chicken @ chicken @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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2 yr. ago

I don't regularly drink coffee, one time I had a big cup made by someone who drinks a lot of coffee, what happened was my face went all tingly and numb and I felt like I was gonna pass out (I was on the highway and there were no bathroom stops so it was extra bad). People who don't think of caffeine as a drug are just incorrect.

I very highly recommend getting a pressure cooker for this. Not only is it cheaper energywise and requires less planning ahead (don't need to soak beans beforehand, much shorter cooking time), but you don't have to keep tabs on a pot for hours. You just pour in the beans water and salt, press a button and come back later whenever you're ready. Especially good for Garbanzo beans, which take a ridiculous amount of time to cook on a stovetop.

I once had a deal with my landlord to provide wifi to the other tenants. Of course I didn't snoop, but it's not like they had any real assurance of that. You'd think there might be some privacy concerns but nobody had a problem except when the internet was down. I think in general people don't tend to care about that, though if you do there's the option of using a VPN.

putting community conversations front-and-center in the user experience and blending AI-driven efficiency with real human perspectives

So, reading between the lines, Reddit is going to collaborate with advertisers to make their bot spam falsified social proof campaigns successful, while pretending that's not what is going on.

I love it, hate having to check my phone for these, brilliant choice to put the code onscreen

One thing it's great for is making granola that holds together. Perfect consistency and sweetness. You need to use a lot because the point is to get the oats to stick together, so it would be ridiculously expensive to use honey instead like some recipes suggest (and I think that would probably make it too sweet, since honey is sweeter).

sell things that you actually have the rights to print and sell.

This would exclude the thousands of makers who subscribe to designers like Cinderwing3D, and have permission to print and sell her articulated dragon designs.

It sounds like they do have the rights, and this policy is still causing problems for them because there's a difference between having the rights and being the original creator.

To me it seems fine, especially if there's still a free version that's basically the same or it gets released after a delay. I don't think I'd pay for something like this myself, and maybe they're taking some legal risk, but if the money lets them spend time making media accessible, how is there a problem that outweighs the good?

To me the part that seems the most wasteful is wasting the time of badly paid workers when you could just prepare food for yourself instead, and to a lesser extent the waste of your money going to a corporation, and the waste of real estate. I don't think things like water use and extra plastic/cardboard trash associated with food is all that impactful or worth worrying about. That said I personally avoid going out to eat except in the rare cases when it is an unavoidable social requirement, so a few times a year at most.

Thanks for taking the time to go through that. These quotes show difficulty disambiguating violent vs nonviolent movements and their outcomes in the data, but I'd say that doesn't quite justify your implied claim that the data points to violent civil resistance methods as successfully "play[ing] a more direct role in undermining the system of oppression."

Her data shows that violent and non-violent methods often work in tandem

Does it? I read the whole interview in the OP post and it does not seem like this would be the opinion of the researcher:

The finding is that civil resistance campaigns often lead to longer-term reforms and changes that bring about democratization compared with violent campaigns. Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns — whether the campaigns succeeded or failed. This is because even though they “failed” in the short term, the nonviolent campaigns tended to empower moderates or reformers within the ruling elites who gradually began to initiate changes and liberalize the polity.

How do you justify the claim that her data shows the usefulness of violent civil resistance campaigns?

At my school there was a group of students who would steal unattended pencils and hoard them in a huge pile in a hole in the woods behind the school. Eventually they got caught but for a while it was easy to make the excuse that you couldn't do schoolwork because the pencils were gone.

What you confuse here is doing something that can benefit from applying logical thinking with doing science.

I'm not confusing that. Effective programming requires and consists of small scale application of the scientific method to the systems you work with.

the argument has become “but it seems to be thinking to me”

I wasn't making that argument so I don't know what you're getting at with this. For the purposes of this discussion I think it doesn't matter at all how it was written or whether what wrote it is truly intelligent, the important thing is the code that is the end result, whether it does what it is intended to and nothing harmful, and whether the programmer working with it is able to accurately determine if it does what it is intended to.

The central point of it is that, by the very nature of LKMs to produce statistically plausible output, self-experimenting with them subjects one to very strong psychological biases because of the Barnum effect and therefore it is, first, not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!) , and second, it is even harmful because these effects lead to self-reinforcing and harmful beliefs.

I feel like "not even possible to assess their usefulness for programming by self-exoerimentation(!)" is necessarily a claim that reading and testing code is something no one can do, which is absurd. If the output is often correct, then the means of creating it is likely useful, and you can tell if the output is correct by evaluating it in the same way you evaluate any computer program, without needing to directly evaluate the LLM itself. It should be obvious that this is a possible thing to do. Saying not to do it seems kind of like some "don't look up" stuff.

