enkers

Don’t trust that other guy. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. I can offer it to you on a payment plan of 24 easy monthly payments of $0.

I have NoScript for JS tracking, but what do you use for fingerprint randomisation?

Yes, maths. It’s the alternative short form of mathematics.

I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an expert, and I don’t like to speak authoritatively on things that I’m not an expert in, so it’s possible I’m mistaken. Also I’ve had a drink or two, so that’s not helping, but here we go anyways.

In the article, the author quips on a tweet where they seem to fundamentally misunderstand how LLMs work:

I tabbed over to another tab, and the top post on my Bluesky feed was something along these lines:

ChatGPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information. You cannot use it as a search engine. LLMs only generate statistically likely sentences.

The thing is… ChatGPT was over there, in the other tab, searching the web. And the answer I got was pretty good.

The tweet is correct. The LLM has a snapshot understanding of the internet based on its training data. It’s not what we would generally consider a true index based search.

Training LLMs is a costly and time consuming process, so it’s fundamentally impossible to regenerate an LLM in the same order of magnitude of time it takes to make a simple index.

The author fails to address any of these issues, which suggests to me that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

I suppose I could conceded that an LLM can fulfill a similar role that a search engine traditionally has, but it’d kinda be like saying that a toaster is an oven. They’re both confined boxes which heat food, but good luck if you try to bake 2 pies at once in a toaster.

God, that was a bad read. Not only is this person woefully misinformed, they’re complaining about the state of discourse while directly contributing to the problem.

If you’re going to write about tech, at least take some time to have a pasaable understanding of it, not just “I use the product for shits and giggles occasionally.”

Because it’s a clickbaity ad to their website that blames it on Lemmy’s technical limitations, when they could have put additional images it in the description field.

I don’t think gate keeping engineering is bullshit, software or otherwise. In fact I think it is one of the few eminently important things to gatekeep.

If computer systems have peoples lives depending on them, having accredited engineers that may be part of a chain of liability for their mistakes is a potentially life saving measure. It provides increased guarantee that someone will be held responsible, be it the firm, or in the case of bankruptcy, the individual engineer.

This provides a significant incentive to only sign off on work that meets all relevant safety criteria.

I’m not sure if that’s how it works in software engineering, but it certainly should.

Makes me think of a trend in FTP gaming, where there was a correlation between play time and $ spent, so gaming companies would try and optimise for time played. They’d psychologically manipulate their players to spend more time in game with daily quests, battle passes, etc, all in an effort to raise revenues.

What they didn’t realise was that players spent time in game because it was fun, and they bought mtx because they enjoyed the game and wanted it to succeed. Optimising for play time had the opposite effect, and made the game a chore. Instead of raising revenues, they actually dropped.

This is why you always have to be careful when chasing metrics. If you pick wrong, it can have the opposite effect that you want.