The first one insisted to make sure one of the most competent human beings who ever existed oriented a thing downward in order to not die during a very well-rehearsed procedure.
The second one is a reference to social media companies “outsourcing” support to chatbots with no intelligence and plenty of control, allowing people to prompt said chatbots into giving them other people’s accounts.
Different cultures and different religious traditions have different norms, that’s the main thing. Giant religions, especially relatively decentralized ones are not a monolith.
In the Gulf states the all-black style is more common for locals, Saudi is massive so it’s different in some areas, here in Lebanon you have many sects and the all-black is more associated with fundamentalist Shia Islam, and so on. Most women who wear headscarves are wearing colorful ones.
As a little kid when we still had a bit more tourists coming from Kuwait and the UAE, I would see some women in Niqabs (full face cover) and metal face plates, which would freak me out. Those are not a thing here.
I think most Americans think all of these are one blob, and use “burka” as a catch-all. And that one is only a thing in super fundamentalist societies in places like Afghanistan, not something common at all. It would be like me assuming all Americans live like the FLDS.
Seeing their flag over our land and heritage sites makes me want to puke
My fucking CPU comment was not that serious. The projects we were doing were just that. I have a notebook full of diagrams that I understand less and less every year.
It was just a bit shitty that the CPU part wasn’t included with the chip itself. IIRC the nicer ones had hardware CPUs/CPU cores anyway.
I meant it more as “hey I need to do this simple task, better write a processor real quick” which is not convenient. I’m almost certain there are dozens of FOSS RISC cores that could be burned to all of Xilinx’s FPGAs. It’s theoretically hardware agnostic but these are super popular parts.
I was a student and this was the first time I really felt like programmery things were paywalled. I think the licenses were per-deployment but free for education.
I think people who learned about programming in a previous generation may be more comfortable with things being very proprietary, and arguably the newest batches of people learning it in the slop era too. But until that point everything I touched had a free (as in beer) or free-ish equivalent. I remember the professor being very excited about the Chinese less closed down stuff, saying it didn’t matter that it was slower for a lot of applications.
The world of FPGA is full of proprietary hardware and software blocks sadly. I haven’t dabbled since being a student but I remember finding it extremely jarring how on one hand you basically could write whatever hardware blocks you wanted (the freedom is comparable to learning programming all over again but in a fundamentally different way), but also you had super optimized “IP blocks” of software you can pull in like a paid library that you had to license. These blocks make the damn chip much more powerful for those of us not willing to write a fucking CPU, what the fuck do you mean DLC for the chip on my lab table?
Vivado was a bit of a pain but not too bad as far as proprietary software goes. There’s more steps involved than just burning a .hex to a regular microcontroller, the debugging is different, I get it, another program makes sense.
Personally I don’t write much code these days but I find myself yearning for like MS Visual Studio 2008. If I ever want to go back to programming on the side I will probably have to figure out my IDE situation from scratch. VS Community seems nice but there’s a lot of unnecessary features and of course Microslop’s grubby fingers all over it
Frankly “people team” is one I’ve been seeing and I think that’s disingenuous or condescending or something. I don’t know what I think it should be.
I’ve been paying more attention to my health lately and honestly going from occasional sugar free soft drinks to even more occasional full sugar drinks has been a great “perk”. The sugary version tastes better, and 300-400 extra calories per month isn’t a big deal when I’m paying attention to my actual day to day consumption.
Besides, yeah yeah natural fallacy etc, but those non-sweetener ingredients probably aren’t stellar for your health either, and less overall volume of this stuff is probably better.
I wish their stuff didn’t get as widely marketed as it did. They seem like luxury little hardware toys and exactly like something that can stimulate me back into making more projects. But they are universally known as “those hacking things for thieves”, so even importing one can get me into hot water probably.
Nice step up, so this is the Pi Zero one if the Zero was the Pico one (try saying that three times quickly). Cool
I mean this is an extreme case. The booing warms my heart but everyone I know who is in teaching is either 100% on the Kool Aid IV drip or absolutely crashing out over what they feel is the end of organized society.
An old friend of mine was a younger, well liked middle school teacher who was very motivated to get the kids interested in actually wanting to seek out more stuff and to nurture that, since our curricula here are ancient. She quit this year. Outright. Mid fucking year. She says that in French the chatbots are even more repetitive and every student from the most inattentive to the “best” seems incapable to hand in any essay without at least running it through the slop machine for good measure.
The infinitesimally thin silver lining is that I’m not just hearing of AI fatigue online.
But the kids call it lies, they say “that’s AI” to mean that’s a hoax, they call their memes brainrot, so the self awareness is there. Then they completely fall apart on writing and researching. I was a dreadfully unfocused categorically shit student with a bad work ethic at school and even I’m offended
New bit idea: guy who insists he doesn’t have any internalized racism to confront, since he doesn’t have a sexual preference for interracial scenes, he simply believes they are better from a composition and cinematography perspective
The post text is dripping with it but I haven’t looked at the code. A lot of my complaining about slop is how people for whom English is not a strong language over-depend on it, kind of never developing a voice over time. Instead sounding like the Burger King support bot.
