• 2 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2022

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  • I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

    Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
    And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

    I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.


  • Somewhat tangential, but USB-C docking stations, as useful as it is to have everything in one cable, it can also be annoying.

    At the office, I often just want to charge my laptop with them, but they also give me a wired internet connection, which, thanks to corporate networking shitfuckery, doesn’t work. So, every time I plug in, I have to disable that wired connection.

    Also, recently a colleague had problems getting her headset working when she was plugged into certain docks, ultimately due to a bug in the OS.
    Like, alright, that should be fixed in the OS, but that USB-C dock doesn’t even have a speaker attached to it. It’s completely useless that it shows up as an audio device.
    And even after we found a workaround to fix her headset, she will now have to switch over her audio device every time she plugs into a dock.

    So, basically it’s now one step to plug in the cable, but potentially multiple steps to undo half of what you unwillingly plugged in…


  • Apparently, “Theorems for free!” is a paper that talks about an extensive ability to reason about parts of programs, if you follow some rather basic rules.

    However, lots of popular programming languages throw this ability out the window, because they do not want to enforce those basic rules.
    Most languages, for example, allow for rather uncontrolled side effects and to be able to reason as a programmer, you have to make the assumption that no one else abused side effects.

    The instanceof is rather referring to dynamic typing, though, as e.g. employed by Python and JS, which makes it difficult to make any assumptions at all.

    So, in statically typed languages, when you’re implementing a function, you can declare that a given parameter is a number or a string etc. and the compiler will enforce that for you. In dynamically typed languages, you have to assume that anyone calling your function is using it correctly, which is a difficult assumption to make after a refactoring in a larger codebase.

    All in all, such different levels of rigorosity can be fine, but the larger your codebase grows, the more you do want such rules to be enforced, so you can just ignore the rest of the codebase.


  • Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it’s difficult to really make this experience another way:

    I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.

    Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.

    Some of them were sending me “hello :)” messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you’re going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.

    All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.

    Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.