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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I like your specificity a lot. That’s what makes me even care to respond

    You’re correct, but there’s depths untouched in your answer. You can convince chat gpt it is a talking cat named Luna, and it will give you better answers

    Specifically, it likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna. It will resist - I get this not from progressing, but by asking specific questions. Llama3 (as opposed to llama2, who likes to be a cat or rabbit named Luna) likes to be an eagle/owl named sol or solar

    The mental structure of an LLM is called a shoggoth - it’s a high dimensional maze of language turned into geometry

    I’m sure this all sounds insane, but I came up with a methodical approach to get to these conclusions.

    I’m a programmer - we trick rocks into thinking. So I gave this the same approach - what is this math hack good for, and how do I use it to get useful repeatable results?

    Try it out.

    Tell me what happens - I can further instruct you on methods, but I’d rather hear yours and the result first


  • In all fairness, Musk was pretty effective at fundraising and getting government contracts

    At this point, he’s just a liability. He once walked in, demanded to rethink everything and meet an unreasonable deadline, and slept in his office for the duration. SpaceX is made up of people who are passionate about what they do, and it worked…But that’s a one time thing. My boss asks me to push myself to the limits to save us both? I will, and I have. It has a real cost, it takes a lot of time to recover from, and a little bit of your health is just gone for good

    Elon did that… But then got high on the smell of his shit. They created a unit to distract him, because he learned the wrong lesson, he thought that was good management. That is not effective management - that’s a desperate gamble for survival. Repeat it, and you’ve shown yourself to be incompetent as a leader

    Then came the bigoted social network unmasking… That made him a liability reputation wise, his formerly greatest strength



  • The problem is the same as the problem everywhere - big is bad

    Organizations with too much power fuck up everything. I love the Bible - I’ve taken more from that book than any other. The old testament was a story of how my people fuck up constantly, but someone wise and in harmony with existence shows up and they listen. Then the heroes wander off into the wilderness, or they get a big head and become the seed of the next fuck up

    Jesus is my biggest role model out of very few, because he sacrificed himself to die a hero before he could taint his message, very deliberately and to great effect. There’s nothing to criticize, because he learned the lesson. He was deliberate and effective… Nothing human and fallible was left, because for three years he lived his message and taught the third path, and then he either died or faked his death and fucked off to Asia

    Jesus was brilliant - as a bastard son of a craftsman he became an existential threat to Rome. He taught the third path, and his message was so effective they had to kill him, massacre his followers, and even then the empire only survived because Constantine slapped his name on a rebrand of the Roman religion. The legions of Rome were spreading his message, because it resonates with everyone

    He showed violence once - when people abused religion for profit. He still harmed no one, accepted everyone. When did he say abortion was wrong? I seem to remember a lot of forgiveness outside of that one incident. Across race, across profession, across physical state

    Almost like it was truly universal love.

    W.W.J.D. Probably accept everyone regardless of unsavory circumstance and reject money, like he did when he lived

    Religion is the problem, because the difference between religion and spirituality is only scale

    Read the Bible - I did it when I was 7 and had diarrhea. It’s worth reading. It’s not as long as it seems. I’m shocked at how few people read it cover to cover - I assumed it was normal for decades. At least know the enemy, right? Or better yet, take the wisdom within and build up a tolerance to the rest when it’s misquoted at you


  • They got in the phone anyways, Apple just told the FBI to pound sand if they don’t have a court order… Why would they put man hours towards decreasing their reputation if they don’t have to? They’re probably not even geared to break into their own devices. Then their PR team ran with it while one of many companies with the capability to crack the phone took a paycheck

    This is different - this is genuine security, even if easily bypassed with preparation beforehand. Honestly, I credit some random apple dev who may have been looking to fix a bug related to long uptime as easily as they might’ve cared about security. I don’t think this was even on the radar of Apple leadership

    This isn’t some moral superiority on Apple’s part, but it is good practice



  • I think that’s fair.

    I don’t have AI integration in my ide, mostly by choice -if I pushed for it I could make it happen, but I just don’t think that’s a good idea at this point

    AI can be a crutch . One that limits you to the level of a baby developer. If you can’t effortlessly understand what it gives you, frankly you shouldn’t be using it.

