Overzeetop @ Overzeetop @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Dell Precision line for computers. They are not light. They are not slim. They are not fashionable. They can probably stop a bullet. Dell is still actively still selling (refurb'd) units from ~6 Intel generations ago. The desktop workstations are similarly bulletproof.

Facebook Messenger is probably the closest thing to a modern Yellow Pages as we have. Not everybody is on there, but most people are - even if they haven't checked their profile in years. With the fall of landlines, it can be the easiest (or only) way to find/contact someone - especially if you're a GenX or early Millennial because we have all dropped out landlines, but we created most of our social connections before any other messaging service existed. Heck, almost none of the people I knew from college in the 90s even had an email address that they stuck with (assuming I actually had email logs going back thirty years). It's nice that so many message services exist, but most have no way to "look someone up" the way it's possible to do on something like messenger/fb. (admittedly - it's both good and bad)

I suppose there's a chance that LinkedIn is the other major database of real names out there; I've never tried it for locating people.

If an accountant leaves his profession to become a commercial pilot, does he get a pass to fly when the rest of the pilots go on strike?

Well, you have to expect it due to the increased cost of (checks notes) storage and data transfer?

Well, lots of normal people due this not for profit, which is just as damning in the eyes of copyright.

But what if they had done this in a legitimate fashion - say they got a library account and just ordered the books one by one, read them in, and then returned the books. As I understand it (which is not very well, tbh) the LLM don't keep a copy of the original reference. They use the works to determine paths and branches in what I assume is a quasi-statistical approach (ie stable diffusion associates characteristics with words, but once the characteristics are stored in the model the original is effectively discarded and can't actually be recreated, except in the way a child might reproduce a picture from memory.)

If the dataset is not, in fact, stored, would the authors still have a case?

Special Pool Operation

Huh, I didn't think it was too bad. The movement/sense/fighting I thought was pretty good, and that was back when I was just (re-)starting gaming and hadn't touched a controller in decades. Granted, it didn't go much into any of the crafting or stat/character enhancement strategy except as a "first time in" walkthrough of each screen.

Funny, thinking back to that tutorial they teach you a couple of mechanics (like rebooting your ship) that are almost never used in game. OTOH, there are, what, 300 different bindings in the game now?

I found the Odyssey tutorial was frustratingly opaque as to how the entire new UI worked.

Story time: My daughter got it near the end of finals week at university, and my wife and I drove her home - 5 hours is a closed up car - on what was probably her first symptomatic day. None of us were masked because none of us knew. She coughed once or twice, but mostly slept on the way home (as she usually does after a week of exams). I almost joked with her after one cough that she'd caught the 'vid. Next morning she woke up with a fever and tested, not actually expecting...positive. She quarantined in her room for 5 days, and all three of us pretty much didn't go out for 10 days and we delayed holiday celebrations with the grandparents for two weeks. Neither my wife nor I were ever symptomatic. We used the two remaining tests we had on day 3 after the car ride and both tested negative, but decided the full quarantine was still safest.

Thinking back to the early New York outbreak, I remember reading an article in (April? May?) that semi-random population testing (I say semi because it was voluntary) for serum antibodies that covered multiple counties showed that around half of the people who tested positive for past Covid exposure had indicated that they had not suffered any symptoms of illness in the prior 3 months. The supposition was that up to 50% of the population had experienced an infection asymptomatically. While odd, it possibly explained why the spread was so rapid - people who were asymptomatic may have simply been vectors to infect many others as they didn't quarantine (or, likely, mask since masks were in very short supply at the time). Regardless, I'm getting an XBB.1.5 vaccine when it's released. Whether I got it or it magically missed me the first time, I have no desire to join the symptomatic club.

Oh, now, don't be rash. Guns don't people, people kill people, or so I'm told. We should just remove guns from the "bad" people.

Based on my observations, disallowing (checks notes) males from owning or operating guns would seem to be a near universal solution.

Evernote. I’m not sure why I even stayed with them for so long; probably the pain of moving after so many years. Switched to Joplin before they doubled their fees for zero new (useful) features.

It is their only true core value.

Sorry, all they have is a lot of fertilizer.

CNC can still be fun. You just need to be confident in your safe word.

The funny thing is he knows a shit-ton about computers. Unfortunately, he knows enough to think he won't be blind-sided, or get tripped up by things he decides to ignore for the sake of (excuse my language) engaging content. In a way, the fact that he steps on a rake every so often just raises his profile.

