sunsofold
@sunsofold@lemmy.zip
- Comment on What can I put on a street lamp to stop the light in one direction? 3 days ago:
Even if we ignore the possible legal trouble of modifying street fixtures without permission, building anything that can hold up out in the wind and rain is going to be a big task. Getting it up there safely is going to be a challenge. Making sure it’s secure so the next puff of wind doesn’t send it down on someone’s head, maybe even yours, will be another challenge. I’ll make a recommendation for ‘blue tack’ and some heavy cardstock or plastic in front of the windows. The blue can hold for years, but leaves zero marks, and the right material could be chosen to allow whatever amount of light through, anything from all to none. Project boards like kids use for school presentations could be great. They can be cut easily to whatever shape the window is, painted or drawn on for decorative purposes, and even offer a little bit of extra insulation.
- Comment on Not intelligent but not random either 4 days ago:
Yeah. We desperately need more people to understand there is no mind behind the tokens that are the output of an LLM.
- Comment on Not intelligent but not random either 4 days ago:
Substitution check:
It is time to understand without complaint that systems designed to enable computers to react to external inputs without need of human interaction are a list of events owned by someone else?
Nope. Still just as incoherent. Fuck the LLM companies and the business monsters pushing them, but that second panel is less sensible as a sentence than the nonsense put out by early versions of chatGPT. At least that means it was probably written by a human, though, so that’s nice.
- Comment on Bill Gates: People saying AI will create more jobs don’t understand what’s coming 6 days ago:
At least that’s prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. It’d be so much worse if it was affordable by more people.
- Comment on Bill Gates: People saying AI will create more jobs don’t understand what’s coming 6 days ago:
Ugh. I hadn’t even thought of AI slop litigation. These companies are giving a firehose to the mentally ill as a monthly subscription.
- Comment on Bill Gates: People saying AI will create more jobs don’t understand what’s coming 6 days ago:
Business majors will find a way to make it worse.
Because the tech is basically ready baked at this point and it only needs training to get up to date on recent events, I suspect the cheaper, possibly open models will be used for a lot of BS. You don’t need the latest vajillion dollar model to run customers through a loop of ‘How can I help you today? … Could you please tell me your account number? … Please wait while this input is processed by an open-source LLM on a raspberry pi CPU. … Can I interest you in signing up for our premium service to receive human support? … That’s okay. I’ll ask again later. … Could you please confirm your account details? … I’m sorry. I’m not authorized to solve your problem. Please visit the nearest branch office of our company, located conveniently one mile from the geomagnetic south pole and our one free tier customer service penguin will be happy to hear your complaint. Is there anything else I can help you with today?’
Doctors and lawyers are professionals with niche skills in reasoning and domain knowledge, not replaceable with an LLM. It takes no knowledge to give someone the runaround. If your goal is the pretense of customer service without actual service, you can run shitty models on shitty hardware to make it slow and even more unreliable, and just slap a disclaimer up front saying your company can’t be held responsible for what the LLM spits out. It won’t matter if it sucks when it cuts your payroll expenses and cranks your shareprice so hard that every competitor follows suit to get their bonuses up, or frees up so much cash you just buy out the competition given anti-trust laws are just ignored these days.
Never doubt the ability of a business schooler to make the world a worse place.
- Comment on Bill Gates: People saying AI will create more jobs don’t understand what’s coming 1 week ago:
My idiotic not-even-briefly-thought-through prediction:
- LLM systems can’t do anything reliably, but they can do it cheaply, so ‘decision makers’ contract out LLM based systems to handle customer support/service and slap a disclaimer on it. You can pay for premium support by a person. Your PA still has to wait on hold to talk to this person. If you can’t afford a PA, you can’t afford the premium service.
- It’s so much cheaper than having real people, not because it’s cheap, but because now you have infinitely scalable team size with no downtime, no managers, no benefits, or other ancillary costs. Quality goes down. Unit economics improve.
