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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • No, the problem is they engineered something they didn’t need to, because Musk thinks everything should be electric because it’s cool. They had to then engineer a mechanical release, because it was required by law (for good reason)

    Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper. The fly by wire in the cyber truck is far more expensive, heavier, and far more dangerous than the very well polished power steering systems every other car uses

    Maybe it’s something like they wanted to make more money on repairs or something… But even that they could’ve done better by starting from very common, cheap technology

    Let’s be clear… The real problem here is that Elon Musk, opinion having idiot that he is, made decisions from on high with very little understanding of engineering



  • Nah, they’re actually fantastic at brain numbing tasks. I like to feed it sql tables and have it act like an ORM, but without the tradeoffs of an ORM. I’d never do it manually, but it’s far more readable and easy to work with

    I also love using it for api’s. You can feed it a response, say “hey, I just want the id, status, and amount” (or whatever) and it’ll restructure the data for you

    These are not hard problems… They are tedious ones though. They solve a problem by brute force, a problem we “solve” over and over because at the end of the day: programmers are lazy.

    You can over engineer complex bindings until the cows come home, but a simple pattern with each field explicitly mapped is the best solution. It’s just really, really annoying to actually do it





  • Lol hell no.

    We had all that before! The old solutions were better in almost every way but cost. It also didn’t fill the world with micro plastics

    You can still get real soap, it’s better for your skin. You can still get real clothes, they’re far more durable and lasts hundreds of times longer. You can buy real gum, I haven’t found any to try yet but apparently it doesn’t keep flavor for as long, but it also doesn’t fill your body with micro plastics

    Obviously there’s exceptions - like glass made with plastics are an actual modern marvel. Some healthcare devices basically require certain plastics



  • The other thing that he doesn’t understand (and most “AI” advocates don’t either) is that LLMs have nothing to do with facts or information. They’re just probabilistic models that pick the next word(s) based on context.

    That’s a massive oversimplification, it’s like saying humans don’t remember things, we just have neurons that fire based on context

    LLMs do actually “know” things. They work based on tokens and weights, which are the nodes and edges of a high dimensional graph. The llm traverses this graph as it processes inputs and generates new tokens

    You can do brain surgery on an llm and change what it knows, we have a very good understanding of how this works. You can change a single link and the model will believe the Eiffel tower is in Rome, and it’ll describe how you have a great view of the colosseum from the top

    The problem is that it’s very complicated and complex, researchers are currently developing new math to let us do this in a useful way



  • Hey, friend, take a breath. Listen… This isn’t how we all die. Unless you live in Iran I guess, and then maybe, depending how it plays out - but even that is not at all a sure thing. I know this is pretty bad, but you can’t burn yourself out on this one

    This isn’t world war III. It’s just another bad thing. China has signaled nothing on this and Russia is in no position to do anything. Europe has been quiet, the other Gulf states have been quiet… This could turn into another forever war, but this isn’t going to spark a powder keg.

    But yeah, Iran has clearly been trying to return to the fold for years now, and netanyahu has started a second conflict to hold into power. It’s very obvious who the aggressors are

    And yes, if you use targeted means to hit civilians and their family, obviously that’s a war crime.

    But war crimes don’t cancel out. There’s no place for whataboutism when real human lives are being snuffed out in their homes. We make a list, and hopefully soon the fascists will fall and all the war criminals will stand trial


  • But that’s it exactly - cluster bombs just fling granades all over a city block at random. It’s basically just collateral damage in the hopes of hitting a soft target

    I mean, fuck palantir and I really don’t like this tech in general, but blowing up a room or a house is way more precise. You’re hitting just what you mean to hit

    And that’s what a lot of war crimes come down to - certain weapons are unacceptably imprecise. Which gets into the first rule of war crimes - you’re not supposed to attack noncombatants

    Let’s not defend cluster bombs just because Israel is going to use this for justification…

    Because of course they will, this whole thing started by blowing up the Iranian negotiator, they’re obviously not going to start acting in good faith now



  • How about: they’re a major factor in the rise of post truth and in ruining the Internet. And in hacking democracy itself

    Their control is endangering the human race. They’ve crushed countless innovations to keep a stranglehold on technology. They proactively helped fascists get into power

    They don’t deserve to make ever increasing money off us. They’re not content creators - they’re bad stewards of a public forum they bought and expanded through monopolistic practices.

    I’d say it’s not only moral to deny them ad revenue, I think watching their ads is a danger to society




  • No no no… It’s not democracy, it’s abstraction

    Democracy would be a worker owned business. Where the people who do the thing decide how it should be done. And it’s great, it makes sense, it’s ethical, and the decisions are made democratically by the most informed people

    Stock markets don’t work like that. At one point you had voting, but now it’s all speculation and layers of abstraction

    Do you think the shareholders know or care how the business is being run? No, they just want line go up, because they’ve got a dozen other places to shift the money to if it’s not going up fast enough

    They don’t know or care if the company is dumping chemicals into the lake until the rest of us do. They don’t know that the cars are dangerous, but it was cheaper to set aside money for damages.

    They aren’t part of the company at all - they have no responsibility for what the company does. They have no control… Except, collectively. Maybe they could join together to replace a board member or sell to lower the price negligably. And the board has a responsibility to the shareholders. And the CEO just listens to the same consultant the shareholders do

    So really, it’s no one’s fault.

    Chick fila donates to hate groups, but they also front the money for new franchise owners. Costco pays well. Arizona iced tea doesn’t raise their prices because they have no debt and the guy says he’s making enough money.

    Yes, you’re going to have shit heads and good people… But as bad as my pillow guy is I’d be shocked if he was knowingly poisoning people… That usually weighs on a person’s conscience, but not so much if they can diffuse the responsibility


  • Yes. Unambigiously.

    What would you rather have, one person with a ton of power making decisions, or abstract it out over a group and diffuse all responsibility?

    Both are bad, but one of them has a (likely not morally great) person at the top, the other has lots of robber barons sharing ownership and collectively demanding line go up

    A person isn’t usually dumb enough to fire half their workforce, because they know their bread and butter comes from that workforce. A consulting company advising the business and shareholders at the same time can easily do such stupidity for short term profits



  • So I should suffer just to suffer? You listed a whole lot of things that they hire people to do just about as soon as they can so they can. And offloading that let’s them do their actual job better

    I work with black boxes all the time. When I have a black box, I poke and prod it until I understand how to make it do what I want. And this particular black box was interesting, so I decided to open it up and learn how it works

    That’s the essence of software development. My job is not typing or data entry, my job is to trick a rock into doing things humans don’t want to do