Please read the citations. I’ve found Claude (and a slightly lesser extend GPT) to be right more often than not, but the leading LLMs do get things wrong with enough frequency that it’s worth checking.

Also, to be clear, I’m not fervently anti-LLM, but I do know how it works (as much as anyone who has read the academic literature). “Thinking” is at best a misnomer and at worst a marketing term. It’s just an ouroboros; the LLM more-or-less feeds its output back into itself to “check” it and “think.” It works surprisingly well, but it’s not actual thinking.

THANK YOU! I studied AI in school, and it always bothers me when people think that LLMs are the only facet of AI. Between 2022-2024, I had a knee jerk reaction of explaining that AI is more than LLMs and that LLMs are really a small subset of the entire universe of AI, yadda yadda yadda. Now I’ve given up and roll my eyes as someone tries to tell me about the cool new Claude skill they built.

What’s funnier is people think I hate LLMs. That couldn’t be further from the truth; they are a fantastically interesting and innovative technology! “Attention is All You Need” is a great paper, and super impactful. I just hate that people are outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot and neglect the rest of my field of study.

Jennifer Griffin phrased this really poorly. (Fox News isn’t really known for intelligence…) Three ships were fired on, and they returned fire with retaliatory strikes, per USCENTCOM. https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-View/Article/4480437/centcom-protects-us-warships-transiting-strait-of-hormuz/

So, the war isn’t back on, but it’s not off either. For a cease fire, there’s been a lot of firing going on. The US never should have kicked this hornet’s nest.

It depends. I’d say it’s a scale of fairly easy to very easy depending on how you have everything set up and documented. Essentially, back everything up and install the new distro then put it all back. It will take some time, though. The first time I distro-hopped, I forgot to take a list of my installed packages, which made for some unwelcome surprises when I couldn’t find certain programs. That’s not hard to overcome, just keep a list of your installed packages. Even if you don’t, it’s easy to just reinstall them.

The job market in tech is not good right now, so they may not. I have a friend who is a dev and was getting heavily recruited by Palantir because he had a clearance already. The money was really good, and he was at the cusp of taking the job because he had been ghosted by other companies for months and only had a handful of interviews after being laid off six-ish months ago. Luckily, another place gave him an offer for a bit lower compensation, which he took. If that other place didn’t come through, though, I think he would have gone with Palantir so that he could get some income.

ETA: That said, Palantir is evil, and my friend was in that position because of the BS that is the US economic system, which is perpetuated by the people at Palantir.

The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.

Absolutely! I say this as a Comp Sci major who loves the humanities (and almost studied History). General education should encompass introductions to both the STEM and humanities areas. It is equally frustrating when I can’t walk through a 7th grade level algebraic function with someone with a Master’s degree in International Relations and when I can’t reference a fairly common part of mythology with a software engineer.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s only a small percentage that are real degrees these day but it’s definitely lower than it should be.

I agree. I think a lot of degrees are still real degrees, but the entire ecosystem has been degraded to the point that quality across the board has diminished. So, the most “rigorous” degrees now are equivalent to a run-of-the-mill degree a generation ago and so forth. Ultimately, the run-of-the-mill degrees of yesteryear are now just diploma mill degrees.

I hate to say it, but a lot of it is e-learning and online degrees. It’s a lot harder to engage with material, with a class, or with the professor themselves behind a screen hundreds of miles away. Even when you put everything into the work, it still just is not as engaging because you don’t have the same dynamic because you can’t just drop by your professor’s office for office hours or get the same level of help or group learning. In undergrad, I used to help others in my classes, and vice-versa, while also going to office hours to clear up details. Online, if it’s not impossible, it’s at least orders of magnitude more difficult. So, the quality of learning drops a ton.

If I go back for another Master’s or a Doctorate, I will only do in person classes.

Oh man this is really sad. I liked SFA way more than I thought I would. The cast was top notch, and they had some good stories. Genuinely sad to see this one go.

Of all the things in the photos that actually made sense. It’s weird, though, and threw me for a loop when I first saw uniforms and such and had to ask back then.

On uniforms, vehicles, etc. the flag is sometimes “backwards” so that the union (the blue and stars) are “forward facing.” The idea is that the flag is flown from the left side in normal orientation, so the union is closest to the pole. If the person or vehicle were carrying a real flag, based on what side a person is observing, the flag may be “mirrored.” In other words, the flag is moving with the person or vehicle and not the opposite way. You’ll see that orientation a lot on American military and para-military uniforms.

I never understood why we don’t just put a normal oriented flag on the opposite shoulder for the same effect, but hey…America is weird.

