• 0 Posts
  • 4.12K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle


  • I’ve heard a bit of news coverage about it.

    Practically soaking I think it’s not exactly a worthwhile goal, we don’t have any particularly concrete expectations about what we are going to get out of boots on the moon that we didn’t already do. However the general public is still moved by the idea for now.



  • He mostly focuses on the under 20 demographic, though later he also is concerned about under 30, but most of his response centers around the figures he cited exclusively about under 20.

    It’s plainly clear he thinks we need a bit more irresponsibility in child rearing. He may not be personally interested in the age bracket, but he does absolutely want them getting pregnant.

    Which on the surface of it is a way to get more people generally, but also a way to increase the particularly desperate labor pool that is ripe for exploitation in 15 years or so.

    Upon further consideration, it actually creates a more desperate labor pool immediately. Instead of unattached 18 year olds that can spend a few years in university, you have teen parents that need to take care of things right now.





  • Problem is that is what the insider traders are counting on. They know it is going to happen, it’s planned to happen and the odds reflect that. So a few million folks toss in a couple of bucks and the insiders cash in.

    Outsiders can’t be 100% sure that it’s a planned event so they don’t take the terrible odds and the insiders don’t have to split things.



  • I don’t know what you are getting at, of the people who come over from China and Taiwan that I talk to, no one believes that the two are one “nation” with different opinions on who is the authority. They may believe there’s not a distinct cultural identity but none think the “no, there’s only one China and onlywe are the real China” is a thing in practice, just a political formality.

    The ones from China do say they wouldn’t push their luck expressing that publicly, and one went so far as to borrow a computer to log into without any association with them because they were paranoid about using their laptop issued to them with the Chinese employer preload. He wanted to read some Wikipedia the way an American sees it while he was over on business.

    Tangentially, another one from China was super excited to try to get someone to get him a gun to shoot. We did manage to hook him up with a gun range.



  • A guy vibe coded something and said to incorporate it into my work.

    Now it was a feature that people had asked for so I had to try it out.

    It failed 75% of the things it was supposed to do and for the other what usually was a near instant interactive task took 5 minutes. I kicked it back saying he needed to fix the problems and improve performance. The end of the next day he answered that the infrastructure must be broken because the AI couldn’t get results and the performance problem was just the nature of the things the software had to interact with. I say “he”, but pretty sure his comment was LLM generated, long and useless.

    But it was the impetus to get that function done now, as his “substantiative” work meant we could technically provide a customer request, lower priority as it may have been. So I spent a morning implementing the same thing it did but the old fashioned way, 100% worked and the unavoidably slow thing took less than a second.





  • I wonder if I counted…

    So I did the tax prep using a free offer from TurboTax. Everything seemed traditional.

    Then, at the end it generated an AI summary of my return. I didn’t have a choice, it just did it. I have the “unhelpful” feedback because:

    • Despite saying it was “explaining” the numbers and why, all it did was just list the numbers from the fairly straightforward table right above the AI response in a more awkward form, not explaining anything.
    • Further, despite the seemingly easy task of “Take a table of figures and repeat them in prose”, it still screwed up and messed up and of the figures that all our had to do was repeat verbatim.

    So AI was forced into my tax prep and did nothing substantive (thank goodness) and flubbed the cosmetic role it tried to play.


  • Yep, when I was a kid I remember people grousing about how stuff used to last forever and now it doesn’t. 20 years later, I got to hear people talk about how stuff made when I was a kid used to last forever but now it doesn’t. Now I get to hear how stuff made 20 years ago used to last forever but now it doesn’t.

    Every time something breaks, someone points to something 20 years old that didn’t break and forget all the stuff that did break.


  • Of course, the practice of repair was different when the appliance costed relatively a lot more.

    E.g. a TV was more likely to be repaired, but also costed about 10x as much relatively speaking.

    So if it would have cost you 25% of the price of a TV to get it repaired, you would have got it repaired. If it’s just as easy to repair now, then the repair would still be over twice the price of just buying new.


  • It might work at the moment, one of the gripes I’ve had is that day to day previously working stuff doesn’t work anymore. So it’s hard to specifically rely upon specific behavior.

    Especially since the tendency of the LLMs is to say “Ok, I’ve done X” even if it doesn’t have a skill or access to do X. So you can’t rely on it to even accurately indicate that it can’t do it.