Another Millennial here, so take that how you will, but I agree. I think that Gen Z is very tech literate, but only in specific areas that may not translate to other areas of competency that are what we think of when we say “tech savvy” - especially when you start talking about job skills.

I think Boomers especially see anybody who can work a smartphone as some sort of computer wizard, while the truth is that Gen Z grew up with it and were immersed in the tech, so of course they’re good with it. What they didn’t grow up with was having to type on a physical keyboard and monkey around with the finer points of how a computer works just to get it to do the thing, so of course they’re not as skilled at it.

Because we’re talking pattern recognition levels of learning. At best, they’re the equivalent of parrots mimicking human speech. They take inputs and output data based on the statistical averages from their training sets - collaging pieces of their training into what they think is the right answer. And I use the word think here loosely, as this is the exact same process that the Gaussian blur tool in Photoshop uses.

This matters in the context of the fact that these companies are trying to profit off of the output of these programs. If somebody with an eidetic memory is trying to sell pieces of works that they’ve consumed as their own - or even somebody copy-pasting bits from Clif Notes - then they should get in trouble; the same as these companies.

Given A and B, we can understand C. But an LLM will only be able to give you AB, A(b), and B(a). And they’ve even been just spitting out A and B wholesale, proving that they retain their training data and will regurgitate the entirety of copyrighted material.

Reminds me of when I read about a programmer getting turned down for a job because they didn’t have 5 years of experience with a language that they themselves had created 1 to 2 years prior.

The argument that these models learn in a way that’s similar to how humans do is absolutely false, and the idea that they discard their training data and produce new content is demonstrably incorrect. These models can and do regurgitate their training data, including copyrighted characters.

And these things don’t learn styles, techniques, or concepts. They effectively learn statistical averages and patterns and collage them together. I’ve gotten to the point where I can guess what model of image generator was used based on the same repeated mistakes that they make every time. Take a look at any generated image, and you won’t be able to identify where a light source is because the shadows come from all different directions. These things don’t understand the concept of a shadow or lighting, they just know that statistically lighter pixels are followed by darker pixels of the same hue and that some places have collections of lighter pixels. I recently heard about an ai that scientists had trained to identify pictures of wolves that was working with incredible accuracy. When they went in to figure out how it was identifying wolves from dogs like huskies so well, they found that it wasn’t even looking at the wolves at all. 100% of the images of wolves in its training data had snowy backgrounds, so it was simply searching for concentrations of white pixels (and therefore snow) in the image to determine whether or not a picture was of wolves or not.

It’s Doritos all the way down?

Always has been.

There’s a difference between having Dorito dust on your fingers and having it massaged/injected into your skin via microneedling. It’s closer to “don’t tattoo yourself with Dorito dust” than it is “don’t let it get on you.”

Yep, they literally cannot work any other way than as a ponzi scheme. Because the people “earning” want to take more money out of the system than they put in, and the company is taking money out as well just to keep the game running and the employees paid, as well as to make a profit. So you need substantially more suckers buying into the system than the money that is being paid out.

Eventually, somebody is gonna be left holding an empty bag.

I mean that crypto currencies are essentially the same as stocks. They have no worth on their own, and their value is tied to converting them to other currencies.

And this conversion rate fluctuates constantly. What one bitcoin is worth today is not what it will be worth tomorrow. In order to buy something with a crypto currency, companies have to first check how much it’s worth in fiat currency.

I wouldn’t say that it’s harder to counterfeit so much as that the methodology is radically different due to the untrusted, peer to peer nature of crypto. Because of the way that that works, in order to fake a transaction you need to convince the majority of ledgers that the transaction occurred (even if the wallet that is buying something doesn’t have anything in it). Because the ledger is ultimately decided by majority vote. You can trace the transaction, but wallets are often anonymous, so the trail ends at the wallet. Especially since somebody would use a burner wallet to do such a thing. It’s basically buying something with a hotel keycard with a stolen RFID on it.

