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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • That point is when you run out of fucks. The world and all its shitty people are exhausting. You are pushed and pulled in 15 different directions. Eventually, the energy to deal with all of it depletes and you start prioritizing. Less and less actually matters. Eventually, nothing matters any more when you crawl into your grave. Did the problem get solved? Meh.



  • Computers to the rescue. AI succinctification:

    Here’s a distilled version of the article:

    Russian Psyops: Poisoning Online Communities

    Russia has developed an effective online tactics game, using cheap and widespread methods to manipulate public opinion and sow discord. Their goal is to create an environment where no online space feels safe or trustworthy.

    Tactics:

    • Creating fake accounts to spread false information and ignite conflicts
    • Targeting sensitive topics like race, politics, and hobbies to exploit emotions and provoke reactions
    • Posting “clueless” comments to elicit responses from genuine users, then fueling the resulting flame wars
    • Playing both sides by promoting opposing views with a mix of truth and disinformation

    Consequences:

    • Fracturing English-speaking communities and eroding trust online
    • Normalizing toxic behavior and making it seem like “just how things are”
    • Disrupting healthy discussions and debates, creating an atmosphere of hopelessness and cynicism

    The Threat:

    Russia’s online psyops campaign is a real and significant threat to global democracy and community cohesion. By recognizing this threat and taking steps to mitigate its effects, we can work towards preserving the integrity and safety of online spaces.






  • haha, yeah I am well aware I could do something like that. Unfortunately, once you start working for larger companies, your options for solutions to problems typically shrink dramatically and also need to fit into neat little boxes that someone else already drew. And our environment rules are so draconian, that we cannot use k8s to its fullest anyhow. Most of the people I work with have never actually touched k8s, much less any kind of server oriented UNIX. Thanks for the advice though.



  • It makes somewhat passable mediocrity, very quickly when directly used for such things. The stories it writes from the simplest of prompts is always shallow and full of cliche (and over-represented words like “delve”). To get it to write good prose basically requires breaking down writing, the activity, into its stream of constituent, tiny tasks and then treating the model like the machine it is. And this hack generalizes out to other tasks, too, including writing code. It isn’t alive. It isn’t even thinking. But if you treat these things as rigid robots getting specific work done, you can make then do real things. The problem is asking experts to do all of that labor to hyper segment the work and micromanage the robot. Doing that is actually more work than just asking the expert to do the task themselves. It is still a very rough tool. It will definitely not replace the intern, just yet. At least my interns submit code changes that compile.

    Don’t worry, human toil isn’t going anywhere. All of this stuff is super new and still comparatively useless. Right now, the early adopters are mostly remixing what has worked reliably. We have yet to see truly novel applications yet. What you will see in the near future will be lots of “enhanced” products that you can talk to. Whether you want to or not. The human jobs lost to the first wave of AI automation will likely be in the call center. The important industries such as agriculture are already so hyper automated, it will take an enormous investment to close the 2% left. Many, many industries will be that way, even after AI. And for a slightly more cynical take: Human labor will never go away because having power over machines isn’t the same as having power over other humans. We won’t let computers make us all useless.



  • Autism or not, without any establishing priors, you can’t confidently say what is happening in a single picture. You can make guesses with varying levels of confidence. That’s just logic? So really, the test seems to sort people based on whether they make poor inferences quickly? Sounds like it isn’t identifying autism, but people that are shitty at logic.

    But perhaps the intent of the test isn’t actually to accurately describe what is happening in the picture, but instead to give “vibes.” The people at the beach picture gives the “vibes” of vacation because the likelihood of the viewer of the picture to live near is a beach is actually pretty low. Same thing with Stonehenge. Essentially, the (biased) collective unconscious association of Stonehenge with celestial events.

    In other words, due to the ambiguity in the test between vibes check vs. a literal, accurate description of the events transpiring in the picture, the people unable see the trees in a forest default to vibes and expect everyone else is like them. It is very “othering” by assuming the vibes check is the default position because a complete lack of thinking rigor being applied.

    Anyhow, corporate trainings are a shitty scam given by very unqualified people in a lot of cases.