MagicShel

@MagicShel@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Investment is not inherently a bad thing, but this is certainly the case. When the owners of the company care about increased profit instead of the employees and customers (which would be aligned in a perfect world but they are not necessarily so in this one) enshittification is inevitable.

  As soon as it is more profitable to lobby for legal changes that make more money at the expense odds your customers or employees—or find other ways to use your money to the same ends, you’ve gone to the dark side. I wish it was illegal for organizations (other than non-profits) to be involved in politics, but as a practical matter you can either allow it or accept it will happen out of view and ability to influence, like drug use.

  These issues are why I’m happy being a worker bee than a queen—there’s no solving people’s problems when the problems almost always turn out to be the ability/drive of some of us to adapt to any system for maximum personal gain at the expense of others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Regulating AI hastens the Antichrist, says Palantir’s Peter Thiel⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Self-importance and loss of connection to reality through both tech and wealth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you think of any now?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.

  BRB. Hyperventillating to test a theory…

  (Going to assume this just results in a smaller quantity of calories processed per breath before anyone get’s all sciencey on me.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who the fuck needs an x axis anyway⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I tutored a young autistic man in college and he was almost non-verbal. He could communicate through speech, but only with great difficulty and stuttering. That was the only definition of autism I understood at that time, and he was considered better off than many.

  A few years later when I learned about Asperger’s because my sister got diagnosed with it, I went to get evaluated myself and after sitting down with me once, they said I’m not autistic.

  I’m about 99% sure I would be placed on the autism spectrum today.

  I don’t know whether it’s good or bad that the diagnostics / definition of autism seem to be broadening — that’s above my pay grade. But you can’t deny people who weren’t considered autistic 30 years ago are today, and so to compare autism rates which measure clearly different levels of capability is pretty useless.

  In order to compare rates, we would need a consistent set of diagnostic criteria.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Alright I’ve rethought about my earlier response. It’s true, but also irrelevant. So let me try that again without taking your comment personally.

  The question is will regular people be able to tell. I think over time, even if they can’t put their finger on exactly why they don’t like something, people will demonstrate a preference for human-created art.

  That’s not the end of the story — AI generated is faster and cheaper and economics will play a role — but that was my point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure who you’re used to dealing with, but I use AI all the time — damn near every day — and have done for 6 years. I’ve written a discord AI dungeon master. I’ve written hundreds perhaps over a thousand short stories often starting from a scenario I’ve written and watched them all play out time and again. I know LLMs inside and out. I’ve jailbroken them to see how far they can be pushed in terms of violence, evil, and intimacy.

  I’m no professional author to be sure, but because I lack the knack for storytelling, not because I don’t understand the craft. So I understand the tools pretty well, and I can tell when they are poorly employed.

  And I’m irritated because I 100% can tell, and I wish you were right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah the problem is pretty much everything AI does requires collaboration with an actual human expert. But we’ve got people who think it can be a therapist without an actual therapist, artist without collaborating with an artist, coder, author, marketing strategist, lawyer, doctor…

  This isn’t me belittling AI, I think it can do some really incredible things, but the way I see it, everything it does requires actual cognitive ability and domain knowledge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I remain hopeful that interest will drop in AI generated products because the quality just isn’t there. You can tell the voices aren’t right, the pictures are soulless, the prose is stilled and often self-contradictory. I think people will respond negatively to that.

  But how long it will take for that to be clear to CEOs and CFOs, I don’t know, and lives are being destroyed in the meanwhile. I think AI is a good tool, but I don’t know how to keep it as a tool but prevent amateurs from thinking the output is professional level when any professional wills tell you it isn’t.

  I’ve generated a lot of text — mostly code and fiction. I’ve seen AI write some really good phrases I’d never have thought of. But I’ve never seen it generate so much as half a page before it writes something that requires editing. If you don’t write like 90% of a thing, its voice takes over and everything sounds terrible and flat even if you keep it from making factual errors.

  And even the great bits require context or it won’t have any impact. AI is god awful at artistry. Sometimes I’ll ask it to analyze something I’ve written and it always wants to rewrite the bits that have style or panache and replace them with the most generic crap. I’m a terrible visual artist but I’m going to assume it does the same thing with image generation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not me, then. Cool. Thanks for letting me know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Comcast Executives Warn Workers To Not Say The Wrong Thing About Charlie Kirk | 404 Media⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I hope everyone publicly expresses support for the kids shot in Evergreen on the same day while pointedly ignoring Kirk’s death. I think that sends a clear message without having to mention Kirk at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who is the enemy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bill Clinton would be unsurprising. He might be just a run of the mill philanderer, though. I haven’t seen any legitimate reason to suspect Biden. Of course I spent 20 years thinking Michael Jackson was just a weird dude with a Peter Pan complex and might legitimately not have been a pedo, so maybe I just don’t have a very good pedodar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla said it didn’t have key data in a fatal crash. Then a hacker found it.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Insurance dropping coverage is going to eliminate them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who is the enemy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, there’s idiots and there’s idiots, you know? Yeah those classes should never have existed and maybe that’s evidence enough of idiocy, but there is an abundance of folks smarter than me. Surely they could hire one of them…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who is the enemy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The complicated thing here is there are so many layers of abstraction to make things easier to use and understand that if you didn’t age with the tech, it’s really hard to fully understand. That’s everything. I see Angular and React developers who don’t understand CSS.