- Companies that don’t jump on the LLM train will be more expensive because they have to have real people, which are better on almost every metric, but expensive to maintainne. No one will be able to afford the premium service of having someone who actually has the ability to do anything, so they will lose customer base, so they’ll get more expensive, so they’ll lose customer base, so they… Repeat until they are bought out by their competitors or are a luxury brand charging fifty billionaires whatever they feel like because the check is blank.
- The market polarizes. Everything is either barely affordable crap or expensive luxury service. No one is happy, but ‘profit’ is maximised. The American health insurance company becomes the model for everything.
- Comment on Bill Gates: People saying AI will create more jobs don’t understand what’s coming 1 week ago:
They don’t give the average call center worker the ability to fix anything already. The gig mostly became being there for customers to abuse at some point with a bit of passing a handful of people up the chain one step closer to a person with the authorization to maybe offer you appeasement for a problem they won’t actually fix.
- Comment on Why is Japanese (language) popular than Mandarin for weebs? (Besides Anime) 1 week ago:
Weebs are people who like Japan. That’s why they learn Japanese.
- Comment on Calm Down 1 week ago:
- Comment on The wording of racists 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on What happened to NFTs and what where they in retro spec? 3 weeks ago:
Dan Olson made one of his fun documentaries about this exact subject. If you have the time, watch it.
If you want my cheap boil-down of the idea:
NFTs are representations of ownership of a digital asset stored on a blockchain. However, as with any digital thing, the represented object can usually just be duplicated, making ownership essentially lacking in the aspect of ‘control’ one usually associates with other forms of ownership, and as with many fad purchases, the value of such things was massively distorted. There was and probably still is no legal structure for that ‘ownership,’ so it’s a bit like ‘owning’ your Lemmy account. As long as you have the password and no one else does, you can control it, if anyone gets the credentials, they can take control and there is little to no legal recourse. So, if you can’t stop other people using duplicates and you can have it taken as easily as any other account, it’s hard to really call it ownership. It’s just a mark in a ledger that says your account is associated with some entry, which is also what registering a title/deed does but with the legal force of the government reinforcing it.
- Comment on Why do celebs make statements on controversial stuff and surprised when it comes with consequences? 3 weeks ago:
Many are not surprised. Those that are might be so because most of the other inane BS they spout is met with cheers from the yes men that cling to fame, money, and power like lampreys.
- Comment on What is the name of this knot? And how does one tie it? 3 weeks ago:
Gesundheit
- Comment on how can I identify problems i'm having 4 weeks ago:
This might get a bit of hate from some people here but this is one of the few good uses of LLMs. Do not use them for advice on how to address problems but if you are just looking for the word to describe what you are dealing with, they can be great for the question of ‘what is the word for when a blank is blank and blank but also not blank?’ The word association mechanism within LLMs is perfect for finding the word most closely associated with a cluster of other words. Though, again, seek human, preferably expert, advice on the issue once you have figured out what it is.
- Comment on How do we stop people from defending billionares and trillion dollar companies? 5 weeks ago:
No, we just have to outnumber or overpower the fools who defend them. We don’t need 100% agreement, just enough to get a ban in place.
- Comment on I'm not sure they will 5 weeks ago:
To understand the ideas present in this meme, you must understand a basic level of anthropology, (not a huge ask, but an ask) the concept of ‘the orient,’ (much bigger ask) critique of that concept, (less rare knowledge but often found only through right-wing criticism of the critique) ‘decolonization,’ (same again) and liberalism. (Same again.) If I fail to understand university level academic discourse on a field I don’t work in, this is utter gibberish. This does not teach anyone who is not already somewhat familiar with the discourse anything. It might as well be in a foreign language to most readers, and, again, oversimplifies the ideas which are being obliquely mentioned.
- Comment on If you live in New Jersey, please take this guy down in November 5 weeks ago:
What the…
Are we all sure the Epstein class hasn’t started the next leg of our slide into cyberpunk dystopian hell by prepping a McConnell clone and the reason they’ve been out of office so much is the time spent preparing for the brain swap?
