AFKBRBChocolate

@AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨those of you with good skills to defuse a tense situation at the workplace, what advice can you give me?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Your friend was feeling attacked, and you walking away made her feel abandoned and unsupported. She just wants to know that you have her back. Yes, standing beside her to help show a united front would do that some.

  Usually to defuse a situation like that, I would try to understand what Karen was actually upset about, and let her know she’s being heard (which is, ultimately, what she probably wants), but also let her know she’s taking it out on someone who doesn’t deserve it. Saying “calm down” is just going to piss her off. Saying “Hey, I understand you’re upset, and I would be too, but the staff here has no ability to schedule your father for surgery when there aren’t any doctors, and you’re yelling at the wrong person” might.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I should have included those things an individual does to help their direct offspring - those also help you pass along your genes. Whether it’s nurturing your young, or dying and letting them feed off your corpse, anything you do to help them survive can be part of natural selection too. Don’t those things increases the likelihood of that trait being found in the population. Ear hair isn’t one of those things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d bet you’re right.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a geneticist or anthropologist, but apparently that’s a debated, not proven mechanism. The theory being that natural selection works not just on individuals, but on societies. So if older members of a society are more inclined to help take care of the young, that society is more likely to survive, so that trait is more likely to get passed along and become more common in the population. That mechanism would only apply to social/pack animals (like humans), so wouldn’t apply to, say, turtles.

  But it’s hard to argue that ear hair in old men helps their society thrive. More likely, it’s just one more trait that is a result of aging and not selected for, like grey hair or wrinkles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Natural selection works when you have a trait that makes you more successful at living long enough to pass along your genes or at attracting a mate to pass them along with. Your offspring are more likely to inherit that trait and so they’re more likely to pass along their genes as well, so the trait is more prevalent in the population. Conversely, if you have a trait that makes it harder for you to live, you’re less likely to pass along your genes, and so that trait is more likely to be less present in the population. If you have a trait that doesn’t impact your ability to live long enough to pass along your genes or attract a mate, it has no impact on natural selection.

  So if you have a trait that only appears after you’re past the baby making stage, it’s not playing into natural selection. By definition, that trait didn’t help you survive or attract a mate or whatever before having kids and passing it along. It just happens, like lots of other traits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember in college, there was a human sexuality class that used what was essentially porn, but with really old people, to reduce the number of people who took the class to watch porn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What possible evolutionary advantage is offered by my ears suddenly sprouting tons of hair?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Unlikely that anything happening when your old is selected for - you’ve already passed on your genes if you’re going to and nothing is helping you do it more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I make pictures less blinding if I prefer dark apps?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you tried the bluelight filter most screens have?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ants Trapped For Years in a Soviet Nuclear Bunker Survived in The Most Horrifying Way⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You needn’t eat the leg, Thompson.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mark Zuckererg Demos New Facebook AI And It Couldn’t Have Gone Worse⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Awesome.

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨These totally legitimate comments⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is Illiterate⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.