With the risk of being tagged as a car analogy, its similar to the experience with internal combustion engine cars, shifted by two generations. My parents (boomers) and the Silent gen often knew cars backwards and forwards because it was the only way to get them to work reliably, not unlike computers of the (60s) 70s and 80s. Those older were pretty resistant/baffled, and those after tend to just see them as appliances - being regularly ridiculed by boomers for things like not knowing how to change the transmission fluid (no longer necessary in many CVTs), drive a stick shift (rare on modern US vehicles), or brake "properly" (aka pumping brakes, which in an ABS enabled system is not recommended).

Laugh all you want, but I know what I'm having for breakfast tomorrow!

“methanol bliss” – a kind of turpentine-flavoured french toast.

These types of uses make ChatGPT for the non-write the same as a calculator for the non-mathematician. Lots of people are shit at arithmetic, but need to use mathematics in their every day life. Rather than spend hours with a scratch pad and carrying the 1, they drop the numbers into calculator or spreadsheet and get answers.

A good portion of my life is spent writing (and re-writing) technical documents aimed at non-technical people. I like to think I'm pretty good at it. I've also seen some people who are very good, technically, but can't write in a cohesive, succinct fashion. Using ChatGPT to overcome some of those hurdles, as long as you are the person doing final compilation and organization to ensure that the output is correct and accurate, is just the next step in spelling, usage, and grammar tools. And, just as people learning arithmetic shouldn't be using calculators until they understand how its done, students should still learn to create writing without the assistance of ML/AI. The goal is to maximize your human productivity by reducing tasks on which you spend time for little added value.

Will the ML company misuse your inputs? Probably. Will they also use them to make your job easier or more streamlined? Probably. Are you contributing to the downfall of humanity? Sure, in some very small way. If you stop, will you prevent the misuse of ML/AI and substantially retard the growth of the industry? Not even a little bit.

So, it's okay to replace jobs which seem like menial bullshit to you, but not jobs you deem to be "creative." We're taking a bell curve of human ability and simply drawing the line of "obsolete human" in a different place and you're disappointed that you're way closer to it than you were a decade ago.

NB: I sat in a room with 200 other engineers this summer and they all scoffed at the idea that a computer could take their place. But I'm absolutely certain that what we do could be - is being - automated even as we claim to be the intelligent ones who are not in fear of replacement. My job is just the learned sum of centuries of human knowledge which is honed year after year and has to be taught, wholecloth, to every new human in my profession. There are people who will say I'm the smartest guy in the room (for a small enough room ;-) but 90% what I do is just applying a set of rules based on inputs and boundary conditions. We feel like this shouldn't happen to us because we're smart. We think independently. We have special abilities which set us apart from ML generated outputs. We're also full of shit. There are absolutely areas were ML/AI will not surpass our value in the system for quite some time, but more and more of our expertise will be accomplishable by application of distilled large data sets.

You're not selling me here. Specifically because using ChatGPT in the role you are talking about is exactly what software developers have been doing for years - putting humans out of work. To use your own description, I could ask a software team to "Give me a calendar app" and a team of software devs, testers, and QA will produce a will go about working to make sure you have a robust, secure and properly architected app which will them obsolete thousands upon thousands of secretaries across the world. They were fully employed making intelligent decisions about their bosses schedules, managing conflicts, and coordinating with other humans to make sure things ran smoothly - and you caused nearly all of them to be fired and replaced with one or two low-paid data entry clerks who don't understand the business or why certain meetings and people have priority over others.

We can go on. Bank tellers? Most of them fired thanks to automated machines. Copywriters? Some lazy programmer puts a dictionary in word and all of a sudden 90% of all misspellings are going. Usage? Yup - getting rid of most of those too. We can go back further to when telephone switchboards were automated and there was no need to talk to someone to make your connection. Sure, those people are dead now, but they wouldn't have jobs if they were alive. And all of those functions were automated to mimic, and then exceed the utility of, humans who used to do that work. Everything from the cotton gin and mechanical thresher to a laser welder and 5DOF robotic assembly station are eliminating jobs. Artists fearing losing their jobs to ml generation? Welcome to the world of modern old school photography. Modern photography, of course, is digital and has destroyed the jobs of hundreds of thousands or millions of analog photography jobs.

The only difference this time is that its you, or people of your intellectual station, who are in the crosshairs.