AFKBRBChocolate

@AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mark Zuckererg Demos New Facebook AI And It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I honestly never look at the AI results because they’re so flawed so often. I don’t have an awful lot of problems finding answers to things with a standard search and then scrolling past any sources that are often crap. Worth noting, by the way, that search results, especially Google’s, were way more accurate several years ago, before there were so many sponsored results and they had agendas to push. So technologically, it’s a fixable situation, it’s just the enshitificaiton problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mark Zuckererg Demos New Facebook AI And It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m an old fart - I got my degree in CS in 1985, and I’ve been paying attention to the predictions and advancements in AI for a very long time. I have at least as much issue with the way people think and talk about it as the author, but probably less of an issue with it being called AI. Remember that for decades, the informal working definition of AI was “A computer doing anything that usually requires a human.” So for ages, they said we’d have AI if a computer could read a page of printed text out loud in English. That seemed almost unattainable when it was first talked about, but now it’s so trivial that no one would consider it AI.

  People have tried to make definitions that are crisper than that, but few if any of those definitions requires anything we’d call “thinking.” The frustrating thing is that the general public talks all the time about AI as if it’s conscious . Even when we’re talking about its flaws, we use words like “hallucinating,” which is something only thinking beings can do.

  To me, LLMs are the worst things because to so many people they seem like the are (or could be) thinking entities. They respond to questions in a lifelike manner and can construct (extrapolate?) somewhat novel responses. But they’re also the least useful to us as a society. I’m much more interested in the Machine Learning applications for distilling gobs of data to develop new medicines or identify critical items in images that humans don’t have the mental bandwidth for. But LLMs get all the press.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon doesn't like AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That works if your company makes yachts, but not so well if your company makes fast food burgers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would it be weird to ask my brother if I could tag along when he goes out with his friends?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it’s weird, but your whole situation is pretty unusual, so I wouldn’t let “weird” become an obstacle for you. Some things are going to be weird no matter what you do, so just roll with it. You’ve said you and your brother have a good relationship, so why not just explain to him what’s going on with you and ask if he could include you at least sometimes? Not too much to lose by talking about it.

  It sounds like a lot for you to deal with. I hope you’re doing better now and can find your way back to a life you feel satisfied with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking for a way to make a proportional timeline out of an Excel or CSV file⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not where I can get to a computer, but as I recall you can do this with a line graph by opening the formatting option on the X axis and setting it to be a date.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't we all?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Apparently it stems from the days when women had servants who helped them dress, while men generally didn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bringing Back Trelane | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My dad was friends with Bill Campbell, the guy who played the original. Pretty funny guy. He told me that he had this thick accent - I want to say it was Bronx - and his parents sent him to a voice coach to give him a more upper crust accent, but they just couldn’t completely get rid of it, so he ended up with that odd speech that became kind of trademark.

  I ran into him at a local wallmart years ago and he had a bunch of action figures in a basket. Turns out they had just come out with the Trelane action figure, which he thought was great, and was buying some for kids in his family.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it really throws me off. I’m a little overly sensitive to body language and other cues about what a person is thinking and feeling, and some of that is messed up when the speed is increased.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨These totally legitimate comments⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Awesome.

  “This glowingly price review is almost perfect, it just needs something… I know, a scream emoji!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨These totally legitimate comments⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I love that each has three emojis, and most of them make no sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m with you, I like written things that I can digest and refer back to, though it’s worth mentioning that if you have questions, it much quicker to work through those face to face.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Eleven Labs Reader

  Thanks for the recommendation. For it to be useful for him, it would have to work on Windows (where the emails and documents he’s reading are). I’m seeing a phone app, do you know if there’s a windows one? I’m sure he’d have to have a paid version for corporate use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨the elder gods⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are different types of fossils, some of which apply to soft tissue:

  • Impression: A shallow imprint of a fossil organism that does not retain any organic material.

  • Compression: A fossil that has been crushed or flattened but retains some organic material, although it has been chemically altered.

  • Carbonization: A process that occurs during fossilization in which complex organic molecules are converted into a more stable carbon compound that generally has a dark brown color.

  This appears to be an impression fossil.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m good with distilling information in whatever form, but I do get impatient with audio/video sometimes. I can read faster than people talk, so I want the audio to go faster. I’ve tried upping the playback speed, but we encode a lot of information in the pauses and cadence of speech, and the faster playback screws with the perception of that. Doing that is fine for technical information, but I don’t care for it with a novel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, yes, we use BLUF at work a lot, but it’s not really useful if you’re trying to pass along detailed knowledge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The text in question would be behind a firewall, but I believe there’s a corporate LLM now. I’ll suggest it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s been working at the company for more than 15 years and still struggles to read any significant block of text, so I’m worried for him. It’s not that he prefers audio, it’s that text is a real problem for him.

  And don’t misunderstand me: I’m the guy’s biggest cheerleader; I very much want him to succeed and am happy with any viable workaround he finds. I’m not pushing any sort of personal bias on him. The company works with a lot of text.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Life is hard enough without those extra challenges. Hang in there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I read a lot of science fiction, and a younger friends at work frequently asked me for recommendations, and he liked talking about the books after reading them. At some point I found out that he exclusively consumes them as audiobooks, which is fine and I didn’t think much about it. Some years down the line, when I was getting ready to retire, I had to pass on things to him. There was enough of it that, in addition to working elbow-to-elbow with him, I documented all the details in some long emails. When we meet, I’d say “The details are in the email,” and focus on explaining the big picture.

  It became obvious that he never read the emails. When I talked to him about it, he admitted that he really struggles with any long block of text. The guy is really smart, and he knows a lot about a lot of things, but he gets all his info from audio and video because struggles to consume text. There’s clearly some kind of learning/mental issue going on there. It’s going to make the job tough for him, but I hope he works it out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thoughts??⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We were restricted even on some proprietary software (especially if it was from a foreign owned company), but you’d be surprised how much scrutiny some of the major packages have had.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thoughts??⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of government stuff requires that they have complete provenance of all code in the system. When you have people contributing to it from different places - potentially different countries - they get nervous about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who's the most ridiculed POTUS of history?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Silly me

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who's the most ridiculed POTUS of history?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never thought so. I mean, I guess it’s hard to quantify, but that’s different from being ambiguous. If someone asked you, “Who in your high school class did people make fun of the most,” you might know right away who it would be, or there might be multiple contenders. Other people in your class might have different opinions, but that doesn’t mean you all don’t know what the question is, just that it’s hard to measure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who's the most ridiculed POTUS of history?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Made fun of

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thoughts??⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where I worked, many of the contacts specifically said we could not use open source software, so no, it is not always available.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you wash a weighted blanket, is it just the outside you wash after removing it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some have a removable cover that you take off and wash. The ones that don’t I think are generally surface wash only, but all should have a tag with instructions someplace.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Young men are 'playing videogames all day' instead of getting jobs because they can mooch off of free healthcare, claims congressman⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t wait to pay for groceries with my free healthcare.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is lemmy.ca so much faster than lemmy.world?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay, makes sense

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is lemmy.ca so much faster than lemmy.world?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Excellent, thank you. I just cleared my cache and it does seem to have helped a fair amount. Not nearly as fast as in a private window, but probably as fast as .ca is now. Much appreciated, I’m glad I asked.

  I guess that would explain why people who access it with an app don’t seem to have the same issue, correct?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is lemmy.ca so much faster than lemmy.world?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, much, much faster! Interesting. Okay, why is that?