Are you saying that it is not possible to use scientific methods to systematically and objectively compare programming tools and methods?

No, I'm saying the opposite, and I'm offended at what the author seems to be suggesting, that this should only be attempted by academics, and that programmers should only defer to them and refrain from attempting this to inform their own work and what tools will be useful to them. An absolutely insane idea given that the task of systematic evaluation and seeking greater objectivity is at the core of what programmers do. A programmer should obviously be using their experience writing and testing both typing systems to decide which is right for their project, they should not assume they are incapable of objective judgment and defer their thinking to computer science researchers who don't directly deal with the same things they do and aren't considering the same questions.

This was given as an example of someone falling for manipulative trickery:

A recent example was an experiment by a CloudFlare engineer at using an “AI agent” to build an auth library from scratch.

From the project repository page:

I was an AI skeptic. I thought LLMs were glorified Markov chain generators that didn’t actually understand code and couldn’t produce anything novel. I started this project on a lark, fully expecting the AI to produce terrible code for me to laugh at. And then, uh… the code actually looked pretty good. Not perfect, but I just told the AI to fix things, and it did. I was shocked.

But understanding and testing code is not (necessarily) guesswork. There is no reason to assume this person is incapable of it, and no reason to justify the idea that it should never be attempted by ordinary programmers when that is the main task of programming.

The problem, though, with responding to blog posts like that, as I did here (unfortunately), is that they aren’t made to debate or arrive at a truth, but to reinforce belief. The author is simultaneously putting himself on the record as having hardline opinions and putting himself in the position of having to defend them. Both are very effective at reinforcing those beliefs.

A very useful question to ask yourself when reading anything (fiction, non-fiction, blogs, books, whatever) is “what does the author want to believe is true?”

Because a lot of writing is just as much about the author convincing themselves as it is about them addressing the reader. ...

There is no winning in a debate with somebody who is deliberately not paying attention.

This is all also a great argument against the many articles claiming that LLMs are useless for coding, in which the authors all seem to have a very strong bias. I can agree that it's a very good idea to distrust what people are saying about how programming should be done, including mistrusting claims about how AI can and should be used for it.

We need science #

Our only recourse as a field is the same as with naturopathy: scientific studies by impartial researchers. That takes time, which means we have a responsibility to hold off as research plays out

This on the other hand is pure bullshit. Writing code is itself a process of scientific exploration; you think about what will happen, and then you test it, from different angles, to confirm or falsify your assumptions. The author seems to be saying that both evaluating correctness of LLM output and the use of Typescript is comparable to falling for homeopathy by misattributing the cause of recovering from illness. The idea that programmers should not use their own judgment or do their own experimentation, that they have no way of telling if code works or is good, to me seems like a wholesale rejection of programming as a craft. If someone is avoiding self experimentation as suggested I don't know how they can even say that programming is something they do.

Doesn't that game already have a "behavior score"?

I think the joke is this wine will get you too drunk to do math right

Kind of sounds like they are just out to get him because he keeps protesting the lack of crosswalks

He also reportedly wrote an email to Charlottesville’s city manager which read: “There is a marked crosswalk now [at the intersection in question] in spite of you … It’s chalk[,] not paint[.] Please replace it with a real one.”

A police report that Cox shared with the news station alleged that officers were unable to determine whether his improvised crosswalk had been created with permanent paint.

Like he explicitly told them it was chalk and also you can just look at it

Ordering someone to change their beliefs at gunpoint is kind of the opposite of asking them to think. You can't reasonably ask someone to not have been born to minority parents, because it's impossible, but you can ask someone to think about why that might not be reasonable, or improve the quality of information that is the basis for their considerations, which are possible.

As for FSM, make pilgrimage to the pasta plains to witness the world's spaghetti supply descending from the sky, and cast a critical eye on media peddling conspiracy theories like "wheat" and "rolling machines".

I guess in a sense those two things could be said to encompass everything that could possibly define a person (discounting fetal development etc), but racism is at least as much of a belief system as it is a conditioned response, and the belief is about genetic determinism, so it still seems like a little bit of an ironic statement.

Even if choices all unavoidably trace back to nature+nurture, I would say there is still a distinction in how much of a 'choice' has been made between say someone who has an emotional response due to trauma associated with a certain ethnicity, and someone with beliefs that an ethnicity is genetically unfit to coexist in society with others, because the latter is conscious and considered, and you can say that such a person has a responsibility to consider more thoroughly whether it really makes sense.