Any MAGA who fell for this is beyond stupid (plus utterly unfamiliar with the military). Her uniform is wrong (skirt WAYYY too high). No one wears dress uniforms underway at sea in general, ESPECIALLY an enlisted soldier (who would likely be nowhere near a ship, even more especially in dress uniform). The ribbons on her dress uniform not only change from picture to picture, but are also the wrong size (sometimes) and not even actual US ribbons. I’ve never seen a regulation name tag say “US ARMY” and not a name. The undershirt in her camis isn’t regulation. And this was just a quick look at the photos and only tangentially around the Army at work.

Oh and that’s before the visible glitches because it’s AI. This is laughably low effort.

EDIT: Damn, they didn’t even use a real ship as the background. It’s supposed to be a destroyer, and there are no US destroyers with an aft-facing bridge or part of the superstructure forward of the bridge windows. Just truly WTF

EDIT 2.0: I just saw a couple other photos because I got curious. One has her as a one-star general 😂, and a couple others have her wearing a (shitty looking) Combat Infantry Badge, which is only awarded for being in combat. So, I guess women CAN hack it in combat! Hegseth must be in shambles.

There are a surprising amount of false positives when using object detection on maritime imagery. While a carrier is a spec, there are a ton of specs in the ocean that can look similar enough. Plus, weather has a huge hand to play. If it were always perfectly clear, then it’s an easier problem, but one cloud can really mess up the detection. Ultimately, ship detection is a difficult problem (not intractable but still hard).

Sort of. Satellite resources are surprisingly scarce, so a lot are focused where people are, i.e. land. Plus, for the imagery sats that are focused on the ocean, ships are also tiny in a literal ocean of blue. It’s just a spec. While the resolution could be good, have fun looking for that spec. That’s why most countries use signal collection to locate vessels at sea. (I’m over-simplifying a lot, but you get the picture)

Doylist: Berman was a fatphobic piece of shit who told her to lose weight before she could wear the uniform.

Don’t forget that he was also a misogynist!

Even moreso with ad-blocker and PiHole. I swear that every corporate website has me do a captcha of some kind every time I click a link.

On that note, just denying trackers breaks SO many email links, and it feels like it gets worse and worse each year.

Wow thanks for sharing this! I think I’ll try my hand at some of these recipes.

I can only imagine the blotch’s suffering while being attached to that putrid growth. Best wishes to the blotch.

This is just the “Davidson Window,” which is based on a CIA report that Xi directed the PLA to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027. ADM Davidson took that and used it as a warning to the US military that China is ramping up their capabilities, and other officers, lawmakers, and intelligence folks ran with that until they started saying “China will invade Taiwan in 2027.” Evidently, CEOs were briefed for some (probably stupid or corrupt) reason.

Personally, I think too many senior American leaders read into that report and Davidson’s warning. Plus, most people who really know anything about China don’t think that China will move kinetically against Taiwan around 2027.

Edit: Here’s the Wikipedia article about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davidson_window

This has been my position since around the time when same sex marriage was being fought in the courts. Interestingly, a family member who is super conservative and religious came up with this same idea back then, and I was on board. (Her reasoning was that she wasn’t against gay people having the same rights but that marriage is a “holy” bond between a man and a woman 🙄)

I’ve found that it’s a way to get conservatives/religious folks onboard with same-sex marriage if their issue is the word “marriage” and ensuring its sanctity (cue eye-roll). It simultaneously outs the bigots because they can’t hide behind religious BS, and they show their hand. Back in the '00s and early '10s, I would use it as a litmus test of which Republicans in my life I would continue to associate with.

Hi Karim! It’s so cool that you’re doing an AMA on the Fediverse!

Anyway, Jay-den is one of my favorite characters of the post-2017 era of Trek. Jay-den is clearly not like most Klingons, but he still feels like a true Klingon. How did you prepare for the role in taking such a unique character who doesn’t fit the “stereotype” (for lack of a better word) of a Klingon while still making him feel like a “real” Klingon to the audience?

I found myself nodding along to a lot that was said in this article. I also would trace a lot of recent issues to JJ Abrams’ take. What I said then is still (I think) true today: “They are good movies, but they aren’t good Star Trek movies.” Discovery and Picard suffered for it, but I think that the ills are being corrected. My hope is that Paramount greenlights “Legacy” as the TNG-spiritually-successor as SNW is the TOS-spiritual-successor.

Where I will disagree, though, is that Star Trek isn’t broken. Five-ish years ago, I would have said that, but after SNW, Lower Decks, and Picard season 3, I think the powers that be have a better understanding of what is needed. We were in a bit of a “dark-ages” from 2006-2020, but I think we’re back on the upswing. We may not be quite at 1990s golden age Trek, but we can get close.