  My last position, we had classes that set sizes for everything in multiples of 4 pixels. So size-1 is 4 pixels, size-2 is 8 pixels, etc. And everything was sized with those classes. Which means if you ever wanted to resize anything, you have to go to every element and change the class instead of you know, having input controls have distinct classes.

  People are layering on abstraction without understanding why and throwing away all the benefits, time to invent another abstraction layer! I had my tech lead argue with me that this was a better system because “standards”. I’m going to assume the standard was poorly understood because I can’t imagine a multi-billion dollar company hires idiots to set standards.

  I got started learning transistors and Boolean algebra and programming an 8088(?) in college. Had computers for a few years before that. It’s surprising how conditionals I see that can be simplified by Boolean algebra.

  I don’t actually hate computers, and I try to give IT workers some grace because I’m not always proud of the work I do when I have to finish 3 months of work in two weeks. But I’ve worked with a lot of folks who aren’t curious or looking to learn and improve, and I have to wonder why they ever got into IT in the first place.

  For me the worst part of IT is the god damned management. Any possible productivity gains from agile are undercut at every turn by management who has to have a concrete promise of a delivery date before they even understand the ask.

  Anyway, sorry for the rant. Started my long weekend early and starting a new job next week, so I have a lot of pent up rants from my last company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who is the enemy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  IT people hate computers.

  IT people hate users. IT people hate other IT people. We’re just a surly lot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think AI is done improving, but companies need to find something other than throwing more compute at it. It seems to get exponentially more expensive for logarithmic gains in performance. I honestly can’t even tell the difference between ChatGPT 4 and 5. I don’t doubt that it is better but I can’t see a difference in my own productivity.

  Time savings vs time sinks depends a lot on exactly what you’re doing. Treading well-worn ground in a new domain can be speedy. But fixing a non-standard or niche (or shitty) code base can be a nightmare because nothing is done the standard way.

  So far, I’ve gained a bit of productivity through AI, but I’ve been down a few rabbit holes, too. Integration tests can be a real pain. It always wants to recommend custom test configurations but then you wind up with a different test environment and you can’t necessarily trust your tests. Date parsing with Jackson in particular can be different between your configured ObjectMapper in production and new ObjectMapper() in test to give just a super basic example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨do what you love⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  👋

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Y tho⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So you can hear the ‘B’ side.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In a new lawsuit, the publisher alleged that AdBlock Plus removes ads by interfering with the “programming code of websites” which violates its exclusive rights under copyright law.

  I would respond that putting ads on my computer interferes with the programming code of my computer under my exclusive rights under copyright law. The unique combination of hardware, software, and data which comprise my computing environment belong exclusively to me.

  However I will grant non-exclusive access to my taint for the sole purpose of licking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s going to vibe code it.

  …

  …

  Fuck!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I uh… I took this as humor. Maybe I was wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Clanker-loving cogfuckers.

  “I’m off to have a clanker-wank.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  progressive gender roles

  I’m not five years old and what’s this?

  /tongue in cheek

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The worst thing about AI is the people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I dislike religion, but you’re not wrong. Interacting with one another putting on friendly faces and performing kindness and fellowship until for some it becomes real.

  For all the fakery and frauds, without that dance it’s so much harder to find the people we really connect with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A similar term “cloudborn” isn’t even dissimilar from the idea of storks delivering babies from heaven. Fuel for a science fiction book or RPG. Less so for actual humankind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bonk.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like in the moment, one would want to overdo it rather then underdo it. Particularly if the thing in its mouth is your other arm or leg.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s lock on iPhone browser engines gets a December deadline⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree with your reasoning. I refuse to use chrome. Even at work I use it only for the sites that are non functional.

  I still think this is a good thing and hope they do keyboards next because fuck do I hate swipe typing on iPhone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t understand why people expect AI to work this way. First, you don’t give it the most information-free prompt you possible can. Second, it would be far better at discussing a diagnosis with an expert than just pronouncing a verdict.

  It would be much better to provide as much patience demographic information as possible and then say something like:

  • “Do you see anything suspicious or abnormal about [thing]?”
  • “What are some possible causes of [unusual spot]?”
  • “I suspect [diagnosis]. Identify and explain features of this image that either confirm or don’t support that conclusion. Is there a diagnosis that fits better or is more likely?”

  Don’t rely on AI to perform the work, use it to make an expert faster or challenge them to be more accurate.

  I don’t exactly know how medical AI works, but the fact that they are discussion prompts suggests LLMs play a role here and they can’t be trusted to function without an expert user.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Black Holes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything was hairy back in the 70’s.