sobchak
@sobchak@programming.dev
- Comment on 1 day ago:
On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of stories of people getting addicted to the “agentic harnesses” and personally (and happily) blowing through hundreds to thousands of dollars/month. I’ve seen people write articles about how their $200/month subscriptions are such a good deal, lol. Companies are forcing their employees to use AI at insane costs. Nearly every software engineering job posting mentions using AI tools as a requirement. Anthropic’s revenue is set to double this quarter and be its first profitable quarter (likely using a lot of accounting tricks).
I’m really curious if this AI industry can self-perpetuate itself with stupidity and greed indefinitely as everything becomes shittier and unreliable, and civilization slowly crumbles.
- Comment on We produce more resources than we could ever consume in the least sustainable ways possible. 1 week ago:
Replace “sustainable,” and the bit about profit and capitalism, with “efficient” and “corruption and un-free markets,” then this is a common right-wing talking point (back when the right wing tried to engage intellectually, at least).
In my unscientific opinion, the current population is unsustainable, and there’s no known ways to make it sustainable enough to support the population in the long term (I hope there will be, of course). The most sustainable framing practices are less intensive and result in less output per acre. That’s just about survival, ignoring quality of life. I’ve heard it claimed we’d need 5 Earths for everyone on Earth to live a first-world-like lifestyle. Granted, we should drastically change our lifestyles.
Climate change will also likely lower the human population the Earth can support, and I think we will likely adopt even less sustainable practices to make up for the loss, accelerating our own demise; kicking and scratching and bringing all the ecosystems of the Earth down with us.
- Comment on Just say no 2 weeks ago:
People are trying to use it on larger code-bases and that’s where it goes rogue and just creates an unmaintainable mess. It’s decent at writing small scripts that are likely similar to scripts it has been trained on (starts failing when you start trying to get it to do more novel types of things).
- Comment on Just say no 2 weeks ago:
I’ve been messing around with AI a bit. Kimi k2.6 is very close to Claude Sonnet; “thinks” a lot, but that seems to help it. I think it’s something like 1/3 the cost of Sonnet. The newest GLM is supposed to be similar. Minimax, MiMo, Qwen, and Deepseek is a bit of step down. The big step down are the small models like Qwen 35B and 27B, but they’re still “useful,” and I can run them on my 24GB GPU. I’m also now forced to use Sonnet and crank out slop code :( It’s going to end in disaster.
- Comment on Videogame pirates tell other pirates to shut up about it after Subnautica 2 developers are taunted with illicit copies 2 weeks ago:
“Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility—reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge—at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude. If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar’s own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve.”
- Comment on Anon needs a job 3 weeks ago:
Ive been hired at every job ive applied to
That’s crazy. Straight out of high-school, I spent about six months driving around and applying to a job or 2 every day before I got a job (applying to pretty much every business in the small towns I lived near; McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Walmart, factories, everything). Now, I’m an unemployed software engineer, and I’ve probably applied to > 500 jobs, and still no luck (I think every job posting gets > 1000 applications in this job market). The vast majority of the time, I never actually get a chance to even talk to a person to impress them with my awkwardness and anxiety :)
- Comment on amazon can afford to treat its workers with dignity 3 weeks ago:
I’ve had jobs with 1 hour lunch breaks before. Well, actually I don’t even think it was in writing, and we could take a break whenever we wanted for however long we wanted. Sometimes I’d go to a restaurant with co-workers, but mostly just brought food from home and took maybe a 30 minute break and go back to working. I’ve also had a job with a 4.5 day work week which was really convenient (it let me get a lot done before stuff like banks closed). I’ve also had a job with unlimited PTO, but that’s kind of a scam (everyone was afraid they’d get fired if they took PTO).
- Comment on Hee Hee Ho Ho Ha Ha 1 month ago:
I don’t think he’s a grifter. He stopped running ads as soon as his contract with Twitch was over, doesn’t do sponsorships, doesn’t sell nutritional supplements, lets “fan channels” repost his content, personally donates to candidates and causes, runs donation streams, etc. I guess he does sell merch, made by union shops. I’m pretty sure most his income comes from subscribers. I think he could make much more money doing the things listed above if he wanted to. I don’t particularly like his personality, and he does seem to be fairly consumeristic and vain, but I don’t think he’s a grifter.
- Comment on Perhaps the only appropriate use of AI 1 month ago:
I mean, you could. Just encode 100ms chunks or whatever into tokens then push them through the same model. I’m pretty sure that’s what the claim to do (though with MoE/routing now, maybe).
- Comment on North America contains some of the longest continuous decididous forest records on the planet. 1 month ago:
I don’t think it’s so much “fear” of defying the president as it is they’re getting what they want from him (white christo-fascism), and they’re getting bribed by the same people. Most of the Dems are also dependant on the same interests as well (not necessarily the white Christian-nationalist stuff, but the same money). The concentration of wealth has put far too much power into too few hands. These same people are heavily influencing politics and public opinion worldwide. Idk, how we get out of this mess; have to bring the entire global economic system to its knees; forcibly redistribute their wealth or make it worthless I guess.
- Comment on Perhaps the only appropriate use of AI 1 month ago:
According to their tech/marketing papers, it’s supposedly multi-modal, encoding audio to tokens.