I wouldn’t even know if the code was machine generated. I never tried that so I don’t recognize it if it’s not glaring.
Code is out there though so maybe someone can port it into a Thunderbird addon or something. I think this is a very cool project
“Semantic search” / “semantic indexing”. Yes. Would be a great thing to optionally have. But you don’t need to hook it up to a prompt and have it spit out natural language output.
It could be just like a standard search with search results, just with a backend that looks at more stuff based on meaning not just explicit word matching. And search engines have worked like this for years to be fair.
But I agree, the general purpose chatbots are probably helpful to get a foothold on looking something up when you don’t really know what it’s called or how to concisely describe it. The problem is that the companies that make them have every incentive to feed you their explanation too, not just point you in the right direction and have you leave their service.
Not creating and searching as far as I understand (or as far as I’m willing to allow it to in this case) but more summarizing, truncating, some but not all types of rewording (not technical parts for example).
They’re getting better at extracting information out of a closed set of data, but it’s still literally impossible to guarantee that it won’t generate a contradictory or unwanted piece of text that looks very close to the right thing, based off the training data inherent to the model.
But the “best” case is something closed ended where you know what the output is. So cleaning up a tiny piece of code, summarizing something that you provide in its entirety, translating a block of text, that’s all a good use case. Using it to distill the entire web’s information into a chatbot format? Fuck no
The entire problem is people thinking this tool that can turn text input into soup and reliably pull text back out of said soup is something it just is not.
Most of the models I’ve played with before the boom were not instruct models. So you didn’t prompt them and have them churn out slop that sounds like the answer to your question. Instead you just wrote text (story, article heading, etc) and it would continue the pattern. The results were “worse” in quality, but because we only thought to use it a specific way, it felt like a very powerful new tool.
My enthusiasm for this shit has fallen through the floor in 2022 and presently is about 18% through the earth’s outer crust
You’re absolutely right — wth indeed does that! And it also just… even mean too. You’re not just nodding along, you’re following this mystery to the end!
Remember to stay hydrated while you’re exercising those neurons too — something you can totally do in a new way by checking out SodaStream™ — or another healthy water source. But I guarantee you that the alternatives can’t be bought with the exclusive #LitaniIsOurs colorway! Water is more than just a natural necessity — it’s something you should always keep as your strategic and tactical objective.
Guys can we please talk about how we better organize society without being so political?
This is almost certainly about the Shah flag, this is an interesting spin on that
Workers and Resources Soviet Republic is an automation simulator masquerading as a city builder.
The most played game right now on my Steam account is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, an automation game disguised as a city builder, with obscenely detailed mechanics. You don’t buy buildings, you have to have functional construction industries to set them up. You don’t magically draw colored lines to set up bus routes like in SimCity, you have to buy buses at the border one by one and then set up a maintenance schedule. You don’t highlight a dark patch on the map and suddenly have a metallurgy industry like in Cities: Skylines, the fuck you don’t, you need to set up a coal industry and rail transport over the course of thirty odd hours before you start cranking out steel. And that’s without even considering food production, alcoholism management, pollution from the necessary chemicals industry, storage and handling of fresh meat, and of course, citizen loyalty to the Party. It’s a fucking insane game by and for people who probably have to be insane themselves.
I wrote that in a post about my strange relationship with games and media in general in my blog a few weeks ago.
Definitely one of the most distinctly engrossing games I’ve ever played. Seriously. Your cities will be ugly as fuck because it’s genuinely difficult to progress.
Reading your post over again maybe it’s a bit on the extreme side and not what you’re asking for. This is the most extreme city management I’ve ever played. Your sewers have to flow downhill, citizens driving in personal cars is something that happens after like 300 hours, if you sell too much oil too fast you can make oil cheaper on the global market and lose money. I hate it, I’ve wasted my life on it. It’s great I want to play more.
pastime
Really? I think these events could be memorialized as a sort of messed up cultural thing to look back upon, but using such a banal word for it feels pretty odd in its own right
I think you might have missed the original story. There was some fuckery going on with changes to the rules of what does and doesn’t get listed at IPO, seemingly designed to force the stock to (be allowed to) launch at a nonsensically high value on the indices, in turn forcing the least gamble-minded investors (which includes a fuckload of normal people via pensions, insurance schemes etc) into becoming bag holders for the most transparently greedy rug pull of all time.
I live eight thousand kilometers from the US, and have no vestigial belief in capitalism, and this made me sell my US index funds this week. What an irresponsible shitshow even if you believe in nothing besides capital, even if you are a true believer in this system.
The definition of being listed on any index isn’t waiting for someone to announce “I want each share to be worth ten trillion dollars! Actually no, eleventy billion dollars!” and taking that at face value. That’s why this is news. It’s not Mr Standard and Mr Poor sitting in an office and deciding they don’t like the stock.