jj4211
@jj4211@lemmy.world
- Comment on I'm pretty sure all of us have given up on any boomer giving us anything anyway 6 hours ago:
So I had a relative who passed, but saw it coming and tried to make some moves to make sure his only son was set up to take care of his wife, because his wife had never really had to “be an adult” and went her entire life without handling any bills or finances or anything. So when he passed at least his middle aged son would be there to handle things including their house.
So he died and sure enough, she couldn’t handle independent living. So they decided to sell the house and she’d move in with another relative. So the rest of us are thinking “oh good, at least they cashed out in this crazy high real estate market to have a bit of a cushion”.
However, no one thought about how little the middle aged son had to worry about things like housing and stuff. He never had to buy or rent a house, he had a hand me down trailer parked on a relatives land. He always had a used car gifted to him by and other relative getting rid of it. So he had no idea what he was doing either, thought a seller’s agent was a scam to take their money, and they ended up selling the whole house and land for about $50k before any one else had any idea that they were even thinking of selling.
As well liked as he is, so much frustration when everyone has to take on a burden to help them and they make such a huge mistake that could have made things so much easier.
Interesting to have a relatively large family to see all the scenarios play out. Also have a relative that is spending all his money and is mortgaged to his eyes, and another relative who lived like a pauper who turned out to have a couple million in liquidity in her 80s because she wanted her kid to be surprised when they got hit with a big inheritance.
- Comment on I hate when a PC game is ONLY available on Epic Games store 2 weeks ago:
Well mine is pretty petty. Every time I start up my system I’m spammed by epic advertisements in the lower right. It’s just so obnoxious, particularly since I’m on my couch and using my controller, so I have to pick up keyboard to dismiss those.
I’m so lazy I haven’t bothered to investigate options to be fair, but broadly speaking I don’t like how much it screams “look at me, look at me!” when I had no intention of interacting with their store/launcher at all that time.
- Comment on Dear Americans, be prepare to get screwed! 1 month ago:
A candidate that expressed nuanced understanding of economic principles would have been less likely to win the election.
A candidate that instead promises answers that intuitively sound right. If imports are expensive, then obviously the big business owners will build domestic and give us more money. If you get rid of immigrants, then the business owners will have to pay more for citizen workers. Simple answers that are easier for people to believe in.
Attempts to explain nuance? That ranges from nerds overcomplicating things and/or those darned liberal elites trying to truck them.
This cuts both ways. In 2020 Biden won not due to a more sophisticated understanding of things, but simply because things were bad, and the other guy therefore was the obvious choice. So to overcome an incumbent, you just have to have people believe stuff is bad, and provide some believable explanation that you could fix it.
- Comment on Realistically... How fucked is the US? 1 month ago:
Also now he’s convinced that God specifically saved him from a bullet and chose him…
- Comment on I'm not worried you're worried 1 month ago:
I don’t know what the final turnout figures will be, but if it is a lower turnout, I can think of a few: -2020 was the easiest year to mail in a ballot ever, and it got harder again as states reinstated various difficulties with mail in ballots. -So many people didn’t have to go into work in 2020, they had more flexibility to vote however they needed to do it.
- Comment on I'm not worried you're worried 1 month ago:
Yeah but the point was about what turnout was. We know who won but it’s a bit early to discuss relative turnout compared to 2020. It is likely lower, but the specifics will be a while.
- Comment on Houses in my area increases 82% in just 4 years 1 month ago:
Generally speaking, one would have hoped for a better solution. To be fair though, we faced an unprecedented scenario in 2020, and for many of the indicators, the closest to precedent that we ever had was the Great Depression. So they did manage to dump truck enough money into the market to patch up the catastrophic drop of the stock market, and provide enough to keep the every day economy vaguely functional. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was still very ‘trickle down’ style and ended up with an enduring imbalance favoring those already wealthy rather than some alternative that might have left folks on a level playing field.
- Comment on Houses in my area increases 82% in just 4 years 1 month ago:
WFH is a logical thing to imagine, but there’s a simpler trend that can be seen by looking at two graphs: fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
“Please don’t melt the economy” printing press fired up in 2020 and real estate investors seemed to get plenty of that cash. While inflation didn’t quite match the M2 injection, anything “investment” like saw that bump. The M2 injection was enough to save the stock market, but housing, which did not see the same crash as stocks, got the same boost.
This is why, more than ever, people see that individuals almost don’t get to participate and big companies are instead buying the stuff and maybe letting people rent them if they feel so inclined. The big companies got the boon of the M2 and most individuals got a modest bump by comparison.
