skisnow
@skisnow@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Looking for the perfect 5 year anniversary gift? 1 week ago:
Interesting, I don’t see any huge red flags there.
I gather frequency penalties have fallen out of favour, due to the harmful side effects being worse than the very occasional loop trap.
- Comment on Bait or r*ta*d*ti*n. Call it. 1 week ago:
If his wealth were a US treasury bond, he’d have to spend at least $50,000,000 every DAY in order to not still keep getting richer.
Take a moment to think about how difficult it is to spend $50,000,000. If I gave you 24 hours to do it using Brewster’s Millions rules, you’d struggle.
There is no good reason for billionaires to exist.
- Comment on Bait or r*ta*d*ti*n. Call it. 1 week ago:
I guess Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were just hapless chaps stumbling around in the dark, until Elon lighted their way with his genius vision of how to build an EV. So much so I had to google their names because even I can’t remember them.
- Comment on Bait or r*ta*d*ti*n. Call it. 1 week ago:
He could declare bankruptcy and be a billionaire again tomorrow.
And I don’t say this out of any kind of admiration for him; just there’s still enough moneyed rubes out there that he could set up a new company making plumbuses and it would hit unicorn status by the end of the day.
- Comment on Looking for the perfect 5 year anniversary gift? 1 week ago:
What’s the associated system instruction set to? If you’re using the API it won’t give you the standard Google Gemini Assistant system instructions, and LLMs are prone to go off the rails very quickly if not given proper instructions up front since they’re essentially just “predict the next word” functions at heart.
- Comment on Looking for the perfect 5 year anniversary gift? 1 week ago:
What’s frustrating to me is there’s a lot of people who fervently believe that their favourite model is able to think and reason like a sentient being, and whenever something like this comes up it just gets handwaved away with things like “wrong model”, “bad prompting”, “just wait for the next version”, “poisoned data”, etc etc…
- Comment on Bait or r*ta*d*ti*n. Call it. 1 week ago:
You’re familiar with survivor bias, yeah?
- Comment on Bait or r*ta*d*ti*n. Call it. 1 week ago:
Well done. I’m like most people in that I didn’t spot it until he started talking about a subject I knew about. The first Tesla Roadster looked amazing^1^, and then the hyperloop sounded like a cool idea^2^, and then oh wait what’s he saying about software development now?
^1^ because its body was made by Lotus
^2^ except it doesn’t work
- Comment on Bait or r*ta*d*ti*n. Call it. 1 week ago:
A lot of their success seems to be recognising an opportunity before anyone else
Pretty much everyone in the world has at some point in their lives had some idea or spotted some gap in the market that could be a successful product, but 99% of us don’t get to act on that because the rent is due and will be due again next month.
- Comment on Who did this 😂😂😂 1 week ago:
CHAIN “SNAPPER” - Comment on what is north? 2 weeks ago:
I think he’s probably trolling us, because he’s doubling down on it elsewhere in the thread in face of all the people explaining it to him. Nobody is that dumb.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 3 weeks ago:
Thing is, you don’t even have to be in a union to get the benefit of other industries having them. They raise the bar for everyone.
- Comment on Weapons trafficking 3 weeks ago:
The implausible part about Homer’s job wasn’t the salary, it was the fact that he was in charge of safety at a nuclear plant despite being completely unqualified. Lenny and Carl both have Masters’ Degrees in Nuclear Science.
- Comment on Canon requires an account to transfer images from your camera. Forces you to sign up using Chrome. 3 weeks ago:
There seems to be a common thread amongst all the Japanese camera manufacturers that their software is all “this must be done in exactly this (often convoluted) way”.
I’m convinced that they put their hardware engineers in charge of writing the software.
- Comment on Techno feudalism, here we come 3 weeks ago:
Having spend some small time in the information theory and signal processing world, it infuriates me how often people champion LLMs for writing things like data dictionaries and documentation.
Information is measured in information theory as “the difference between what you expected and what you got”, ergo, any documentation generated automatically by an LLM is by definition free of Information.
- Comment on Techno feudalism, here we come 3 weeks ago:
What’s currently pickling my noggin is how I’ve been seeing “new model smashes benchmarks by an unexpectedly huge factor” headlines every month for the last two years, and yet somehow no matter how many models suddenly score 99% on tasks that they used to score 20% for, I’ve not actually found the damn thing any more helpful or reliable than it was in 2023 for anything real-world. I’m starting to think all these supposed breakthroughs they keep having are being hugely overstated.
