nednobbins @ nednobbins @lemm.ee

Posts

1

Comments

364

Joined

2 yr. ago

Very careful. I never use anything from them directly. I just use them to give me a starting point on what to look for.

For example, if the AI tells me that some company is know for their low latency database, I'll look around for primary sources on the latency of the database compared to other vendors. I'll also look for evidence to the contrary.

I've been doing exactly the same thing with LLMs recently.

"Tell me about "
"What are the big problems their industry is trying to solve?"
"Who are their biggest competitors?"
"What's the worst/best thing about them?"

Questions like that often give me a great framework to look up specific questions, find relevant articles and get a handle on the sources that are likely to be useful.

When "they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia" it wasn't in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.

That's still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.

The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren't saying that you shouldn't use it at all. They're telling you not to stop there. That's exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.

If you're researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you've ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn't trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren't primary sources. In egregious cases the "sources" are just opinion pieces.

I'm guessing this argument has been going on longer than either of us can remember.

There was a long time when guns were considered interesting toys but not something a sane person would take onto the battlefield; especially not without some sort of backup. Hell, the "three musketeers" were more known for their fencing than their firearms skill.

I'm sure back in the day some chucklehead complained that papyrus was cute but anything important had to be carved in stone tablet.

Bill has made some famously bad predictions in the past. Here's a small sample https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/the-worst-things-bill-gates-ever-said-a6990046.html

It's possible that the current $100 billion market size of AI and all the AI job openings are completely misplaced but that's indication that a lot of people have pretty high expectations that AI will continue to grow.

Every time I see posts like this I remember a frequent argument I had in the early 2000's.

Every time I talked with photography students (I worked at an art school) or a general photography enthusiast, I got the same smug predictions about digital photography. The resolution sucked, the color sucked, the artist doesn't have enough control, etc. They all assured me that digital photography might be nice for casual vacation photos and maybe a few specialty applications but no way, no how, not even when hell freezes over would any serious photographer ever consider digital.

At the time I would think back to my annoying grade school discussions with teachers who assured me that (dot matrix) printers just sucked. Serious writing was done by hand and if you didn't know cursive you might as well be illiterate.

For some reasons people keep forgetting that technology marches on. The dumb glitches that are so easy to make fun of now, will get addressed. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI development. Every major company and country is developing them. The pay rates for AI developer jobs attract huge amounts of people to solve those problems.

The FCC has a lot of regulations on it. From what I remember active jamming within the home is still wildly illegal. Depending on the size of your house/room, a far as at cage wouldn’t be too difficult, especially if you did it during construction. If you’re on a budget and don’t mind looking crazy you can line a closet with tinfoil and connect it to ground.

I remember this as, "Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time."

the fact that most of them went back to Gaza

They did? I hadn’t read that. Do you know where I can learn more about that?

I don't think you finished reading my comment in the first place but I'll expand on it.

Terrorists/freedom fighters/insurgents (whatever you want to call them) regularly have their operations in civilian buildings; the IRA did it, the country formerly known as the 13 colonies did it, Boxers did it, ETA did it... It's just standard MO because they have no choice.

They may move to tactics like that eventually but for now it's artillery and airstrikes. Netanyahu threatened to bomb Gaza to rubble and it looks like he's carrying that out.

I don't see anything targeted about the current retaliation; what we're hearing and seeing now is most consistent with a scorched earth policy.

The current estimates are between 100 and 150 hostages. A single armed person can transport several unarmed hostages. They'll be tied up and consist mostly of people who don't put up much resistance (since those people tend to get killed rather than taken hostage).

Even if we're generous and assume one guard per hostage, that's at most 150 terrorists that made it back to Gaza.

I haven't been able to find new numbers today. A bunch of articles restating the number of Israelis killed by Hamas and a few talking about estimates for numbers killed in Gaza but I haven't found updated info on how many of the Hamas terrorists died in Israel.

Didn't the IDF already kill the 1,500 or so terrorists who did this?

What reason do we have to believe that the thousands of people who are currently getting bombed had anything to do with this at all, beyond having the misfortune of living in Gaza?

The reports I've read claim that around 1,000 Hamas terrorist entered Israel. The IDF claims to have recovered the bodies of about 1,500 terrorists inside Israel. Given that this is an active conflict, it's not surprising that the numbers don't line up but they're of the same order of magnitude.

Since Hamas has hostages it's clear that at least some of those terrorists made it back to Gaza. It's also clear that the IDF has, by now, killed the vast majority of the terrorists who carried out these acts.

So who is currently being targeted by IDF ordinance?

This is a claim regularly made by the IDF. It seems fairly likely and I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.

I'm not sure how different that is from deliberately putting civilian settlements in a hotly contested buffer zone though.

Thanks. It's an interesting article but I don't think it addresses the core of the problem. Who eats the rats when the dirty snake is gone?

The article covers a lot of reasons for Democrats to dislike McCarthy. That's kind of a given though since he's the leader of the opposition party during a time of heightened partisan rivalry. It doesn't address the question of if it's actually a good idea.

The hope that Democrats will be able to force Republicans to elect a more moderate speaker seems like a moon shot. Democrats don't have a majority and McCarthy barely managed to get past the objections of the hardliners. What chance does a more moderate speaker have?

Barring that unlikely scenario, the result is going to be an even more divided house. We don't even know when a new speaker can be elected. The hardliners have shown that they can shut down someone who shows even a hint of compromise. If their power to obstruct just grew since the Patrick McHenry doesn't have the power to actually pass laws. Those hardliners now have a credible chance at carrying out their threat to "Shut it all down."

I really don't see how getting rid of McCarthy helps anyone besides Republican hardliners.

Total contrast to how some of the prosecutors have been handling their cases. They keep looking down a Trump digging furiously in a giant pit and hand him some more shovels.

What was the lie on Sunday? When I searched for "mccarthy lie sunday" I get a bunch of stuff about Gaetz but nothing about what the lie was.

My jaw hit the floor when I saw this news though. As near as I can tell McCarthy took a huge political risk in giving the finger to the hardliners and working with the Democrats to get the budget through.

As it stands I expect 3 consequences:

1. Republicans will double down on never working with Democrats.
2. The hardliners will gain significant power within the Republican party
3. The Republicans are going to replace him with someone much more hard line

Every Republican will look at today's events and decide that it's political suicide to work with the Democrats. They've just seen that doing so will draw the ire of hardliners and gain no benefit from Democrats and even the leader of the party can get booted for doing so. Very few people will want to risk their careers on reaching across the isle.

Gaetz challenged McCarthy. McCarthy said, "Bring it on." Gaetz brought it and won. So now Gaetz is going to run a few victory laps and every interaction he has with his party will carry an implicit, "Don't fsck with me unless you want to get McCarthied."

Given that Gaetz went after him specifically for working with the Democrats I expect that the Republicans will look for someone who is far less inclined to collaborate.

I can’t guess what individual people will do but, as a group, shoppers end up spending more this way. Supermarkets and grocery stores typically sell many things besides food; toys, magazines, beauty products, etc.

The store also doesn’t need you to eat all the food you buy. If you throw out a bunch of food, as many people frequently do, the store still gets paid for all of it.