- Comment on How do we stop people from defending billionares and trillion dollar companies? 5 weeks ago:
I sound like a broken record but, BAN ADVERTISING. Along with all the pretty well established secondary bad effects of advertising, the most basic direct effect of it is lying to people. If people weren’t deluged daily with lies about how they should think of this or that company, they wouldn’t be so readily deluded into thinking of a company like a person with a positive effect on their world.
- Comment on I'm not sure they will 5 weeks ago:
The problem is the medium of memes doesn’t convey ideas well, if at all, and helps promote thought-terminating ideologies and ignorant partisanship. If you can fit the idea into a meme, it’s probably oversimplified to the point of uselessness, and if the meme relies on you already knowing the real idea, it’s not informing anyone of anything.
- Comment on Capitalism is a strong argument for Socialism. 1 month ago:
Isn’t part of the problem with capitalism that there are fewer/no breadlines but poverty remains? The capitalist ethos pushes toward libertarian economic ideas, which remove social welfare programs and expect you to just disappear/die if you ‘can’t make it’ in the capitalist regime.
- Comment on Fewer People 55-And-Over Choose To Work. But Why? 1 month ago:
The world run by MBAs…
If you are old in a professional field, you have years of experience they have to pay you for, so they hire the young guy to make the payroll smaller, even if it causes problems for some other department, because no one high enough to do anything about it is going to catch it.
If you are in the general labour space, making min wage, they know they can’t expect the same energy, and can expect you to know the ‘advancement’ they dangle over ambitious min wage workers’ heads doesn’t actually exist, so they will get more labour out of a kid for the same money.
- Comment on Meme check point. 1 month ago:
Gynamourous envy?
- Comment on The prices of these NFL games…nope. 1 month ago:
There will be people at that game living one missed paycheck away from a personal financial crash who put those tickets on a credit card and will be paying it off with minimum payments for months or years.
- Comment on Look What I've Found! 1 month ago:
Crunchy!
- Comment on My student loan is gaining interest while I'm in school but I'm not allowed to start paying it off yet 1 month ago:
Often enough, even with the degree, you can end up no better off for some time. If you don’t get a degree and make x/yr, or you get the degree, spend 6~8 years in school and looking for a position that pays 2x/yr but you spend half of the money on paying down your debt for 20 years… That’s a long time to get back into the black, assuming you even went for a degree leading to a position that will pay that much. It is almost criminal that a credit hour learning to work on machine learning systems often has the same cost as one spent learning about art history. Both are valuable to society, but they definitely won’t get you the same paycheck.
- Comment on On Jail websites they let you know the exact address where a Pedo lives. But tells you not to go out and harm them. Has anyone ever used it as a list to go hunt down pedo's? 1 month ago:
The vast majority of premeditated murders are not done by someone who just wants to kill, and so looks for someone to kill that will be more morally defensible. They are done by people who really want to kill a particular person or group who they hate, or view as a threat. Serial killers are also generally not doing the Dexter thing. They have their own targetting preferences that aren’t usually aligned with social morality.
So, no. Probably no one ever has done that.
- Comment on This Avocado Oil that claims to be “0 Calories” 🙄 1 month ago:
You, too, are 0 calories if we eat you in small enough bites.
- Comment on Pedestrian rating sticker | David Pope 1 month ago:
The fun part is the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes would let the car companies sue the country if they attempted to pass a law requiring something that might decrease sales.
- Comment on How to deal with people who obtusely miss your point on Lemmy? 1 month ago:
I recommend only continuing the interactions where you and your interlocutor seem to have aligned intentions. If they are trying to understand, that’s what you posted for. Help them. If they have partially understood, you have partially succeeded. Use the interaction to help them understand and find better ways of expressing yourself. But if they have named you their opponent, you won’t be able to fix that through the internet. If it seems worth it, add an ‘edit: Blah blah blah’ note to your original post to help keep others from misunderstanding but don’t try to become a teacher for someone who has decided you are the enemy. Communication won’t work without good-faith effort on both sides.
