• 3 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle

  • This is obviously funny for the intended punchline but it’s such a good satire of the most bullshit ‘lifehacks’, like, presumably the non-joke version would be something like allow yourself 30 minutes or 1 hour every morning and that’s already laughable to begin with and amounts to “have more time” as the ‘hack’. Gee thanks guys I’d never have thought of that.



  • 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.



  • Will it actually kind of was ironically. I was going to try and make a go of it, but I was immensely worried I’d be caught in the act and having to maintain the channel flipping with the remote made things awkward too. When it suddenly tuned in consistently I thought I’d hit the jackpot but then I got so worried I’d leave evidence I flicked away from the channel again before I could really you know, get anything out of it.


  • Once I went on holiday in Europe as a young teen. The hotel room had a tv with like 2-3 free normal channels and extra channels including porn that you could access if you called the front desk and gave them credit card information. I definitely wasn’t going to do that since I didn’t have a credit card and this room was booked in my parents’ names, however the whole reason I knew about this was because I was flicking the through the normal channels simply because I was bored and I accidentally flipped past the porno channel. You weren’t supposed to be able to see anything on there because they want you to pay up for that so when you land on this channel you’re presented with some kind of teletext on black screen saying something like call reception to access with a phone number or something, however, when you first flick to this channel, it takes a little while to kind of tune in to it before it displays the teletext and as it tunes in it looks just like the image from this post before instantly clearing in to a complete picture and you get about 1 almost 2 seconds of whatever porn was showing at the time and then the paywall. So being pretty desperate, obviously I flicked up past the channel and back down again to get my 1-2 seconds of porn and did this repeatedly over and over again. Funnily enough, I would have been content with this uncomfortable viewing arrangement but after doing this in a rhythm for a while I noticed that sometimes you’d get 1 second or sometimes 2, or sometimes even like a full 5 seconds or more and this would happen in no particular order of successive channel flips when then suddenly it just flicked on to the channel permanently with no interruption. I have no idea why that happened but this image definitely reminds me of that. Funnily enough I didn’t really take advantage of this luck because I was so shocked by that suddenly happening and so worried it might get billed to the room anyway that I just flicked away from the channel and turned it off.


  • 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 really don’t think giving the head of state the power to pardon is a very good idea. I used to be totally baffled how it was a thing at all but the rationale has since been explained to me. While I sorta get it, the theoretical benefit is far outweighed by the inevitable grimy reality. Like others, probably mostly because of my own biases, I find it hard to summon a great deal of outrage about this understandable if blatantly hypocritical move after so much prior abuse of the lower had already occurred, but frankly if the option weren’t even there then nobody would even need to talk about this. If the justice system of the nation is supposedly well designed and theoretically trustworthy then there isn’t the need to have the ability for it to be arbitrarily overrulled in a manner that operates very much like the monarchical tyrants the United States was supposedly foundationally opposed to.


  • Shit was crazy, random conservative shock jocks and mainstream conservative politicians all over the world were losing their minds over this kid it was hilarious. It was so funny watching them just fucking PR faceplant over and over again when all they ever needed to do was just shut the fuck up about it and wait for her to disappear from the news cycle in time as she herself said she fully expected would happen. I’m pretty sure her continuing relevance is at least in part because of the Streisand effect generated from a whole international cabal of right-wing old men desperately trying to destroy this child and fucking losing hahaha.


  • Economics really isn’t my strong suit so the fact that the outcome is surprising or confusing to me isn’t entirely unexpected but I have to say that outcome is actually kind of surprising. I would have thought the theory for how the tariff was supposed to work was that the 20% increase in price seen on the ground for foreign made washing machines owing to the cost of the tariff being passed on to the consumer would mean that the domestic producer of washing machines could expect to look more attractive on the shelf than the foreign made ones for being cheaper. The domestic manufacturer could also afford to be cheaper in a way that’s easy for them to achieve because they don’t face the artificial increase in the cost of making and selling their washing machines. This would mean they had the opportunity to sell more of them than their foreign competitors resulting in higher profits. If they saw it as an opportunity to raise prices by 20% without being punished by their competitors, wouldn’t that eliminates their natural advantage? Seems they’d be leaving money on the table. I would have thought the more likely outcome you’d see would be the domestic company essentially raise prices by something more like 19% so that they still get to profiteer from the chance to raise prices without penalty in the marketplace and unlike their competitors keep that as profit rather than put it towards paying tarrifs, but still be cheapest on the market meaning increased sales. You’d see a double benefit from their perspective. I mean that would still completely suck, everyone would be paying 19% more than when they started, but you’d think you’d see some of the intended desireable effects of the tariff in this one simple example of the washing machines, ignoring other factors.