and I suspect, but don’t know, that applicable law in these cases is broadly similar. The store and their employees aren’t law enforcement and can’t arrest you or have any legal recourse for you ignoring their demands to stop and allow your receipt to be checked. They likely also have the right to refuse service to you and deny you entry to their premises and so long as this isn’t being done for a small number of specifically forbidden reasons (such as on the basis of race for example) they don’t need a legal justification to do so. This would mean that refusing to comply with their receipt checking policy might be enough if they see fit, to decide to deny you entry to their stores going forward. Many large department stores are incorporating facial recognition and don’t it seems feel the need for proper informed consent beyond some printed signage saying that but entering you’re consenting, so the practicality of them doing this is at least a little bit higher these days but I guess there’s no way to assess how likely this really is.




  • Realistically we didn’t need it before YouTube existed and I should be fine without it, but I think it’ll be tough, I don’t have an aerial for FTA tv anymore, nor a tv in my bedroom and I don’t really want to sign up for a subscription streaming service. Plus a decent chunk of my employers use YouTube as end point for the videos I edit so that could be a bit of a hit too. There’s always reading I guess, that might be doubly necessary if I end up poorer and can’t afford much else.