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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it’s like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn’t work. I still don’t understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)

    Sure, they’ll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they’re running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we’ll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that’s been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they’ve read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I’ll think we’ll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.

    That’s not to say we’re not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don’t think LLMs will allow for that.

    tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn’t as on board with









  • I have no idea what year it happened, but my parents and I were driving from church (evening service) to a restaurant and a dark shadow appeared on the moon. This would have been late 80s / early 90s in the mountain west, USA, around 8PM. It kind of looked like it was cracking apart at the bottom. It stayed that way for a few minutes, so theoretically longer than something like a branch hanging over the road. It didn’t move at all. It was just there suddenly. Everyone in the car saw it, and the people we met at the restaurant saw it too. I’ve never seen anything like it since.

    I’m guessing something in space cast a shadow on it? This was before phone cameras so no evidence exists other than a weird memory.


  • I had kind of a similar experience a while ago. My parents moved a couple times after I went to college but kept a lot of the furniture between moves. I visited one xmas and slept in my childhood bed, next to my childhood dresser in a completely different house, on a completely different side of the country. A lot of the same chairs were there in the living room. For a variety of reasons I don’t tell my parents much about my private life. Most of the conversations picked up from around when I was a teenager.

    It felt like everyone but me wanted me to feel like I was right back at home and nothing was different. We’d pressed rewind for more than a decade and should be able to pick up right where we left off. I wasn’t the weird, deeply depressed and anxious person I’d become; I was supposed to still be the awkward, slightly hopeful teenager. And I could not connect in any way. Being surrounded by just enough of the artifacts from my childhood only made it weirder. Things are better now for all of us, but I still have dreams about it. They’re not exactly nightmares, but I’m rarely happy when I wake up.