- Comment on I am an American. I used to be proud of my country. Now it feels like a turd circling the drain. Is there anything going on behind the scene that America is actually doing good in? 2 months ago:
Seems like more people are getting involved in direct action (against ICE). Starting around the time of Bernie’s primary campaign in 2020, I’ve noticed the amount of people getting involved in mutual-aid-type stuff slowly growing. The US has been “helping” Ukraine with “lethal aid,” though it’s debatable that’s the best way to help, and it’s probably more about enriching arms manufacturers and making sure Ukraine is perpetually indebted to the US.
- Comment on Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash 2 months ago:
Fair enough. I was just trying to point out that the entire hardware industry, and pretty much the entire executive and investor class is doing the same stuff as Nvidia.
- Comment on Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash 2 months ago:
The more you buy, the more you save!
- Comment on Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash 2 months ago:
Would have to boycott pretty much all hardware. I don’t know of any large hardware manufacturer that’s not chasing the AI investment money and bribing the Trump admin.
- Comment on Nvidia Announces DLSS 5, and it adds... An AI slop filter over your game 2 months ago:
NNs are deterministic. Chatbot and image generator implementations just purposely add randomization to make them seem more intelligent.
- Comment on Why is the USA attacking Iran? 2 months ago:
At the most basic level, the Trump admin likely has plans to make bank on it. Perhaps bribes or “deals” with oil companies, Israel, weapons manufacturers, etc.
Also, a part of the MAGA coalition consists of Zionists (the Evangelical Christians and Zionists Jews [both are death cults, IMO]), which makes it easier for Trump to do these things without too much opposition from MAGA. And, groups like AIPAC have been somewhat successful at tipping the scales of US elections against politicians that don’t support Israel.
- Comment on Unlimited Power ⚡ 3 months ago:
My grandparents called it that. I guess it comes from a time where lights were the primary consumer of electricity in a household.
- Comment on Get. Out 3 months ago:
a robot is still going to be cheaper in the long run
x
- Comment on Get. Out 3 months ago:
I’m working with people that seem to try to offload a lot of their work to AI, and it’s shit, and making the project take longer and shittier. Then they do things like write documents in AI and expect people to read that nonsense, and even use AI to send long, useless Slack messages. In short, it’s been detrimental to the project.
- Comment on Get. Out 3 months ago:
I don’t buy that. There’s little reason to automate those jobs because the labor is so cheap. And as someone who has worked most of those jobs in the past, most of those workers could be easily trained for different jobs; most are actively taking it upon themselves to train to get out of them.
- Comment on But bro please 3 months ago:
Perhaps. I read it as the “setup” being the emphasized part (i.e. the context set by the first part of the sentence), with the states being a representative of the “people” under the political theory at the time… This was written by the elite more or less fine with slavery and indentured servitude, and only thought that white male landowners really counted. Either way, I think regular citizens should be able own firearms.
- Comment on But bro please 3 months ago:
Maybe I’m just old, but suppressors seem pointless to me. If I understand correctly, you need to use subsonic ammo to get the full effect, which pretty much negates the extra “stopping power” of rifles (or higher velocity handguns). Simple foam ear plugs, like many people wear to work, can be as good or better in terms of db reduction if going to a range or popping some off in “the back nine” if you’re fortunate. If you need to run to your gun in an emergency to save you’re own life, I don’t think you’d take the time to grab your hearing protection. Hearing impaired is better than dead. And you’re definitely not going to EDC active hearing protection. Perhaps I’m not understanding the benefits though. I see the benefits if it’s like your job or something (work at a range, are a rancher that shoots vermin/predators at night). I suppose if you’re training in some kind of militia to work in a squad, active hearing protection with integrated radio would be nice, but virtually nobody is doing that.
- Comment on But bro please 3 months ago:
The interpretation of the 2nd amendment that the courts take never made sense to me. I clearly says states can have well-regulated militias, not that citizens must have rifles with 50rd drum magazines.
- Comment on Save as PDF 3 months ago:
I assumed LaTex is a descendant of TeX. I’m not really well informed about the history of this kind of stuff, which is why I found it interesting.
Your POV is also interesting, as I always kind of held “hacker culture,” in pretty high regard. But, now that I think about it, I see the appeal of rigorous, well studied things, built very deliberately, on strong foundations. I guess that’s why I instinctively like things like Haskell, the kind of ML with provable bounds, information theory, etc. I’ve never messed around with Lisp-like languages, but I remember my ML-focused advisor speaking of them from when symbolic-AI and self-modifying code was all the rage.
- Comment on Save as PDF 3 months ago:
This video gave me a background on LaTeX I didn’t know about before (didn’t know Knuth was behind it): www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc
- Comment on Just vibing 3 months ago:
Low self discharge. Good for ultra low power devices like remote controls or lights only used on occasion where a rechargeable battery would self discharge faster than the rate of actual use.
- Comment on ICE agents attempt to arrest US Citizen in St Peter, Minnesota 3 months ago:
I read a post from someone in MN that said ICE typically doesn’t pursue people that run (on foot or vehicle). They can chase you, probably not legally in most cases, but laws don’t apply.
- Comment on At this point, what should we do about the ICE raids? If an ICE agent breaks in without a warrant or holds you at gunpoint, what do you do? 4 months ago:
Honestly, I’d take my fate into my own hands, and hope I could take a couple out before they took me out. Assuming I could get to a gun before they had me in their sights. Oragnaized and committed community defense could stop it from getting to that point, but the people participating also have to be prepared to die for their community.
- Comment on Definitely the safest source for advice 4 months ago:
I always thought it was pleasant. Kinda like MXE. Have to be careful to get the ones with no other active ingredients though.