A cranky biologist who means well. My hobbies include long walks off short piers and anything science related.

  • 2 Posts
  • 111 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle



  • meyotch@slrpnk.nettoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    I remember at my first job in high school in a store on Main Street. We had a sidewalk sale with other business owners.

    My innocence was lost when my boss instructed me to place higher prices using our ordinary white stickers and then cover them with ‘discounted’ orange sales stickers at slightly higher prices than normal.

    These dicks just do it at scale. Amazon is a tawdry crime organization. We all know it.


  • Boo hoo, losers. Your device has a power switch. Influencers have a warped and inflated sense of the value they create. They can stop at any time and use their skills in other ways.

    Making good content is hard, but ‘good’ content doesn’t have an expiration date. Shallow brain-rot content does and that’s what the algorithms reward.

    The entitlement that influencers have is nauseating. There are many creators out there laboring in near obscurity and producing useful content all the time for little or no compensation.

    They are tools for Zuck and fools for propping his platforms up. It sounds like a hard slog, but they can stop any time.


  • I don’t buy it.

    A diversity of regulatory approaches especially in such a complex subject really does need the 50 state laboratory.

    In fact because states are smaller markets, it might encourage the development of more smaller companies. A complex regulatory landscape gives an efficiency edge to players who focus product development in specific states.

    Anything to keep this shitshow happening in a more democratic way is fine by me. Anthropic and that Altman fellow seem so desperately out of touch with humanity, I welcome any disadvantages we can give them.


  • As a junior biologist, I remember having the realization that viruses and other quasi-living things are just an epi-phenomenon of life. That was a level-up moment in my training, a lot of things clicked into place.

    Meaning, if one could magically remove all viruses from the biosphere, they would re-evolve very quickly. Let alone the fact there are significant numbers of viral fragments in our DNA, some of which have been co-opted and used for crucial purposes, such as the mammalian placenta.

    Plus the tendency of some of those fragments to move around the genome, providing a source of variation that is sometimes selected for.

    Viruses and maybe this archaea may not meet a binary definition of ‘life’, but any biosphere anywhere in the universe will have things like them in great abundance. Any evolving system will produce them.






  • It definitely does in my experience. I have intentionally used it for specific tasks for defined periods of time. And then stopped and used only my normal online search tools and a text editor without AI assistance. My projects were written concept development, plus some light coding to create utility scripts.

    From just my own experience there is definitely a real cognitive hazard associated with using LLMs at all, for all but the most specialized tasks where an LLM is really warranted.

    The scripts worked fine, as they were quite simple python utilities for some data cleaning, so I see a use there. But I found that the concepts never caught fire in my imagination, whereas usually a good share of concepts developed manually turn into something that gets a deeper treatment, even a prototype design at least.