I think governments don’t want anything to do with it because its nature causes it to be too unstable in its value. It would be like tying the value of your country’s currency to the value of day trade stocks. One day, your money is worthless; a week later, it’s skyrocketing in value.

At the end of the day, currencies are a system of abstraction to simplify the process of trade - whether between people or countries. We agree that the magic paper is worth the same amount because it’s easier than arguing that the magic rock that gave your wife cancer is worth at least 2 goats, not one. It’s always going to be a flawed system in some way. Crypto’s flaws just make it an ideal system for black market dealings compared to traditional fiat currency in its current setup, on top of the energy and computing costs.

Found the diamond hands.

Crypto currencies are still backed by and dependent on those same currencies. And their value is incredibly unstable, making them largely useless except as a speculative investment for stock market daytraders. BitCoin may as well be Doge Coin or Bored Ape NFTs as far as the common person is concerned.

I hope your coins haven’t seen a 90%+ drop in value in the past 4 years like the vast majority have.

I think it’s because of what crypto turned into and the inherent flaws in the system. Crypto currencies are still backed by and dependent on traditional currency, and their value is too unstable for the average person. The largest proponents of crypto have been corporations - big capital, as you put it - and there’s a reason for that (though they’re more on the speculative market of NFTs looking to make a profit off of Ponzi schemes).

In the end, crypto hasn’t solved any problems that weren’t already solved by less energy intensive means.

I recently noticed a number of bitcoin ATMs that have cropped up where I live - mostly at gas stations and the like. I am a little concerned by it.

To remove any residual feces or salmonella that might still be on the shell.

Huh, TIL. I’d always heard that you need to wash eggs before using them.

There are pre-rinsed eggs in the US? I know our rice comes pre-washed, but I’ve never heard of pre-washed eggs.

I think it’s a combination of the old news, how expensive hosting video is compared to anything else, and how Twitch is basically a boat - a hole in the water that you throw money into.

People lose the connection that burning money like it’s going out of fashion is only step one in the game. Step two is capitalizing on the market share that you acquired in step one. And, as every social media company has shown, ad revenue and data harvesting are very profitable. Otherwise, every tech giant wouldn’t have pivoted to that years ago.

TIL Carmen Sandiago works in IT.

This is why a museum would be perfect. You’d have trained employees to maintain the cars, including taking them for a drive. Plus, you could even sell rides in some of them the way they sell rides in F1 cars. Add in car shows and a cycling of the cars on display the way museums don’t have their entire collection on display at all times, and the cars would probably hold up better in the long run.

Ideally, you’d do this with government money pulled from a wealth tax or a foundation rather than trusting some billionaire to do it and maintain the museum.

The short of it is: why is he making that much money in the first place, especially at a time where the game’s industry has seen record-breaking layoffs for the past 2 years - worse than during the 2008 financial crash.

The long of it is that they’re symptoms of the same problem and show the ever increasing wealth disparity between the aristocracy and the commoners in the US. In 2020, the wealth disparity in the US was said to be on par with France just before the French Revolution, where the price of a loaf of bread hit a full day’s wages for the average worker. To add to this, at least one of the people laid off was going on scheduled maternity leave the next day, which is probably in violation of some workers’ rights law, but because the majority of states are “at will” employment states, Bungie won’t face any consequences. The average time for people in the industry to find a new job is 2-4 months, and with all the layoffs, plenty of these people will never work in the industry again. And on top of that, these workers are already exploited so badly for their passion for making games that they could see a 50% or more pay increase with lower responsibilities for the same skill set just by changing industries. There are people working at Activision-Blizzard-King who are living out of their cars because they don’t get paid enough to afford rent within commuting distance of the studio.

People are waking up to the fact that the boss makes 10 grand while we make a dime, and they’re getting pretty pissed about it.

How about putting that money towards museums for these cars that allow the general public to appreciate them as well instead of letting them languish in somebody’s private collection. This would also have the benefit of creating more jobs and helping to improve the flow of money in the economy.