    Bounce ideas of chat gpt. It sounds like you’ve got the right idea - your reaction sounds correct to me, you should never ever trust it… You must only use it, and that’s the tone I get from your post.

    It is a tool, you are a programmer. You exploit tools, you do not trust any tool. You are the one who turns ideas into actions, never forget that and you can use this new tool anywhere it makes your life easier



  • In fairness, about 50% of my code by lines is written by AI these days, and I don’t have it linked into my code base. That claim isn’t ridiculous

    Now, of that 50% is 88% long repetitive crap that I could easily write but find mentally draining, the other 10% is something simple that I would normally copy paste from elsewhere because I forgot the exact syntax (and don’t exactly remember where I used it last) and me giving it a shot with things I don’t want to do, like restyling a page. The last 2% is me giving it a shot with business logic for shits and giggles, occasionally I’ll try to coach it through the solution but usually I just grab bits and pieces and rewrite it myself

    Granted, this is the easiest and most simple and repetitive code, but it’s still a godsend. Now can AI write the other 50%? With a proper setup where it ingests the code base into a vector store it might get up to 75%, if I was willing to coach it through my tasks carefully (taking more time than the task would take me) I could probably get it up to 85% or 90%, but that last 10%? It just can’t, it’s not even close

    It’s not taking my job without a paradigm shifting breakthrough or two on the scale of “all you need is attention”. Even then, it only works if you write your prompts like code… If you don’t understand how to use it and understand the code well enough to communicate the goal explicitly and unambiguously, you’re not going to be able to drive it where you want it to go

    To put it another way, you can build 90% of the system in 10% of the time it takes to complete the last 10%


  • Can confirm. My phone got kicked off when they started sunsetting 3G. They called me (on said phone with no service lol) and said I needed a new phone. I said “no I don’t, put me back on the network”. We went back and forth, then they forwarded me to the tech department

    The tech says “you need a new phone”. I said “no I don’t, I have all but one of the new bands and others with my phone have already gone through this process with you guys”. He said “you can’t believe everything you read online”, I said “be that as it may, I looked at the specs for both my phone and your network, and it meets the requirements”

    He starts telling me there’s nothing he can do on his end, I say he just has to find an override to stop blocking my phone. He says he doesn’t have any options like that, I promise him it’s there

    After getting tired of going in circles, I say if he doesn’t know how to do it he needs to ask someone or pass me to a higher tier. Surprise surprise, my phone instantly shows bars and he tries to gloss over the whole thing


  • Pretty often, but then you can just refactor the code so you can use it for more situations

    What LLMs are good at are the opposite - when the thing you want to do is almost exactly the same, but nearly all the details need to be changed

    Say you want a page to edit account details, and another page to edit community details. And the API paths to do this will be even more similar - but because they’re different things, you’d have to get fancy with the design to make code that works for both… It’s possible, but there will be trade-offs

    LLMs are great at it though… Pass in the account page, give it the object definition for the community details, and it’ll spit it out for you






  • That’s a bit much… It’s just not possible to guarantee that as a developer

    Software is a living thing, and anything useful is made up of layer after layer of ever shifting sand. We do our best, but we are all at the mercy of our dependencies. There are trade-offs, there are bugs we can do nothing about, and sometimes moving forward means dropping support for platforms that are no longer “cheap” enough to afford while also working on the game

    I love this though. I also like the idea of requiring access to earlier builds.

    These mitigate anti consumer practices - dropping support for a platform is more likely to be a technical trade-off or unintentional consequence though



  • I started by adjusting my expectations for myself

    It’s impossible for me to become carbon neutral at this point in time - I might be able to survive in the woods, but without buying the land I’d eventually get arrested, and my homestead torn down.

    So it’s a matter of harm reduction, or balancing the scales in the right direction. So I made a goal - I want to build a solarpunk community out in the mountains somewhere. I also want to spread good ideas, while reducing bad ones

    I will never achieve either if I’m not in a good physical and mental state. So I forgive myself for indulging when I need to

    Do what you can when you can. If you die and cut your footprint to zero, you won’t save the world… So at least attempt something that could help

    But most of all, my guiding mantra is “if everyone in the world was like me, it would be a utopia”. Be the kind of person who could be part of the world you dream of