- Comment on Houses in my area increases 82% in just 4 years 1 month ago:
Don’t know about them specifically, but it seems that more than anything real estate investors are just grabbing as many properties as they can find, whether they can get tenants or not. A house goes up for sale and it’s bought sight unseen by a company almost instantly.
- Comment on Houses in my area increases 82% in just 4 years 1 month ago:
So occasionally I look out of curiosity and the reason is pretty plain.
I look for houses for sale in a suburban area as public listings, and there’s like 1 within a few square miles of the area.
I switch over to renting, and there’s like 12 houses just like the one for sale available, all owned by companies. I also know a coule that aren’t listed that have no tenants, but are still owned by one of those companies. You can tell because those yards are now waist deep grasses (in an area where HOA throws a hissy fit if your yard looks just a smidge unkempt).
Don’t know why the companies find it more profitable to buy houses people aren’t looking to actually move into, at least at the rent they are willing to accept. If I fully understood why, it might just piss me off more. Like maybe the houses work better as a loan basis than other assets, so even empty and unused they are valuable as some sort of financial trick.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
While true, I have been scratching my head wondering why this rash of ads is happening, why they are so intent on making sure everyone knows their election participation is available to all.
One possibility: if you sit it out, people will know and blame you if your candidate loses.
Another possibility: if you vote, and the “wrong” person wins, you’ll be suspected of voting for the “wrong” person.
I don’t know which they are going for, but it has tickled my “creepy” meter, and this was before I saw it associated specifically with Trump/Vance (the ads I’ve seen mention no candidate and just seems a vague go out and vote pitch)
- Comment on Clever, clever 1 month ago:
The text has nothing unusual, just a request to make sure a certain author is cited. It has no idea that said author does not exist nor that the name is even vaguely not human
- Comment on Clever, clever 1 month ago:
That’s an odd level of cheating yet being industrious in a tedious sort of way…
- Comment on Clever, clever 1 month ago:
Strangely enough I recall various little mistakes in assignments or handing in assignments, and I lived.
Maybe this would be an undue stress/wild goose chase in the days where you’d be going to a library and hitting up a card catalog and doing all sorts of work. But now it’s “plug name into google, no results, time to email the teaching staff about the oddity, move on with my day and await an answer to this weird thing that is like a normal weird thing that happens all the time with assignments”.
On the scale of “assisstive technology users get the short end of the stick”, this is pretty low, well behind the state of, for example, typically poor closed captioning.
- Comment on Clever, clever 1 month ago:
Even if the prompt is clear, the ask is a trap in and of itself. Because it’s not possible to actually do, but it will induce an LLM to synthesize something that sounds right.
If it was not ‘hidden’, then everyone would ask about that requirement, likely in lecture, and everyone would figure out that they need to at least edit out that part of the requirements when using it as a prompt.
By being ‘hidden’, then most people won’t notice it at all, and the few that do will fire off a one-off question to a TA or the professor in an email and be told “disregard that, it was a mistake, didn’t notice it due to the font color” or something like that.
- Comment on Clever, clever 1 month ago:
No, because they think nothing of a request to cite Frankie Hawkes. Without doing a search themselves, the name is innocuous enough as to be credible. Given such a request, an LLM, even if it has some actual citation capability, currently will fabricate a reasonable sounding citation to meet the requirement rather than ‘understanding’ it can’t just make stuff up.
- Comment on Clever, clever 1 month ago:
I’d presume the professor would do a quick sanity search to see if by coincidence relevant works by such an author would exist before setting that trap. Upon searching I can find no such author of any sort of publication.
- Comment on Clever, clever 1 month ago:
I would think not. The instructions are to cite works from an author that has no works. They may be confused and ask questions, but they can’t forge ahead and execute the direction given because it’s impossible. Even if you were exposed to that confusion, I would think you’d work the paper best you can while awaiting an answer as to what to do about that seemingly impossible requirement.
- Comment on Clever, clever 1 month ago:
In this specific case though, when you have read to you the instruction: “You must cite Frankie Hawkes”
Who, in fact, is not a name that comes up with any publications that I can find, let alone ones that would be vaguely relevant to the assignment, I would expect you would reach out to the professor or TAs and ask what to do about it.
So while the accessibility technology may expose some people to some confusion, I don’t think it would be a huge problem as you would quickly ask and be told to disregard it. Presumably “hiding it” is really just to try to reduce the chance that discussion would reveal the trick to would-be-cheaters, and the real test would be whether you’d fabricate a citation that doesn’t exist.