- Comment on Anon can't go on a field trip 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, kind of my point was that y’all are viewing it as a “field trip”, which is typically a specific event that’s infrequent, carefully organized and supervised, which is a whole different beast to the generic standing instructions of “we’re not going to supervise your kids if they wander off school grounds” slip.
For the former case it’s pretty much understood that everyone in class should be able to join a field trip, but for the latter it’s not such a foregone conclusion.
- Comment on Anon can't go on a field trip 3 weeks ago:
For the benefit of the many non-Brits complaining about how unrealistic it is: the Leaving School Grounds Unsupervised form is (when I grew up at least) a huge social divider and Big Deal in a lot of British schools. There was a whole micro industry at mine where the ~70% of kids who were allowed out would provide delivery services for sweets and pop for the 30% who weren’t.
JKR didn’t just pull this whole thing out her ass, it was something that most British kids will have instantly related to. (She’s still an awful human mind)
- Comment on Common British L 3 weeks ago:
The British national dish is curry.
- Comment on Speak American 3 weeks ago:
There is a set of ISO codes for each language, but it’s not catchy used as an icon, and are also implicitly Western-centric by virtue of using the Latin alphabet.
- Comment on Speak American 3 weeks ago:
I wish there were some internationally recognized symbols to represent languages as distinct entities from their countries of origin, but the idea of trying to make some seems really unpopular for some reason.
There’s other languages that have far more politically contentious flags representing them - at least all the English-speaking countries are broadly allies. Spare a thought for the Taiwanese who have to select a People’s Republic of China flag, even though the language is as much theirs as it is the PRC’s, or the large number of Russian-speaking native Ukrainians who have to select the flag of the country who’s bombing them and their families.
The notion of a country owning a language is fraught with toxicity (indeed, Russia’s claim to vast swathes of Ukraine leans heavily on it), and if languages had their own flags we could sidestep the whole issue.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Western expats in Japan are notorious for hating every other Western expat in Japan. It’s even got a name, “My Japan Syndrome”.
- Comment on “This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.” 5 weeks ago:
It’s such an insane story that I wonder what the other side of it is. It’s easy to imagine the guy just having got out of a meeting ten minutes earlier with “if you don’t get Julia Roberts into a movie by the end of the week, I’ll see you never work in this town again!” ringing in his ears.
- Comment on xAI’s Grok suddenly can’t stop bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa 5 weeks ago:
The terrifying thing is that this is just a temporary technical misstep.
Musk’s response to this won’t be to pack that shit in, it’ll be to order his goons to figure out how to make it more subtle.
- Comment on Liquid Trees 1 month ago:
Thanks for that. It looks from that like a relevant detail OOP missed out is that these thing (purportedly) claim to produce as much oxygen as 15 trees, which isn’t nothing.
- Comment on Liquid Trees 1 month ago:
I think the problem is putting them in those dumb tanks where a tree would be, as if to say “do this instead”. The principle would be fine if they got a bit more creative with it and played to its strengths, e.g. if you make a train platform out of it, or the railings of an overpass, or the external wall panels of buildings etc.
Ofc OOP didn’t actually provide a source so we’ve no idea what the creators were actually thinking…
- Comment on Pearson complaining about using Linux to access my course material 1 month ago:
I was talking about all those downvotes you got by people who got whooshed
- Comment on Pearson complaining about using Linux to access my course material 1 month ago:
Too many users on here don’t know about the old magics
- Comment on Transitioning in STEM 1 month ago:
I used a scientific approach in the science memes community.
The issue is that your application of “the scientific approach” is to dismiss the entire field of research up to now, and demand that OP prove their point from first principles. It’s not a reasonable response to what they posted.
What we’re seeing here is an example of how it’s possible to be both right and very wrong at the same time.
You don’t seem to care about actual science.
…and the second issue is that you’re now attacking the integrity of the people calling you out on it, for no clear benefit other than to put them down.
- Comment on I'm a 6'1" man with size 3 feet which means every they measure my feet at a shoe store, the Brannock device gatekeeps my gender 1 month ago:
The first few decades of my life I assumed that there’d been all sorts of important orthopaedic/podiatry research done into the difference between men and women’s feet, gaits etc that meant wearing sports shoes sold as “women’s” would in some way cause my feet long term harm. Nope, it was bullshit marketing all along.