- Comment on Clever, clever 1 month ago:
I think here the challenge would be you can’t really follow the instruction, so you’d ask the professor what is the deal, because you can’t find any relevant works from that author.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT will just forge ahead and produce a report and manufacture a random citation:
Report on Traffic Lights: Insights from Frankie Hawkes ...... References Hawkes, Frankie. (Year). Title of Work on Traffic Management.
- Comment on Eat lead 1 month ago:
It’s got as much merit as any other faith based theory of existence.
We see things that don’t seem to make any intuitive sense in science, and simulation theory is one explanation, but without any evidence (and really, there can’t be evidence against, because it faces the same response of “any evidence against is explicitly put there by the simulation”).
Simulation theory is essentially science-themed religious theory rather than directly evidence based theory.
I’ll admit it’s a fun “why” as to the weirdness of quantum mechanics and relativity, but ultimately the hard science folks I respect confess they are just finding models that predict stuff accurately, and the various extrapolations to intuitive neat things people make up in that context are beyond the realm of “science” (simulation theory and many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics are the biggest ones I can think of).
- Comment on Trump cosplaying 1 month ago:
As much as I enjoy shitting on McDonald’s
So you are behind the outbreak!
- Comment on How to clean a rescued pigeon 2 months ago:
There are signs of three distinct interpretations in the result:
- On topic, the concept of cleaning a wild bird you are trying to save
- Preparing a store bought Turkey (removing a label)
- Preparing a wild bird that is caught
It’s actually a pretty good illustration of how AI assembles “information shaped text” and how smooth it can look and yet how dumb it can be about it. Unfortunately advocates will just say “I can’t get this specific thing wrong when I ask it or another LLM, so there’s no problem”, even as it gets other stuff wrong. It’s weird as you better be able to second guess the result, meaning you can never be confident in an answer you didn’t already know, but when that’s the case, it’s not that great for factual stuff.
For “doesn’t matter” content, it may do fine (generated alternatives to stock photography, silly meme pictures, random prattle from background NPCs in a game), but for “stuff that maters”, Generative AI is frequently more of a headache than a help.
- Comment on How to clean a rescued pigeon 2 months ago:
I mean, not one a human would ever make.
First off, the word “rescued” would have immediately made the context of “protect the pigeon” clear.
Second, a “rescued pigeon” wouldn’t have a label on it, so it’s clearly mixing in something from likely a store bought turkey, but then the other steps don’t make sense either as those don’t apply either.
A traditional search approach would not have made the mistake either. It would either have failed to find anything or found actual on topic results. It’s “clever” enough to genericize “pigeon” to “birds” and hit upon text related to birds from a grocery store and birds that you hunted and mix all that together in a coherent language but with content that is nonsense.
In this case, hilarious, in other day to day situations, it’s maddening, as some professional colleague gets the same sort of nonsense but lacks knowledge to correct it and relays it as fact. Then when called out on the data was in fact so bad it wasted time, they just say ‘oh, lol, AI’ (they wanted to take credit for it if it worked, but can hide behind AI when it doesn’t).
- Comment on Home Depot 2 months ago:
What van are you thinking? Work vans do this all the time.
- Comment on Home Depot 2 months ago:
I think it was more how weird the downscale looked for that one, along with being posted next to AI generated ones.
- Comment on Home Depot 2 months ago:
Yeah, 3 out of 4 AI generated fodder and the 4th is using some weird downscale that manages to also give off AI vibes… I can understand the impression myself…
- Comment on Is your writing skibidi? 2 months ago:
Didn’t say that the concept of absurdist G-Mod stuff is new, it’s that the singular specific “skibidi toilet” thing is new.
- Comment on Is your writing skibidi? 2 months ago:
There’s some difference.
So you have the slang that’s akin to “Rad”. Words used with sincerity to communicate. “Rizz” and “Sus” fall into this category and seem pretty ‘mundane’, shortening Charisma and Suspicious.
Skibidi is a bit different. It’s more like that generations “Wazzzzzzzuuuuuuuup?” It’s something they themselves consider “just stupid to say”.
- Comment on Is your writing skibidi? 2 months ago:
Nah, it’s definitely a Gen-Alpha/Z meme. Millenials were more Badgers and Mushrooms sort of memes.
Yes, G-Mod is the medium for this, but this specific thing is new.
And Michael Bay I guess felt he must outshine the emoji movie…